Aly’s thesis is persuasive. It confirms that wars are as much about propaganda, what people think and how wars are financed as they are about fighting.
The book was repetitive with conclusions at different points in the text. However, that they were so important, they bore repetition. Maybe the faults were those of translation. However, I suspect they follow those in the German original.
The book might have been different by concentrating on the beneficiaries, the 95% of Germans comprising the volk, who were kept better off by the regime and largely supported it almost to the end. Aly notes that National Socialism for most young Germans didn’t mean dictatorship and repression, but freedom and adventure. “Tomorrow belongs to me”. The book follows Aly’s other publications, in particular Hitler’s Volkstaat (2006) where the Volk may be more of the focus.
Aly estimates anti-semitic financial moves, the atonement payment following Kristalnacht in November 1938, compulsory exchange of investments for government bonds, and punitive emigration levies added a significant 9% to government revenues.
Investments were not taken from Jews directly as they were credited for them with German Banks. The Jews were then murdered, and the debts forgotten. Similarly, the value of stolen jewellery and art was fenced through city corporation owned pawn brokers with the assets sold for cash credited to the Reich. This wasn’t just a war facilitating genocide but using pillaged funds to finance the war, genocide driven by seeking finance rather than finance facilitated by genocide. So, this was policy not straight anti-semitism.
Forced labourers from territories defeated and occupied were paid but between 15 and 40% less than Germans. Deductions were then made, eg for Belgian dependents, but these were meant to be paid by Belgium itself, the deductions credited to the Reich which had little intention of paying them to the nominal beneficiaries.
Aly disputes the post war view that forced labour principally benefitted large German businesses, Krupp, Daimler Benz etc. He instead argues the system benefitted the regime.
Why Germans continued to fight is considered in Ian Kershaw’s the End Germany 1944-5. Aly’s thesis concentrating on how the regime combined rearmament, high borrowing with high living standards for the volk adds to the explanation. When I was taught economics, there was a choice between guns and butter. Under the Fuhrer, Germans had both. German soldiers received 73% of their peacetime income compared with 37% in the US and 38% in the UK. British occupiers were impressed how fit and healthy Germans appeared. This book explains why.
Throughout the regime was able to function as it relied on experienced and able civil servants and bankers. Experts decided who would receive adequate sustenance and who very little or none, Jews, psychiatric patients and Soviet POWs. The volk was misled into believing war was profitable. Conquests were supposed to be self-funding but were never quite, so Aly argues Germany had to continue its expansive war.
All this was kept confidential, the persecution of Jews presented as a purely ideological policy.
What Aly doesn’t emphasise is that the result of war & reparations etc was that pre-war Germany was poor. It lacked natural resources to produce weapons etc. Therefore, it fought an imperial war.
Germany built up huge debts in the occupied territories which it aimed to pay off by burdening them with further occupation costs/ reparations when it won the war. Another reason it kept on fighting. The regime had no alternative.
German incomes were funded by exploitation of conquered territories, the currencies of occupied territories artificially reduced in value against the Reichsmark. RKK certificates, surrogate money, was paid to German soldiers who spent it in occupied France, The Banque de France had to exchange the certificates for Francs for its own citizens. As it, in practice, had received nothing in exchange, it had no alternative, but to print money,inflation transferred.
Under the Hague Convention occupied jurisdictions could be charged the costs of occupation. In practice the Germans charged them significantly more and for the substantial costs of coastal defences. (How did this work in Jersey?) Germany also burdened its allies, such as Slovakia and Bulgaria, with the costs of fighting for them in the anti-Bolshevik struggle.
Aly describes a regime based on plunder. German soldiers and their families were bought off. The Germans were effectively encouraged to be black marketeers, exactly the sort of behaviour of which they accused the Jews. This behaviour, encouraged by the Reich, continued after the War. See Harald Jahner’s excellent “Aftermath; Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich”. Aly estimates that Germany bore at most only one third of the costs of war, external sources two-thirds. How reliable these figures are must be uncertain. However it definitely provides a different view of these years, including raising questions about the States allied to Nazi Germany.
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