Who provided the money used to build up Hitler’s National Socialist Party and then his war machine? I think it unlikely that the money came from inside Germany as the country was flat broke.
Just because a country is “flat broke” dosen’t mean that everyone living in said country is also flat broke as well, right?
If the country was broke the cost of running a party must have been next to nothing, don’t you think?
Indeed. Foot soldiers came comparatively cheap, especially when you consider that their job wasn’t just handing out leaflets and taking elderly people to the polls, but rather physically attacking opposition supporters. Our modern biases make us think of elections in terms of heavily funded media campaigns, when for decades they were about feet on the ground, feet that were once much cheaper than today, particularly during the Depression.
Also, there were indeed many Germans with hereditary and business-generated wealth, even during the Depression, and many of them supported the Nazis as the only party nasty enough to outmatch the Communists, who most directly threatened that wealth and the existing social order. That the Nazis had little respect for private property or any power structure that they didn’t control didn’t quite dawn on many of them until it was too late.
A milestone in German industrial support for Hitler actually occurred after he became Chancellor, but before he had consolidated power: A secret meeting at Göring’s office in the Reichstag in February, 1933, in which hefty contributions were solicited/extorted from many prominent German industrialists.
“Flat broke” doesn’t mean the total elimination of productive assets. Even if a nation decides to default on its foreign debt, it still maintains its industry, resources, and workforce, and can begin generating fresh wealth again once the debt becomes manageable (though they’d be constrained because the ability to borrow from foreign lenders would become prohibitively expensive, or be eliminated completely).
Germany had stopped paying its Versailles reparations in 1931, which removed a huge millstone from around its neck. They had also borrowed quite a bit of money from the U.S., a debt they would default on and pocket (though they did start paying us back again after WWII). Plus, the fact that the German economy had completely and utterly collapsed in 1923 probably made economic recovery easier, as there was nowhere to go but up. There’s even a school of thought that believes that the hyperinflation of the Weimar government was a conscious decision made by the German government in order to inflate away the debt burden.
Compare Germany’s situation with France and Britain, who were stuck with their war debt, which put them at a disadvantage through the 1930s. The way Germany managed to clean up its balance sheet while its rivals remained saddled with debt was pretty canny on their part.
I’ve been reading a recent book on Nazi Germany’s economy: The Wages of Destruction, which discusses the mechanics of all that in great detail. The major policy decisions mostly pre-date the Nazis, though, as they were less interested in rebuilding the economy as part of a global community than in funding, by whatever means necessary, an army with which to invade Russia (the whole “Lebensraum” thing). It’s quite an interesting book, if even more voluminous.
If we’re talking books I’d recommend “Unholy Alliance”, by Peter Levenda, which chronicles the founding of the Nazi Party by the rich people of the thulegeschelleschaft and “I funded Hitler” by Fritz Thyssen, who funded Hitler.
As one of the relatively few people who I imagine has read both The Wages of Destruction and Unholy Alliance, I have to suggest that that was a most bizarre juxtaposition of recommended reading material. They are orders of magnitude apart in their rigorousness.
(However suspicious for all sorts of reasons, Thyssen’s book is at least a somewhat primary source.)
As someone who has read neither, I’d like to hear your opinion on both, if you could, bonzer.
in terms of party funding, I think it’s useful to remember that pretty much all parties are funded by rich people. Some rich people funded Nazis, other rich people funded Christian Democrats etc. Today, of course, it’s no different, e.g. with both American political parties being funded by rich people, reputedly sometimes by the same ones.
Interestingly, even the Russian Bolsheviks before the Revolution were to significant extent funded by rich people who were, in modern terms, champagne socialists (they also self-funded via armed robbery of banks though).
Later on, of course, Communist parties in Europe (such as Bela Kun’s regime in Hungary and the German Communists themselves before Nazis wiped them out) were routinely funded by the government of Russia via the Comintern. In China, on the other hand, Communists could operate as regional warlords and self-funded by taxing the local peasants just like their competitors, the Nationalists.
Another recent book that covers the period in detail is Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed.
It’s an examination of the four central bankers of England, France, the U.S., and German, from WWI to WWII, and the continuing crises they had to face. After the ruinous inflation of 1923, Hjalmer Schacht, the president of Germany’s Reichsbank, got Germany’s economy up and functioning again. That helped it to fund the huge capital flow into munitions that took place during the 1930s. I believe that most of the money did come from inside Germany. Other countries were not eager to lend money to Germany to rearm themselves, although the U.S. - officially neutral throughout the whole era - did more than most.
The Nazis got a lot fo their money - probably most of it - from donations from lower- and middle-class Germans, though. The wealthier members and supporters were definitely needed, but were relatively few in number. The old money tended to support traditional political causes until that proved to be totally dead.
Tooze’s book is the major recent academic re-interpretation of the economic history of the Third Reich. It’s 800 pages of analysis dealing with the likes of labour statistics, export controls and armament production targets. Along the way he dismantles received opinions like the role of the autobahn building programme - he sees it as being of some symbolic and propagandistic value, but little else.
I’m not an expert in economic history and so can’t really judge whether Tooze’s interpretations will prevail amongst those who are. But there are striking insights along the way, like how the combination of Prussian bureaucracy and a dictatorship allowed them to run an economy through the Thirties when they had minimal foreign currency reserves. Or just how ill-prepared the same economy was for an extended campaign against the Soviet Union.
Levenda’s a bog-standard, if readable, run through Nazi mysticism. Not as bad as most such potboilers, but that’s hardly saying much. Anyone interested in such matters, including the Thule Society, would be better off reading Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism instead. Though one of its merits is that it makes it clear how astonishingly dull such roots were.
As the party gained momentum a lot of the money was also confiscated from Jews and other people deemed enemies of the regime whose property was seized when they were either arrested or fled the country, and this was years before all of the Jews were forced into ghettos or camps. Sigmund Freud alone had to pay the equivalent of more than $1 million in today’s money in trumped up tax charges to leave Vienna and that’s not counting the possessions (some very valuable) and real estate he left behind, and he wasn’t remotely as wealthy as some of the Rothschilds or titled aristocracy or business leaders who had to flee or be taken into custody.
Thanks.
I think this seriously overestimates the needs of political parties in developed countries outside the US for donations. Parties in non-US countries are mostly membership organizations financed in large parts by membership dues, also most activities by party activists are unpaid, and expenses for media ads does not play nearly as large a role as presently in the US.
I could not find data for the finances of the NSDAP (Nazi Party), but the following data from German parties in 2008 show that donations need not play a large role
cite: Finances of the 6 German parties that had members in the Bundestag in 2008 - PDF, German language - percentages for all parties by my calculation
donations by persons donations by corporations Membership, end 2008
(% of total revenue) (% of total revenue)
Christian Democrats * 9.2 % 5.1 % 528,972
Social Democrats ** 6.2 % 1.6 % 520,970
Free Democrats *** 20.2 % 8.4 % 65,600
Greens 12.5 % 1.8 % 45,089
Left Party **** 8.5 % 0.4 % 75,968
Christian Social Party ***** 22.0 % 12.6 % 162,232
total 10.4 % 4.4 %
(€ 47 million) (€ 19.9 million)
* center-right outside of Bavaria
** center-left
*** fiscally conservative, socially liberal
**** ex-communists - the East German state party after three renamings
***** center-right in Bavaria
The last pre-1933 NSDAP membership figure that I could find is 129,563 for 1930 cite which by today’s German standards would be a membership figure that makes a party viable without having to rely on a lot of donations. Also the membership of an extremist party would have been more willing to pay membership dues, and to volunteer.
From 1933, of course, the party could tap the state’s material resources.
There’s a well-documented trilogy of books- Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, and the two accompanying volumes- Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and Wall Street and FDR. Google them up- you should be able to find them copied online.