World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [107]
23
In other words, to a surprising extent Weimar Germany shared both the basic background conditions prevalent in many developing countries today and the standard policy package being pursued by these countries. In conditions of widespread economic distress and a (perceived) economically dominant minority, Weimar Germany pursued intensive market liberalization and rapid democratization. Indeed, in important respects, conditions in Weimar Germany were more propitious for the success of these policies than they are in the developing world today. For example, Weimar Germany had a much higher general level of education; an impressive array of “social safety nets”; and a much stronger legal system, whose judges were notoriously independent (and anti-Semitic).
The fate, however, of Weimar free market democracy is well known. In 1932 and 1933, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, as the Nazi Party was formally named, gained control of the German government through electoral means. Although historians over the last fifty years have repeatedly described the Nazi movement as self-contradictory and ideologically inconsistent—“a confused mixture of nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and pseudo-socialist demands”
24 —the Nazi movement led by Adolf Hitler was in fact unwaveringly and quintessentially ethnonationalist, and in this diseased sense, perfectly coherent. Point Four of the twenty-five-point party program (coauthored by Hitler and promulgated in 1920) declared: “Only members of the nation may be citizens of the State. Only those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. Accordingly no Jew may be a member of the nation.”
25
Like the ethnonationalist movements of the developing world, National Socialism was never truly socialist. The Nazis never undertook to abolish the institution of private property nor to eradicate all economic classes. On the contrary, Hitler repeatedly made overtures to big business, and the Nazi movement was supported by many wealthy Germans, including industrial magnates and aristocrats. Indeed, Nazism was more anti-Communist than it was anticapitalist—in either case with the same anti-Semitic thrust. Precisely because its principal commitment was to ethnonationalism, there was little need for an economic policy. (Once heard at a Nazi gathering: “We don’t want higher bread prices! We don’t want lower bread prices! We don’t want unchanged bread prices! We want National Socialist bread prices!”) Far more than any of its rivals, the Nazi Party was successful in bridging social cleavages and transcending class divisions—from industrial tycoons to farmers, but above all the middle class—in its call for a once-again-powerful Germany for “true Germans” and the destruction of Germany’s “enemies” at home and abroad.
26
Once Hitler was in power, “the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe” became a guiding principle of official state policy. Hitler began with a series of laws depriving Jews, through stringent “racial” qualifications, of their positions in the state bureaucracy, the judiciary, universities, and the professions. In 1938, for example, Hermann Goering required Jewish physicians and lawyers to liquidate their practices, then issued the more general Decree on Eliminating the Jews from German Economic Life. Soon afterward he dictated the wholesale expropriation of Jewish property and businesses. Goering insisted that expropriated Jewish property belonged to the state. In reality, private German enterprises were the main beneficiaries. At the same time, Jews were stripped of their citizenship and political rights. Hitler’s “final solution” was the extermination between 1941