The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  There were many similar cases all over Germany. Municipal utilities, such as gasworks, waterworks and the like, offered ample opportunity for SA men to find employment, often surplus to requirements. An audit of the Hamburg Sickness Fund office found that it had employed 228 more administrators than it actually needed. Thousands of old Party men found comfortable jobs in the transport system; the Hamburg local railways took on over a thousand in 1933-4, though whether they really needed them was another matter. The Hamburg Regional Farmers’ Leader Herbert Duncker, for instance, was paid 10,000 Reichsmarks a year as ‘agricultural adviser to the Hamburg Electricity Works’ without ever once turning up even to see what the job might involve. In this way, public corporations were in effect required to subsidize the Nazi Party and its ancillary organizations. Similar pressures were brought to bear on a wide variety of private enterprises. Meanwhile, laws passed in 1934 and 1938 indemnified Party members against claims for damages as a result of the destruction they had meted out to trade union and other offices in 1933, and allowed them to clear their debts without penalty if they had got into financial difficulties before 1 January 1934.196 By contrast, former activists in the Communist or Social Democratic Party found their attempts to get a job repeatedly rebuffed, until the demand for labour in the arms industry became so insistent that their previous political activity could conveniently be forgotten. The experience of Willi Erbach, a skilled engineering worker who had been a member of the Reichsbanner, the paramilitary wing of the Social Democrats, cannot have been unusual: sacked for his political activities in 1933, he did not find a job again until three years later, in 1936, when the labour exchange suddenly assigned him to the Krupp factory in Essen. Meanwhile, less skilled workers found getting a job easy enough if they were members of the Nazi Party.197

  The opportunities for self-aggrandizement went all the way down the scale, right down to the ordinary brownshirts who helped themselves to the cash-boxes, the furniture, the bed-linen and the equipment they found in the trade union premises they raided on 2 May 1933, and in the homes of the men and women they arrested. Not untypical was the case of the leader of the Munich Student Union, Friedrich Oskar Stäbel, victor in a bout of in-fighting that resulted in his appointment as head of the national German Students’ Union in September 1933. Stabel celebrated his climb to the top by using student union fees for personal expenditure, clothes, cars and the like, and to finance and equip a marching band for his own entertainment. The local student union in Berlin spent its members’ contributions on the purchase of no fewer than seven automobiles for the personal use of its officers.198 The quantity of money and property flowing into the Party from early 1933 onwards was so vast that few proved able to resist the temptation to squirrel some of it away for themselves. The Party Treasury did not take kindly to embezzlement from its own funds, and between 1 January 1934 and 31 December 1941 it brought no fewer than 10,887 prosecutions for misappropriation of Party funds before the courts; they involved ancillary organizations of the Party as well as the Party itself. The auditing of accounts and the control of finances in general were almost bound to be chaotic in a situation like that of 1933, when the Nazi Party and its myriad subordinate groups were growing almost exponentially. It was hardly surprising that among the 1.6 million people who joined the Party in the first few months of 1933 there were many who hoped to make their fortune by doing so.199

  III

  With such money flowing into their accounts, it was small wonder that Nazi officials at every level of the hierarchy were soon enjoying a lifestyle they had not even dreamed of before 1933. This included the men at the very top. Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, for instance, had declared an annual income of no more than 619 Reichsmarks to the tax authorities in 1932. Within a few years, however, he was earning 300,000 Reichsmarks a year in fees for his weekly leading articles for the Nazi magazine The Reich, a sum that was out of all proportion to standard journalistic rates and represented in practice a huge annual bribe from the magazine’s publisher Max Amann. For his part, Goebbels wrote off 20 per cent of his earnings as business expenses, although in fact he had none. With this money, The Propaganda Minister bought among other things a villa on the Berlin island of Schwanenwerder, which its previous owner, the Jewish physician Charlotte Herz, had been forced to sell. In 1936 the city of Berlin placed another property at his lifelong disposal, on Lake Constance: he then spent 2.2 million Reichsmarks on extending and refurbishing it. In 1938 he sold the Schwanenwerder property to the industrialist Alfred Ludwig, who then let it to him rent-free. Yet Goebbels counted in popular opinion as one of the less corrupt of the Nazi leaders, as did Albert Speer, whose architectural fees, augmented by the usual Christmas presents from the Labour Front Leader Robert Ley and the tax concessions commonly made to leading Nazis, made him a millionaire already before the war.200

  Most notorious of all was Hermann Goring, whose hunting lodge Carinhall was extended and refurbished at a cost of more than 15 million Reichsmarks in taxpayers’ money. The upkeep and administration of these palatial premises cost not far short of half a million marks, again paid for by the taxpayer; and beyond this, Goring also owned another hunting lodge in East Prussia, a villa in Berlin, a chalet on the Obersalzberg, a castle, Burg Veldenstein, and five further hunting lodges, not to mention a private train whose coaches accommodated ten automobiles and a working bakery, while Göring’s private quarters on the train, taking up two whole carriages, cost the state 1.32 million Reichsmarks in 1937 even before the extravagantly luxurious furnishings and fittings had been installed. In the same year, the Reich Association of Automobile Manufacturers donated to him a yacht worth three-quarters of a million Reichsmarks for his personal use. In all these locations Goring displayed a large and ever-growing collection of artworks, though his real chance for building it up would not come until the war. Like the other leading Nazis, he also managed to conceal much of his income from the tax authorities and obtain massive concessions on the rest; tax evasion was made easier by a ruling in 1939 that the tax affairs of Reich Ministers and Nazi Party Reich Leaders were to be dealt with exclusively by the finance offices of Berlin Central and Munich North, where they could be sure of a sympathetic handling.201

  Such conspicuous consumption was not just a mark of the personal corruption that affects every dictatorship, but also expressed a widespread desire among the higher Nazi officials to demonstrate symbolically that they were the new masters of Germany. Hunting became a favourite pastime of many Regional Leaders, who bought themselves hunting grounds even where they had shown no previous interest in this most aristocratic of pastimes. Faced with the need to keep up with his colleagues in this respect as in others, the Regional Leader of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, was unable to do very much initially, since his urban fiefdom had no hunting land. With the creation of Greater Hamburg in 1937, however, the incorporation of a wooded area to the north of the city gave him the chance; he immediately declared it a nature reserve, stocked it with game, enclosed it from the public with eleven kilometres of fencing, and then leased it from the city for his own use. In a similar way, most of the leading Nazis followed Hitler’s example and purchased Old Masters and new works from the Great German Art exhibition to put on the walls of their grandiose villas and hunting lodges, not because they were particularly fond of art, but because this was an obvious symbol of their status in the Nazi hierarchy.202

  Not surprisingly, corruption allied itself to theft and extortion when Nazi leaders and their underlings came into contact with the helpless and the powerless. The hatred that Nazi activists felt for Jews, Communists, ‘Marxists’ and other ‘enemies of the Reich’ gave them free rein to plunder them at will. In the course of the violent seizure of power in 1933, brownshirt gangs enrolled as auxiliary police carried out ‘house-searches’ that were little more than pretexts for robbery. In the concentration camps, officers and commanders treated the workshops staffed by inmates as their personal possessions, taking furniture for
their quarters, pictures and paintings for their walls, and so on. The commandant of the concentration camp at Lichtenburg had inmates make new bindings for his books, shoes and boots for himself and his family, letterboxes and ironing-boards for his household, and much more besides. Lower camp officials forced inmates to steal asparagus and strawberries for them from the camp vegetable garden, they ‘organized’ food for themselves from the camp kitchen, and embezzled money from the camp canteen. Theft of personal possessions and money brought into the camps by those unfortunate enough to be sent to them was the rule, not the exception. In 1938 the commandant of Buchenwald, Karl Koch, confiscated no less than 200,000 Reichsmarks’ worth of goods and currency from Jews brought into the camp, dividing some of it amongst his subordinates but depositing most of the money in his personal account.203

  If anyone at a relatively senior level was prosecuted for such offences then it was more likely to be as a result of carelessness than of any sense of rectitude on the part of his superiors. When Robert Schöpwinkel, a senior official of the Reich Association of German Hoteliers and Innkeepers, was tried and sentenced with his two most senior officials for embezzling 100,000 Reichsmarks, this was mainly because their corruption had become so notorious in the trade that the innkeeper of the Rheinhotel Dreesen, in Bad Godesberg, where Hitler frequently stayed, approached the Leader and told him that if nothing was done to bring Schöpwinkel to book, the whole innkeeping trade in the Rhineland would become disaffected from the regime.204 A few court cases such as this enabled the leaders of the regime to portray themselves as resolute in the combating of corruption, unlike their predecessors under the Weimar Republic. In fact, corruption of this kind was more often concealed from the media. It was encouraged by the lack of any press or public control over the government and the Party, by the personal nature of power in the regime, and by the general distaste of the Nazis for formal administrative structures and rules. In the depressed economic climate of the early and mid-1930s, power seemed a quick way to riches, and there were few in any position of responsibility in the Nazi Party who could resist the temptation to take it. Rumours and stories about corruption spread rapidly amongst the population. In September 1934 Victor Klemperer recorded a conversation with a Hitler Youth member, the son of a friend, who described how Group Leaders embezzled the members’ contributions for excursions and used them to buy luxuries as expensive as motorbikes for themselves. All this was common knowledge, he said.205

  The morass of corruption into which the economy rapidly sank after 1933 was the source of a good deal of bitter humour amongst the population. The definition of a ‘reactionary’ was said to be ‘someone who has a well-paid post that a Nazi likes the look of’. Göring’s taste for uniforms and titles was a particular butt of popular humour. A ‘Gör’ was popularly said to be ‘the quantity of tin that one man can carry on his chest’. On a visit to Rome to negotiate with the Vatican, Goring wired back to Hitler: ‘Mission accomplished. Pope unfrocked. Tiara and pontifical vestments are perfect fit.’ At night, according to another joke, Göring’s wife woke up to find her naked husband standing next to the bed waving his marshal’s baton around. What was he up to, she asked. ‘I am promoting my underpants to overpants,’ came the reply. Jokes about corruption even made it onto the stage: in 1934 the cabarettist Wilhelm Finck, doing a stand-up comic routine at Berlin’s Catacomb, posed holding up his right arm in the Nazi salute while a tailor measured him for a new suit. ‘What sort of jacket should it be?’ asked the tailor: ‘With chevrons and stripes?’ ‘You mean’, said Finck, ‘a straitjacket?’ ‘How would you like your pockets?’ ‘Wide open, in the current fashion,’ came Finck’s reply. Not long afterwards, the cabaret was closed down on Goebbels’s orders and Finck taken off to a concentration camp. Hitler was usually exempt from jibes about corruption, whether public or private. Complaints about corruption were directed against his subordinates, above all the ‘little Hitlers’ who ruled the roost in the regions. A typical joke had the Goebbels children invited to tea in turn to the houses of Goring, Ley and other leading Party figures. After each visit they came home raving about the wonderful cream cakes, treats and other goodies they had been given. After a visit to Hitler, however, in which they had only been given malt coffee and tiny cakes, they asked: ‘Daddy, isn’t the Leader in the Party?’206

  Yet alongside such humour was a widespread feeling that the Nazi regime had achieved a good deal in the economic sphere by 1939. After all, the economy had recovered from the Depression faster than its counterparts in other countries. Germany’s foreign debt had been stabilized, interest rates had fallen to half their 1932 level, the stock exchange had recovered from the Depression, the gross national product had risen by 81 per cent over the same period, and industrial investment and output had once more attained the levels they had enjoyed in 1928. The two greatest economic bugbears of the Weimar years, inflation and unemployment, had been conquered.207 All this had been achieved by a growing state direction of the economy which by 1939 had reached unprecedented proportions. Whatever the propaganda messages about the battle for work might claim, Nazi economic policy was driven by the overwhelming desire on the part of Hitler and the leadership, backed up by the armed forces, to prepare for war. Up to the latter part of 1936, this was conducted in a way that aroused few objections from business; when the Four-Year Plan began to come into effect, however, the drive for rearmament began to outpace the economy’s ability to supply it, and business began to chafe under a rapidly tightening net of restrictions and controls. More ominously, private enterprise started to be outflanked by state-run enterprises founded and funded by a regime increasingly impatient with the priority accorded by capitalism to profit. Yet none of this, whatever critics suspected, represented a return to the allegedly socialist principles espoused by the Nazis in their early days. Those principles had long been left behind, and in reality they were never socialist anyway. The Third Reich was never going to create total state ownership and centralized planning along the lines of Stalin’s Russia. The Darwinian principles that animated the regime dictated that competition between companies and individuals would remain the guiding principle of the economy, just as competition between different agencies of state and Party were the guiding principles of politics and administration.208

  What Hitler wanted to ensure, however, was that firms competed to fulfil the overall policy aims laid down by himself. Yet those aims were fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, autarky was designed to prepare Germany for a lengthy war; on the other hand, rearmament was pursued with a headlong abandon that paid scant regard to the dictates of national self-sufficiency. Measured by its own aims, the Nazi regime had only succeeded partially at most by the summer of 1939. Its preparations for a large-scale war were inadequate, its armaments programme incomplete; drastic shortages of raw materials meant that targets for the construction of tanks, ships, planes and weapons of war were not remotely being met; and the situation was exacerbated by Hitler’s own inability to set stable and rational priorities within the rearmament programme. The answer was plunder. The corruption, extortion, expropriation and downright robbery that became the hallmarks of the regime and its masters and servants at every level in the course of the Aryanization programme put plunder at the heart of the Nazi attitude towards the property and livelihood of peoples they regarded as non-Aryan. The enormous stresses and strains built up in the German economy between 1933 and 1939 could, Hitler himself explicitly argued on several occasions, ultimately only be resolved by the conquest of living-space in the east. The ‘old fighters’ of the Party had been rewarded for their sacrifices during the ‘years of struggle’ under the Weimar Republic with money, jobs, property and income after the seizure of power. Now, writ large, the same principle was applied to the German economy and the economies of the rest of Europe: sacrifices were demanded of the German people in the build-up to war, but once war came, they would be rewarded with a vast new domain in Eastern Europe that would deliver w
ealth on an unprecedented scale, supply the nation with food for the foreseeable future, and solve all Germany’s economic problems at a stroke.209

  Meanwhile, the German people had to make the sacrifices. The regime bent all its efforts towards building up production while keeping the lid firmly on consumption. Shortages of fat, butter and other consumables, not to mention luxury items such as imported fruit, had become a standard part of daily life by 1939. People were constantly exhorted to make contributions to savings schemes of one kind and another. Savings were directed into government bonds, loan certificates and tax credits, so that the vast bulk of them became available for spending on arms. People were remorselessly exhorted to save, save, rather than spend, spend, spend. Compulsory pension schemes were introduced for the self-employed that forced them to invest funds in insurance companies which the government could then draw upon to help finance rearmament. At the same time, government departments and the military often delayed paying contractors for well over a year, thus extracting from them what was in effect a kind of hidden loan. In many small and medium-sized enterprises engaged on arms production or arms-related projects, this created cash-flow problems so serious that they were sometimes unable to pay their workers’ wages on time.210 The regime justified all this with its customary rhetoric of sacrifice for the greater good of the German racial community. But did people accept the reality of that community? Did the Third Reich, as the Nazis had promised, sweep away the class antagonisms and hostilities that had rendered Weimar democracy unworkable and unite all Germans in a rebirth of national unity and struggle for the common cause? On the fulfilling of this promise a great deal of the regime’s popularity and success would surely depend.