By the late 1930s the Luftwaffe and its associated industries had enrolled the labour power of hundreds of thousands of men. Even if only a few thousand were trained as aircrew, hundreds of thousands more were engaged in the infrastructure necessary to sustain the fliers, and for millions more the Luftwaffe provided a point of imaginary identification, making a reality of a decade-old dream of national air power.78 In this sense at least, the idea of an affluent Volksgemeinschaft was more than mere rhetoric. If Germany could not match the United States in terms of private consumption, in the
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