You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The Nazis came to power promising, above all, to end the misery of the Depression, restore Germany to greatness, and 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. Those promises rested on the regime's popularity; they also carried a dark corollary, for a community defined by race was necessarily defined by exclusion. This lesson examines the domestic record of the dictatorship in peacetime — the economy, society and the escalating persecution of those the regime cast out — and asks how far the promises were fulfilled, and at whose expense. It has three tasks. First, to assess the economic record: the dramatic fall in unemployment, the drive for rearmament and autarky, 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. Third, to trace the racial policy in its pre-war phases — the intellectual roots, the legal discrimination, and the turn to organised violence — up to the eve of the war, at which point (in the next lesson) it escalated into systematic murder. 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.
For a breadth study running to 1989, this lesson develops the economy and society thread and completes the portrait of the Nazi dictatorship against which the post-war German states will be measured. The Nazi economy — geared to rearmament, resting on the subordination of labour and the exploitation of the excluded — stands in deliberate contrast to the social-market "economic miracle" the Federal Republic would build after 1949, and the exclusionary Volksgemeinschaft stands against the pluralist society West Germany became. The racial policy examined here is the beginning of the trajectory that culminates in the Holocaust, the crime whose memory shaped both German states. The Holocaust and its victims must be treated throughout with full seriousness, their suffering represented accurately and never minimised; the historian's task is analysis and explanation, not the narration of atrocity.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 1, Option 1G (Route G): "Germany and West Germany, 1918–89" — a breadth study assessed by extended analytical essays (Sections A and B) and by the evaluation of historians' interpretations (Section C). In our teaching sequence it develops the economy and society thread and the beginning of the racial state, following the consolidation of the dictatorship and preparing for the war and genocide of the next lesson.
Because Paper 1 rewards command of change over time, keep asking how far the domestic record fulfilled the regime's promises, who benefited and who suffered, and how the economy and society here contrast with the post-war order. (For the precise assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
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.
| 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 fall was real but demands critical analysis rather than acceptance. Public-works schemes such as the autobahns and the National Labour Service (RAD) 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. The reintroduction of conscription in 1935 removed hundreds of thousands of young men from the labour market by putting them in uniform — not, in any meaningful sense, civilian employment. Women were pressed out of the workforce and Jews dismissed from their posts, both vanishing from the unemployment rolls without the figures recording alternative work; and the statistics were, in any case, massaged, so that the headline figure flattered the reality. A strong answer separates genuine recovery from accounting and rearmament.
Behind the social policy lay an economy increasingly subordinated to the goals of rearmament and preparation for war. In the early years the financial ingenuity of Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank and from 1934 economics minister, kept the recovery afloat — his MEFO bill 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 foreign-exchange reserves, and the decisive turn came in 1936 with the Four-Year Plan, placed under Hermann Göring 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 oil and rubber. Its goal, set out in Hitler's secret memorandum of 1936, was to make the economy and armed forces ready for war within four years. Autarky was never achieved: Germany still imported around a third of its raw materials in 1939, a dependence that shaped its strategic options and the conduct of the coming war.
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 defended neither the right to strike (now illegal) nor free collective bargaining; wages were set by state-appointed trustees. In compensation the regime offered Kraft durch Freude ("Strength Through Joy", KdF), which provided subsidised holidays, cruises and cultural events, presenting the regime as the benefactor of the ordinary worker, and the KdF Volkswagen ("people's car"), promised to savers but never delivered to a single civilian before the war. The balance sheet for workers is genuinely mixed: against the return of employment and the novel leisure of KdF must be set the loss of independent representation, the suppression of wages, and the lengthening of hours as rearmament accelerated. The propaganda of a contented, cared-for workforce concealed a reality in which workers had been politically disarmed and economically subordinated to the state.
Nazi ideology assigned women a subordinate, domestic role, encapsulated in the slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche ("children, kitchen, church"). Concerned by a falling birth rate, the regime promoted motherhood through marriage loans (a quarter written off for each child born), the Mother's Cross medal and the Lebensborn homes, while pushing women out of the professions. Yet practice increasingly diverged from ideology: from around 1937 the labour shortages of rearmament drew women back in, and by 1939 more women were employed (some 12.7 million) than in 1933 (about 11.5 million). Tim Mason argued that the regime nonetheless never fully mobilised female labour even in the war, inhibited by its own ideology — a marked contrast with Britain and the Soviet Union. The regime placed enormous emphasis on capturing the young: membership of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls (BDM) became effectively compulsory from 1936 (some 8.7 million members by 1939), and the schools were "nazified" around racial "science", the glorification of war and, for girls, preparation for motherhood. Yet indoctrination was not uniformly successful — the Edelweiss Pirates and Swing Youth show that a minority evaded the regime's grip.
All these strands 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. Unemployment fell, KdF provided a sense of inclusion, and propaganda fostered real national pride — yet workers lost their unions and the right to strike, underlying class divisions in wealth and status persisted, the old elites kept their positions, and the "unity" was achieved through the exclusion and persecution of "outsiders". Detlev Peukert characterised the Volksgemeinschaft as a "mobilising utopia" — a powerful, integrating ideal that shaped behaviour even where it did not correspond to social reality — while Richard Evans stresses that it was in substance a "racial community" defined by exclusion, its inclusiveness for some inseparable from the persecution of others. The truth is that it was simultaneously both: a potent construct that genuinely mobilised many Germans, and a misleading description of a society "unified" chiefly by casting others out.
Nazi racial policy did not arise from nothing; it drew together several strands of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thought — social Darwinism (life as a perpetual struggle between races), eugenics (the pseudo-scientific belief in "racial improvement"), modern antisemitism (older religious anti-Judaism recast in racial, hereditary terms), and völkisch nationalism ("blood and soil") — welding them into a murderous worldview centred on the Jews. The decisive and most dangerous element was the recasting of antisemitism in racial rather than religious terms: by defining Jewishness as an immutable matter of descent, the ideology closed off the traditional escape of conversion and made the "Jewish question" insoluble by any means short of removal. Modern scholarship stresses that there was no straight line from 1933 to the death camps, but rather an escalation through distinct phases, each more radical than the last, in which ideology interacted with circumstance — above all the circumstance of war (examined in the next lesson).
In the regime's early years persecution took chiefly legal and administrative forms, designed to isolate Jews from German society, strip them of rights and livelihoods, and pressure them to emigrate.
| Date | Measure |
|---|---|
| 1 Apr 1933 | A nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses and professionals |
| 7 Apr 1933 | The Civil Service Law dismissed Jews (and political opponents) from the bureaucracy |
| 15 Sept 1935 | The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and criminalised marriage and relations between Jews and "Aryans" |
| 1937–38 | "Aryanisation": the forced sale and expropriation of Jewish-owned businesses and property |
The Nuremberg Laws (15 September 1935) — the Reich Citizenship Law, reducing Jews from citizens to mere "subjects", and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour — gave the persecution a legal architecture and a pseudo-scientific definition of the victim by ancestry. The persecution then turned decisively more violent with Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass", 9–10 November 1938), a state-organised pogrom in which some 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, around 267 synagogues burned, more than 90 people killed and some 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps; the Jewish community was then collectively fined one billion Reichsmarks for the damage. Kristallnacht is an analytically significant threshold. It shifted the persecution onto openly violent ground, and it exposed the tensions within the polycratic state over method: the pogrom, instigated chiefly by Goebbels and the party, dismayed officials such as Göring concerned with the economy and order, and in its aftermath authority over the "Jewish question" was concentrated increasingly in the SS and Heydrich's security apparatus, which favoured a more "systematic", bureaucratic approach. The episode thus illustrates the wider mechanism of cumulative radicalisation: a violent initiative from one quarter provoked not a retreat but a consolidation of the persecution under the agency most committed to it.
The Jews were the central target of Nazi racial policy, but not its only victims, and a full account must register the breadth of the assault while weighing the distinctiveness of the genocide of the Jews. The Sinti and Roma were persecuted on explicitly racial grounds. Political opponents — Communists and Social Democrats above all — had been the first inmates of the camps from 1933. Jehovah's Witnesses, who refused the Hitler salute and military service, were imprisoned in large numbers; homosexual men were criminalised under a strengthened Paragraph 175 and sent to the camps; and a wide range of people classified as "asocial" were swept up. This breadth reflects the logic of a worldview that sought to "purify" the racial community by excluding all it judged a threat to its imagined purity — though the historian must hold this breadth together with the recognition that the systematic, continent-wide destruction later directed at the Jews remains distinct in its scale, intention and character. Also in this period the regime launched the T4 "euthanasia" programme (from October 1939), the murder of disabled and mentally ill people judged "unworthy of life"; some 70,000 were killed under the formal programme before the 1941 sermons of Bishop von Galen forced its official suspension, though killings continued by other means. T4 is of central importance because it served, in effect, as a precursor to the genocide: it developed the techniques of mass killing by gas and trained personnel later transferred to the death camps.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.