Better than the Soviet system did, I mean. (I know Harry Turtledove wrote a novel on this theme but I haven’t read it.)
Nazism was an anti-Marxist movement that still claimed to be “socialist.” In practice this meant the state would not take over, own and manage the entire economy as in the Soviet Union, but it would nationalize some industries and the others would be under exactly as much state supervision as the state thought necessary for the greater good. The rich were not expropriated unless they were Jews; mostly the same managers were left in place after the Nazis took over. Unemployment was ended by massive deficit-driven public works programs. Service in the Reichsarbeitdienst (Reich Labor Service) was compulsory for unemployed men 16-25 (they did a lot of work on the new Autobahns). All labor unions were forced to merge with one state-controlled union, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front), which quelled any worker-generated demands but did set relatively high wages and make dismissal difficult.
The world only ever got to see how this system would work as applied to a superheated pre-war-production economy and then to a wartime economy. If Hitler had won WWII, how well would it have worked as a peacetime system? Would it have been more productive than the Soviet system and those modeled on it?
Well, I don’t think the system was particularly good or efficient in war time either, to be honest. The party (or Hitler) pulled the strings of production at a whim…many times to disastrous results.
During peace time this would have been the same. The Nazi’s, assuming they won, would have probably economically stagnated or collapsed at some point. Of course, since they treated conquered/captured territory as a larder house to loot, it might have taken them some time to hit the wall…depending on what exactly it meant that they ‘won’. Conquered all of Europe? Soviet Union? Africa? The UK? America? China? Depending on the extent of their victory would effect exactly when they eventually hit the wall.
And of course this is purely economic. I think Germany would have faced continuous revolts in their conquered territory, especially in places like the Soviet Union. And can you imagine the fun they would have had in the Middle East? Sure, folks like the Ba’athists were all for the Nazi party…but fundamentalist Muslim types? Even in Western Europe I think they would have faced more and more what the French were doing as the iron fist started to really squeeze.
One of the more interesting aspects (to me, at least) of Fatherland was that Robert Harris spent quite a bit of time depicting the Reich in 1964, eighteen years after signing a peace accord with the US (the Soviet Union was defeated and pushed back over the Urals in 1943, and Britain was starved into submission in 1944).
The system hasn’t changed much — there are Reichsministers in charge of everything from munitions factories to the green linoleum on government floors — and the overall impression is that of an economy which looks healthy enough on the surface (in a grandiose, pompous way), but which is deteriorating badly at its foundations. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that the Reich is still fighting the remnants of the Soviet Union on the Urals front (the Cold War is between the Reich and the US, with the Russians as US proxies), but the setup does not seem to have served the State very well. At one point Xavier March (the protagonist) describes the system as one in which everyone spends more time in covering his ass and/or conspiring against potential enemies than in doing any productive work.
(Yes, I know it’s a work of fiction; but Harris seems to have done his homework, and the conclusions he draws are plausible at least.)
Nazi economics managed to combine the least functional aspects of capitalism, communism, socialism, and organized crime together into one massive pile of confusion.
It didn’t work in the short run; long run it was a disaster waiting to happen. The government spending was never really funded. Resources were massively overused, with the presumption they would simply be stripped from other areas. Wages were artificially capped low, and in order to preserve labor peace, workers were provided government benefits (such as holiday camps) at unsustainable prices, with the government once more not funding the cost in any true long term sense.
Then there was also the incredible redundancies in the system - in order to prevent powerful internal opposition, Hitler set up competing structures below him, who overlapped massively. The SS became a state within a state.
Absent a foreign war, Germany would have collapsed into a spiral of inflation and labor chaos within a matter of years.
Let’s assume the scenario in Harris’ Fatherland, cited above by OttoDaFe: The Reich has conquered and annexed all of Poland and all the Soviet Union west of the Urals, killing all Jews and Communists, reducing the surviving native population to second-class noncitizenship, and colonizing the territory with as many “Germans” (based on family history and skull measurements) as can be found anywhere in Europe. (This was actually Hitler’s ultimate war aim, as can be read in his second book, never published in his lifetime.) A rump Soviet government fights on from Siberia. The remaining states of Europe remain independent under Fascist governments following German leadership.
There’s no realistic scenario involving Nazism that doesn’t include continued warfare, irrespective of what this gentleman Mr. Harris wrote.
“If Hitler had won WWII” is effectively the condition of Germany conquering the entire world; had the Soviets been defeated and Britain subdued, Hitler would have moved on to other enemies. The entire point to Nazism is conflict and war. Nazism assumes the endless, natural state of conflict between all races, and holds that the purpose of the state, such as it should be, is to conduct that war against other races, and to conduct itself in whatever manner is necessary to ensure the victory of the (German, in the case of Hitler) race. There isn’t any such thing as Nazism without war. A Nazi government is either fighting, or positioning itself to fight.
No matter how things went up to 1945, the continued existence of a Nazi state meant continued war. As has already been pointed out, the Nazis has essentially mortgaged the future for the weapons of the present; the entire German eocnomy, and that of its client states, was dedicated to war. Nazi Germany really didn’t have any sort of cohesive economic policy beyond quick militarization and some pie-in-the-sky ideals about what a true Aryan state would look like someday, with giant people’s halls and planned cities and silly utopian stuff like that. It could not possibly have been sustained, and the bigger it got the worse its inherent systematic problems would have become.
Well, the Nazis had a practical advantage there, in that, unlike the other colonial-imperial powers of Europe, they would not stick at completely exterminating any population that resisted their rule. That would lose them a cheap non-German labor force, but they didn’t really want that anyway, they wanted Lebensraum for Germans.
But Lebensraum was a slogan, not ever really a workable policy. There weren’t enough Germanic people, certainly not enough who wanted to live the fronteir lifestyle of soldier/farmer envisioned in the propaganda.
Germany lacked resources, both human and material. While the conquest would have got it more of the latter, the policies of racism and extermination already ran very heavily into conflict with the desire to run an efficient economy.
My bottom line is that facism only survives when on a constant war footing; once that war arrives, if it results in defeat, then the facist economy collapses. Even if it results in victory, the absence of ongoing war leads to economic collapse. It’s a huge house of cards and only “works” in a very temporary sense.
I read an article in a journal at the bookstore the other day which stated that the German economy would typically strip all useful items (weapons, vehicles, machinery) from a conquered nation (e.g France) instead of fostering economic growth in that nation. This had the effect of providing a short term boost in efficiency for the Germans, but a long-term deficit. For example the Nazis basically stole all motor transport that they could find in France to use in Russia. While this provided a quick but short-lived boost in supply capability during Barbarossa, it caused the French economy to become stagnant (at best) as they had virtually no trucks to allow them to move and trade goods and materials around. The milk industry in France, which could have been used to generate lots of calories for both German civilians and soldiers basically became moribund after their trucks got comandeered. Thus in the long run Nazi Germany got very little from the French economy.
It’s not very good form to cite a work of fiction in Great Debates, but Fatherland posits a situation not far from what you describe. There is enough warfare on the Ostfront to warm the cockles of the Führer’s heart (according to an American journalist who becomes March’s love interest and co-conspirator, the Pentagon estimates 100,000 Germans killed between 1960 and 1964).
But there’s a fly in the ointment: the days of Blitzkrieg are long gone, and despite a steady stream of victories trumpeted by the Propaganda Ministry, the grinding, endless war has had the opposite effect on much of the population. Instead of keeping the Volk in fighting trim, the war has caused it to lapse into apathy where military matters are concerned. In addition, they have had the spoils of Europe dropped on their collective doorsteps, leading to exactly the “decadence” Hitler was trying to stave off.
Or as Artur Nebe, head of the Kriminalpolizei puts it: “As for us, the young don’t want to fight and the old don’t want to work.” Hardly a recipe for long-term prosperity.
The Nazis targeted small population groups (like the Jews and Gypsies), not entire populations. When they tried to rule in the conquered parts of, say, Russia, they ended up alienating a large segment of the population…which pretty much increased their problems by a huge factor. Simply put there weren’t enough Germans to KILL all the Russians. Nor would they have been able to do something similar in any large population group…not without the tacit agreement of a majority population.
The Germans weren’t some kind of evil magicians (though they were evil enough)…nor were they completely stupid (though, again, they were stupid enough). There just weren’t enough Germans to rule even the empire they DID manage to carve out…even had they defeated the Russians they wouldn’t have been able to hold things together unless they brought the majority of the Russians on board with their ideology. If they tried to rule Russia by wacking significant portions of the population they would have had endless revolts which would have eventually (read: fairly quickly) brought them down.
Here’s this one… what were the influences that gave rise to hippies of the 60s? I think they were victory in war and economic prosperity following reconstruction. If Germany won, wouldn’t it have experienced the same stimuli? I think what produced hippies is a fundamental instinct for people to become liberal in response to good fortune (same as it’s an instinct, exemplified by 1920s Germany, to turn barbaric when fortune is bad).
I think if Germany won the war, it would have found itself becoming a much more liberal place. Or at least, it would face a massive counter-culture.
On the other hand, the bad fortune of the conquered states (espcially the slavic ones) would lead them down the same path as Germany following WW! (especially if the Nazis tried to milk them like the powers tried to milk the republic). Then, the tables would have turned, Western Europeans would take arms dreaming of making the hedonistic, hippie Germans slaves, and we’d have WW3 (possibly with nukes).
Well, the hippie movement was a response to the stifling conformity of the 1950’s. The economic prosperity helped make it possible, but it was the civil rights struggle that kicked the door in, making it OK to be different and to question authority. I don’t see that happeneing in Nazi Germay for a while.
A Fascist economy would fail in direct proportion to how much centralized control the government chose to exert on the economy. Centralized planning doesn’t work when it’s implemented by a Fascist government any more than it does when implemented by a Communist government.
Because some private ownership exists in a fascist society, I would expect it to outperform an equivalent Communist society, but underperform compared to an economy that allows the market to make its own decisions.
True – even their (relatively) less severe policies in real-world history lost them a lot of locals who initially saw them as an improvement over Stalin.