Social and Economic Philosophy of the Third Reich

Hey everyone. This is an answer from the previous Q&A. As often seems to happen, it turned into a short essay. Answers to more questions will be coming soon.

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Question: Subscriber John M Anderson asks: Darryl, can you discuss the economic situation in Germany in the mid-to late 1930’s? Specifically the programs and policies Hitler implemented to benefit the German people, the impact of those policies compared to the rest of the world, and Hitler’s attempt to separate Germany from Central Banking cartels and how that might have affected international policies towards Germany.

Answer: Well, getting into the weeds would take an entire essay or podcast episode. I’ll eventually get to that in the current series, but if you don’t want to wait til then, check out Wages of Destruction, by Adam Tooze, and Hitler’s Revolution, by Richard Tedor. Both are excellent books about your question, and Tooze’s book especially goes deep into the actual policies. For now, let’s discuss some of the ideas that informed the social and economic policies of the NSDAP.

Purity and unity were the two master concepts of the Third Reich’s domestic policy agenda. The Germany that fought World War 1 had only been around for 43 years when that war began, and, although many were enthusiastic patriots of the Kaiser’s Reich, in 1914 the country was still riven by regional, religious, and class differences. Some regions had to be dragged into unification, which they regarded as mere submission to Prussian military power. After the Great War, for example, Bavarian separatist movements sought to break their region away from the Weimar Republic, a tendency which Hitler denounced as venomously as he did the hated Republic itself. Germany was also split between Catholic and Protestant Christians, and the religious divide overlapped with, and intensified, regional divides since each denomination was concentrated in different parts of the country. Above all, the most worrying and potentially destructive element was the radicalization of the newly-politicized working class. The two rising ideologies of the 19th century, liberalism and socialism, pitted class against class and intensified divisions within industrializing societies.

Hitler was born into a middle class family (his father was a respectable civil servant), but spent his young adulthood as a penniless drifter in Vienna. For a time, he slept in shelters and workhouses, and often went hungry. In his middle class youth, he had observed the contempt with which the “respectable” people viewed the so-called proletariat; in his young adulthood, he observed and experienced the want and neglect from which poor and working people suffered. Nationalism was a bourgeois ideology - everyone Hitler knew as a boy had been a fervent nationalist. Middle class nationalists heaped scorn on the urban riff raff for their apparent lack of national feeling. Hitler had imbibed the biases of his father’s class, and was at first repelled when he got a close-up look at the proletariat in Vienna. Dissolute, disrespectful of all authority, without interest in anything beyond their next drink, fix, or meal, and, it was true, practically devoid of national feeling. To the extent that they were political at all, they were drawn to the street corner socialism preaching violent hatred for everything associated with the higher classes. Over time, as he shared their suffering, he developed sympathy for the underclass. Early in Mein Kampf, he scolds the middle class for their contempt of the poor and working people. One passage is worth quoting at length, both for its insight into the “social problem” and into the political mind of the young Adolf Hitler: