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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 economic record and the social experiment were bound together and, as this lesson will argue, both were bent towards a single overriding purpose — the preparation for war.
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 conflict. 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 war. 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. This distinction is the single most important skill the topic demands, because the Nazi regime was a prolific manufacturer of statistics and imagery designed to flatter its own record.
The organising question is therefore how far the Nazi regime fulfilled its promises of economic recovery and a classless 'people's community', and how the achievement is to be weighed against propaganda, exclusion and the imperatives of rearmament. As ever in this period, the evidence cuts both ways, and the strongest analysis holds genuine achievement and its heavy price together.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y221 (Non-British period study): Democracy and Dictatorships in Germany 1919–1963, and covers Nazi economic policy and the social experiment of the Volksgemeinschaft. Within our own teaching sequence we treat the economy and society together as a single study of "promises and their price", because the economic and the social were inseparable and both were oriented towards rearmament; this reflects our own pedagogical judgement rather than a transcription of the specification's ordering. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Y221 is a period study assessed on AO1 only, examined by a two-part question: a shorter part (a) (around ten marks) requiring a comparative "greater importance" judgement, and a longer part (b) (around twenty marks) demanding a sustained analytical essay with a substantiated overall judgement. There is no source enquiry and no interpretations component. The second-order concepts to foreground here are change and continuity (how far Nazi rule transformed the economy and society), significance (which policies mattered most and to whom) and causation (why the economy was bent towards war). For this lesson that means being able to compare, say, the relative importance of rearmament and public works in reducing unemployment (a part (a) comparison), or to argue how far the Volksgemeinschaft was a reality (a part (b) essay).
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 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. The fall in unemployment was real, but it demands critical analysis rather than acceptance: a strong answer separates genuine recovery from accounting, exclusion 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. The most prominent was Kraft durch Freude ('Strength Through Joy', KdF), which provided subsidised holidays, cruises, sporting events 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 realities beneath the propaganda are worth setting out plainly, because the gap between claim and experience is the analytical heart of the topic.
| Nazi claim | Reality for workers |
|---|---|
| A cared-for, contented workforce enjoying KdF holidays | Cheap cruises reached only a fortunate minority; most 'holidays' were modest day-trips |
| Wages protected within the people's community | Wages set by state trustees and held down; real earnings barely regained 1929 levels by the late 1930s |
| The Volkswagen delivered to the ordinary saver | Not a single car reached a civilian saver before the factory turned to war production |
| Class conflict abolished | Hours lengthened as rearmament accelerated; the right to strike was gone |
The underground reports compiled by the exiled Social Democrats (the Sopade reports) recorded persistent grumbling over low wages, long hours and high prices — evidence that the propaganda of contentment concealed a reality in which workers had been politically disarmed and economically subordinated to the priorities of the state. This does not mean workers were uniformly hostile: the return of employment was a genuine relief after the Depression, and many valued the order and pride the regime projected. But the improvement was bought at the price of the independent institutions through which workers had once defended themselves, and it was always subordinate to the demands of 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 and the rearmament programme afloat. Schacht's most inventive 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 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 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. Autarky was never achieved: Germany still imported around a third of its raw materials in 1939, a dependence that shaped its strategic options and its conduct of the coming war. The displacement of the cautious Schacht by Göring illustrates the cumulative radicalisation of policy through institutional competition — the economy too was reshaped by the dynamics of the polycratic state.
The debate over the Nazi economy turns on the relationship between recovery, rearmament and war, and it is worth grasping even though Y221 does not formally assess interpretations, because it frames the essential analytical point.
| Historian | View on the economy (paraphrased) | Evaluation |
|---|---|---|
| Adam Tooze | The economy was geared to war from an early stage; the 'recovery' was largely a by-product of military spending, and Germany's resource base was fundamentally inadequate | The major modern study; some find its emphasis on resource weakness deterministic |
| Richard Overy | The economy was only partially mobilised by 1939; Hitler had planned a major war for 1942–43, and the conflict came before full preparation | Strong on the timing; qualifies the 'total mobilisation' picture |
| Tim Mason | A structural tension between rearmament and workers' living standards generated a crisis that pressed the regime towards war — the 'flight into war' thesis | Influential but contested; Overy in particular questions the evidence for so acute a crisis |
The essential point, on which the historians agree even as they differ over its precise form, is that the economy and the drive to war were inseparable: the recovery was purchased through rearmament, and rearmament pointed towards conflict.
Nazi ideology assigned women a clearly subordinate and domestic role, encapsulated in the slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche ('children, kitchen, church'). Concerned by a falling birth rate and committed to building a large, racially 'valuable' population, the regime promoted motherhood through marriage loans (a quarter written off for each child born), the award of the Mother's Cross 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). Even during the war the regime never fully mobilised female labour, remaining inhibited by its own ideology and its fear of antagonising the population — in marked contrast to the more thorough mobilisation 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 organisations mixed camaraderie, sport and outdoor activity with military-style drill and relentless ideological training, so that leisure itself became a vehicle of indoctrination and, for boys, a preparation for soldiering. The schools were 'nazified' in parallel: the curriculum was reshaped around racial 'science', the glorification of war and the German Volk, biology was recast to teach racial hierarchy, and history was rewritten to serve the national myth, alongside a heavy emphasis on physical education and, for girls, domestic preparation for motherhood. A network of elite institutions — the Napolas and the Adolf Hitler Schools — was created to train a future Nazi leadership.
Yet the indoctrination was not uniformly successful, and its limits are as instructive as its reach. As the Hitler Youth became compulsory and increasingly regimented, some of the young came to resent its discipline, and dissident subcultures emerged: the working-class Edelweiss Pirates, who defied Hitler Youth patrols and asserted a rough independence, and the middle-class Swing Youth, who embraced the very 'un-German' jazz and Anglo-American styles the regime despised. These were cultural non-conformity rather than organised political resistance, and they involved only a minority, but they show that even the generation the Nazis worked hardest to capture could not be wholly moulded — a reminder that the appearance of total coordination concealed pockets of evasion.
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.
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