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Such a title was bound to attract the attention of the Nazis.
Thus the heavily indebted German farmer, at the beginning of the Third Reich, was protected from losing his property by foreclosures or from seeing it shrink in size (there being no necessity to sell a piece of it to repay a debt), but at the same time he was bound to the soil as irrevocably as the serfs of feudal times.
The best the country could do, despite all Nazi efforts in the much-advertised “Battle of Production,” was to reach 83 per cent of self-sufficiency and it was only by the conquest of foreign lands that the Germans obtained enough food to enable them to hold out during the second war as long as they did.
For the first year Nazi economic policies, which were largely determined by Dr. Schacht—for Hitler was bored with economics, of which he had an almost total ignorance—were devoted largely to putting the unemployed back to work by means of greatly expanded public works and the stimulation of private enterprise.
But the real basis of Germany’s recovery was rearmament, to which the Nazi regime directed the energies of business and labor—as well as of the generals—from 1934 on.
It was not exactly a new idea among the Germans, for in Prussia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some five sevenths of the government’s revenue, as we have seen, was spent on the Army and that nation’s whole economy was always regarded as primarily an instrument not of the people’s welfare but of military policy.
He manipulated the currency with such legerdemain that at one time it was estimated by foreign economists to have 237 different values. He negotiated amazingly profitable (for Germany) barter deals with dozens of countries and to the astonishment of orthodox economists successfully demonstrated that the more you owed a country the more business you did with it.
In short, the German economy was mobilized for war, and businessmen, though their profits soared, became mere cogs in a war machine, their work circumscribed by so many restrictions, by so many forms to fill out, that Dr. Funk, who succeeded Schacht in 1937 as Minister of Economics and in 1939 as president of the Reichsbank, was forced to admit ruefully that “official communications now make up more than one half of a German manufacturer’s entire correspondence” and that “Germany’s export trade involves 40,000 separate transactions daily; yet for a single transaction as many as forty different
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Fleeing Germany at the outbreak of the war, he recognized that the “Nazi regime has ruined German industry.”
But the men of industry and finance soon learned that Hitler had not the slightest intention of honoring a single economic plank in the party program—the radical promises had been thrown in merely to attract votes.
But they were quickly thrown out by Hitler and replaced by conservative businessmen.
The little businessmen, who had been one of the party’s chief supports and who expected great things from Chancellor Hitler, soon found themselves, many of them, being exterminated and forced back into the ranks of wage earners.
On the other hand the great cartels, which even the Republic had favored, were further strengthened by the Nazis.
The Ministry of Economics was empowered to organize new compulsory cartels or order firms to join existing ones.
The graft involved in finding one’s way to key officials who could make decisions on which orders depended or in circumventing the endless rules and regulations of the government and the trade associations became in the late Thirties astronomical.
Despite his harassed life, however, the businessman made good profits.
In theory, according to the law, any amount above that had to be invested in government bonds—there was no thought of confiscation. Actually most firms reinvested in their own businesses the undistributed profits,
Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike, the German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf, bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor.
Its aim, as stated in the law, was not to protect the worker but “to create a true social and productive community of all Germans. Its task is to see that every single individual should be able… to perform the maximum of work.”
And just as in ancient times the lord was supposed to be responsible for the welfare of his subjects so, under the Nazi law, was the employer made “responsible for the well-being of the employees and laborers.” In return, the law said, “the employees and laborers owe him faithfulness”—that is, they were to work hard and long, and no back talk or grumbling, even about wages.
In practice, they set the rates according to the wishes of the employer—there was no provision for the workers even to be consulted in such matters—though after 1936, when help became scarce in the armament industries and some employers attempted to raise wages in order to attract men, wage scales were held down by orders of the State.
Compared to the United States, and after allowances were made for the difference in the cost of living and in social services, wages in Germany had always been low.
But a sober study of the official statistics, which perhaps few Germans bothered to make, revealed that the much maligned capitalists, not the workers, benefited most from Nazi policies.
Besides stiff income taxes, compulsory contributions to sickness, unemployment and disability insurance, and Labor Front dues, the manual worker—like everyone else in Nazi Germany—was constantly pressured to make increasingly large gifts to an assortment of Nazi charities, the chief of which was Winterhilfe (Winter Relief).
As with the medieval serfs, the workers in Hitler’s Germany found themselves being more and more bound to their place of labor, though here it was not the employer who bound them but the State.
The workbook not only provided the State and the employer with up-to-date data on every single employee in the nation but was used to tie a worker to his bench. If he desired to leave for other employment his employer could retain his workbook, which meant that he could not legally be employed elsewhere.
Tied down by so many controls at wages little above the subsistence level, the German workers, like the Roman proletariat, were provided with circuses by their rulers to divert attention from their miserable state.
In a twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorship, as perhaps with older ones, it is deemed necessary to control not only the working hours but the leisure hours of the individual.
In pre-Nazi days Germany had tens of thousands of clubs devoted to everything from chess and soccer to bird watching. Under the Nazis no organized social, sport or recreational group was allowed to function except under the control and direction of Kraft durch Freude.
A cruise to Madeira, for instance, cost only $25, including rail fare to and from the German port, and other jaunts were equally inexpensive.
The organization also made available at bargain rates tickets to the theater, the opera and concerts, thus making available more high-brow entertainment to the laboring man, as Nazi officials often boasted.
Finally, the organization took over the 200-odd adult education institutions which had flourished during the Republic—a movement which had originated in Scandinavia—and continued them, though adding a strong mixture of Nazi ideology to the instruction.
In fact, it was estimated that from 20 to 25 per cent of its income was absorbed by administration expense.
Every German, or at least every German workman, he said, should own an automobile,-just as in the United States.
When 750 marks had been paid in, the buyer received an order number entitling him to a car as soon as it could be turned out. Alas for the worker, not a single car was ever turned out for any customer during the Third Reich.
By the time the war started the Volkswagen factory turned to the manufacture of goods more useful to the Army.
An observer who had known something about his precarious predicament during the Republic could understand why he did not seem to be desperately concerned with the loss of political freedom and even of his trade unions as long as he was employed full-time. In the past, for so many, for as many as six million men and their families, such rights of free men in Germany had been overshadowed, as he said, by the freedom to starve.
In the days of the Republic, most judges, like the majority of the Protestant clergy and the university professors, had cordially disliked the Weimar regime and in their decisions, as many thought, had written the blackest page in the life of the German Republic, thus contributing to its fall. But at least under the Weimar Constitution judges were independent, subject only to the law, protected from arbitrary removal and bound at least in theory by Article 109 to safeguard equality before the law.
To be sure, not many judges were eliminated by this law, but they were warned where their duty lay.
Say to yourselves at every decision which you make: “How would the Fuehrer decide in my place?”
Occasionally, however, for propaganda purposes when relatively light sentences were to be given, the foreign correspondents were invited to attend.
No figures were ever published, though in December 1940 Roland Freisler, the much-feared president of the People’s Court (who was killed during the war when an American bomb demolished his courtroom during a trial) claimed that “only four per cent of the accused were put to death.”
Thus the lawyers who attempted to represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally withdrew the action.
As Gerhard F. Kramer, a prominent lawyer in Berlin at the time, later commented, “It was impossible to establish whether Goering blackmailed the industrialist or whether the industrialist bribed the Prussian Prime Minister.”
Thus, as we have seen, when Pastor Niemoeller was acquitted by the Special Court of the main charges against him and sentenced only to a short term, which he had already served while awaiting trial, the Gestapo snatched him as he was leaving the courtroom and carted him off to a concentration camp.
He had at first intended to designate it merely as the Secret Police Office (Geheimes Polizei Amt) but the German initials GPA sounded too much like the Russian GPU. An obscure post office employee who had been asked to furnish a franking stamp for the new bureau suggested that it be called the Geheime Staatspolizei, simply the “Secret State Police”—GESTAPO for short—and thus unwittingly created a name the very mention of which was to inspire terror first within Germany and then without.
As Dr. Werner Best, one of Himmler’s right-hand men in the Gestapo, explained, “As long as the police carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.”
By the end of 1933 there were some fifty of them, mainly set up by the S.A. to give its victims a good beating and then ransom them to their relatives or friends for as much as the traffic would bear.
On Christmas Eve, 1933, Hitler had announced an amnesty for twenty-seven thousand inmates of the camps, but Goering and Himmler got around his orders and only a few were actually released.
The S.S. Fuehrer saw more clearly than the Minister that the purpose of the concentration camps was not only to punish enemies of the regime but by their very existence to terrorize the people and deter them from even contemplating any resistance to Nazi rule.
