Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / Did the Great Crash of 1929 really propel HITLER into power? With Dr. Christopher Dillon

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Did the Great Crash of 1929 really propel HITLER into power? With Dr. Christopher Dillon · The Smart Cookies podcast

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  Dr. Christopher Dillon is Senior Lecturer in
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  Modern German History at King's College London.
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  He has authored many books and articles on the
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  history of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.
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  And today, we're going to be tackling an incredibly
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  fascinating, if not an often discussed subject,
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  and that's the inner workings of Nazi economy.
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  Professor Dillon, welcome to the show. Thanks
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  very much for having me. I'm really pleased to
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  be invited. Feels kind of odd to put these two
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  words together, doesn't it? Nazi and economy,
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  because it's not something histories of this
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  period usually focus on. Now, I do remember that
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  back in school, in high school, while going over
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  World War II history, we did mention the planned
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  economy of the Soviet Union and the industrial
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  might of the United States. But when it came
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  to Hitler's regime, we kind of focused on the
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  constant political and genocidal horror show,
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  which is understandable, but just doesn't provide.
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  like a comprehensive picture of the story of
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  the Third Reich. I mean, also in the popular
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  understanding that's usually out there, people
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  will throw in the fact that the Nazis built the
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  Autobahn and that they invented the Volkswagen
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  Beetle car, which is supposed to imply that Hitler
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  was onto something economically. But I do suspect
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  things were a little bit more complicated than
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  that. Anyway, there'll be a few myths to bust
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  in this session. Perfect. Anyway, since the Nazis
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  didn't come to power just out of the blue, I
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  think it would be nice to inspect what role did
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  the economy play in that rise at the beginning.
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  So maybe let's start here. We all know about
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  the great crash of 1929, often touted as one
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  of the major reasons Hitler was able to exploit
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  the weakened state of the Weimar Republic. But
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  in what shape was Germany's economy just before
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  this catastrophic tumble? Yeah, I mean, historians
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  kind of differ in their assessments, but generally
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  the economy is in pretty good shape and certainly
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  much better than the popular myth would suggest.
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  So there's kind of like an economic apocalypse
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  in 1923 when the French and the Belgians occupied
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  the Ruhr and the German currency tips into a
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  hyperinflation that leads to, you know, kind
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  of like a devastating... kind of levels of prices,
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  like billions of marks for an egg, this kind
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  of thing. Is that the famous picture of the pyramid?
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  That's right, yeah. It's kind of like children
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  building walls out of banknotes. I guess these
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  scenes can seem quite amusing to us, but at the
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  time for Germans, it's deeply, deeply traumatic.
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  But somehow the economy bounces back very rapidly
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  from... this kind of apocalypse. And between
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  1924 and 1929, GDP grows at a decent clip of
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  about 4 % per year, which is very good by interwar
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  standards. There's a surge in industrial output
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  of about 8 % a year. And it's based on a big
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  cult of scale that rests on an aberration for
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  America. So you mentioned America in your intro,
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  and this is a big reference point for... Weimar
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  Republic. So there's a cult of Henry Ford, for
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  example, the automobile tycoon in the US. His
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  autobiography sells hundreds of thousands of
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  units in Germany. Productivity soars during this
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  period and wages also go up. So things look pretty
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  good. In contrast to our idea of Weimar as being
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  somehow doomed, if you look from 1928, it looks
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  to have a really bright future. And there's a
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  set of industries that kind of emerged that become
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  very important in Nazi Germany. So E .G. Farthen,
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  which is a giant chemicals conglomerate, is formed
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  in 1925. United Steelworks, a big kind of vertical
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  combine for heavy industry, 26. Carmakers Daimler
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  and Benz also merge in 1926 to create a new kind
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  of like world leading kind of outfit that will
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  become important again after 33. Even in banking,
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  there's a set of mergers in 1929. And all this
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  seems at the time to create a set of German viable
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  economic units that can compete with America's
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  giant corporations. And there's also a timing
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  of great consumerism. So we think of the roaring
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  20s. And these are really very roaring in Germany,
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  partly because after losing all their savings
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  in the hyperinflation, Germans don't want to
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  save. They want to spend. And so you get this
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  kind of quite sort of dizzy consumerism, modern
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  department stores, cinemas, nightclubs, spectator
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  sports takeoff, fashions, you know, start to
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  rival Paris. You have a whole new visibility
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  for young women. So one of the kind of most famous
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  aspects of the Weimar work is that sort of young
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  new woman. And this is like a German version
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  of a flapper. That's right. Yeah. So they've
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  got that short kind of like booby cop hair. They
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  smoke, they drink in public. They're basically
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  carving out a new kind of life stage between
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  leaving school and getting married. And they
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  really sort of become sort of internationally
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  famous, kind of like as kind of like emblems
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  of kind of like where Germany is developing.
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  And the key to all this is to set up what happens
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  next is Germany's return to the gold standard.
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  And this was kind of like a 19th century. international
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  monetary system, which basically pegged how much
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  everyone's currency was worth to particular measures
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  of gold. And what it meant was that countries
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  couldn't just print lots of money because what
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  they could print was tied to how much gold was
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  in their vaults. So it kept currencies very stable,
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  unless you happen to discover a hole of gold
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  in the Rhineland, which didn't happen. And under
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  this, lots and lots of money flows in. to the
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  Weimar Republic. So Wall Street in particular
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  is attracted by returns which are far greater
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  than those available back in the already booming
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  US. So something around kind of 3 billion US
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  dollars flows in to Germany in the late 1920s.
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  And this is more than twice the amount, just
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  to illustrate it, that later comes to West Germany
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  under the Marshall Plan. It all kind of flows
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  in from Wall Street and underpins massive investment.
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  Throughout the economy, so there's lots of new
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  roads, railways, there's new subway systems in
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  cities, there's mass building. So Weimar is famous
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  for its housing estates, really large cutting
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  edge units. And ones in Berlin are now kind of
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  UNESCO heritage sites. They're so kind of important
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  and cutting edge. And these are all this is why
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  it seemed to be going so well. This is one of
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  the. the choking things for us you know you know
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  what came afterwards they really did seem to
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  be that germany had finally sorted itself out
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  um and had kind of like a bright and glittering
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  future there's a very generous welfare state
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  so in 1927 a law is passed in germany which provides
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  um unemployment assistance without means testing
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  or extraordinary step uh by kind of like you
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  know interwar um standards um And all this money
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  also helps Germany to pay its reparations under
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  the Doors Plan. Germany makes all of its payments.
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  So things need to be looking up. You've got Germany's
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  rehabilitating the international stage. Its economy
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  is humming very nicely. There's kind of social
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  progress. But there is, of course, a vulnerability,
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  which is that if all this foreign money dries
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  up, for example, from Wall Street, then what
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  happens next? So you've got, in some ways, a
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  mortgage democracy. that is dependent on being
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  able to constantly refinance its debt and on
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  the kindness of strangers, essentially. And this
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  is the scheme that starts to implode with the
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  Great Depression. That's really not what I was
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  expecting to hear. I thought... The economy of
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  Weimar, the Weimar Republic was kind of like
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  this wounded animal the entire time. And then
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  the great crash is just the coup de grace, you
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  know, at the end. But that's not what you're
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  telling me. But I wanted to ask you, you've described
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  it as a new age of consumerism this period in
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  the 20s. Does that mean that also a new kind
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  of urban middle class of people is growing in
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  Germany? Yeah, people have large disposable incomes,
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  and Germany has a very rich tradition of cultural
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  provision. And more and more people can afford
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  to go to the cinema, can afford to go to see
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  plays, can afford to go and see artwork and eat
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  out. There's a new vitality, I think, to particularly
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  urban life. If you're unlucky enough to be the
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  daughter of a farmer in East Prussia, then your
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  life is by no means changed by these social innovations
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  and you'll spend your days still paddling around
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  in pig poop. But if you're lucky enough to be
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  in the city, then you get to explore these new
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  life stages in a way that your mothers and your
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  grandparents wouldn't even have recognised. So
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  there is a new urban strata. particularly for
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  white -collar employees. Okay, here's the big
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  one. So what did the Great Depression that followed
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  the crash that we mentioned at the beginning
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  do to the Weimar Republic's stability and also
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  to people's livelihoods? Yeah, this is the big
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  one, yeah. So it changes everything. So I focus
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  first on the Reichstag, which is the German parliament.
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  Now, we have like a cartoon image of the Reichstag
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  from various... TV series and films with a sweaty
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  den of extremists shouting past each other. But
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  that's by no means the case before 1930. In 1930,
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  kind of like stung by the Great Depression, the
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  electorate returns, the Nazi Party and the Communist
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  Party to the Reichstag as the second and third
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  largest kind of groupings respectively. And everything
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  breaks down. So before 1930, all kinds of legislation.
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  is passed with pretty large healthy majorities
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  including this unemployment assistance act so
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  as mentioned but also kind of like quite controversial
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  laws around kind of like morality gender sexuality
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  the Reichstag even comes quite close to repealing
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  the law against male homosexuality in 1929 which
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  would have been you know very kind of like pioneering
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  step in international context but then come to
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  the Great Depression, and voters are going to
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  start to turn to the extremes. So the key fact
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  I'd like our viewers to remember is that in 1928,
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  the Nazi Party gets 2 .6 % of the national vote.
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  This is minute stuff. So the idea that you've
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  got a republic that's simply waiting for a charismatic
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  saviour is in no sense borne out by this stat.
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  And then just a couple of years later, in 1930,
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  they get 20 % out of nowhere. One of the most
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  stunning surges in German electoral history,
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  suddenly the Nazis become the second biggest
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  party. At this point, the Reichstag seizes up
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  because the Nazis and the communists have no
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  interest in passing laws or making a meaningful
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  difference. They just want the parliament to
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  be a propaganda platform. This is the point at
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  which politics moves from the parliament, where
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  it's been kind of all the way through to 1930,
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  onto the streets with paramilitary violence,
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  and also to the circular people around the elderly,
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  Paul von Hindenburg, who is a president, and
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  he's equipped with emergency powers. If the Reichstag
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  breaks down, Hindenburg decides what happens.
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  And now the lifestyle is broken down. And this
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  kind of is very much kind of like what happens.
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  At that point, he's what, like 155 years old?
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  He must be 83 or something by then. So, you know,
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  older than Joe Biden, you know, like towards
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  the end of his presidency. And a lot, I think
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  in many ways, a lot deal less there than Biden
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  was. Just kind of like Hindenburg is a guy who
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  fought in the Franco -Prussian war. You know,
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  like in 1870. So, you know, what he's got to
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  offer a modern, sophisticated, liberal democracy
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  kind of like is unclear at the time and has been
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  ever since. Now, in terms of people's lives,
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  the Great Depression, curiously, initially, it's
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  not a major change. So the Wall Street crash
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  in 1929 is terrible for German bankers. But it's
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  really it doesn't make a huge difference. The
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  lives of most kind of Germans. And in fact, there's
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  some. schadenfreude so there's a very large kind
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  of like german community uh german american community
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  in the u .s and quite a lot of german families
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  are you know are quite entertained by the you
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  know the sight of these kind of loudly prosperous
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  german americans being cut down to size and they
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  kind of like they see it in some ways as a rebuke
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  uh for the versailles treaty but from this point
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  onwards um once the loans from wall street they're
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  not cancelled they're just not renewed which
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  means that companies can't invest. They start
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  to lay people off. And then this turns into really
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  quite a desperate spiral in Germany. So Germany
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  is kind of like outside the US, the most impacted
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  by the depression. So its GDP falls by 42%. I
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  just have been a comparison for British listeners.
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  It's that in Britain, GDP falls by 16%. But the
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  Great Depression has a huge footprint, even today,
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  in British political culture. George Orwell makes
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  his name writing about the miseries. In Germany,
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  it's almost three times worse. And it really
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  does impact every aspect of life. So nearly six
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  million Germans are recorded as being unemployed
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  in 1932. But if we compare how many were employed...
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  compared to how many then are employed later.
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  It's probably around 9 .5 million Germans who
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  are unemployed, and it's huge in some sectors.
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  And the population is what, around 60 million?
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  The population is about 60 -odd million, so it's
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  a really very large number. And shipbuilding,
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  two -thirds of people are unemployed, because
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  Germany is traditionally an export economy. So
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  once exports dry up and there's an unhelpful
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  and very topical set of tariffs that are introduced,
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  by the US. Any kind of worker that's involved
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  in an export industry is going to be waiting
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  outside a locked factory gate to get any hope
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  of work. The Weimar welfare system cannot cope.
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  So this unemployment law was designed for maybe
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  a maximum of 800 ,000 people. When you've got
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  9 .5 million people, there's nothing there. So
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  people are dependent really on charity, begging.
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  foraging uh it's a real kind of like it really
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  shows kind of like just how quickly an apparently
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  modern sophisticated um welfare economy can kind
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  of like can crack down so half a million people
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  are homeless uh there's stories of children in
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  kind of school playgrounds playing signing on
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  games you know where they pretend to go uh to
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  the uh unemployment office to you know to you
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  know to get um uh unemployment support suicide
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  rate soars And women kind of bear the brunt.
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  So women, in some ways, the winners of the Republic,
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  then they bear the brunt during the Great Depression
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  because they're the ones that are in charge of
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  household budgets, trying to get hold of daily
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  food, trying to keep things ticking over. So
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  it really feels like an endless and hopeless
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  downward spiral. And it's unsurprising that Germans
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  start to, you know, to clutch at straws in political
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  sense and to think it's worth kind of like spinning
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  the wheel. And this way you get the Nazi vote,
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  as I say, nothing in 1928. less than 3%, 20 %
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  by 1930, kind of like once the depression starts
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  to kick in. It just goes upwards all the way
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  until late 1932. The Nazi vote in local elections,
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  national elections, just tracks the unemployment,
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  tracks the decline of the economy. And this changes
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  in late 1932. The Nazi vote drops by about 4%,
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  which, you know, devastating to the sense of
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  inevitability of the movement. But this is because
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  the economy is improving a bit. And so it starts
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  to go down. There's a direct correlation with
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  the economy. Absolutely. Historians sometimes
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  get bored of the assertion that the Nazi vote
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  reflected economic circumstances. But the fact
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  that it goes down when the economy starts to
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  improve slightly. It's pretty compelling. But
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  why the Nazis in particular? There must have
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  been other people offering easy solutions at
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  that time, other parties. Yeah, so you've got
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  Nazis and Communists. These both have an enormous
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  advantage that they've never been in government.
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  It's always easy to hector from the sidelines.
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  The Communists have been very briefly in government
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  in a German state for a couple of weeks. Nazis...
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  in the state of Thuringia, they've had a post
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  of Minister of Culture, but they're really not
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  at all tarred with the track record of the Weimar
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  Republic. And so they benefit from the anti -incumbency
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  protest vote. Their hands are clean, they're
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  promising radical solutions. No one's quite sure
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  which, as I'm sure we'll come on to. But if you're
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  unemployed, you voted communist. If you're worried
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  about becoming unemployed, you voted Nazi. And
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  this kind of like... This is why they benefit.
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  So it's the idea of the horizon of expectation
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  is so gloomy that people think, well, I'm just
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  going to roll. At least they seem to have some
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  energy. I wanted to ask you, since people often
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  say that the rise of the Nazi party is a direct
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  consequence of this dramatic economic downturn
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  of 29, but you kind of answered already. So the
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  answer is yes, probably, right? Absolutely yes,
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  yeah. It doesn't entirely explain why it's the
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  Nazis that benefit. And this relates to geopolitical
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  culture, to the Versailles Treaty. There's all
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  kinds of reasons that extreme chauvinistic nationalism
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  with weird socialist undertones is the beneficiary
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  of the anti -incumbency vote. But without the
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  Great Depression, Hitler is nothing. There's
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  quite an amusing excerpt. I think it's the British
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  ambassador writes his memoirs in 1929. When he
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  mentions the Munich Putsch, he feels obliged
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  to put in a footnote to explain to readers who
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  the hell Hitler was. And this is just a year
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  before he breaks through. So this kind of really
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  illustrates that Hitler is saved by the slump.
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  By the way, I recently went to an English bookstore
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  here in Japan where I live. And while browsing
• 19:23
  the Second World War section, I spotted a pretty
• 19:25
  bizarre looking yellow book. And lo and behold,
• 19:28
  it turns out to be the English edition of Mein
• 19:30
  Kampf. It was kind of unsettling to see it just
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  laying there on the bookshelf like it was a gardening
• 19:36
  manual or something. Because I used to live in
• 19:39
  Berlin for 10 years. And of course, you would
• 19:42
  never see it there in any bookstore. There's
• 19:46
  been a scholarly version that's been brought
• 19:48
  out that's got all kinds of annotations to make
• 19:51
  sure people aren't drawn in by anything that
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  Hitler says. But there's so many annotations
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  that have to be added to it, it's quite hard
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  to absorb it as a reader. Even though people
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  who read it usually say it makes for an extremely
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  boring and tedious reading. Utterly tedious,
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  yeah. It's just a jumble of... It's typical autodidact.
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  So Hitler cannot put any great particular education,
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  just kind of like spewing forth things he's heard,
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  things people have told him. There's no coherence
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  to it, really. Okay. So, yeah, I imagine that
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  Hitler, who was pretty much like a high school
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  dropout or something, probably didn't have super
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  sophisticated views on the economy. But I wonder
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  what, if anything, did he write about the subject
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  in his dreadful little book? Yeah, I mean, there's
• 20:37
  not many specifics. So it presents the economy
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  as being like a racial phenomenon. What does
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  that mean? For Hitler, the master category of
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  history is race, and therefore the economy is
• 20:54
  in some ways like a phenomenal kind of secondary
• 20:57
  expression of racial relations. So all that's
• 21:01
  good about the economy comes from so -called
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  Aryans, and all that's bad is a result of kind
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  of like a Jewish or Slavic influence. So the
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  Jewish so -called parasite is in control of international
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  finance, has department stores that put honest,
• 21:17
  rosy -faced German tailors out of business. The
• 21:20
  Versailles Treaty is kind of a form of economic
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  rape of Germany. And there's some admiration
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  for the US, especially in his unpublished second
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  book, which comes out in 1928. And Hitler kind
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  of shared in the general kind of Weimar German
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  kind of like. admiration, just for the scale
• 21:39
  of what the US is achieving in terms of industry
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  and Taylorism and Fordism. But after 1945, very,
• 21:48
  very, very many Germans claim they voted Nazi
• 21:51
  because of their economic policies. Because obviously
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  after 45, this was probably a safest thing to
• 21:58
  like divulge as being the motivation for voting
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  for them. But the harsh truth is the Nazis didn't
• 22:03
  really have an economic policy. Even now, historians
• 22:06
  like me, struggle to work out what they claimed
• 22:10
  they were going to do and what they did do. So
• 22:12
  the idea that Germans at the time had some kind
• 22:14
  of clear impression seems entirely dubious. With
• 22:20
  a century of hindsight, we don't know. So how
• 22:22
  would a German voting in 1932 really have had
• 22:25
  a sense by what the Nazis' economic intentions
• 22:28
  were? Basically, it's economic populism they
• 22:30
  offer. So they're just saying, we're going to
• 22:33
  make it better. We're going to make Germany great
• 22:36
  again. We're going to free you from the sinister
• 22:41
  influence of socialist and Jewish elites. We're
• 22:44
  going to free Germany from the bondage of international
• 22:46
  finance. And you'll soon see that once we've
• 22:51
  got the Jews out of the way, Germany is going
• 22:53
  to flourish like never before. But there's no
• 22:56
  real sense of economic theory or of reflection.
• 23:03
  What there are, there's a few kind of reflationary
• 23:06
  plans. So these are economic packages designed
• 23:08
  to create work. So the state would create money
• 23:14
  and would use this money to give to firms to
• 23:17
  build bridges, whatever. This would then create
• 23:21
  employment opportunities for the unemployed Germans
• 23:24
  who would then have money in their pockets to
• 23:25
  spend. And this would kind of like help to kind
• 23:27
  of get the economy ticking over again. So the
• 23:30
  Nazis bring out a couple of these in 1932. The
• 23:34
  first one is quite big. It's 10 billion Reichsmarks.
• 23:38
  But this causes a negative reaction amongst the
• 23:40
  business community and amongst the middle class
• 23:42
  who fear hyperinflation coming back. If you start
• 23:45
  printing money again, this is going to create
• 23:48
  hyperinflation. So they scale it back down to
• 23:51
  3 billion. And after 1933, what the Nazis do
• 23:54
  is pretty much... They take schemes that have
• 23:57
  already been developed by the late Weimar governments
• 23:59
  of Franz von Papen and General von Schleicher,
• 24:04
  just rebadge them as being kind of like Nazi
• 24:06
  initiatives and kind of take the credit for whatever
• 24:09
  difference they make. Speaking of the business
• 24:12
  community, in 1932, the Nazi party was famously
• 24:15
  facing financial ruin. But then just a year later,
• 24:18
  the Nazis moved from being totally broke to actually
• 24:20
  being in control. of the German government. And
• 24:23
  what happened in the meantime was that apparently
• 24:25
  some of Germany's biggest industrialists decided
• 24:27
  to bail them out. Why did the capitalist class
• 24:31
  bet on this mildly put, wildly unpredictable,
• 24:35
  loony, autocratic regime? Yeah, I mean, it's
• 24:39
  a left -wing myth, generally, that the big business
• 24:42
  launched the Nazis. So, you know, for Marxists,
• 24:46
  it's pretty obvious that fascism is simply the
• 24:48
  mailed fist of kind of like a of big capital,
• 24:51
  but we now know that most Nazi revenue comes
• 24:55
  from its members. So they pay membership dues
• 24:58
  from events, so people were kind of paid to go
• 25:01
  and hear Hitler or Goebbels speak. Also in the
• 25:04
  Nazi newspaper, the Fokkerchebe or Bachter, this
• 25:07
  is where most of the money comes from. There
• 25:09
  are some early Nazi donors, so Fritz Thyssen,
• 25:13
  who in fact owned the United Steelworks concern
• 25:18
  that I mentioned earlier. He's an early kind
• 25:20
  of backer and he likes the nationalistic kind
• 25:23
  of foreign policy. But generally, big business
• 25:26
  spreads its bets across all the middle class
• 25:28
  parties rather than kind of like them picking
• 25:31
  out the Nazis. But there is a very infamous meeting
• 25:34
  or should be more infamous that happens on the
• 25:38
  20th, 20th of February 1933, between the Nazis
• 25:43
  and two dozen German businessmen. So they all
• 25:46
  kind of turn up in Hermann Goering's flat. a
• 25:49
  palatial flat in Berlin. Karl -Mar Schacht is
• 25:52
  there, the Nazi central banker. And Hitler makes
• 25:56
  a speech saying that Weimar had shown that democracy
• 26:00
  and capitalism were just incompatible because
• 26:03
  democracy gives a vote to workers who could then
• 26:07
  intend to use this to return left -wing parties
• 26:10
  who take away bits of profits and funnel them
• 26:13
  to their clients. And so Goering says, we can
• 26:18
  stop all this. We're going to have one more election.
• 26:21
  It's going to be the last election for 10, maybe
• 26:24
  for 100 years. And if we win this election, we're
• 26:27
  going to sweep aside the German labor movement.
• 26:29
  You guys can make profits. Well, this is crucial
• 26:32
  due to the fact, as you say, the Nazi party is
• 26:35
  broke. So between 1930 and 32, there's an endless
• 26:39
  sequence of national elections. state elections,
• 26:44
  municipal elections, there's presidential elections,
• 26:48
  the Nazis contest. These are all very expensive.
• 26:50
  So the Nazi party is broke. So it's about 12
• 26:54
  million kind of gleichmarks in debt. So big business
• 26:57
  agreeers, big contribution towards the last election
• 27:01
  that's going to be held in March 1933, which
• 27:04
  in turn funds Goebbels' kind of massive propaganda
• 27:07
  drive. and delivers just about enough votes for
• 27:12
  the Nazis and their nationalist allies to have
• 27:16
  a majority in the Reichstag and to start dismantling
• 27:18
  the Weimar state. And the motivation of big business
• 27:22
  isn't that they particularly like the cut of
• 27:23
  Hitler's jib, though some did. They just want
• 27:25
  to crush the labor movement and get bigger profits.
• 27:29
  And from the regime's point of view, bigger profits
• 27:32
  for business means they've got more money to
• 27:34
  invest in research and development. And particularly
• 27:38
  in armaments business. So business has got more
• 27:42
  money, it can then kind of create more modern
• 27:44
  plant and more manufacturing techniques, which
• 27:46
  will help Germany to rearm. And this does happen
• 27:48
  on unprecedented scale. How did Hitler view capitalism
• 27:51
  then? Hitler's views on capitalism were confused.
• 27:56
  So on the one hand, he thought it was kind of
• 27:59
  like a kind of a Jewish selfish enterprise that
• 28:02
  was kind of like unworthy of German culture.
• 28:07
  On the other hand, the competition mechanism,
• 28:10
  which underwrites free markets and capitalism,
• 28:13
  was one that had analogies to the way he understood
• 28:16
  how societies work. So by a constant process
• 28:18
  of fighting, confrontation, natural selection,
• 28:22
  the strongest will emerge. So there's kind of
• 28:25
  like an admiration for the successful big businessmen
• 28:29
  because they had come through this kind of process
• 28:31
  of competition and natural selection. unless
• 28:35
  they were Jewish, in which case they'd achieved
• 28:37
  this by kind of like nefarious kind of like underhand
• 28:39
  methods. So although kind of the Nazis often
• 28:42
  claimed to be socialists, it was really kind
• 28:44
  of like the socialism of racial equality rather
• 28:48
  than the socialism that we would recognise. And
• 28:51
  some historians, you know, tried to make the
• 28:53
  argument that Nazis really were socialists, but
• 28:55
  they're wrong. Really, there's nothing there
• 28:57
  really, any kind of socialist character at all.
• 29:00
  Once they swing into power, what kind of economic
• 29:02
  policies do the Nazis implement? You talked about
• 29:05
  them a little bit already, but especially given
• 29:07
  the fact that they're already kind of looking
• 29:09
  forward to waging war. Yeah, well, I mean, the
• 29:13
  first key policy is that the Nazis destroy the
• 29:17
  German labor movement. So this is the trade unions,
• 29:21
  the socialist party. So much for socialism. Absolutely,
• 29:25
  yeah. So the German Labour movement is the biggest
• 29:29
  in the world outside the Soviet Union. You know,
• 29:31
  it's really powerful. And the combined vote for
• 29:33
  left -wing parties, so the communists and the
• 29:35
  Nazis, sorry, the communists and the social democrats,
• 29:37
  in November 1932, the last free election of Weimar,
• 29:42
  is much larger than the vote for the Nazis. So
• 29:45
  it's very clear that, you know, they want to
• 29:47
  win the hearts and minds of German workers. They're
• 29:50
  going to have to remove these kind of like these
• 29:51
  rival suitors. So there's a mass wave of violence
• 29:55
  starting in February 1933 after the Reichstag
• 29:58
  fire. Communists are locked up in camps and increasingly
• 30:02
  so are trade unionists and socialists. And all
• 30:06
  of the assets of the German trade union movement,
• 30:09
  everything from, you know, the German trade unions
• 30:11
  had banks, building societies, bowling clubs,
• 30:17
  newspapers, huge amounts of property are all
• 30:21
  seized. and put to the disposal of the German
• 30:25
  Labour Front, which is a Nazi sham trade union
• 30:28
  under the control of Robert Lai. So with the
• 30:32
  left out of the way in concentration camps, in
• 30:36
  prisons, intimidated, big business can start
• 30:39
  paying less of the national pie to workers and
• 30:43
  keep more for itself. This extra slice of the
• 30:48
  pie, the Nazis hope, will then be funneled into...
• 30:52
  So this is that on the macro, the violent level
• 30:54
  of 1933. Then you've got these various kind of
• 30:59
  like pump priming kind of initiatives that happened
• 31:02
  in early 33. First myth to bust here, the Nazis
• 31:05
  did not invent the Autobahn. The first Autobahn
• 31:09
  was opened by Konrad Adenauer, a later kind of
• 31:12
  like West German president in the summer of 1932.
• 31:19
  the Nazis really kind of like emulated this to
• 31:21
  some extent. Most of the work creation schemes
• 31:25
  that they use in 33, I say they're inherited
• 31:29
  from Weimar and they're rebadged as being some
• 31:32
  genius Nazi initiative. So it's house building,
• 31:35
  repairs on roads, building new bridges, reclaiming
• 31:41
  marshes, all of which is kind of gobbled up by
• 31:44
  the cameras as an example of kind of like a singular.
• 31:48
  singular Nazi zeal and elan. There's a very,
• 31:52
  very large amount of spin involved. The other
• 31:57
  kind of initiative was the role of Hjalmar Schacht,
• 32:00
  who was initially in Weimar a fairly left -leaning
• 32:05
  democratic character, but radicalizes in response
• 32:09
  to the Versailles Treaty and becomes a Hitler
• 32:13
  whisperer for the German elite. And Schacht is
• 32:18
  described at the Nuremberg trials as being the
• 32:20
  financial genius of Nazi Germany, which probably
• 32:22
  pleased him somewhat, certainly pleased him more
• 32:25
  than the various accusations people made quite
• 32:28
  rightly about him being a Hitler enabler. And
• 32:30
  he has a new ministry, the Ministry of Economic
• 32:31
  Affairs, that meddles extensively in all elements
• 32:35
  of German trade. So it's Schacht that decides
• 32:39
  whether you get a few dollars to import something
• 32:41
  from the US. You don't get to decide yourself.
• 32:44
  It's a real micromanaged. kind of economy. And
• 32:47
  he wants to make sure that all foreign currency
• 32:51
  goes to sort of war -related industries and not
• 32:53
  to consumer sectors. And does this on a really
• 32:56
  very, very minute scale. So by 1934, Schacht
• 33:01
  is down to his last few dollars and pounds. He's
• 33:03
  literally rummaging behind the sofa trying to
• 33:05
  find a few dollars to import from the US. And
• 33:10
  this then leads to the other kind of well -known
• 33:12
  Nazi policy of autarky. So if you can't import
• 33:15
  consumer stuff, from overseas because you don't
• 33:17
  have the foreign currency for it. You've got
• 33:18
  to make your own. You cut yourself off from international
• 33:22
  trade. And this means that Germans have to use
• 33:28
  their own domestic radios, for example, which
• 33:31
  are rubbish compared to ones they could have
• 33:33
  got from the US. And the big dilemma that this
• 33:36
  is all trying to solve is whether you prioritize
• 33:40
  guns or butter in the economy. So on the one
• 33:44
  hand... Do you rearm heedlessly and not worry
• 33:50
  about the consumer sector? Or do you want to
• 33:52
  keep consumers happy and then kind of like rearm
• 33:55
  alongside that? This is the great balance that
• 33:57
  struck, well, I mean, for the next 12 years,
• 34:01
  really. And Hitler sometimes blinks. So Hitler
• 34:05
  sometimes worries about the consumer sector not
• 34:08
  being enough butter and orders Schacht to allocate
• 34:11
  some of this foreign currency. to import fats,
• 34:15
  for example. It does this on a couple of occasions
• 34:16
  in 35 and 36 because there's widespread perception
• 34:20
  that the regime's not really as popular as it
• 34:22
  claims to be by then. So if you look at the Gestapo
• 34:25
  underground reports from 35, 36, people are kind
• 34:29
  of a bit sick of the Nazis and they're sick of
• 34:31
  empty shelves and rising prices. So the Nazis
• 34:34
  then start to allow some imports of food just
• 34:38
  to offset this. But the balance between guns
• 34:40
  and butter runs like a red thread. through the
• 34:43
  Nazi economy all the way through to the end.
• 34:46
  Schacht also has quite clever ways for rearming
• 34:50
  and that he creates a new form of credit which
• 34:54
  are called MIFO bills. These are basically IOUs
• 34:59
  issued by the state which are backed up by Germany's
• 35:02
  kind of like platinum industrial corporations
• 35:05
  and that allow the regime to rearm off the books
• 35:09
  so they don't have to borrow money from the bond
• 35:11
  markets. or borrow money internationally, they
• 35:15
  instead create this credit and then keep it kind
• 35:17
  of like semi -hidden inside the realignment economy.
• 35:21
  This is because of the Versailles Treaty kind
• 35:23
  of forbids Germany to rearm. So by 1938, about
• 35:26
  12 billion Reichsmarks worth of these MIFO bills
• 35:29
  has been used to provide credit and liquidity
• 35:32
  to the armament sector. And it's not been inflationary
• 35:37
  at all because people have kept hold of the credit
• 35:39
  notes because they're quite an attractive thing
• 35:40
  for firms to hold on to. By 1938, it doesn't
• 35:43
  really matter. Everyone knows the Nazis are rearming,
• 35:45
  so there's no need for secrecy anymore. So this
• 35:47
  is a wheeze that is pretty successful. And the
• 35:52
  other kind of policy is the four -year plan,
• 35:54
  which is launched in 1936, which may remind you
• 35:59
  of Stalin's five -year plan you mentioned at
• 36:01
  the start that you kind of studied at school.
• 36:03
  This is under Hermann Goething, a proper Nazi
• 36:06
  of the old school, which wants to make the economy
• 36:10
  match fit for war. within four years. So kind
• 36:15
  of like really kind of like putting aside the
• 36:17
  butter and going, you know, really going all
• 36:19
  in on the guns. And the rationale was that the
• 36:25
  various problems of kind of like matching up
• 36:28
  guns and butter over the previous years have
• 36:30
  shown Nazis needed to expand and get their own
• 36:32
  resources and not have to depend on kind of like
• 36:35
  outside people for their iron ore or for their
• 36:39
  oil. And therefore it's time to, you know, to
• 36:43
  start to look towards the Soviet Union's kind
• 36:45
  of like oil fields or those of Romania, rather
• 36:48
  than trying to kind of like either have it produced
• 36:51
  domestically via e -gay farming, quite an expensive
• 36:53
  and inefficient process or trying to import it
• 36:56
  from elsewhere. So the four -year plan is about
• 36:58
  we need to have war soon to get these resources.
• 37:00
  We're running to the end of what we can achieve,
• 37:02
  you know, kind of with this kind of micromanaged
• 37:07
  economy. You said that people voted for the Nazis
• 37:12
  based on the economy, but you also said that
• 37:15
  Nazis kind of quickly turned to the kind of politics
• 37:21
  of guns instead of butter. So I imagine this
• 37:24
  was not good for most of the people's living
• 37:27
  standards. So are people responding to this in
• 37:30
  the 30s then? Many Germans were quite proud of
• 37:35
  the fact that there was this reassertion of German
• 37:38
  kind of... social militarism. The Nazis bring
• 37:41
  back a social militarism. It's a belief that
• 37:43
  it's fine to believe in your country and it's
• 37:45
  fine to start to rearm and to try and restore
• 37:51
  Germany's place on the international stage as
• 37:54
  a great power. Ideology takes over. Exactly,
• 37:59
  yes. The Nazis were very popular, largely because
• 38:03
  they were promising to restore German honour
• 38:06
  on the international stage, and especially once
• 38:08
  there's a few victories after 1936, so that Rhineland
• 38:12
  is re -militarised, people are more on board.
• 38:15
  However, people are people, and they don't like
• 38:17
  empty shelves, they don't like rising prices,
• 38:20
  and so there's a degree of simmering discontent
• 38:25
  that they can't have it both ways. the restoration
• 38:29
  of German military capacity and nicely full bursting
• 38:33
  shells, the finest quality imports from Denmark
• 38:37
  or whatever. So there's an inconsistency to how
• 38:40
  Germans respond, but that's human nature. However,
• 38:42
  these big infrastructure projects, okay, they
• 38:45
  didn't do the Autobahn, but other than that,
• 38:48
  they are kind of lowering unemployment, aren't
• 38:51
  they? They do make a difference. So, I mean,
• 38:55
  the Autobahn, for example, only has a few thousand
• 38:57
  workers. And there's also, there's very low,
• 39:00
  very low levels of car ownership in Germany.
• 39:03
  So compared to like the US, you know, hardly
• 39:05
  anyone has a car. I mean, a good way of illustrating
• 39:08
  that is that in early Nazi era regulations for
• 39:11
  the road, you only had to drive on the right
• 39:13
  if there happened to be a car coming the other
• 39:14
  way. That's how few, that's how little traffic
• 39:16
  there was around. So the idea of the Autobahn
• 39:19
  per se, kind of revolutionize anything, you know,
• 39:21
  kind of like is for the birds. They're mostly
• 39:24
  like about fascist prestige and the latent. military
• 39:28
  potential. Now, when it comes to the other projects,
• 39:31
  these kind of this building and this land reclamation,
• 39:35
  historians differ. So on the one hand, you've
• 39:39
  got Keynesians. So these are kind of like people
• 39:42
  that believe that a state should be kind of fiscally
• 39:46
  proactive and should kind of like create jobs,
• 39:49
  should roll out worker schemes. And they tend
• 39:53
  to believe that the Nazis did kind of have success.
• 39:57
  by creating jobs so this multiplier effect i
• 40:00
  mentioned that people are employed they spend
• 40:02
  money and then this kind of like then feeds through
• 40:04
  to the commercial sector uh and canes at the
• 40:08
  time said the nazis kind of vindicated him that
• 40:10
  you know that they that they've shown that uh
• 40:13
  that kind of like trying to try and trying to
• 40:15
  get out of the trap by being kind of proactive
• 40:18
  had worked um And also Keynes believes that Germany
• 40:22
  kind of leaves the gold standard effectively
• 40:24
  in kind of like in 1933. This also kind of like
• 40:27
  helped. On the Hayekian side, so these are the
• 40:30
  more kind of hardcore free marketeers, they say
• 40:34
  no, that the schemes are much too small to have
• 40:36
  made a meaningful difference. So we're talking,
• 40:39
  you know, kind of like, you know, a few billion
• 40:41
  Reichsmarks. And this is not enough to have brought
• 40:44
  around the very clear recovery that the Nazis
• 40:48
  manage. And instead, the Nazis benefit from being
• 40:52
  very, very lucky. So they come to power when
• 40:55
  the economy has already turned a corner. They
• 40:57
  inherit these work creation schemes from the
• 41:01
  last Weimar governments. They can then badge
• 41:02
  as being their own. And the Nazis are also kind
• 41:08
  of extremely lucky in demographic terms. So one
• 41:12
  of the problems of the late Weimar Republic was
• 41:14
  that. Lots of young people are coming onto the
• 41:17
  work market in the late 20s, early 30s, who were
• 41:20
  born just before the First World War, which is
• 41:22
  kind of like a kind of boom years for the population.
• 41:25
  And the early 30s, you've got the cohorts from
• 41:28
  the war years coming on to the job market. And
• 41:31
  this is much smaller because soldiers have been
• 41:33
  away during the First World War. They've been
• 41:35
  much lower kind of like fertility rate. And so
• 41:39
  there could have been several more million people.
• 41:42
  who needed a job had it not been from this lower
• 41:44
  kind of like both birth cohorts during the war.
• 41:46
  So the Nazis get again a very, very lucky here
• 41:48
  as well. On balance, probably their schemes did
• 41:54
  make a meaningful difference. So there's about
• 41:57
  one million people employed in them by the summer
• 42:02
  of 1934. And employment is going to be wiped
• 42:06
  out by 1936. Historians and economists still
• 42:11
  argue over whether the New Deal, Roosevelt's
• 42:13
  New Deal, was good or bad for the economy, or
• 42:16
  whether Barack Obama's stimulus program in 2009
• 42:20
  was good or bad. The Obama stimulus program was
• 42:24
  4 % of US GDP, a vast, vast sum, much, much larger
• 42:28
  than anything a Weimar government could even
• 42:30
  dream of. Economists still argue over whether
• 42:34
  it made any difference or not. We'll never know
• 42:36
  for sure, but certainly in terms of the vibe.
• 42:39
  I think the vibe of having these work creation
• 42:41
  schemes, having them fanned by propaganda, having
• 42:44
  one million people kind of like employed in them,
• 42:47
  clearly, you know, does make a difference. But
• 42:49
  it's not necessarily, you know, kind of like
• 42:51
  all down to the Nazis' brilliance. And also,
• 42:54
  I've got to break something to you here. The
• 42:56
  Nazis weren't very honest with their stats. So
• 42:59
  there were a lot of... That's a big shock. Yeah,
• 43:02
  I know, I know, I know. Sorry to break it. But
• 43:05
  so... There's all kinds of massaging of the stats
• 43:08
  and people who kind of like worked only in the
• 43:12
  summer are suddenly branded as being kind of
• 43:14
  like full time workers. There's also a scheme
• 43:18
  that's used to encourage women to withdraw from
• 43:20
  the workforce. So new newly married couples get
• 43:24
  a loan from the state and for every child they
• 43:27
  have, they can pay off a bit less of it. The
• 43:29
  idea here is that kind of your boost fertility
• 43:32
  rates, but also you keep women off the labour
• 43:34
  market and therefore off the job stats. There's
• 43:37
  all kinds of dodgy counting that kind of flatters
• 43:40
  the stats. But on balance, yes, they did make
• 43:43
  a difference. But this may be partly down just
• 43:45
  to get the energy and vibe as much as to the
• 43:47
  actual content of the programs. What were some
• 43:50
  of the biggest economic sectors that people were
• 43:53
  employed in? What was a typical job in Nazi Germany?
• 44:00
  Pretty similar to kind of like they've been to
• 44:02
  a lot, a large part of the German workforce is
• 44:04
  still in agriculture. So it's a much more agricultural
• 44:06
  kind of like economy than, you know, for example,
• 44:09
  Britain was, which pretty much imported all of
• 44:12
  its food. So a very large agricultural sector.
• 44:15
  You've got heavy industry. So the Ruhr in particular
• 44:20
  is still kind of my huge numbers of coal mining.
• 44:25
  So steel output. You've got a growing kind of
• 44:30
  services sector. So kind of like, you know, legal
• 44:34
  services, accounting. We've got the modern kind
• 44:37
  of phenomena. You've got a lot of small traders
• 44:40
  still. It's a very good mix, you know, kind of
• 44:43
  like of economy. But towards the end of the 1930s,
• 44:46
  you've got more and more people working in armaments
• 44:47
  industries. So, for example, by then, amongst
• 44:50
  the biggest corporations in Germany, you've got
• 44:53
  Junkers, Heinkel. uh messerschmitt so the big
• 44:57
  kind of like aircraft manufacturers are real
• 45:00
  kind of become major players so there's kind
• 45:01
  of like um a re -industrialization of the workforce
• 45:05
  especially income like in heavy industry but
• 45:08
  also you know germany fires the same path throughout
• 45:11
  the 20th century as other modern economies that
• 45:13
  it moves slightly away from agriculture and more
• 45:16
  into like a services um kind of like modern economy
• 45:19
  and the nazis don't make much difference here
• 45:22
  you know there's a limit to what even the most
• 45:25
  and supposedly revolutionary of regimes can achieve.
• 45:28
  And they can't also, they can't prevent women
• 45:31
  from forming an ever greater part of the labor
• 45:32
  force too. But there's definitely a stronger
• 45:36
  emphasis on rearmament, obviously by the late
• 45:38
  1930s. You mentioned the services industry. Did
• 45:41
  people from other countries ever go on a holiday
• 45:45
  to Nazi Germany? That sounds really wrong from
• 45:49
  today's standpoint. I think we look at Nazi Germany
• 45:53
  from the perspective of the Second World War.
• 45:56
  That's like going on a holiday to North Korea
• 45:58
  right now. Even worse, probably. But there are
• 46:01
  some tourists in North Korea. Not very many,
• 46:04
  I think. We look at the Nazis through the prism
• 46:08
  of Auschwitz and the Second World War. Whereas
• 46:11
  before 1939, it was a fascist... kind of economy
• 46:17
  like Mussolini was quite widely admired. Fascism
• 46:19
  seemed to be the future in many ways. So kind
• 46:22
  of people come over, they're very interested
• 46:23
  in what's going on. A lot of British right -wing
• 46:27
  newspapers are very much into the Nazis, you
• 46:30
  know, the Daily Mail kind of infamously, you
• 46:32
  know, a big cheerleader for fascism. So there's
• 46:36
  lots of tourism that happens. The Nazis are kind
• 46:38
  of pretty happy to have tourists because they
• 46:40
  create foreign currency. And they often send
• 46:43
  back pretty positive reports. You know, the Olympics,
• 46:46
  for example, you know, kind of like a massive
• 46:48
  kind of like map tourism is created. It's generally
• 46:52
  seen as, you know, being a propaganda kind of
• 46:55
  like boon for the Nazis. Some of our best accounts,
• 46:59
  essentially, of what life is like in Nazi Germany
• 47:02
  come from foreign travelers, because Germans
• 47:05
  themselves, you know, weren't free to, you know,
• 47:07
  to write down at the time, you know. exactly
• 47:10
  what was going on. So it's a strong flow, you
• 47:14
  know, school exchange programs. It's all kind
• 47:17
  of rumbled on. I think only really in 1938, when
• 47:20
  you have the pogrom against Germany's Jews, that
• 47:27
  really how far the Nazis have moved from even
• 47:30
  the most kind of latitudinous understanding of
• 47:32
  civilized conduct really becomes very clear.
• 47:35
  And the drumbeats of war kind of like do chill
• 47:38
  tourism. Yeah, I'm originally from the Balkans,
• 47:41
  so when you said there's a school exchange program
• 47:44
  to Nazi Berlin, that kind of sent shivers down
• 47:47
  my spine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of amusing.
• 47:51
  I wanted to ask, how much wealth did the state
• 47:54
  loot from its exile that imprisoned, obviously
• 47:57
  later killed, Jewish population? Was that like
• 48:00
  a boom for the economy, or what did that do?
• 48:02
  No, so this is another myth that we can dispel.
• 48:07
  So there's an idea that somehow taking Jewish
• 48:13
  wealth allowed the Nazi regime to buy off the
• 48:16
  German people or somehow kind of like, you know,
• 48:19
  help the process of rearmament. But this is not
• 48:23
  the case simply because the population of Jews
• 48:26
  in Germany is so small. So it's in 1933, it's
• 48:30
  about 0 .75 percent, so less than 1 percent.
• 48:34
  of uh the population is jewish and they said
• 48:38
  we didn't have enough wealth uh in order to enrich
• 48:41
  the other 99 or to allow the state to undertake
• 48:45
  ambitious realment um programs or certainly not
• 48:49
  outside of the anti -semitic imagination which
• 48:51
  imagined that jews held this kind of like you
• 48:53
  know this kind of this extraordinary amount of
• 48:55
  wealth so there's around a hundred thousand jewish
• 48:58
  businesses in germany most of them just small
• 49:01
  uh outfits And these are going to gradually kind
• 49:06
  of like expropriated by the state or by other
• 49:11
  Germans in the 30s. But in terms of GDP, moving
• 49:16
  a Jewish business from its Jewish owner to a
• 49:20
  so -called Aryan owner makes no difference whatsoever.
• 49:23
  It's just an accounting transaction. So the idea
• 49:26
  that somehow giving a Jewish business to an SA
• 49:30
  man had made any difference to GDP. or to the
• 49:33
  realment program. It's just completely illogical.
• 49:37
  There's also a good deal of pragmatism. So in
• 49:39
  summer of 1933, Hitler personally approves a
• 49:44
  credit line to a Jewish -owned department store
• 49:47
  in Berlin, Tietz, because he's concerned about
• 49:50
  if it goes bust, the unemployment stats will
• 49:55
  suddenly look worse. So there's a degree, you
• 49:57
  know, kind of like of finessing. how in 1938,
• 50:04
  80 % of these 100 ,000 Jewish businesses are
• 50:07
  still in the hands of their original owners.
• 50:09
  This then changes over the course of the year.
• 50:13
  And there's a real kind of like intensive program
• 50:16
  of harassment before 1939 to force Jews to emigrate.
• 50:22
  So it's important to remember that the so -called
• 50:24
  final solution until 1941 is emigration. There's
• 50:30
  no plan to set up gas chambers at this stage.
• 50:35
  And the economy is used as a vice to try and
• 50:39
  force Jews who hadn't yet emigrated to do so.
• 50:42
  So they're pressured to sell up and to move.
• 50:45
  So after the 1938 pogrom, on Hitler's personal
• 50:49
  order, 30 ,000 German Jews are locked up in concentration
• 50:52
  camps in order to terrorize them into emigrating.
• 50:57
  and they were only released if they promised
• 50:59
  to do so and promised to turn over their businesses.
• 51:02
  When Jews sold their businesses, they would have
• 51:05
  to do so way below the market rate, often 20
• 51:08
  % or 30 % of the cover value, and also to pay
• 51:13
  a so -called flight tax to the state. All of
• 51:16
  which nets money, but the population is so small,
• 51:20
  it doesn't net enough money to be much more than
• 51:23
  a blip. on the overall kind of GDP growth, despite,
• 51:26
  you know, the sickening morality, but just in
• 51:28
  terms of the pure economics. And there's also
• 51:31
  a 1 billion Reichsmark fine is imposed on Germany's
• 51:34
  Jews for supposedly provoking the 1938 November
• 51:38
  pogrom, because the German ambassador in Paris
• 51:43
  was shot by a stateless Jew. And so the Nazi
• 51:47
  regime claimed that the German people have risen
• 51:48
  up in understandable outrage at this, and that
• 51:51
  the Jews should therefore should pay a fine.
• 51:54
  And also Jews that had insurance contracts on
• 51:57
  their businesses that they wanted to claim on
• 51:59
  for the damage that had been done during the
• 52:01
  pogrom, the proceeds instead are pocketed by
• 52:04
  the state and Jews have to pay it themselves.
• 52:06
  So it does net money for the state. It does enrich
• 52:09
  kind of like deuced in kind of like Germans,
• 52:13
  kind of SA men benefit from this process. But
• 52:17
  it doesn't really, just in terms of the overall
• 52:20
  macroeconomics, it's a rounding error. The sums
• 52:22
  are too small. Okay, once the war starts in 1939,
• 52:28
  how does the direction of Nazi economy change?
• 52:33
  That's a good question. Because by 1939, the
• 52:35
  limits of a peacetime economy have already become
• 52:40
  kind of like very clear. The raw materials Germany
• 52:44
  has or can get hold of are exhausted. There's
• 52:47
  not enough material to, you know, to build more
• 52:50
  tanks. Even things like, you know, army barracks
• 52:53
  can't be built because there's not enough kind
• 52:54
  of concrete around to do it. There's labor shortages,
• 52:59
  partly because so many Germans have been sort
• 53:02
  of called up and are doing military service.
• 53:05
  But also because the economy is overheating.
• 53:06
  It's trying to do too much. And there's not enough
• 53:10
  labor around to carry out all the roles. The
• 53:14
  German Central Bank is basically printing freely.
• 53:18
  It's printing like a drunken sailor. It's like
• 53:20
  back in the days of the hyperinflation, because
• 53:22
  Hitler has sacked the entire board of the Central
• 53:25
  Bank to say there should be no more restrictions
• 53:27
  on the amount of credit the Nazis can use to
• 53:30
  rearm. And then once the soldiers depart to Poland
• 53:34
  and then to France, the economy is stretched
• 53:39
  even more. The workforce is even more thinly
• 53:41
  spread. So really, by this point, there had to
• 53:48
  be a change of tack. And this is where some historians
• 53:53
  can put forward the idea of blitzkrieg, a term
• 53:56
  that you'll be familiar with. This is the idea
• 54:00
  that what happens in 1939 is the Nazis switch
• 54:03
  to a war strategy, which involves quickly rolling
• 54:05
  over lots of opponents and basically kind of
• 54:08
  like grabbing uh all of their resources and therefore
• 54:11
  kind of like keeping feeding the economy kind
• 54:13
  of like keeping it going in uh an ad hoc way
• 54:16
  and then this links to the idea of guns versus
• 54:20
  butter that there's they're still trying to uh
• 54:23
  according to the blitzkrieg theory to keep this
• 54:25
  balance and the idea is if you can mobilize just
• 54:28
  in a short sharp burst this will then um reduce
• 54:32
  the amount that that butter is constrained for
• 54:35
  consumers if you kind of like you can really
• 54:37
  have an efficient brief mobilization this will
• 54:40
  then spare the consumer um privation so the nazis
• 54:44
  are haunted by the first world war when there
• 54:47
  was kind of like a severe kind of like uh demoralization
• 54:51
  on the home front and so um some historians argue
• 54:55
  that there's a continuity in terms of what the
• 54:57
  nazis do across 1939 in which they're trying
• 55:00
  to balance the consumer sector and the military
• 55:03
  sector, guns versus butter, which continues.
• 55:08
  This research now shows is not the case, and
• 55:11
  that basically Blitzkrieg is entirely a myth.
• 55:15
  It's a myth in the economic sense, because the
• 55:17
  Nazis are trying to get as many rearmaments as
• 55:19
  they possibly can, right from 1939 onwards. It's
• 55:24
  a myth in the military sense, because the Wehrmacht
• 55:26
  does what any army tries to do, which is to win
• 55:28
  a war, to win a campaign quickly. And it's only
• 55:31
  kind of like... On the military side, it's kind
• 55:33
  of like British and French generals who claim
• 55:35
  the Nazis account for some diabolical new military
• 55:38
  strategy, blitzkrieg. And on the economic side,
• 55:41
  it's Albert Speer. He's the Nazi that takes over
• 55:45
  the war economy in 1942 to make it much more
• 55:48
  efficient and not worrying so much about butter
• 55:51
  anymore. But again, this is with kind of research
• 55:54
  by particularly Adam Tooze, U .S. historian,
• 55:57
  has shown that. In fact, the idea there was any
• 56:00
  kind of change in 1942 is another myth. Nazis
• 56:04
  were basically trying to get as many arms as
• 56:06
  they could right from the start. The fanatical
• 56:08
  pace of pre -war rearmament continues all the
• 56:12
  way across 1939. So it's far less of a chronological
• 56:18
  marker than you might think. So the message is
• 56:20
  that blitzkrieg is a myth in every sense. The
• 56:22
  Nazis had all of these political prisoners already.
• 56:25
  And then on top of that, they're starting to
• 56:26
  acquire all of these vast territories during
• 56:28
  the war. What role did forced labor play in their
• 56:32
  wartime economy? Yeah, forced labor plays an
• 56:35
  enormous, enormous role in the wartime economy.
• 56:39
  So estimates suggest that they probably, Nazis
• 56:42
  used around 30 and a half million people as foreign
• 56:46
  laborers from, I think. 26, 27 countries in the
• 56:51
  course of the war. One and a half million of
• 56:54
  these were kind of volunteers. Often they come
• 56:57
  from Germany's fascist cousin, Italy, to work
• 57:02
  in the economy. But often volunteers should be
• 57:05
  understood in a very kind of like loose sense,
• 57:07
  that people are kind of like violently recruited
• 57:13
  to work for the Nazi regime. Initially, it's
• 57:17
  fairly slow. So by late 1940, you've got around
• 57:20
  2 .7 million foreigners working in the economy,
• 57:25
  including 1 .2 million French and British POWs.
• 57:29
  So they've been captured during the fall of France,
• 57:32
  especially in the summer of 1940. And half of
• 57:36
  them are in farming and the other half are in
• 57:38
  industry. Doesn't particularly make an effort
• 57:44
  to do much more at this stage. The big turning
• 57:47
  point in the entire war is the setback for the
• 57:52
  Wehrmacht outside Moscow in December 1941. And
• 57:57
  at this point, the Nazis stop capturing so many
• 58:00
  Soviet POWs who can be used for forced labor.
• 58:04
  And there's a kind of a drive to recruit from
• 58:08
  all the way across Nazi -occupied Europe. So
• 58:12
  in 1942, you start to get French factory workers
• 58:15
  are kidnapped by the Gestapo and kind of sent
• 58:19
  back to work in Germany. And this certainly is
• 58:20
  what kicks off the French resistance. This is
• 58:25
  what really spurs it. It wasn't necessarily the
• 58:27
  idealistic enterprise that French historians
• 58:31
  used to claim. So in 1944, you've got 8 million
• 58:35
  foreign workers in Germany. This is around a
• 58:38
  quarter of the workforce. Three million are from
• 58:40
  the Soviet Union. And they're everywhere. So
• 58:43
  they're in camps. They're in kind of barracks.
• 58:47
  They're in hostels. They're in schools. They're
• 58:50
  in tents. And almost every German company is
• 58:52
  using unfree forced labor of some kind. And it's
• 58:56
  very, very visible all the way across German
• 59:00
  society. After 1945, many Germans said, I never
• 59:04
  came across a forced labourer or a concentration
• 59:07
  camp in May. I didn't know. This is extraordinarily
• 59:10
  improbable, unless you really are in a very far
• 59:12
  -flung area of Germany. These forced labourers
• 59:17
  are provisioned according to the Nazis' racial
• 59:19
  hierarchy. So the best fed are Germans, followed
• 59:23
  by West Europeans and Italians. followed by Central
• 59:29
  Europeans. And then towards the bottom of the
• 59:32
  ladder, you've got Slavs and Soviet citizens
• 59:35
  and then Jews at the very bottom. So it's a quite
• 59:38
  elaborate kind of like hierarchy of taxonomy
• 59:41
  of rationalication. And this is mirrored in productivity.
• 59:45
  So it turns out that Soviet prisoners produce
• 59:48
  far less per hour than did a French or a German
• 59:52
  prisoner. This is not because of the Nazis claim
• 59:54
  the Soviets are going to have like... lazy or
• 59:56
  backwards or uneducated is because they're not
• 59:58
  fed to the same degree. There's a very clear
• 1:00:01
  correlation between provision and productivity.
• 1:00:04
  And then the concentration camps too. So these
• 1:00:08
  were set up in 1933, but there's only kind of,
• 1:00:10
  it's only kind of like six or so by the outbreak
• 1:00:12
  of the war. During the war, more camps are set
• 1:00:16
  up and they all have satellite camps, what are
• 1:00:18
  called Alsenlager, which are then set up around
• 1:00:21
  various kind of like work sites or uh sent to
• 1:00:26
  companies and there's around 600 of these alsen
• 1:00:29
  lager by 1943 um all of which are kind of like
• 1:00:34
  carrying out work for the war effort or to keep
• 1:00:36
  the economy ticking over the prisoners are very
• 1:00:39
  poorly treated um sometimes they're building
• 1:00:42
  v1 or v2 rockets which are these self -propelled
• 1:00:45
  rockets that are launched from um german launching
• 1:00:50
  sites in france kind of like against britain
• 1:00:53
  And in total, around 1 .6 million concentration
• 1:00:57
  camp inmates are deployed in the war economy,
• 1:01:00
  and only 475 ,000 of them survived the war. So
• 1:01:03
  there's a really very, very high mortality rate.
• 1:01:06
  And they're very, very visible throughout Germany.
• 1:01:09
  So I'd say this would be an unmissable phenomenon
• 1:01:11
  for your average German citizen. Yeah, I wanted
• 1:01:16
  to ask you that. We know that concentration camps
• 1:01:19
  were mainly like killing factories. But there's
• 1:01:22
  this famous scene in Schindler's List, obviously
• 1:01:24
  it's not a documentary, where that poor man is
• 1:01:26
  making door hinges or something. So maybe they
• 1:01:29
  were actually making stuff in concentration camps
• 1:01:32
  as well. They were, yeah. Even from 1933 in Dachau,
• 1:01:35
  which I wrote my first book on, you get prisoners
• 1:01:37
  being put to work, reclaiming land, building
• 1:01:42
  wood, doing things in camp workshops. It's important
• 1:01:46
  to separate between extermination camps. and
• 1:01:49
  concentration camps. So extermination camps are
• 1:01:53
  ones that are set up in Poland, purely for the
• 1:01:57
  business of murdering Europe's Jews. Concentration
• 1:02:02
  camps have a longer pedigree in Nazi Germany,
• 1:02:05
  and there are some that have gas chambers, such
• 1:02:08
  as Majdanek or Auschwitz -Birkenau, but they're
• 1:02:11
  very much structured around a daily routine of
• 1:02:14
  work. The best memoir is Primo Levi's a survivor
• 1:02:18
  in Auschwitz. He worked in Mornewitz, which is
• 1:02:22
  a Auschwitz branch run by Ige Farben. There is
• 1:02:29
  this emphasis on trying to get some productivity.
• 1:02:32
  Now, it doesn't work that Mornewitz produces
• 1:02:33
  nothing that it's intended to, but there are
• 1:02:37
  attempts to get prisoner labor to produce something
• 1:02:40
  for the economy. All right, this is something
• 1:02:43
  I've always wondered. Since Germany was at war
• 1:02:46
  with literally most of the planet at that point,
• 1:02:49
  who was it left trading with? How did that work?
• 1:02:52
  Or did they actually manage to become completely
• 1:02:54
  self -sustainable during the war? Well, the starting
• 1:02:58
  point here is that it's almost impossible to
• 1:03:00
  disaggregate a German economy from the European
• 1:03:04
  economy during the Second World War because so
• 1:03:06
  much is occupied by the Germans. So it's very
• 1:03:09
  much intertwined. So between 1939 and 1941, for
• 1:03:14
  example, you have the Molotov -Ribbentrop Pact,
• 1:03:18
  which is an agreement between the Soviet Union
• 1:03:21
  and Nazi Germany that they're going to be good
• 1:03:23
  friends for the foreseeable future. And under
• 1:03:27
  the framework of the Molotov -Ribbentrop Pact,
• 1:03:30
  oil and grain and metals are delivered to Germany
• 1:03:35
  from the Soviet Union. So there's a big trade
• 1:03:38
  artery here. And in fact, after the Nazis break
• 1:03:42
  the Nazi -Soviet pact in 1941 and invade the
• 1:03:46
  Soviet Union, they actually wound up getting
• 1:03:48
  far less oil and grain than they had done beforehand.
• 1:03:50
  So it was economically counterproductive. After
• 1:03:55
  1941, the Nazis control such a large slice of
• 1:04:00
  Europe that really trade is not a big issue.
• 1:04:02
  And Hitler rejoices in 1941 that occupied Europe
• 1:04:07
  is the most blockade -proof. place in the world
• 1:04:10
  because the Nazis are haunted by the memory of
• 1:04:12
  the First World War when the British blockade
• 1:04:15
  really had caused severe privation on the home
• 1:04:18
  front, really had kind of like created all kinds
• 1:04:20
  of discontent and privation. It's not a problem.
• 1:04:25
  And if you look at what the Nazis control in
• 1:04:28
  1942, they have 290 million people are under,
• 1:04:34
  are occupied by the Nazi regime. It's got a GDP
• 1:04:38
  bigger than the British Empire or of the USA.
• 1:04:42
  There's a diverse industrial base, so North Italy,
• 1:04:45
  France, the Ruhr, the Central European breadbasket
• 1:04:51
  of Ukraine. It starts to look like a missed opportunity
• 1:04:55
  for the Nazi regime to win the war. And some
• 1:05:00
  historians, like Richard Overy, for example,
• 1:05:02
  makes the case that if you'd asked... somebody
• 1:05:06
  in 1942 who didn't have hindsight, who's going
• 1:05:08
  to win the war? You'd think, well, it's going
• 1:05:10
  to be the Nazis. They've got this extraordinary
• 1:05:12
  economic resource that's integrated, that's quite
• 1:05:15
  sophisticated. You've got manufacturing in the
• 1:05:19
  West. You've got ample labor and resources in
• 1:05:22
  the East. All you do is reconcile these and it's
• 1:05:25
  going to be a formidable economic unit. So it's
• 1:05:33
  all there. And Hitler is also... able to feed
• 1:05:36
  the German people because the Nazis want to starve
• 1:05:40
  Eastern Europe. This is very much part of the
• 1:05:42
  longer range plan. So the idea of Lebensraum,
• 1:05:48
  so living space for Germany, involved what was
• 1:05:52
  called depopulating Eastern Europe and then replacing
• 1:05:56
  it with German soldiers and German peasants and
• 1:06:00
  Germanizing it. There's a particularly horrific
• 1:06:04
  plan from the SS called the Generalplan Ost,
• 1:06:07
  Generalplan East, which foresees in Eastern Europe
• 1:06:10
  by starvation and forced expulsion, eliminating
• 1:06:15
  85 % of the Polish population, two thirds of
• 1:06:18
  Ukrainians, three quarters of Belarusians. So
• 1:06:21
  perhaps 45 million people in total are to starve
• 1:06:24
  in order that the food can first of all feed
• 1:06:28
  Germans. western europe and then also in the
• 1:06:30
  longer term create this living space for the
• 1:06:33
  population so the german citizens suffer much
• 1:06:36
  less until the end in the second world war in
• 1:06:40
  terms of food than they had in the first world
• 1:06:42
  war and this is all kind of part of the of the
• 1:06:44
  big plan what about when the war starts turning
• 1:06:48
  and also like bombs are flying on german cities
• 1:06:52
  The First World War, as I say, there have been
• 1:06:54
  really severe problems with morale, with productivity,
• 1:06:57
  even with performance of the soldiers at the
• 1:07:01
  front, just from shortages. So from 1915, you
• 1:07:05
  see food riots, you see assaults on bureaucrats,
• 1:07:09
  you see town halls in provincial Germany being
• 1:07:12
  stormed by hungry and angry women. There's lots
• 1:07:16
  of strikes. There's a black market. And eventually
• 1:07:20
  there's a revolution in November 1918, which
• 1:07:23
  is very much kind of fueled by the fact people
• 1:07:26
  are hungry and pissed off with the Kaiser's regime,
• 1:07:29
  which has failed to deal with food shortages.
• 1:07:32
  This doesn't happen at all in the Second World
• 1:07:36
  War. But this is mainly because the regime is
• 1:07:39
  much more ruthless than had been the Kaiser's
• 1:07:42
  regime. So there's very, very declining morale
• 1:07:45
  from 1943. So you've got aerial bombing, especially.
• 1:07:48
  So the US Air Force by night, the British Air
• 1:07:52
  Force by day. The Eastern Front starts to look
• 1:07:55
  like, you know, a losing cause after Stalingrad
• 1:08:01
  and the kind of the cursed battle. Fall of Mussolini
• 1:08:05
  also is not a good omen for the prospects of
• 1:08:09
  European fascism. So there is clearly a downturn
• 1:08:12
  in morale, and this is aggravated by the shortage
• 1:08:15
  of consumer goods. People are eating okay, but
• 1:08:18
  the consumer sector is definitely squeezed. But
• 1:08:21
  in 1943, Heinrich Himmler of the SS is appointed
• 1:08:24
  Minister of the Interior, and he's basically
• 1:08:27
  charged with preventing what happened in 1918
• 1:08:29
  from possibly happening in Germany. So there's
• 1:08:32
  ruthless policing and sentencing, the Gestapo.
• 1:08:36
  There's no space in Germany for organized protests.
• 1:08:40
  People sometimes imagine that Germans could have
• 1:08:41
  protested against the Holocaust, but there's
• 1:08:45
  no kind of political space just for doing this
• 1:08:50
  kind of thing. By the end of the war, you've
• 1:08:51
  got party activists stringing up so -called defeatists
• 1:08:55
  from lampposts. It's a different kind of political
• 1:08:58
  regime entirely to the First World War. And whilst
• 1:09:02
  there was probation, probably Germans suffer
• 1:09:05
  more after 1945. from black shortages than they
• 1:09:09
  did maybe until the early months of 1945. Yeah,
• 1:09:15
  I just wanted to ask, once the tides of war turn
• 1:09:19
  against Germany again and living standards disintegrate
• 1:09:24
  and it gets worse and worse towards 1945, does
• 1:09:28
  that begin to cause any uprisings within the
• 1:09:31
  Third Reich? But you pretty much answered already.
• 1:09:33
  No, there's no capacity for it. To some extent,
• 1:09:38
  Germans are still positive about Hitler personally.
• 1:09:41
  He still has a resonance. There's a lot of social
• 1:09:46
  inhibitions. There's a huge fear of what the
• 1:09:51
  Red Army is going to do when it comes in. This
• 1:09:54
  helps to keep people in line as well as the domestic
• 1:09:56
  forms of terror as well and propaganda. Well,
• 1:10:00
  that fear ends up being quite justified, right?
• 1:10:04
  Red Army reaches these German cities, they behave,
• 1:10:08
  well, a euphemism would be like really poorly.
• 1:10:12
  There's lots of sexual assaults. There's lots
• 1:10:14
  of killings and stuff, reprisals. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:18
  I've read somewhere recently that part of this
• 1:10:21
  rage was that due to the fact that when Soviet
• 1:10:25
  soldiers saw what kind of living standards Germans
• 1:10:28
  were enjoying, that they all had fridges at home.
• 1:10:32
  plumbing and indoor plumbing and so forth, that
• 1:10:35
  they went absolutely berserk because their standards
• 1:10:37
  of living were so poor already in the Soviet
• 1:10:40
  Union most of the time, and then the Germans
• 1:10:42
  on top of that invaded. I wonder what you think
• 1:10:44
  of that. Yeah, it's certainly part of the story,
• 1:10:46
  but it's very important to convey the sheer scale
• 1:10:49
  of the Soviet losses in... the Second World War.
• 1:10:53
  Almost 30 million people. More people die in
• 1:10:58
  the siege of Leningrad than Britain and America,
• 1:11:00
  between them losing the entire war. One in seven
• 1:11:04
  Soviet citizens dies. It's unsurprising there
• 1:11:07
  was this pent -up rage. It comes out in sickeningly
• 1:11:11
  awful ways, especially as you mentioned in the
• 1:11:13
  sexual violence. Part of this is seeing what
• 1:11:17
  the Germans had in the first place, but also
• 1:11:18
  it's just that... War is hell, and this helps
• 1:11:21
  to contextualize what happens. But the scale
• 1:11:24
  of the Soviet losses is still very, very difficult
• 1:11:27
  to comprehend. Certainly, you can't capture it
• 1:11:29
  even through the numbers I've just given you.
• 1:11:33
  All right. At the end, always an ungrateful question.
• 1:11:35
  Are there any historical parallels that we can
• 1:11:37
  draw from where we started at the beginning?
• 1:11:42
  And where the West is right now, like with the
• 1:11:44
  Weimar Republic, with its welfare state and how
• 1:11:47
  quickly that turned and, you know, the West these
• 1:11:50
  days? Yeah, sure. I mean, there's a longstanding
• 1:11:53
  account that explains the Weimar Republic's fall
• 1:11:56
  by the fact that Germans are not very good at
• 1:11:58
  democracy. You know, they didn't have very much
• 1:12:00
  practice at it. And the Weimar Republic is a
• 1:12:02
  kind of a doomed interlude between a monarchy
• 1:12:05
  and a dictatorship. We don't have to look very
• 1:12:08
  far around the world today to see that even polities
• 1:12:10
  with hundreds of years of democratic history
• 1:12:12
  are kind of like a swooning over kind of autocratic
• 1:12:16
  strongmen and tolerating the breakdown of the
• 1:12:19
  rule of law, tolerating, you know, the crumbling
• 1:12:22
  of the idea of universal rights. So very much
• 1:12:25
  is very, very, you know, very contemporary. And
• 1:12:26
  then the war in the Ukraine, you know, this is
• 1:12:28
  the worst European conflict since 1945. You know,
• 1:12:33
  we're seeing the conduct of the Russian army
• 1:12:34
  is, you know. sickening and violence against
• 1:12:37
  civilians, the use of camps, filtration camps.
• 1:12:39
  So, unfortunately, all these echoes are going
• 1:12:41
  to be far too resonant today. Professor Dylan,
• 1:12:46
  thank you so much for taking the time. What an
• 1:12:48
  interesting conversation. I hope we can do this
• 1:12:52
  again. Do you have any social media where people
• 1:12:55
  can follow what you're up to? I'm on Blue Sky.
• 1:12:58
  Blue Sky, perfect. Letting go of Twitter. Yes,
• 1:13:02
  absolutely. All do. Very happy to let go of Twitter,
• 1:13:05
  yes. Awesome. Thanks again. Thanks for having
• 1:13:08
  me on, Zad. I really appreciate it. Thank you
• 1:13:09
  very much for listening. Please subscribe to
• 1:13:11
  the podcast on YouTube. Follow on Spotify and
• 1:13:14
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• 1:13:17
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• 1:13:20
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• 1:13:23
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• 1:13:29
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• 1:13:39
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• 1:14:15
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