The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Such policies helped dull the minds of medical researchers to the negative side of Nazi health policy. Improving the race included not only research and prevention of this kind, but also, as we shall see, eliminating supposed negative influences on the race and its future by forcible sterilization and, eventually, murder, dressed up in the neutral-sounding rhetoric of preventive medicine.313 The intrusion of racial hygiene and eugenics into medical education under the Third Reich had its own influence on medical ethics too, as medical researchers in other fields also succumbed to the idea that racially inferior or subhuman people could legitimately be used as the objects of medical experimentation.314 The immense power and prestige of medicine and allied subjects in the Third Reich gave some medical researchers the belief that anything was justified in the name of the advancement of science, not only if it could be directly linked to the fortunes of the nation in the struggle for power, but even in far-removed realms of pure research. In this belief, they were encouraged by the regime’s contempt for conventional morality. The deep-rooted Christian beliefs that underpinned medical ethics and were held more broadly by many millions of Germans appeared to the Nazis in the end as yet another obstacle to the mobilization of the Aryan racial spirit. Nowhere was there any clear evidence that the Nazis had succeeded in their ambition of sweeping away alternative sources of moral and cultural identity amongst the great mass of Germans and replacing it with unqualified enthusiasm for their own world-view. Yet allegiance to a political system, even one as extreme as that of the Third Reich, never depends wholly on ideological identification. In conventional politics at least, material factors are even more important. The Nazis came to power in the midst of, and in large measure also as a consequence of, the most calamitous economic depression of modern times. If they could manage to pull Germany out of the morass of mass unemployment and economic despair into which it had fallen at the end of the 1920s, that alone might be enough to secure people’s assent to the Third Reich even when they remained indifferent to its more ambitious religious, cultural and educational purposes.

  4

  PROSPERITY AND PLUNDER

  ‘ THE BATTLE FOR WORK’

  I

  On 27 June 1933 Hitler’s government issued a law authorizing the building of a new type of road, the motorway (Autobahn). The dual-carriageway roads would link Germany’s major cities with one another, establishing a communications network that would allow citizens and freight to be transported with unprecedented speed and directness across the land. The idea originally came from Italy, where a prototype had been built as early as 1924. A private enterprise scheme had already been proposed to link Hamburg, Frankfurt and Basel and planned in some detail from 1926 onwards, but in the circumstances of the Depression it had come to nothing. Almost as soon as he was appointed Reich Chancellor, Hitler took it up again. Speaking at the Berlin International Motor Show on 11 February 1933, Hitler declared that the state of the nation’s highways would in future be the chief yardstick by which its prosperity would be measured. An enthusiastic devotee of the automobile, he had travelled the length and breadth of the land by car during the election campaigns of the previous years, and regarded driving - or at least being driven - as an aesthetic experience far superior to that provided by flying or travelling by train. Thus the new motorways were going to be built along scenic routes, with lay-bys for travellers where they could get out of their vehicles, stretch their legs and admire the German countryside. For Fritz Todt, the man whom Hitler appointed on 30 June 1933 to oversee the building of the motorways, they even fulfilled a racial purpose, linking the motor-borne German soul to the authentic woods, mountains and fields of its native land, and expressing the Nordic race’s delight in the adventure, speed and excitement provided by modern technology.1

  It was Todt who had been largely responsible for persuading Hitler to adopt the idea. A civil engineer by training and background, he had worked on tar and asphalt roads for the Munich firm of Sager and Woerner and had been a member of the Nazi Party since the beginning of 1923. Born in the Swabian town of Pforzheim in 1891, he had received a technical education and served in the air force during the First World War. His commitment to the Party was in the first place the product of his personal admiration for Hitler. After the failure of the Munich putsch, Todt avoided active political engagement and concentrated instead on his career, but by 1932 he had become a member of the stormtrooper reserve, and at this point he assumed the leadership of the engineers’ division of the Party’s Fighting League of German Architects and Engineers, founded the previous year. Like other professionally qualified men in the Party, he saw it as a decisive, energetic, modern movement that would do away with the dithering of the Weimar Republic and impel Germany into a new future based on the centralized application of science and technology to society, culture and the economy in the interests of the German race. Within the Party, he tried to counter the hostility of economic thinkers like Gottfried Feder to mechanization and rationalization, which they considered to be destroying jobs, by proposing ambitious new construction schemes such as the motorways, on which he submitted a report to the Party leadership in December 1932. By this time he had gained important backing for his ideas through his appointment as chief technological adviser in the office of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. When Hitler announced the initiation of the motorway construction programme, it was largely Todt’s ideas that he proposed to put into action.2

  On 23 September 1933, Hitler turned the first sod on the long-planned Hamburg-to-Basel motorways; by May 1935 the first stretch, from Frankfurt to Darmstadt, was open; 3,500 kilometres were completed by the summer of 1938. The motorways were perhaps the most durable of the propaganda exercises mounted by the Third Reich; they survive to the present day. Hitler took a close personal interest in the routes the motorways followed, intervening on occasion to redirect them when he thought they were not going by the most picturesque route. He also insisted on personally approving the design of bridges and service stations. Many of these were bold examples of modernism, and Hitler gave the task of designing them to architects rather than to engineers; the former head of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, even submitted plans for two of the service stations. The modernity of the motorways, the vast, simple bridges striding across rivers and gorges, the elegant dual carriageways cutting through hills and sweeping across the plains, made them one of the Third Reich’s most striking creations. Todt instructed the planners to merge embankments and cuttings into the landscape, to use native varieties of plants for the verges, and to construct the roads so that the landscape was clearly visible to all drivers and their passengers.3 But in fact they signified not the German soul’s merging with the landscape, but technology’s mastery over it, an impression strengthened in the propaganda that celebrated them as the modern age’s equivalent of the pyramids of Ancient Egypt, outdoing the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages or the Great Wall of China in the grandiosity of their conception. ‘Clear the forest’, declared the bold slogan on Carl Theodor Protzen’s illustration of a motorway bridge, ‘ - blow up the rock - cross the valley - overcome distance - drive a path through German land.’4

  Map 9. The Motorway Network

  There were other respects in which Todt’s plans failed to work out as he had predicted. Only 500 kilometres in addition to the 3,500 kilometres completed by 1938 were finished by 1945, since building resources were soon diverted to construction programmes more directly related to the war; the Reich Defence Ministry even vetoed strategically unimportant routes and insisted on priority being given to military roads in sensitive areas like East Prussia. As a result of such interventions and further postwar delays, the motorway linking Hamburg to Basel was not actually completed until 1962.5 Moreover, few people had the means to enjoy them before 1939, since Germany was one of the least motorized societies in Europe. In 1935, only 1.6 per cent of the population in Germany owned motor vehicles, compared to 4.9 per cent in France, 4.5 per cent in Britain, and 4.2 pe
r cent in Denmark. Even Ireland had a higher proportion of vehicle-owners, at 1.8 per cent. All of these figures were dwarfed by vehicle ownership in the USA, which stood at 20.5 per cent, or one in five of the population.6

  In his speech at the Berlin motor show, Hitler announced not only the inauguration of the motorway building programme but also the promotion of motor sports and the reduction of the tax burden on car ownership.7 The result was a 40 per cent increase in the number of workers in the motor vehicle industry from March to June 1933 alone. Motor car production doubled from 1932 to 1933 and again by 1935. Well over a quarter of a million cars were now being produced every year, and prices were much lower than they had been at the end of the 1920s. Foreign car sales in Germany had fallen from 40 per cent of all car sales in 1928 to below 10 per cent six years later.8 The number of passenger cars on the roads increased from just over half a million in 1932 to just under a million in 1936.9 Even Victor Klemperer bought himself a car at the beginning of 1936 despite his growing financial worries, though he soon came close to regretting his decision: ‘The car’, he wrote on 12 April 1936, ‘gobbles up my heart, nerves, time, money. It’s not so much my wretched driving and the occasional agitation it causes,’ he added, ‘not even the difficulty of driving in and out, it’s that the vehicle is never right, something’s always going wrong.’10

  Even he, however, had to admit that the new motorways were ‘magnificent’. Driving down one on 4 October 1936, he noted with enthusiasm that he and his wife enjoyed a ‘glorious view’ and he even ‘dared a speed of 80 km an hour a few times’11 Despite the spread of car ownership, however, the motorization of German society had still not got very far by 1939, and to describe it as the powerhouse behind Germany’s economic recovery in these years is a considerable exaggeration.12 By 1938, to be sure, Germany’s vehicle production was growing faster than that of any other European country, but there was still only one motor vehicle there per forty-four inhabitants, compared with one for every nineteen in Britain and France.13 The vast majority of personal travel and the movement of bulk goods was still accounted for by Germany’s railway system, Germany’s largest employer at this time, which was brought under centralized administration and provided with enough additional funds to produce a 50 per cent increase in the (very small) stock of electrically powered locomotives and a quadrupling of the number of small shunting engines between 1932 and 1938.14 However, in general the railways suffered from chronic under-investment during this period. The railway management, jealous of its leading position in goods traffic, succeeded in delaying the removal of taxes on commercial vehicle sales until January 1935, though as soon as this happened, production of commercial vehicles increased much faster than that of passenger cars - 263 per cent in 1934-5 as compared to 74 per cent for cars.15

  None the less, even after this, the motor-car embodied an important part of Hitler’s technological vision of Germany’s future, which encompassed car ownership on an almost universal scale. Already in the 1920s he had come across an article on the ‘motorization of Germany’ as he whiled away his leisure time in Landsberg prison, and by the early 1930s he was drawing rough sketches of a small family vehicle that would sell for less than a thousand Reichsmarks and so be within reach of the vast majority of the population. Meeting with scepticism from the mainstream motor industry, Hitler secured the collaboration of the racing-car engineer Ferdinand Porsche, whose prototype design was ready by the end of 1937. At Hitler’s personal insistence, the car’s production was funded by the German Labour Front, the Nazi Party’s successor to the trade unions, which built a vast new factory to produce the car. In this way, the dominance of the American-owned Opel and Ford works over the small-car market in Germany would finally be broken. Dubbing the vehicle the ‘People’s Car’ or ‘Strength Through Joy car’, Hitler envisaged up to a million models a year rolling off the production line, and a huge advertising campaign was launched to persuade workers to put aside part of their wages to save up for one, with the slogan ‘a car for everyone’16

  The campaign met with a good deal of success. In April 1939 a Social Democratic agent in Rhineland-Westphalia reported:For a large number of Germans, the announcement of the People’s Car is a great and happy surprise. A real Strength-Through-Joy car-psychosis developed. For a long time the car was a main topic of conversation in all sections of the population in Germany. All other pressing problems, whether of domestic or foreign policy, were pushed into the background for a while. The grey German everyday sank beneath notice under the impression of this music of the future. Wherever the test models of the new Strength-Through-Joy construction are seen in Germany, crowds gather around them. The politician who promises a car for everyone is the man of the masses if the masses believe his promises. And as far as the Strength-Through-Joy car is concerned, the German people do believe in Hitler’s promises.17

  Hitler proudly presented one of the first models in person to the International Motor Show in Berlin on 17 February 1939, and gave another one to his partner Eva Braun for her birthday. Although no production models came off the assembly-line during the Third Reich, the car stood the test of time: renamed the Volkswagen, or People’s Car, after the war, and popularly known as the ‘beetle’ from the rounded shape Hitler gave it in his original design, it became one of the world’s most popular passenger vehicles in the second half of the twentieth century.18

  I I

  Creating a motorized society was not just a grand technological vision for the future. It was also intended to produce more immediate benefits. Fritz Todt calculated that building the motorways would provide employment for 600,000 men, not just on the roads themselves but also in all the industries that supplied the basic materials for their construction. By June 1935 there were some 125,000 men working on motorway construction alone, so the programme did indeed create jobs, though fewer than many supposed.19 The Nazis had gained their stunning electoral successes of the early 1930s not least on the strength of their promise to pull Germany out of the catastrophic economic depression into which it had fallen. Six million people were registered as unemployed in January 1933, and three million more had disappeared from the employment statistics altogether, many of them women. Twenty million Germans had been in work in mid-1929; by January 1933 the number had fallen to 11.5 million. Many more were in short-time work, or had been forced to accept cuts in their hours, their wages or their salaries. Mass unemployment had robbed the labour movement of its principal bargaining lever, the strike, and made things easier for the new regime to destroy it in the first few months of 1933. Nevertheless, getting Germany back to work was the most immediate priority announced by the coalition government that took office under Hitler’s Chancellorship on 30 January 1933.20 Already on 1 February 1933 Hitler declared in his first-ever radio broadcast that the ‘salvation of the German worker in an enormous and all-embracing attack on unemployment’ was a key aim of his new government. ‘Within four years’, he declared, ‘unemployment must be finally overcome.’21

  Hitler’s government was able to use work-creation schemes already set in motion by its predecessors. Germany’s effective departure from the Gold Standard in the summer of 1931 had allowed the state to pump money into the economy to try and revive it. Under pressure from the trade unions, General Kurt von Schleicher’s short-lived government in particular had made a significant beginning of this process late in 1932, building on plans already drafted under his predecessors Franz von Papen and Heinrich Brüning. While Papen had made 300 million Reichsmarks available in tax vouchers for road-building, agricultural improvement and housebuilding, Schleicher put 500 million directly into the economy for such purposes; this was increased to 600 million by the Nazis in the summer of 1933. This programme only started coming into effect on 28 January 1933, enabling the Nazis to take the credit for it. The plans were in large measure the brainchild of Günter Gereke, an economist who had become Reich Commissioner for Work Creation on 15 December 1932 and continued in this position i
n 1933. By 27 April 1933 the Labour Minister Franz Seldte was able to announce that the number of jobless had fallen by over half a million. Some of this was doubtless the result of seasonal factors as employment picked up after the winter slump. The beginnings of economic recovery that had already made themselves noticeable in the last months of 1932 also played a role. Hitler’s government was lucky in its timing.22

  Nevertheless, the Nazi Party was not entirely without its own ideas in this field. The Party Programme of 1920 had presented leftish-sounding ideas for economic reform, including widespread state takeovers of private firms, so that when gaining power had begun to seem a real possibility ten years later, Hitler and the leadership had been forced to work hard to convince industrialists and financiers that they had grown up a good deal in the meantime. In 1930 the Party’s chief administrator Gregor Strasser had set up an Economic Policy Division which cultivated close contacts with business and devoted itself to working out job-creation schemes for the future. By July 1932 the Nazis were making great play in their electioneering with a proposal to use state credits for public works as a means of reducing unemployment, through schemes such as draining marshes, building canals, bringing moorland under cultivation and the like. Germany, they declared, needed to pull itself up out of the Depression by its own boot-straps; it could no longer afford to wait for international trade to recover.23