I’ve been reading Hitler’s Beneficiaries by Götz Aly, and wanted to share some initial thoughts. It’s a very interesting book. Its subject, as the title suggests, is a look at the people who materially benefited from the government of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party from 1933 to 1945. Or in other words, how did the Nazis stay popular in Germany?

I must admit that for a long time I never questioned whether the National Socialist German Worker’s Party was popular in Germany (while it was in power). It had a secret police—what did it matter if it was popular? In fact, why would it have a secret police if it was popular?

(It turns out that even with a secret police “the beatings will continue until morale improves” doesn’t work, and Hitler knew it.)

However that may be, it is immediately striking to what a great degree Hitler, Göring, et al were extremely concerned with keeping the German people happy. Time and time again, as Aly shows, they overrode their finance ministers in order to keep taxes low and benefits high for the lower and middle class Germans. Moreover, they worked hard to steal as much as possible from occupied nations for the benefit of the German people. They came up with clever ways to have soldiers “buy” things in occupied lands and send them back home to their families. (The scare quotes are because the soldiers used local currencies which were, through various accounting tricks, taken from the people of the occupied lands, mostly via their governments. Thus the soldiers thought of themselves as buying things and the shop keepers thought of themselves as selling things, but nothing of value flowed from Germany into the occupied lands, while much of value flowed into Germany.)

There are also some very interesting tie-ins from Hitler’s policy of trying to keep the German people happy to the oppression and murder of the Jews within the lands that Germany controlled. Governments have to get their money from somewhere, and while Hitler was a huge fan of “tax the rich,” that sounds a lot more effective than it actually is at procuring large amounts of money for the government—there just aren’t that many rich people, and if you take away all their money, they’re not rich next year and you probably need more money than you did this year. If you want a huge amount of money, year after year, you have to get it from a large number of people. (This is why socialism and other ponzi schemes always fail.)

The racism intrinsic to National Socialism made it very politically tenable to heavily tax the Jews, though. Greedy people can never stop before they make things unsustainable, so of course Germany progressed on to “needing” to take everything away from the Jews, though they did it in stages.

I’m less than halfway through, but it’s a very interesting book so far.