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The Nazis came to power promising, above all else, to end the misery of the Depression, to restore Germany to greatness, and to forge a new kind of society — a Volksgemeinschaft, or 'people's community', that would dissolve the bitter class divisions of the Weimar years into a racially defined national unity. These were the promises on which much of the regime's popularity rested, and they raise the central question of this lesson: how far were they actually fulfilled, and at whose expense? The task is twofold. First, to assess the economic record — the dramatic fall in unemployment, the drive for rearmament and self-sufficiency, and the structural tensions that pointed towards war. Second, to examine the social experiment — the treatment of workers, women and the young, and the gulf between the propaganda of classless community and the reality of a society reorganised around race and gearing for conflict. Throughout, the analytical discipline is the same: to distinguish what the regime claimed from what the evidence shows, and never to mistake propaganda for description.
Key Question: How far did the Nazi regime fulfil its promises of economic recovery and a classless 'people's community', and how should historians weigh genuine achievement against propaganda, exclusion and the imperatives of rearmament?
Key Definition: Volksgemeinschaft ('people's community') was the Nazi ideal of a racially unified, harmonious national community that transcended class. Its unity was defined by exclusion: it was founded on race, and Jews, Roma and others deemed alien or 'unworthy' were cast out of it. The concept is therefore as much about who was excluded as about who belonged.
This lesson addresses Nazi economic policy and the social experiment of the Volksgemeinschaft within Part Two of Option 2O: Democracy and Nazism: Germany, 1918–1945, the Paper 2 Depth study. It covers the specification content on economic recovery, rearmament and the Four-Year Plan, and on the impact of Nazi rule on workers, women, young people and social structure.
No achievement did more to win the regime support than the apparent conquest of mass unemployment, which had stood at six million when Hitler took office. The official figures fell with remarkable speed.
| Date | Registered unemployed |
|---|---|
| Jan 1933 | 6.0 million |
| Jan 1934 | 3.8 million |
| Jan 1936 | 1.6 million |
| Jan 1938 | 0.5 million |
| 1939 | Labour shortage |
The methods behind this fall were various, and a critical analysis must weigh how much of the improvement was genuine and sustainable. Public-works schemes, the most famous being the construction of the autobahns and the work of the National Labour Service (RAD), absorbed labour and were trumpeted in propaganda, though their direct contribution to employment was smaller than the publicity implied. Far more important was rearmament, which from 1935 became the single greatest driver of demand for labour and materials. The reintroduction of conscription in 1935 removed hundreds of thousands of young men from the labour market by putting them into uniform — not, in any meaningful sense, genuine civilian employment. Women were pressed out of the workforce to make room for men, and Jews were dismissed from their posts, both groups vanishing from the unemployment rolls without finding alternative work that the figures recorded. And the statistics were, in any case, massaged: those in make-work schemes, conscripts and excluded groups did not appear, so the headline figures flattered the reality.
Exam Tip: The fall in unemployment was real, but it demands critical analysis rather than acceptance. Much of it rested on rearmament (which was unsustainable without war), on conscription (which is not civilian employment), on the exclusion of women and Jews from the figures, and on statistical manipulation. A strong answer separates genuine recovery from accounting and rearmament.
The destruction of the free trade unions in May 1933 transformed the position of the industrial working class. In their place stood the DAF (German Labour Front) under Robert Ley, a compulsory mass organisation that embraced both workers and employers but defended neither the right to strike (now illegal) nor free collective bargaining; wages were set by state-appointed trustees of labour, and workers lost the institutions through which they had defended their interests under Weimar. In compensation the regime offered a battery of organisations designed to bind workers to the Volksgemeinschaft and to manage their leisure as well as their labour. The most prominent was Kraft durch Freude ('Strength Through Joy', KdF), which provided subsidised holidays, cruises, sporting events, theatre trips and concerts, presenting the regime as the benefactor of the ordinary worker. A related scheme, 'Beauty of Labour', sought to improve factory conditions. The KdF Volkswagen ('people's car') was promised to workers who paid into a savings scheme, but not a single car was delivered to a civilian saver before the war diverted the factory to military production.
The balance sheet for workers is genuinely mixed. Against the return of employment and the novel leisure provision of KdF must be set the loss of independent representation, the suppression of wages, the lengthening of hours as rearmament accelerated, and the broken promise of the Volkswagen. The propaganda of a contented, cared-for workforce concealed a reality in which workers had been politically disarmed and economically subordinated to the priorities of the state.
Behind the social policy lay an economy increasingly subordinated to the goals of rearmament and preparation for war. In the early years the financial wizardry of Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank and from 1934 economics minister, kept the recovery and the rearmament programme afloat. Schacht's most ingenious device was the MEFO bill, a form of disguised government credit that allowed rearmament to be financed off the books and inflation to be concealed. But Schacht grew alarmed at the pace of rearmament and the strain on Germany's foreign-exchange reserves, and pressed for a more cautious, export-oriented course.
The decisive turn came in 1936 with the Four-Year Plan, placed under Hermann Goring rather than the sceptical Schacht (who resigned the economics ministry in 1937). The plan prioritised autarky — economic self-sufficiency — and the production of armaments, pouring resources into synthetic substitutes for imported raw materials such as oil and rubber. Its goal, set out in Hitler's secret memorandum of 1936, was to make the economy and the armed forces ready for war within four years.
Key Definition: Autarky means economic self-sufficiency — the attempt to free a national economy from dependence on imports. Germany pursued autarky from 1936 but never achieved it, still importing around a third of its raw materials in 1939, a dependence that shaped its strategic options and its conduct of the coming war.
The historiography of the Nazi economy is among the richest in the field, and it turns on the relationship between recovery, rearmament and war.
| Historian | View on the economy |
|---|---|
| Adam Tooze | The economy was geared towards war and rearmament from an early stage; the 'recovery' was substantially a by-product of military spending, and Germany's underlying resource base was fundamentally inadequate (The Wages of Destruction, 2006) |
| Richard Overy | The economy was only partially mobilised for war by 1939; Hitler had planned for a major war in 1942–43, and the early conflict came before full preparation |
| Tim Mason | The regime faced a structural tension between rearmament and the need to maintain workers' living standards, generating a crisis that pressed it towards war — the thesis of a 'flight into war' |
Tim Mason's influential argument that mounting domestic economic pressures — labour shortages, inflationary strain, the impossibility of guns and butter together — pushed the regime towards war as an escape from an insoluble crisis remains contested, with Richard Overy in particular questioning the evidence for so acute a crisis; but the debate itself frames the essential analytical point that the economy and the drive to war were inseparable.
Nazi ideology assigned women a clearly subordinate and domestic role, encapsulated in the slogan Kinder, Kuche, Kirche ('children, kitchen, church'). Concerned by a falling birth rate and committed to building a large, racially 'valuable' population, the regime promoted motherhood through a range of measures: marriage loans (of which a quarter was written off for each child born), the award of the Mother's Cross medal to women with large families, and the Lebensborn maternity homes intended to encourage births among the 'racially desirable'. At the same time women were pushed out of the professions and discouraged from higher education and paid employment, partly on ideological grounds and partly to free jobs for men during the unemployment crisis.
The reality, however, increasingly diverged from the ideology. From around 1937 the labour shortages produced by rearmament meant that female labour was once again needed, and the regime's practice quietly contradicted its rhetoric: by 1939 more women were in employment (some 12.7 million) than in 1933 (about 11.5 million). Tim Mason, who pioneered the social history of the Nazi working class, argued that the regime nonetheless never fully mobilised female labour even during the war, remaining inhibited by its own ideology and its fear of antagonising the population, in marked contrast to the more thorough mobilisation of women achieved in Britain and the Soviet Union. The position of women thus illustrates a wider pattern: ideological commitment colliding with the practical imperatives of an economy preparing for, and then waging, war.
The regime placed enormous emphasis on capturing the young, in whom it saw the future of the racial community and the soldiers of the coming war. Membership of the Hitler Youth (for boys) and the League of German Girls (BDM) was made effectively compulsory from 1936 and legally so by 1939, and the Hitler Youth claimed some 8.7 million members by 1939, displacing the churches and independent youth groups it had absorbed or banned. The schools were 'nazified': the curriculum was reshaped around racial 'science', the glorification of war and the German Volk, and a heavy emphasis on physical education and, for girls, domestic preparation for motherhood. A network of elite institutions — the Napolas (National Political Educational Institutions) and the Adolf Hitler Schools — was created to train a future Nazi leadership. Yet the indoctrination was not uniformly successful: the existence of dissident youth subcultures such as the Edelweiss Pirates and the Swing Youth, examined in the previous lesson, shows that a minority of the young resisted or evaded the regime's grip even here.
All these strands — economic recovery, the management of workers, women and youth — bear on the central social claim of the regime: that it had created, or was creating, a classless racial community. The evidence cuts both ways.
| Evidence for the claim | Evidence against the claim |
|---|---|
| Unemployment fell dramatically, restoring dignity and income | Workers lost trade unions, the right to strike and free wage bargaining |
| KdF provided leisure and a sense of inclusion | Underlying class divisions in wealth and status persisted |
| Propaganda fostered a real sense of national unity and pride | The 'unity' was achieved through the exclusion and persecution of 'outsiders' |
| Some opportunities for advancement opened through the party and its organisations | The old industrial and landed elites largely retained their positions and property |
Historians have judged the Volksgemeinschaft accordingly. Detlev Peukert characterised it as a 'mobilising utopia' — a powerful, integrating ideal that shaped behaviour and won loyalty even where it did not correspond to social reality. Richard Evans stresses that it was, in substance, a 'racial community' defined by exclusion rather than a genuine abolition of class: its boundaries were drawn by race, and its inclusiveness for some was inseparable from the persecution of others. The truth is that the Volksgemeinschaft was simultaneously a potent propaganda construct that genuinely mobilised many Germans and a profoundly misleading description of a society that remained unequal in wealth and class and was 'unified' chiefly by the exclusion of those it cast out.
Exam Tip: Always distinguish the regime's propaganda claims from the historical reality, and look behind the statistics to ask who benefited and who suffered. The Volksgemeinschaft is best analysed as both a real mobilising ideal and a misleading description: it integrated the included by excluding the rest.
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