What did Hitler do in Germany?

The Great Depression had hit America hard, very hard. But it affected Germany much worse. Within little more than two years of the crash on Wall Street, some six million Germans were unemployed, more than one in three Germans, and millions more were on reduced hours and so reduced wages. Hitler was aware of the political necessity. In his first radio broadcast, made on February 1^st, 1933, just two days after becoming Chancellor, he told the German people that ‘the salvation of the German worker in an enormous and all-embracing attack on unemployment’ was a priority and promised that it would be overcome within four years.[1] And Hitler delivered.

The Nazis great achievement as far as most Germans were concerned was in bringing down unemployment. It was down to a little over 100,000 on the eve of war in 1939 (though women had long been removed from the figures, whilst many had been forced out of their jobs so creating jobs for men) but still, it wouldn’t have been reduced so quickly and by so much without the Nazis employment schemes.

In an initiative very similar to Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ in America, the German Labour Front or National Labour Service was set up and organised jobs in public work schemes building houses, schools and hospitals, water conservation, afforestation projects, building autobahns (motorways), extending or building new railways, as well as the rearmament programme and conscription. So big was the organisation that it was a major employer itself with more than 40,000 paid officials. The focus on militarisation was also a factor that, even though it ultimately brought disaster to Germany, it at first contributed greatly to reducing unemployment.

Conscription, lasting two years, was introduced in 1935 for all men between the age of eighteen and twenty-five and a year later, the Four-Year Plan to rearm Germany and prepare it for war was started. In 1935 conscription very quickly increased the size of the army to 550,000 (remember the Treaty of Versailles had restricted it to just 100,000), and by over a million by 1939. Every conscript from this point onwards was a figure taken off the unemployment register or else not adding to it. And the push to rearm created jobs not just in the armaments industry itself but in coal mining, the steel mills and even the textile industry (uniforms needed to be made).

Still, whilst government spending on rearmament increased from 1.8 billion marks in 1933 to a whopping 17.2 billion marks in 1938 (still ostensibly a time of peace), government spending on construction (houses and city planning, and the like) also increased considerably, if more modestly: from 1.7 billion marks in 1933 to 7.9 billion marks in 1938, whilst government spending as a whole increased from 18.4 billion marks in 19333 to 37.1 billion marks in 1938. The Nazis also benefited from the perception Germans had of pre-Nazi Germany. They would not compare the boom years of Weimar Germany (1924-9) with 1938, but would compare 1932, the peak year of the Great Depression, with 1938, whilst many would also remember the effects of hyperinflation in 1923. So, they were generally satisfied with what they had under the Nazis.

However, the reality was that though workers had jobs, their pay was low, very low on some of the government schemes, and their standard of living dropped (though it was much the same in Roosevelt’s scheme). They also worked increasingly long hours: an average of forty-three hours in 1933 rose to an average of forty-seven hours by 1939. But if they didn’t take a job, they would not get any benefits, and they couldn’t strike for better pay or conditions, and in some cases, they were even prevented from leaving their employment for something better paid.

Workers’ rights were restricted and the Nazis leaned heavily in favour of employers in work place relationships. Trade unions had been banned and so workers had no means to agitate for improvements. They had to join the Nazi-run General Labour Front which existed to control workers rather than fight for them. However, the Nazis did also set up two organisations for workers: ‘Beauty of Labour’ which aimed to ensure health and safety at work such as better ventilation and better lighting, and it introduced amenities such as washing facilities and low-cost canteens. Whilst the second organisation, ‘Strength Through Joy’, organised leisure activities such as cheap cinema and theatre tickets, sports events and even holidays at cheap rates, including cruises, for workers.

But before I finish, I feel morally obliged to mention a group who were completely taken out of the German economy: the Jews. Indeed, the decree of 1938, the Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic life, said so. But it began almost immediately on the Nazis coming to power, in May, 1933 when Jews were excluded from all government jobs. But this had nothing to do with the depression, but was the product of the Nazis racist and anti-Semitic view of things.

So, there you have it, Hitler’s policies were similar in important ways to those of Roosevelt’s New Deal: state-driven job-creation initiatives, a priority given to men, and we could say a priority given to Germans as it was to white Americans. But this shouldn’t be so surprising. A democratic government in a capitalist economy has two options: leave it to the economy (the Republican-Hoover way) or kick start the economy and then step back (the Democrat-Roosevelt way). The big difference, and an important difference, of course, was the priority given to rearmament and general militarisation in Nazi Germany.

[1] Quoted in Richard J. Evans, p. 328