[This is Section 35 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
35. Conflict of groups
A second major point of agreement between Nietzsche and the Nazis is their view of conflict. For both, conflict is the fundamental human reality. Both believe firmly that life is a matter of some individuals and groups gaining at the expense of others.
The Nazis were clear about this in theory and practice. They did not believe it possible for Aryans and Jews to live in harmony. Nor did the Nazis believe that Germany could live in harmony with the liberal capitalist nations of the West.
In the liberal capitalist nations, by contrast, many economists and politicians had come to believe that conflict and war may become a thing of the past. The productive power of the Industrial Revolution was creating great wealth and surpluses, and those surpluses were leading to increased trade between nations that was mutually beneficial. Trade was a powerful harmonizing force, leading nations to want to do business with each other rather than make war.[115]
The Nazis rejected that view and argued that recent economic history was a matter of the Jews and the capitalists advancing their interests at the expense of Germany’s.
Nietzsche shares wholly with the Nazis the general point about zero-sum conflict. In his words, “The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few are opposite viewpoints of value.”[116] But even more strongly, he believes that this conflict is not merely a matter of historical and cultural accident but is built into the requirements of life:
“Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.”[117]
The horse eats the grass; the lion kills the horse; the man rides the horse and kills the lion. Life is an ongoing struggle between strong and weak, predator and prey. Cooperation and trade are possible, but they are superficial interludes between more fundamental animal facts about life. As Nietzsche again puts it: “‘Life always lives at the expense of other life’—he who does not grasp this has not taken even the first step toward honesty with himself.”[118]
On this key point, Nietzsche and the Nazis agree.
Given that conflict is inescapable, the next question is: How will the conflicts be resolved?
References
[115] For example, the great British politician Richard Cobden argued that commerce is “the grand panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world” (Cobden 1903, p. 36). Consider also Norman Angell, speaking to the Institute of Bankers in London on January 17, 1912, on “The Influence of Banking on International Relations”: “commercial interdependence, which is the special mark of banking as it is the mark of no other profession or trade in quite the same degree—the fact that the interest and solvency of one is bound up with the interest and solvency of many; that there must be confidence in the due fulfillment of mutual obligation, or whole sections of the edifice crumble, is surely doing a great deal to demonstrate that morality after all is not founded upon self-sacrifice, but upon enlightened self-interest, a clearer and more complete understanding of all the ties that bind us the one to the other. And such clearer understanding is bound to improve, not merely the relationship of one group to another, but the relationship of all men to all other men, to create a consciousness which must make for more efficient human co-operation, a better human society” (quoted in Keegan 1999, pp. 11-12).
[116] GM, end of First Essay note.
[117] BGE 259.
[118] WP 369.
[Bibliography]
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[This is Section 32 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
32. On Judaism and Christianity: opposite or identical?
One more key difference between Nietzsche and the Nazis is important, and that is their views on Christianity. Nietzsche consistently states that Judaism and Christianity are allies, both stemming from the same source, both advocating a religious ethic that puts the weak, the sick, and the humble first. As with Judaism, Christian morality is a slave morality.
Christianity, he writes, is “a rebellion of everything that crawls on the ground against that which has height.”[100]
The Christians, he writes, “did not know how to love their god except by crucifying man.”[101] And for that great crime against humanity, Nietzsche says: “I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions.”[102]
So Christianity does not escape Nietzsche’s wrath, just as the slave morality of the Jews did not escape his wrath—and for the same reason: Christianity is an extension and purification of moral themes first developed within Judaism. In Nietzsche’s own words: “In Christianity, all of Judaism … attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian, the ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more—even three times more.”[103]
This identification of Christianity with Judaism also separates Nietzsche from the Nazis, for the Nazis took great pains to distinguish the Jews and the Christians, condemning Judaism and embracing a generic type of Christianity.
Early in the Nazi Party’s history, in its founding document, the 1920 Program, point 24 states the following: “The party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, without, however, allying itself to any particular denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit.”
The use of Christian themes and imagery was prominent in Nazi propaganda throughout the 1920s.
In Joseph Goebbels’s semi-autobiographical novel, the main character Michael is portrayed as a hybrid Christ-figure and German martyr. And in a 1935 interview, Goebbels was so concerned to separate Christianity from Judaism that he went as far as to deny that Jesus was a Jew.
Adolf Hitler argued that the Christians and Jews were fundamentally opposed religions[104] and himself sounded Christian moral themes explicitly in public pronouncements such as this one: “When I came to Berlin a few weeks ago … the luxury, the perversion, the iniquity, the wanton display, and the Jewish materialism disgusted me so thoroughly, that I was almost beside myself. I nearly imagined myself to be Jesus Christ when He came to His Father’s temple and found it taken by the money-changers. I can well imagine how He felt when He seized a whip and scourged them out.”[105]
References
[100] A 43.
[101] Z 2: “On Priests.”
[102] A 62.
[103] A 44.
[104] Hitler 1925, 307.
[105] Hitler, quoted in Langer, (viewed July 25, 2006). Hitler also claimed: “By warding off the Jews, I struggle for the work of the Lord” (quoted in Lilla 1997, p. 38).
[Bibliography]
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[This is Section 33 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
33. Summary of the five differences
We have five significant partings of the ways between Nietzsche and the Nazis:
1. The Nazis believe the German Aryan to be racially superior—while Nietzsche believes that the superior types can be manifested in any racial type.
2. The Nazis believe contemporary German culture to be the highest and the best hope for the world—while Nietzsche holds contemporary German culture to be degenerate and to be infecting the rest of the world.
3. The Nazis are enthusiastically anti-Semitic—while Nietzsche sees anti-Semitism to be a moral sickness.
4. The Nazis hate all things Jewish—while Nietzsche praises the Jews for their toughness, their intelligence, and their sheer survival ability.
5. And finally, the Nazis see Christianity to be radically different and much superior to Judaism—while Nietzsche believes Judaism and Christianity to be essentially the same, with Christianity being in fact a worse and more dangerous variation of Judaism.
Those five points identify important differences and lend support to those interpreters of Nietzsche who complain about simplistic identifications of Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi philosopher.[106]
But there are equally important ways in which the Nazis were right on target in seeing Nietzsche as an intellectual ally.
References
[106] E.g., Walter Kaufmann 1954, p. 14.
[Bibliography]
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[This is Section 31 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
31. On the Jews: admirable or despicable?
But how does this fit with the harsh things we know Nietzsche said about the Jews? This takes us to a fourth point of difference between Nietzsche and the Nazis.
For all of the negative things Nietzsche says about the Jews, he also respects them and gives them high praise.
Here is a representative quotation from Beyond Good and Evil: “The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe.”[96]
Here is another, from The Antichrist: “Psychologically considered, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy, who, placed in impossible circumstances . . . divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against ‘the world.’”[97]
He again praises the Jews for having the strength to rule Europe if they chose to: “That the Jews, if they wanted it—or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want—could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.”[98]
And in another book, Nietzsche compares the Jews favorably to the Germans—in fact, he identifies a way in which the Jews are superior to the Germans: “Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making its people more logical, for cleaner intellectual habits—none more so than the Germans, as a lamentably deraisonnable race that even today first needs to be given a good mental drubbing.”[99]
But how can all this praise of the Jews fit with the rest of what he says about the Jews?
One important distinction here is between blaming the Jews of several millennia ago for devising the slave morality and foisting it upon the world—and between evaluating the Jews of today as inheritors of a cultural tradition that has enabled them to survive and even flourish despite great adversity. In the former case, Nietzsche assigns blame to the Jews and condemns them for subverting human greatness—but in the second case he would at the very least have to grant, however grudgingly, that the Jews have hit upon a survival strategy and kept their cultural identity for well over two thousand years. How many other cultures can make that claim? The list is extremely short. And for that the Jews deserve praise.
References
[96] BGE 251.
[97] A 24.
[98] BGE 251.
[99] GS 348.
[Bibliography]
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[This is Section 21 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
Part 5. Nietzsche’s Life and Influence
21. Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” “Live dangerously!”[46]
Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century German philosopher famous for his worship of human potential and for encouraging individuals to seek great heights and make real their creative dreams. He is also famous for his absolute loathing of all things small, cowardly, or mediocre.
In his writings we find a corresponding reverence of all things great, noble, heroic. He spoke directly and passionately to the best within each of us: “Do not throw away the hero in your soul” and “Hold holy your highest hope.”[47] And for those of us who sense we have a creative spark that must be honored and nurtured—“the noble soul has reverence for itself.”[48]
One indication of the importance of Nietzsche is the pantheon of major twentieth century intellectuals whom he influenced.
He was an influence on Jean-Paul Sartre and Hermann Hesse, major writers, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. He was an influence on thinkers as diverse in their outlooks as Ayn Rand and Michel Foucault. Rand’s politics are classically liberal—while Foucault’s are far Left, including a stint as a member of the French Communist Party. There is the striking fact that Nietzsche was an atheist, but he was an influence on Martin Buber, one of the most widely-read theologians of the twentieth century. And Nietzsche said harsh things about the Jews, as we will see—but he was nonetheless admired by Chaim Weizmann, a leader of the Zionist movement and first president of Israel.
So what is the attraction of Nietzsche? There is the exciting, sometimes scorching prose—Nietzsche was a stylist par excellence. There is his romanticism of life as a great, daring adventure. And of importance to serious intellectuals, there is the fundamentality and sheer audacity of the questions he raises about the human condition.
According to his teachers and professors, the young Friedrich Nietzsche showed extraordinary intellectual promise. He was appointed professor at University of Basel in Switzerland—at the age of twenty-four, which is unusually young for a professor. Even more unusually, he was appointed before finishing his doctoral degree, which was almost unheard of.
As brilliant as Nietzsche was, he was not suited for academic life. By most accounts he was a terrible lecturer, and he suffered from chronic health problems, which contributed to a general nervous collapse in 1870.
From the late 1870s, he wandered mostly alone and lonely over Europe, surveying the cultural landscape.
And when we take stock of the world in the late nineteenth century, what do we learn?
References
[46] EH “Why I Am So Wise” 2 and GS 283.
[47] Z I.
[48] BGE 287.
[Bibliography.]
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Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 3:04 pm. 3 comments
[This is Section 19 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
19. The Holocaust
In 1821, the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.” Heine was evoking the terrible era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in which both people and books were burned regularly. But he was also making a philosophical point about the importance of ideas: books are about ideas, and ideas matter. We humans live what we believe, and if history teaches us anything it is that people can believe an incredible variety of things about themselves and the world they live in. Books store and transmit ideas, but it is in the minds of actual human beings that ideas live and are put into practice. Burning a book has some stopping power for an idea, but the only way to eliminate an idea fully is to eliminate the individuals who believe it. Dictators know this and they have no compunction about eliminating individuals.
The Nazis were not historically unique in this way—where they were unique is in the huge scale upon which they operated and the cold-bloodedly efficient ruthlessness with which they destroyed, killed, and burned human beings.
Eleven to twelve million human beings were exterminated during the Holocaust; approximately six million of them were Jews. We have all heard the numbers and the terrible stories before, and sometimes it is hard for them not to become just abstract statistics in our minds.
But just think of one person you know who lives a real life, has dreams, works hard, loves his or her family, has a quirky sense of humor, wants to travel the world. And then imagine that person taken away in the middle of the night, herded into a cattle car, stripped naked, experimented upon without anesthesia, slowly starved, gassed, shoved into an oven and burned to cinders. That is what the Nazis did to millions of human beings.
All of the theoretical ingredients of the National Socialist program that contributed to the Holocaust were announced publicly twenty years before the Holocaust began:
That human beings are divided into collective groups that shape their identity.
That those collective groups are in a life and death competitive struggle with each other.
That any tactic is legitimate in the war of competing groups.
That human beings are not individuals with their own lives to live but are servants of the state.
That the state should have total power over both the minds and bodies of its citizens and may dispose of them as it wishes.
That citizens should obey a higher authority and be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of their group, as defined by higher authority.
Additionally, during the 1930s the Nazis had experimented with most of the practical techniques that would be used in the Holocaust. In the 1930s, basic human rights to liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness were denied to millions as a matter of official policy. Many of those deemed undesirable had been forced to leave their homes and country. Those who stayed were subject to officially tolerated vandalism, beatings, and occasional murders. Some of those deemed unfit to reproduce had been sterilized. Some of those deemed unfit to live had been euthanized. As early as 1933, concentration camps had been established north of Berlin at Oranienburg and at Dachau in the south of Germany. More camps were added as the decade progressed.
And of course the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their sympathizers among millions of Germans had been common knowledge and common practice. It is appropriate that the classically-educated Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Culture, would express it most bluntly and clearly: “Certainly the Jew is also a Man, but the Flea is also an Animal.”[42]
So I return to our early question: How could Nazism happen?
References
[42] “Sicher ist der Jude auch ein Mann, aber der Floh ist auch ein Tier.”
[Bibliography.]
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[This is Section 16 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
16. Eugenics
Nazi education and censorship attempted to control people’s minds. The Nazis also controlled the bodies of their citizens as much as possible. Milder controls involved new public-health measures such as an aggressive campaign against smoking: the Nazis banned smoking in certain public places, ran an anti-smoking propaganda campaign, and placed restrictions on how tobacco could be advertised.
Stronger controls extended to the sex and reproductive lives of the citizens, and this takes us into darker territory—the Nazis’ embrace of eugenics.
Eugenics was not unique to the Nazi regime or to Germany. As early as 1895, eugenics researcher Adolf Jost had published a book called The Right to Death, which called for state control over human reproduction, and many intellectuals in many countries embraced eugenics. In nature, the argument ran, only the strongest males get to mate with the females; the weaker males get to mate less frequently or not at all; this natural selection of the stronger and de-selection of the weaker serves to keep the species healthy and strengthen it.
The same principle holds for farming. Just as a farmer is concerned to improve the quality of his herd, so the state should be concerned to improved the quality of its citizenry. And just as a farmer will not let any bull mate with any cow, so the state should not let just any male have sex with any female; the farmer will select his strongest and healthiest bulls and have them mate only with his strongest, healthiest cows. Those bulls and cows not up to standard are culled from the herd and not allowed to reproduce at all.
As Rudolph Hess, deputy Führer of the Reich, would say a little later: “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”[34]
Before the Nazis came to power, German intellectuals were among the world leaders in eugenics research. In 1916, Dr. Ernst Rudin, the director of the Genealogical-Demographic Department of the German Institute for Psychiatric Research, established a field of psychiatric hereditary biology based on eugenics theory. Rudin became the president of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, the world leader of the eugenics movement. In 1920, psychiatry Professor Alfred Hoche and distinguished jurist Karl Binding wrote The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. Their book called for the destruction of “worthless” humans for the sake of protecting worthy humans. So-called worthless individuals included the mentally and physically disabled.
Another influential book, The Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene, written by Drs. Eugen Fischer, Lenz, and Bauer, hailed the superiority of the German race and called for the use of concentration camps for non-Germans and mixed races. Fischer already had experience with this—having planned and executed the forced sterilization of South Africans who were the offspring of German military men and women indigenous to South Africa.
By the time the Nazis came to power, eugenics was an established part of German intellectual life. One striking indication of this is that German universities had twenty-three official Professors of Racial Hygiene.
National Socialism held that the state should take over where natural selection left off. In line with their collectivism and anti-individualism, the Nazis held that medicine and reproduction should serve the interests of the state rather than the individual. Like the farmer, the Nazis wanted high quality Aryan children for the state’s purposes, so they took charge of the mating process of Germany’s citizens. The Reich could not allow individuals to rut with just anyone. Taking away individual choice in reproduction would improve the stock and cleanse the nation of bad genetic elements.
The Nazis also argued that they were thus more strongly socialist than their arch-rivals, the Communists. While the Communists focused almost totally on issues of money, capitalism, and economics, the Nazis argued for a more comprehensive socialism: Every aspect of human life, including family and reproduction, was to be socialized.
The Nazi eugenics program had two faces: positive and negative.[35] The positive face aimed at increasing the number of pure Aryan births; the negative face aimed at eliminating inferior genetic influences in Germany. In order to implement both sides of the program, the Nazis first needed to define racial purity. They decided that there were three racial categories: Full Jew, having three or more Jewish grandparents; two degrees of Mischlinge, or mixed types, having either one or two Jewish grandparents; and Full Aryan, having no Jewish grandparents. The pure Aryan would be the tall, slender yet strong, blond human being.
This led to some serious parody, given that not many of the Nazi leadership met those criteria. Neither Goebbels nor Göring nor Hitler himself obviously met them.
All humor aside, the Nazis set to achieving the positive face of their program in several ways. They provided incentives to encourage racially pure marriages. Incentives included loans to help married couples get established, subsidies for each child produced and official awards and medals for “hero” mothers of four or more children. Childless couples were vilified. The Nazi government also lowered the age of marriage to sixteen, encouraged the birth of illegitimate Aryan children, outlawed abortion for Aryans, outlawed marriage for sterile women, strictly regulated birth control, and initially forbade mothers from working outside of the home.
Heinrich Himmler was in charge of this area of Nazi policy. Himmler was also the Chief of the SS and the Gestapo, and so was one of the top two or three most powerful Nazis in the regime. Under Himmler’s direction, the Nazis also created the Lebensborn, or “Fount of Life,” program in 1935. This project developed group homes for young, unmarried Aryan women impregnated by Aryan men. Once the racial purity of the parents had been established, the young women stayed in the homes and were given free food and medical care. In return, the women signed over all rights to their fetuses, who, upon birth, would be raised by select Nazi families. Between 12,000 and 16,000 infants were born in Lebensborn homes in Germany and Nazi-occupied territories. A few years later, in order to speed up the development of a pure Aryan race, the Nazis began to kidnap Aryan children from occupied territories. An estimated 250,000 children six years of age and younger were taken back to Germany and assimilated into Nazi homes.
The negative face of the Nazi’s eugenics program required the extermination of non-Aryans. In 1935, the Nazis implemented the Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of Hereditary Health. These laws included forcible sterilization of individuals with mental and hereditary physical defects. During the 1930s, the Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 people. Certification of Aryan descent became a requirement for marriage; interracial marriages were prohibited; and the remaining rights of Jews were revoked.
The Nazis then introduced extermination. In May of 1935, the regime euthanized twelve patients in a mental hospital in Hadamar, Germany. The Nazi Interior Ministry required that all children under three years of age with congenital malformations and mental deficiencies be registered with the state. Those deemed unfit were taken away from their homes for “special treatment.” “Special treatment” meant either being injected with a lethal dose of medicine or simply starved to death. The Nazis were still somewhat cautious about public scrutiny, so part of their strategy was slowly to get the nation accustomed to human extermination before they turned their full attention to the Jews.
The public justification for these deaths was not only the biological health of the state. The Nazis also gave a collectivist economic justification. If the health of the citizenry is the State’s responsibility, then the State must allocate its economic resources responsibly. If money and resources are used to care for the weak, then the stronger humans are forced to sacrifice. But the stronger human beings are the State’s best assets; it is they who are the realization and the future of the Volk. The State accordingly has a moral obligation not to waste economic resources on the weak; and when the weak are destroyed as nature intended, the strong will be enhanced and the species advanced.
This brings us to Nazi economic policy.
References
[34] Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942, had a crucial role intellectually and administratively in determining Nazi policy: “Just as in the animal world, this committed Social Darwinist proposed a system of racial selection in order to ‘breed’ a new rural nobility and to achieve the ‘breeding goal of the German people.’ Darré suggested marriage restrictions for Jews and ‘less valuable’ non-Jews, strict state control of all marriages and fertility, and sterilization of those members of the community who were considered to be a threat to the ‘racial purity’ of the German people. The Nazis used all of these measures in the subsequent years …” (Gerhard 2005, p. 131-132).
[35] Using “positive” and “negative” here descriptively, not normatively.
[Bibliography.]
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[This is Section 17 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
17. Economic controls
Through education and censorship, the Nazis attempted to socialize the German mind. Through public health measures and eugenics, they attempted to socialize the German body. A natural extension of both policies was to socialize German economic production.
As would be expected by the socialist part of National Socialism, the guiding principle of Nazi economics was that all property belongs to the people, the Volk, and was to be used only for the good of the people. Just as one’s body is no longer one’s private possession but rather belongs to the whole community, economic property was no longer anyone’s private possession but to be used by State permission and only for the good of the people.
Upon coming to power, the Nazi government nationalized Jewish property and in 1934 passed a law allowing the expropriation of property owned by communists.
Another early policy given high priority by the Nazi government was the organizing of all German businesses into cartels. The argument was that—in contrast to the disorderliness and egoism of free market capitalism—centralization and state control would increase efficiency and a sense of German unity. In July of 1933, membership in a cartel became compulsory for businesses, and by early 1934 the cartel structure was re-organized and placed firmly under the direction of the German government.
By 1937, small businesses with capital under $40,000 were dissolved by the State; labor unions had been dissolved, as were the rights to strike and collective bargaining. Unemployment was dealt with by public works programs of road-building and so on.
All property and labor power was now either owned by the State or, if still owned by private parties, subject to almost-total control. Businesses were told by the State what to produce and in what quantities. Prices and wages were set by the State.
And if anyone complained, a commonly used Nazi slogan put them on the defensive: “The common interest before self interest.”[36] The argument was quite clear: You are not a private individual seeking profit or higher wages in a capitalist economy. You and your property belong in trust to the German people, and you have a duty to serve the public interest, even if it involves a personal sacrifice.
There is an important sub-point worth dwelling upon, for there is a lively debate about just how committed to socialism the Nazis were. After all, they did not outright nationalize all businesses as pure socialism would require; rather they allowed several important businesses to remain in private hands.
A 1935 official statement put the National Socialist policy this way: “The power economy will not be run by the state, but by (private) entrepreneurs acting under their own free and unrestricted responsibility. … The state limits itself to the function of control, which is, of course, all-inclusive. It further reserves the right of intervention … in order to enforce the supremacy of considerations of public interest.”[37]
The issue about how socialist the Nazis were is, in part, a judgment call about long-term principles and short-term pragmatism.
Here is a related example: Clearly the Nazis were strongly committed to racism. But we could point out that they formed alliances with the Italians and the Japanese, neither of whom are Aryans racially. Yet obviously it would be a mistake to infer from these alliances that the Nazis were not really racist. They were racist, but as a matter of short-term strategy and political compromise they were willing to form alliances with those whom they would otherwise despise. Since the Italians and Japanese were powers, it made strategic sense to overlook the racial issue in the short run.[38]
The same holds for the economic socialism: allowing some major businesses to remain officially in private hands made pragmatic economic sense in the short run. The Nazis knew they needed productive businesses to fuel the economy and their developing war machine, so it would have been foolish to interfere too much with smoothly-running enterprises. Additionally, the Nazis knew they could count on the German nationalism of many business owners to go along with what the Nazi government asked of them. And if push came to shove, the Nazis could and did pass precise regulations to direct production as they saw fit.[39]
So while the Nazi government imposed many regulations upon German businesses, the Nazis counted on and received much voluntary commitment and enthusiasm. Most business owners, managers, and workers believed in the cause and devoted their economic energies to it. They saw the personal sacrifices demanded of them as their duty, and they obediently and willingly bore the sacrifices for the good of the cause.
As a result, from 1932 to 1936 Germany underwent an economic boom, lifting itself out of the stagnation of the 1920s and early 1930s. Unemployment fell from six million to one million, national production rose 102% and national income doubled.[40]
By 1936, the same year the Germans hosted the Olympic Games in Berlin, the German economy was again a powerhouse. A national vote was held in March to gauge popular support for Hitler’s regime. “Adolf Hitler” was the only name on the ballot, and voters had a choice to vote for Hitler or not. As dubious as the vote was, the numbers do tell us something: 98.6% of the voting population voted, and of those 98.7% voted for Hitler. That means that over 44 million adult Germans expressed approval and only about half a million did not.
References
[36] “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz!” (quoted in Meinecke 1950, p. 51); cf. the 1920 Nazi Program.
[37] Quoted in Pipes 1999, p. 221.
[38] Hitler’s pragmatism in foreign policy: “In political life there is no such thing as principles of foreign policy. The programmatic principles of my party are its doctrine on the racial problem and its fight against pacifism and internationalism. But foreign policy is merely a means to an end. In questions of foreign policy I shall never admit that I am tied by anything” (quoted in Heiden, p. xx).
[39] “Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much, and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending ‘special contributions’ to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing Germany at the outbreak of the war, he recognized that the ‘Nazi regime has ruined German industry.’ And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, ‘What a fool [Dummkopf] I was!’” (Shirer 1962, p. 261).
[40] Shirer 1962, p. 258-259.
[Bibliography.]
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