Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris - Review

Reason, August-Sept, 1999 by Michael McMenamin

Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, by Ian Kershaw, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 845 pages, $35.00

Adolf Hitler was "wholly ignorant" of economics, Ian Kershaw boldly writes in his excellent new study, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris. What the dictator did know was politics and how to achieve public support - Hitler was an immensely popular leader with approval ratings even Bill Clinton would envy - and early on, he made it clear that economics would be subordinate to politics.

One odd result of Hitler's decision is that few of his biographers have paid much attention to his economic policies prior to the Nazis' first overt military act, the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. Indeed, if they pay any attention at all to the subject, most merely accept Nazi propaganda claims of Hitler's "economic miracle" in restoring Germany's prosperity. Kershaw's book is a welcome exception to this tendency.

The general view that Germany's shattered economy surged to life in the first few years of the Nazi regime is typified by Sebastian Haffner, a German writer whose short book The Meaning of Hitler (1979) received extravagant praise in John Lukacs' recent The Hitler of History. As Haffner put it, "Among these positive achievements of Hitler the one outshining all others was his economic miracle. ... In January 1933, when Hitler became Reich Chancellor, there were six million unemployed in Germany. A mere three years later, in 1936, there was full employment. Crying need and mass hardship had generally turned into modest but comfortable prosperity.

"Almost equally important: helplessness and hopelessness had given way to confidence and self-assurance. Even more miraculous was the fact that the transition from depression to economic boom had been accomplished without inflation, at totally stable wages and prices. Not even Ludwig Erhard succeeded in doing that later in post-war Western Germany."

Haffner is hardly alone in his glowing evaluation of Hitler's supposed economic miracle. In his highly influential Origins of the Second World War (1961), British historian A.J.P. Taylor similarly gave the Nazis credit for creating widespread prosperity, concluding, "The Nazi secret was not armament production; it was freedom from the then orthodox principles of economics. Government spending provided all the happy effects of mild inflation; while political dictatorship, with its destruction of trade unions and rigorous exchange control, prevented such unfortunate consequences as a rise in wages, or in prices."

Kershaw's version of things more accurately reflects what was really happening in Germany from 1933 through 1935. Hitler's economic policies were systematically wrecking the German economy and were rapidly painting him into a corner where his only choices were war or a loss of power.

Hitler, argues Kershaw, was deathly afraid of inflation and a repetition of the early 1920s. Nevertheless, he had to reduce unemployment or he wasn't going to last long enough to begin rearming Germany, a public goal of his since the '20s. Increasing exports was not a possibility since, unless the German government devalued the mark (as Britain had done with the pound and the United States with the dollar), German exports couldn't compete in a way that would add new jobs or bring needed foreign exchange. Hitler nixed devaluation because he thought it was a step on the road to inflation. Tax cuts were also out of the question because he believed they led to less revenue not more growth.

Hitler's solution for both the rearmament and unemployment problems was the same: massive deficit spending. In fact, by Kershaw's account, the Nazi government guaranteed some 35 billion Reich-Marks to the German armed forces alone over an eight-year period, along with massive road building, subsidies to the auto industry, lots more bureaucrats to enforce all the new controls and regulations, and bribes to women to get married and stop working.

Did such policies reduce unemployment from 6 million in 1933 to 1 million three years later? Not exactly. Statistics from Dan Silverman's Hitler's Economy (1998) show that unemployment was reduced in Germany from 34 percent or about 6 million people, in January 1933, to 14 percent, or 2.5 million people, in January 1936. That's a dramatic reduction, to be sure, but hardly full employment. Even the 2.5 million number is extremely unreliable, as Stephen Roberts, an economic historian at Australia's University of Sydney who lived in Germany in the mid-'30s, explained in his 1937 work, The House That Hitler Built.

The "official statistics naturally tell only part of the story," wrote Roberts. "They do not take into account the Marxians, Socialists, Jews and pacifists who have lost their jobs and are cut off from relief; such persons do not appear in the official figures of unemployment. The refugees are ignored. In addition, at least a million people have been absorbed in the army, the labour-service camps, the Nazi organizations, and various partly-paid forms of labour on public works. Half a million women have been taken off the labour market in the last four years by means of the marriage allowance paid by the Government to entice them away. ... What they have done has been to introduce a series of emergency steps which have drastically reduced the number of unemployed; but such steps, by their very nature, are in many cases temporary. On the other hand, the reduction [in unemployment], however artificially it may have been achieved, has had a tremendous propaganda value for the Government, and there is the fixed belief of most Germans today that Hitler has achieved wonders in providing employment."