Hitler in Hell Page 18
To help me to get the economy moving again I turned to Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, a banker of international reputation, He was also a liberal-conservative and a terrible snob. No man was ever haughtier or looked down more on ordinary people, us National Socialists included. The feeling was heartily reciprocated. But he had a strong record; in November 1923, at the height of the inflation, President Ebert and Chancellor Stresemann appointed him special commissioner for currency. So successful were his efforts to stabilize the mark that he was made President of the Reichsbank, the Central Bank. He remained at that post until the spring of 1930.
Over the subsequent three years, recognizing that there really was no alternative, he drew closer to some elements in our party. Using his links with his conservative friends, he helped us obtain funds. The aforementioned meeting with Germany’s leading industrialists was held in his house. In March 1933 I reappointed him President of the Reichsbank. Later, I made him Minister of Economics as well. To be sure, the man was never quite filled with the kind of National Socialist élan I valued most. He was much too elitist for that. Nevertheless, he proved a good choice. I provided the indomitable driving will; Schacht provided the technical and administrative details of the program that we now started putting into place. Essentially, it consisted of spending, spending, and spending. The objective was to generate work and to put money into people’s pockets. They, in turn, would spend it to buy what they needed, and so on. Once given a push the avalanche would start rolling, growing ever larger as it did so. At the time all this represented a revolutionary policy. It was the very opposite, I should add, from the one Brüning, as well as Ramsay MacDonald in England and Herbert Hoover in the U.S., had been implementing from 1929 on. With them the response to the crisis, and the fiscal deficits to which it gave rise, had been to cut and save.
The way Schacht explained it to me, two obstacles stood in our way. First, rearmament was illegal under the Treaty of Versailles. At the time we were too weak to resist the Allies, so we would have to find ways of raising money without drawing the attention of foreign experts to what we were doing. Second, the same Treaty, specifically with a view to preventing such rearmament, prohibited our government from borrowing more than 100,000,000 marks from the Reichsbank. The time was to come when we could safely ignore both issues; for the time being, though, we had no choice but to avoid provoking our enemies.
Schacht neatly solved the problem by forming a limited liability company named Metallurgische Forschungsesellschaft (Metallurgical Research Company), or MEFO for short. The company itself only existed on paper, and its capital amounted to no more than one million marks. Building on these slender foundations, during the six years leading up to World War II he used it to issue no fewer than 12 billion marks’ worth of bills. The bills were convertible into marks after five years. Until then they were guaranteed by the Reich government. Industry, pressed by us of course, used them to pay its suppliers. As a result, there came into being an economy within an economy. The vast majority of ordinary Germans never put their eyes on a MEFO bill. Most of them probably did not even know they existed. Nor, going about their day-to-day business, was there any reason why they should. Using this device, we were able to increase our deficit by two thirds, no less. Other measures included high corporate taxes, curbs on shareholders’ rights, limits on dividends, and increased taxes on profits derived from the sale of stocks. All of this encouraged long-term investment and growth.
To stimulate our foreign trade Schacht, making full use of the fact that we were Europe’s largest importers of foodstuffs by far, negotiated a series of reciprocal agreements with a number of other countries, chiefly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. They enabled us to use our industrial products to pay for our imports of food and raw materials. All calculations were made in marks, and any surpluses our trade partners enjoyed were held in German banks in special accounts created for the purpose. All this enabled us to keep our scarce dollar and sterling reserves. To make sure we did, we imposed strict control on all non-government foreign transactions. Later, in 1939-41, we put in place somewhat similar arrangements with Russia. To such effect that the last train, carrying supplies, crossed the border fewer than twenty-four hours before we launched our attack on that country.
I do not pretend to understand every detail of the financial wizardry involved. But it certainly worked. By 1935 the English magazine Economist was praising our economic recovery, noting that it was proceeding faster than anywhere else in Europe. By 1939 our gross national product had increased eighty-one percent—eighty-one percent—over the 1932 figure. Even if one subtracts the forty percent we had lost in 1929-32, a forty-percent increase in seven years still represented a substantial achievement. Our interest rate had been halved, and the stock exchange had responded accordingly. Thanks partly to the measures just described and partly to my refusal to go on paying reparations, our foreign debt had also been stabilized.
Last, not least, unemployment, that great scourge of the period 1929-32, disappeared. By 1936 everyone who wanted to could easily find a job. For those who did not want to, meaning the Arbeitscheu, or work-shy, we had our concentration camps, complete with their famous slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei. There was nothing like a stay in one of those camps to teach people what was what! Starting in 1937-38, indeed, the place of unemployment was taken by a shortage of labor, especially skilled labor of the kind our factories needed. We achieved all this without devaluating our currency and without leading to any inflation worth mentioning, measures which, though they were often urged on me, I always refused to use because of the negative impact they would have on public opinion. After all, for countless ordinary people my integrity, Erhlichkeit, was the ultimate guarantee that their hard-earned savings would not be taken away from them as they had been after 1918. “An absolutely unique achievement,” as the famous American economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote much later.
To be sure, here and there people grumbled. Don’t they always? They specifically mentioned long hours, poor working conditions, and some shortages of consumer goods such as poultry, fruit, and clothing. This, in turn, led to the creation of a black market. It reflected the fact that we were hard pressed to produce both guns and butter. Choices had to be made. And we, unlike so many of our predecessors and successors both in Germany and abroad, had what it took to make them and stick to them.
Take the problem of motorization. At the time we Germans had far fewer registered motor cars per head of the population than England and France did. That’s not to mention the U.S., which had about as many cars as the rest of the world put together. But that was a problem we had inherited from the Republic. Even without taking into account the enormous Volkswagen project, which would have provided every family with a car but had to be put on ice at the outbreak of the war, we multiplied production over and over again. On the way we forced some firms to merge, thereby driving prices downward and making sure that the share of foreign-built cars on our roads would fall from forty percent in 1928 to under ten percent just six years later. If we still did not have quite as many cars as some critics thought we should, then one reason for this was that our railway system led the world in terms of both size—it was the largest single public enterprise—and quality. On the whole, our countrymen were enthusiastic about the measures we put in place. Recalling the situation as it had been just a few years earlier, they had every reason to be.
I well understood that only political and military means can create a great power. To last, though, it also needs artistic expression. That is why, defying the naysayers and the bean counters, we built and built and built. We weren’t building just weapons, on which I will say more in a moment, but everything we could think of and then some. New housing projects for our population which, owing to the measures we put in place, was starting to grow again; new factories, new ministries, new theaters, new barracks, and new airports; new railways, new canals, new bridges, new theaters—especially open-air ones—and new museums; and new sp
orts facilities, of course, in order to help us achieve the Graeco-Germanic ideal of mens sana in corpore sano. Of those, the largest was the Olympiastadion in Berlin. Originally it was constructed for the 1936 Olympic Games. It was so successful that, renovated after more than half a century of neglect due first to the war and then to the Communist government of the GDR, it was used again for those held in the same city in 2000.
In Augsburg, Bayreuth, Breslau, Dresden, and a dozen other cities new buildings shot out of the ground like mushrooms. My own principle was that money was no object. I simply assumed that the necessary funds would be found, and, almost invariably, they were. On one occasion I encouraged a certain mayor to build something—I think it was a new community center, or whatever—for his town. He hesitated, said that he did not know where the money would be coming from, etc. etc. Finally, he asked me to assure him—in writing!—that the bill would be paid. What he got, by return mail, was his dismissal.
The crowning glory of our efforts was the system of Autobahnen, or motorways. I myself was descended from simple folks. I could appreciate the beauty of horses, and even commissioned several gigantic statues of them for Munich and other cities. However, I had never cared for them as so many of my self-appointed “betters” did. Instead, starting around 1920, I had taken an interest in motor cars, talking to my Mercedes dealer and reading manuals until I became quite knowledgeable about them. Campaigning for the party, I had driven all over Germany many, many times. That is how I learned to appreciate the advantages of this means of transportation over the railways and to enjoy the incomparable beauties of our German Motherland.
The idea of building special roads for our automobiles and trucks, as the most important form of twentieth-century transport, was in the air. It had been discussed by the various ministries even before our rise to power. Against the background of the economic crisis, though, my predecessors did not have the determination and the esprit to carry it out on anything like the scale needed to make a difference. I, by contrast, wasted no time. As early as 11 February, fewer than two weeks after I entered office, I spoke to a gathering at the Berlin International Motor Show. I told them that, in the future, the state of the roads would act as the principal yardstick by which a country’s prosperity would be judged. Like so many of my prophecies, incidentally, this one turned out to be spot-on.
My man in charge was Friedrich (Fritz) Todt. Todt had joined the party as early as 1922. Thus he had every right to consider himself one of my oldest fellows and followers. By trade he was a civil engineer; in fact his dissertation dealt with the construction of roads. Now he threw himself into the job, designing and building roads right and left. By his own estimate, directly or indirectly, the project would provide work for no fewer than 600,000 people. In September 1933 I personally turned the first sod on the Hamburg-to-Basel motorway. By that time, so much did the workers on the project admire, not to say worship, me that, no sooner had I turned my back, than they took away the little earth I had shoveled as souvenirs.
But that was just the beginning of my involvement. I wanted to make sure that my Autobahnen, far from spoiling the natural beauty of our Germany, would enhance it. That is why, in this case, as in that of many other construction projects, I saw to it that the constructors were not just engineers but architects. I myself looked into the building materials used and the way in which contours, bridges, rest areas, and so on were built. Decades before anyone else started doing so, we even paid attention to the impact on wildlife! At that time, the project was by far the largest of its kind undertaken by any country. As our propaganda never tired of saying, it could be compared to the construction of the pyramids or the Great Wall of China. And it worked. To this day the German Autobahnen are often considered a model of their kind.
The overall objective was to get the gears of the economy running again and to modernize the country’s transportation system. I remember how, at one time, we were considering building a motorway from Munich to Augsburg. Someone told me that there was little traffic between the two cities. Do you think, I answered, that such will remain the case after the road is built? But it also goes without saying that the Autobahnen, running all over Germany as they did, served military ends as well as civilian ones. Indeed, not having them do so was just the kind of stupidity only our bourgeois could think of! They made it much easier to move our troops from one theater of war to another.
It is one of my deepest regrets that, owing to the outbreak of war, construction of the Autobahnen had to be interrupted. I planned to renew it as soon as circumstances would allow; unfortunately, that only happened during the 1950s. At that time I was no longer around to provide direction. But most of my people were. Of course they did their best to disassociate themselves from me. But there is no denying that they continued the work in my spirit.
As we rebuilt the economy, there were growing complaints about corruption. As long as we stayed in power, they remained muted. After all, ours was not a liberal state. We did not believe in permitting every Tom, Dick, and Harry to say whatever he thought about everyone and everything without distinction or regard for the consequences. Later, though, some historians made a fetish of the issue. They could say little against me. Everyone knew I had no gang of hungry relatives to feed and that I lived abstemiously enough, so much so, in fact, that there were many jokes about the subject. Goebbels, who always had his ear to the ground, saw to it that I was told about them, and I quite enjoyed them. The worst thing my critics could accuse me of was that, upon entering office, I made sure the tax authorities got off my back. So I did, but only to avoid distractions and to enable me to concentrate on my proper work. Better that than not understand my own tax bill, as Reagan later said was the case with him. In any case, this was decades before many other heads of state, including the kings and queens of England, started paying income tax either.
Another much-repeated claim was that not only did I close my eyes to what was going on but that I actively encouraged it. That is an exaggeration. However, it is certainly true that I wanted to reward those who helped me on my way. The worst error any politician can make is to suppose that people are better than they are. Whatever Napoleon may have said, to maintain their loyalty, especially over time, one must give them more than just colored ribbons. He himself set the example. So much so that, in his last years in power, he complained that his marshals had turned into grands seigneurs. Instead of leading their men in battle, they would much rather enjoy their estates! I followed in his footsteps. As, for instance, by giving large (and tax-free) sums of money to some of my senior officials and generals who, through their efforts on Germany’s behalf, deserved them or who had fallen on hard times.
Some of the things we did, such as giving old party members priority when they were looking for work, did not really represent corruption at all. We were not liberals and did not believe in their kind of distributive justice. In fact the system had been copied, lock, stock, and barrel, from the pre-1918 Prussian/German Rechtstaat (state based on law) on which both our own scholars and foreign ones have lavished so much praise. In particular, I saw to it that NCOs should get the gravy. Rightly so, because it is the NCOs, men who have reenlisted, who form the indispensable backbone of any army. And also because they make the best low-level civil servants and elementary teachers of all. Nor were we National Socialists exactly the only ones to provide jobs for the boys. If, in Germany and abroad, some effete intellectuals did not like the system, then that was their problem.
But such things are small potatoes and are hardly worth mentioning. I realized very well that many of my associates were helping themselves to state money and/or took massive bribes and/or found other ways to enrich themselves. The champion in this game was Göring. Others included trusty old Wilhelm Frick; Robert Ley, my Minister of Labor; Joseph Goebbels, whom I appointed Minister of Propaganda; my old comrade Alfred Rosenberg; my one-time lawyer, Hans Frank; my Foreign Minister (from 1936 on) Joachim von Ribbentrop; my Party Secretary,
Martin Bormann; most of the Gauleiters; as well as countless smaller fry. Some I knew; others not. All of them accumulated more or less considerable fortunes, often in the form of country houses and valuable works of art as well as money in the bank. First in Germany and then in other countries, too, some of the property they confiscated or bought at ridiculously low prices had been expropriated from Jews. Serves the latter right.
Among the few exceptions known to me were Speer, the haute bourgeois architect whom I made my Minister of Munitions, Himmler, the incorrigible romantic, and his deputy Heydrich. In fact the importance they attributed to Anständigkeit, best translated (I am told) as a combination of decency, incorruptibility, and reliability, was one of the things that kept the last two, who in other respects were ill matched, together. But even in their cases that only meant that they refrained from amassing property and displaying it, not that they did not live as opulently as they wished at the expense of the organizations they led.
During the last few years before the war our emphasis shifted. Our initial objective of doing away with unemployment and getting the economy moving had been accomplished. So we got to the stage where we could start preparing for war in earnest. I decided to place overall responsibility on Göring as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan. To be sure, Göring’s qualifications as an academic economist were dubious to nonexistent. But for all his immense bulk, he had proved himself a dynamo able to get things moving. He did not, to use an expression not yet current at that time, stop at the red light. As he put it later during his “trial” at Nuremberg, he did not simply provide us with arms; he did so until we were positively bristling. His only regret, he neatly added, was that he had not provided us with more of them still.