New Book: Hitler’s People’s State: Plunder,
Race War and National Socialism
There’s a new book out in Germany on the redistributive and welfare-statist foundations of Hitler’s regime in Germany: Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, by GÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?¶tz Aly, a professor at the Fritz-Bauer-Institut of the University of Frankfurt am Main. (I have ordered it but not yet gotten it; it will be available in English in 2006.) Der Spiegel has a write up on the book on their English site. It sounds like a useful complement to the excellent work by the Israeli historian Avraham Barkai, Das Wirtschaftssystem des Nationalsozialismus, which was published in English by Yale University Press as Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy. The latter showed how National Socialism was, as one might expect from the name, dedicated to central planning and the replacement of market allocation of resources by state direction, although, as usual, such planning “worked” better in theory than in practice.
One thing I’m confused about is how Germany kept up it’s production during WWII. Given the large group of men in the army, the carpet bombing by the allies (later in the war), and limited international trade, one would think that Germany should have been a push-over, production-wise. Yet, they produced the best tanks and airplanes, as well as other supplies; enough to fight on three continents against four super-powers. How did they pull this off with their propensity for central planning?
A related issue is, how come the ‘war economies’ of both Germany in the 30s, and the US in ’41, took those countries out of depression? Or did they? It may have something to do with a numbers game; if a nation ships a chunk of her men off to war, her offical unemployment may go down, but obviously nobody is better off for it. This answer seems partial and unsatisfactory, though.
I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate here; as a freedom-advocate, I find WWII to be a conundrum in many ways, especially in regards to the economics of it.