The Nazis were good for business (until the end)

Nazi is an abbreviation for “National Socialist” which is a short form of “National Socialist German Workers Party,” but they were not, in fact, a left-wing or socialist party under any reasonable definition.

The Nazis were opponents of free enterprise.  They did not believe in the unregulated free market.  But they were not opponents of capitalism.   The capitalists did very well under the Nazi regime.

Source: The Wages of Destruction, by Adam Tooze.   Click to enlarge

I have read The Wages of Destruction, and it refutes the notion that Hitler was a madman — evil, yes, but not without reasons for what he did.  Hitler’s idea was that Germany could be a great nation only if it had access to resources equal to the great continental nations, the United States and Soviet Russia, or the great overseas empires, Britain and France.

To accomplish this, after coming to power in 1933, he planned to conquer and depopulate Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia in order to create “living space” for the Germans.  Ukrainians and Poles were starved so that the German population could be fed.  Even Hitler’s anti-Semitism, even though it didn’t have an economic motive, served an economic purpose.  Confiscation of Jewish property helped to finance the Nazi regime.

Source: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century.   Click to enlarge,

This chart shows that, in Germany under Hitler, holders of financial assets received about a third of the national income, while in the United States under the New Deal, they received less than one-fourth.   Piketty’s statistics only go through 1938, but the German capitalists did very well in the early days of the war, when they were able to buy up property and companies in conquered countries at bargain rates.

Of course in the end the Hitler regime ended disastrously for everybody, including the Nazis themselves.   Germany later achieved prosperity and a dominant position in Europe in the way it always could have done — but developing its industry and its human resources.

The Hitler and Stalin regimes were both one-party dictatorships exercising absolute power, and both were among history’s greatest mass killers.  But instead of being regarded as two examples of the same thing, they have been regarded as opposite extremes, both in their time and the present.

The explanation is in the charts.   Under Lenin and Stalin, capitalist wealth was confiscated.  Under Mussolini and Hitler, the capitalists lost their power, but continued to enjoy their incomes and affluent ways of life.  That is the difference.

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I took the charts from this post and this post on Corey Robin’s web log.