How did National Socialist Germany manage to essentially eliminate unemployment and idleness in just 3 years?

How did National Socialist Germany manage to essentially eliminate unemployment and idleness in just 3 years?

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economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/13982/feast-or-famine-rm-winkler-1.pdf
amazon.com/German-catastrophe-Reflections-recollections-paperback/dp/0807056677
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Incidentally I was just writing a paper on this.

They did it by lowering wages, striking certain groups off of employment categories altogether, and enlisting people en masse in a giant-ass army paid for by the state. The result was that the Nazi government always spent more than it earned. Between 1933 and 1939 the total revenue amounted to 62 billion marks, whereas expenditure (at times comprising up to 60% rearmament costs) exceeded 101 billion, thus causing a huge deficit and national debt reaching 38 billion marks in 1939 (H .P. Willmott, "World War II," p. 18). The Germans attempted to stave this off by looting Austria and Czechoslovakia, with the plunder of the former's reserves alone doubling Germany's own reserves in 1938 (Adam Tooze, "Wages of Destruction," p. 473), but looting could only delay the inevitable. The Germans' answer? More looting. Hence WW2.

The system was basically a tower of duct tape always on the edge of collapse. And it didn't even improve the lives of the people working under it DESPITE said unsustainable spending, besides what natural improvements come from a country emerging from the depression like every other nation on Earth. But they even managed to screw that up. Per Richard Overy's "The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1933-1938", wages and consumptions of luxury goods dropped during Nazi rule. Consumption of rye bread increased 20% between 1928 and 1938, while consumption of meat was 18% lower, of fats 37% lower, and of wheat bread 44% lower (Overy, p. 34). Wages in 1938 were 7% lower than they were in 1938 despite all the spending,
and wages as a percent of national income had decreased from 64% to 57% (Overy, p. 32).

They made unemployment illegal and sent people who were "work-shy" people to concentration camps.

They just fudged the books. Its not that hard to lie.

Overy's book has a good chart on all the different types of food and their changes in consumption between 1927 and 1937.

>the total revenue amounted to 62 billion marks, whereas expenditure (at times comprising up to 60% rearmament costs) exceeded 101 billion

Nothing wrong with running budget deficits to prop up the economy after a major Depression

>They did it by lowering wages

Fake. Real wages and working conditions for the German working class increased considerably from 33 to 39

>Wages increased by 10.9% in real terms during this period
Lee, Stephen (1996). Weimar and Nazi Germany. Oxford: Heinemann. p. 86

>Fake. Real wages and working conditions for the German working class increased considerably from 33 to 39
Compared to 1932, yes. But not if you compare it to 1928.

>1927 start year at the height of a speculative boom
>Cherry picked goods doesn't include durable consumer goods or household investments in housing

Into the trash it goes

>Nothing wrong with running budget deficits to prop up the economy after a major Depression
Yeah but only if you are reinvesting the money into something profitable, not when all the investments are going into the military.

>National Product
This is largely irrelevant to the standard of living.
>cherry picked goods
They are based on German surveys from 1928 and 1938. So it's the German government fault they were "cherry picked".

>not allowed to choose the most prosperous years of the weimar republic
>wide array of food products is "cherry picked"

>>Wages increased by 10.9% in real terms during this period
>Lee, Stephen (1996). Weimar and Nazi Germany. Oxford: Heinemann. p. 86
That book does not contain any quote like that whatsoever. Chapter 4 however does contain a rather lengthy deconstruction of the notion that people benefitted from Nazi economy policy.
>Nothing wrong with running budget deficits to prop up the economy after a major Depression
They weren't propping up the economy, it was being spent almost entirely on armaments, which is what Schact had an issue with. Buying tanks and guns wouldn't actually lead to any tangible return. Unless, of course, you're going on a looting spree. Which was explicitly always Hitler's plan.

Rearmament was seen as a necessity for the German nation. Just because national security is not an economic good that can be measured doesn't mean it's not valueable

economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/13982/feast-or-famine-rm-winkler-1.pdf

>This is largely irrelevant to the standard of living.

Yeah that's why Uganda with a GDP per capita of 500$ has the same standard of living as Switzerland. Opinion discarded stop responding you are clueless

>if they did something retarded while believing in it really really hard, then it wasn't actually retarded
know how I know you're a stormfag?

A list that doesn't include assets is irrelevant and misleading. If you reduce your consumption temporarily in order to buy assets such as housing or government bonds that's good for the economy and the people.

>stormfag

Go back to r/socialism

Does Uganda spends half of its GDP on rearmament?

The same way as communism.
Planned Economy.

Germany went in full total war mode in 1943

That's the commie tactic.
Nazis just enlisted half the country into the army and called them employed.

>buy assets such as housing
Investment into housing in 1938 was 300 million Reichsmarks less than 1928, with a larger population.
>government bonds
Interestingly, the government preferred to secretly pilfer funds from private bank accounts instead of relying on bonds like the previous war.

That is one ugly merchant.

taking out massive loans and spending it on memes

Cos they're really cool!

>trannies!

Back to /r/traditionalism

>/r/traditionalism - 555 subscribers
>/r/socialism - 119,580 subscribers
Yet more proof that socialism is the most reddit ideology.

In 1936 they introduced elements of planned economy and started to prepare for war (4 year plan).

Germany spent a greater percentage of GDP on military expenditure than any other power in the war, and compared to Britain, had higher levels of women in the workforce and industries working on war orders and lower levels of civilian consumption in every year between 1939 and 1944.

The most popular political subbreddit is Drumpflestiltskin's.

>r/the_donald 500000+ subscribers

reminder g*rmans haven't paid their debts

>thinking trannies are mentally ill and their mental illness should not be encouraged nor normalized is now a traditionalist position

How far has the world fallen in the last 5 years or so.

tips

But it wasn't a necessity for the German nation. The Germans weren't in any danger of being attacked by any power that could actually do them much damage. France and Britain didn't want war. Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland either didn't want war or were too weak to threaten Germany. The USSR would have had to cross Poland to attack Germany, which would probably have caused France and Britain to jump in on Germany's side to maintain the balance of power (and protect an important trading partner). WW2 was an unforced mistake on the Nazis' part.

- regression to the mean
- state funded employment

They literaly followed their motto:"Arbeit macht frei", so they worked towards the "liberation" of other countries of their resources.

The same way the U.S. government "fixed" the economy post 29, just so happened that a war as looming and men were needed for it.

I don't give a shit, but all three books you mention use secondary sources and this makes me think you were too lazy to read works from which those (and hundred others) tidbits were lifted.

You don't like 'old' books?

And thesis and conclusion of Tooze's book is literally shit.

What "old books"? German Nazi books which were mostly just propaganda? Sorry, but real historians use different sources than public speeches of crazy dictators.

how so?

For fuck's sake. Those works you mention use almost exclusively secondary sources and all three works use heavily Shirer's 'Rise and fall...' as a source for example.

From the Penguin's add
>The Wages of Destruction is a chilling work of originality and tremendous scholarship that is already setting off debate in Germany and will fundamentally change the way in which history views the Second World War
It didn't set off any debate and it didn't fundamentally change the way which history looks at WW2.

Tooze tries to imply 'Roman genius' (funny, since that's what Churchill called Mussolini) to Hitler. He gives too much credit to him and his 'master cunning': the real brains of the regime did their best to work out economy and all else to please Hitler's dreamy ideas.

>beer -58%
Boy am i glad the nazis lost

>graph conveniently leaves out the 200% growth of the soviet economy in the same period
Ha

Tooze's work is good to explain how Nazi economy worked. It doesn't mean it's a perfect book. There are other books trying to explain the Hitler phenomenon. They are often very contradictory - evil genius, weak dictator, opportunist, puppet. Today I think the dominant view is that Hitler wasn't anyone special and "German catastrophe" was largely the fault of external factors than Hitler's genius.

>beer -60%
How did this regime survive as rulers of Germany?

>German catastrophe" was largely the fault of external factors than Hitler's genius.
You are aware he is basically soulley responsible for almost all of world war 2 in europe?

>"German catastrophe" was largely the fault of external factors than Hitler's genius
No. Almost no one but neo-nazis think that the war in Europe could have possibly been caused without Hitlers aggression.

Italy was actively threatening Germany in the 30s, though it was over German meddling in Austrian politics

Too add to this deconstruction of the prosperous Nazi economy myth, Evan's The Third Reich in Power cites numerous contemporaneous letters and journals that discuss shortages of refined flour, animal fats, and meat.

The purchasing power of average families took a real hit.

As for defense being a good investment, it isn't when you have a retarded leadership who start wars they have no hope of winning and then your cities get area bombed, millions of your young men die, and half your country gets turned into a Soviet puppet after the larger, more productive country you somehow thought you could invade while at war with another great power BTFOs you.

>Italy was actively threatening Germany in the 30s, though it was over German meddling in Austrian politics
That's very explicitly Germany's own fault.

that's retarded, Europe has always been a powder keg until MAD came into play

This term was coined by a famous German historian Friedrich Meinecke and denotes the period of 1933-1945, not only the WW2.

amazon.com/German-catastrophe-Reflections-recollections-paperback/dp/0807056677

Yes, but I don't think Italy posed any threat to Germany unless allied with at least one of France and Britain. And it would have been aggressive German moves that provoked such an alliance, I don't one would have formed for offensive purposes.

*don't think one

Dude, you gotta loy of the meth if you want to be taken seriously, hitler launched 7 unprovoked invasions of neutral countries as well as making an agreement with the soviets handing them half of eastern europe and then invading them aswell
So its basically a term referring to hitlers time in power amd labells it a catastrophe? Huh