Hitler's Handouts

Inside the Nazis' welfare state

Michael C. Moynihan | August/September 2007 Print Edition

Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, by Götz Aly, New York: Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32.50

Few subjects arouse a historian’s reductionist instinct like Nazism. It’s hard to resist that desire to explain, in a single bullet point, just how “the nation of Goethe and Schiller” descended into imperial, genocidal madness. The earliest Holocaust reductionists saw in the German character a preternatural fealty to power: the stolid Prussian willing to subsume morality to a vague notion of duty, with those not of the Junker class simply terrorized into submission, too fearful to resist.

Among historians, this idea fell out of favor long ago. For non-specialists, it was effectively debunked in 1996 by the Harvard political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, who demonstrated that punishment was rarely if ever meted out to soldiers who refused to participate in mass murder. (According to Goldhagen, S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler allowed the righteous—and the squeamish—to be redeployed from the killing fields.) But Goldhagen merely replaced one monocausal theory with another, contending that the Holocaust was a natural extension of popular anti-Semitism. Fascism flourished, he claimed, because Germany was a country suffused with a “racist eliminationist view of Jews.” Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, was cut to ribbons by his peers, many of whom wondered why, if genocidal anti-Semitism was uniquely German, so many non-Germans willingly betrayed, deported, and executed their Jewish neighbors.

So if anti-Semitism alone cannot explain the fate that befell European Jewry, what can? According to Götz Aly’s Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, most previous treatments of German complicity in genocide overlook a significant aspect of Nazi rule. Aly, a historian at the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt and the author of more than a dozen books on fascism, urges us to follow the money, arguing that the Nazis maintained popular support—a necessary precondition for the “final solution”—not because of terror or ideological affinity but through a simple system of “plunder,” “bribery,” and a generous welfare state. When first published in 2005, Aly’s book caused a minor sensation in Germany, with critics accusing him of everything from sloppy arithmetic (a charge he vigorously denies in a postscript to the English translation) to betraying his soixante-huitard roots by implicitly connecting West German social democracy to fascism. After the massive success of books like Günter Grass’ Crabwalk and Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire, two bestsellers stressing that Germans too were victimized by fascism, Hitler’s Beneficiaries shifts the brunt of the blame back toward ordinary Germans.

Far from being victims of Nazism, Aly argues, the majority of Germans were indirect war profiteers. Requisitioned Jewish property, resources stolen from the conquered, and punitive taxes levied on local businesses insulated citizens from shortages and allowed the regime to create a “racist-totalitarian welfare state.” The German home front, Aly claims, suffered less privation than its English and American counterparts. To understand Hitler’s popularity, Aly proposes, “it is necessary to focus on the socialist aspect of National Socialism.”

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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Schopenhauer