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What do you mean? Morality aside, it appeared to be working great. As you say, Hitler was remarkably popular, even after the extremely costly war was lost, and all the evil was revealed to those who pretended not to see.
First, like FDR, he presided over the recovery for the worst economic crisis of the century, which by itself confers Saviour status, even though it’s likely just mean reversion. In foreign policy, he was a gambler who repeatedly won big. At first the western allies kept flinching, giving him everything for nothing, and then when push came to shove he even easily beat what was in theory the best army in the world, partly because of his own tactical input.
In domestic policy, he understood himself as both of and as a ‘friend of the people’ – as a lower middle class guy, a corporal, he disliked both the liberal elites which ran weimar and the old conservatives elites, the ‘vons’. Aside from the economic recovery/rearmament boom, he was also transferring to poor germans the wealth stolen from jews, and later, other people’s jews’, and other people’s. Because of all his achievements and popularity (which he and his regime cared very much about), for the first years there was little repression.
I would say he bribed the germans far more than he threatened them, but bribe implies that they didn’t intrinsically want to follow him in the first place. The truth is, as vile as he was, he genuinely cared about and improved the life of the common man (in peacetime at least, and with increasingly evil means), and they always loved him back.
💀. Well yeah. Morality aside, everything was working fantastically.
Apart from that to the economic point. Hitler either understood or ultimately figured out (or rather his advisors did) that large scale Keynesian state expenditures could rescue a morbid capital economy from destruction. Basically what American businessmen later learned during WW2.
But it’s difficult to say this is because they lived under a “Nazi” program specifically. “Nazism” faced the exact same problem “Communism” did in this sense. The Nazis weren’t in power all that long and so nobody really got a chance to see what a “National Socialist State” would look like. They didn’t just oppose Communism. They also opposed Capitalism. One reason they wanted lebensraum was to prepare for an autarkic economy because they knew their activities were going to lock them out of international markets; quite similar to the way North Korea is today. Hitler specifically wrote about this. They also opposed modern practices of the credit system. The amount of days you could analyze their political program and domestic policies numbers in the mere months at best, outside of the war effort.
The same with Communism. Marx never wrote about what a post-Capitalist system would look like. He died before he was able to do that. When people attack “Marxism” and they point to the Soviet Union, what they’re really attacking is “Marxist-Leninism” which is one particular twist and variation that was grafted onto Marx’ ideology by others and at a different time.
Well, yeah of course morality aside. I actually think people were too easy on the germans of the time, my grandparents. We let them get away with their lies; that they didn’t believe, or profit, that they didn’t know, that they were threatened, that the war just happened to them, and that it was hard.
I think that’s more true of japan; they thought that without the resources of an empire, they could never fight and win a long war, therefore they could not threaten one, therefore they’d be relegated to the third rank of powers.
Hitler had a more dramatic, crazier theory: as more nations became industrialized and more populous, they would find it increasingly difficult to exchange their competing industrial goods for the limited food surplus from more agrarian countries, who themselves were industrializing and therefore there was less and less food surplus to trade. So he needed lebensraum to avoid the inevitable Malthusian starvation of his people. Not such a bad guy after all. Well, other people would still all starve. Anyway, it’s not that he loved autarky, it's that he thought all international trade would soon break down naturally. And then he planned to ‘keep a balance’ between the lebensraum-agrarian part (farms in the east)and the industrialized part(german factories) of his empire so that there would be no reduction of the agrarian food surplus and no starvation.
Yeah, I remember the Covid times too.
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Yeah he wouldn’t be such a “bad guy” were it not for the implications and designs that were baked into his desire for agricultural sustainability. This wasn’t some national policy of ecology he was seized by. It was part and parcel for his desire for German colonies via the war effort.
Anyone else can speculate endlessly about his ideas for the future state.
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