Book Review: Hitler's Beneficiaries

I am a Canadian. I was born here. I was raised here. I hope to die here. I have no loyalties to other nations and desire to be anything other than a Canadian. I am also the son of a woman who was born in Hitler's Germany and a father whose family came to Kanada from the Hapsburg Empire. Not surprisingly, I have struggled with trying to understand how a cultured nation, a people that produced great artists and brilliant scientists, could have followed an evil megalomaniac like Adolph Hitler.

Thousands of books have been written about Hitler and National Socialist Germany. (When I searched Amazon.com with the search words "Adolph Hitler" I got 70,996 results.) Some authors try to demonize Hitler; others try to explain him. Some books focus on the dictator as the willful architect of the great world catastrophe that was the Second World War; others show more ambition and expand the discussion to include Nazi Party functionaries, generals, industrialists, and other "great men". Very few look at the average German, "Johann Q. Öffentlichkeit" who lived under the regime.

Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State goes a long way to explaining how average Germans benefited materially from the Nazi state's imperialistic forays. We are all familiar with how high ranking Nazi officials looted museums and private collections of valuable works of art, but author Götz Aly suggests that individual Germans played their roles too.

But instead of stealing Vermeers or Rembrandts, German soldiers in occupied countries used local currency that had been converted at very favourable rates to pay for food, clothing, and luxury goods that were no longer available in Germany itself. The goods were then shipped back to Germany. The net result was to strip the de facto colonies of their resources while ensuring that Germany itself did not suffer from inflation.

Similarly, Adolph Hitler -- like other, more contemporary politicians -- attempted to wage an expensive war without raising taxes. Despite the huge demands for armaments and the resources to produce them, the Nazis avoided increasing taxes for the vast majority of Germans. (Unlike today's populist politicians, however, the Nazis limited their tax increases to the wealthiest Germans, a nod, no doubt, to the "socialist" element of National Socialism.)

One of the more bizarre, if interesting, policies pursued by the Nazi government was the lavish system of pensions and income supplements they put into place to ensure the support of the people. The German government provided the wives and families with such rich benefits that a woman could make 80% of her pre-war income by staying home to look after die Kinder. (National Socialists obviously believed that "Der Platz einer Frau ist im Haus.") When the family benefits were combined with the money that soldiers were forced to save, some family incomes increased.

So how was the Nazi state able to bankroll such lavish benefits? Simply put, they plundered and enslaved their victims. Hitler's Beneficiaries goes into sickening detail how Nazi Germany relied first on Jewish resources and then on the riches of occupied countries to bankroll both the war effort and the personal prosperity of individual Germans. In fact, Aly makes the argument that Nazi Germany was forced by its very economic foundations to continue wars of aggression in order to maintain average Germans in the standard to which they had become accustomed.

Perhaps the most horrific stories in a volume filled with horrific stories were also the most banal. Aly repeatedly quoted older Germans who had lived through the war years as they fondly recollected how well off they had been in the war. The most chilling moment in the book, for me at least, was when an elderly German lady mentioned that she did not lack for material comforts during the war. It was only after the war, when the victorious Allies instituted rationing, that things became scarce.

Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi State
Götz Aly (translated by Jefferson Chase)
Metropolitan Books, New York City, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7926-2