Germany. Indeed, it may strike some readers as absurd to have to make this point. But doing so makes clear that this standard of counterfactual criticism is not always applied even-handedly to all aspects of Hitler’s regime. The economic sphere, in fact, is often exempt from such critical scrutiny altogether. Too often it is assumed that real strategic choices in economic policy, choices in which National Socialist ideology really mattered, were faced by Hitler’s regime only in 1936, four years after the seizure of power.
