This is a segment from a paper contextualizing the rise of Nazi power in the economic realities preceding the Nazi Germany regime.  I wrote it for a class that sought to explain how the rise of Nazi Germany can be normalized when viewed through the lens of the dominant social ideologies of the time.  I extended the ideas discussed in class in my paper titled “The Economic Dynamics of Nazi Germany: Economic Implications in the Creation and Implementation of Nazi Ideology” by integrating the dominant social and economic ideologies to provide a background to the movement that led to the Nazi Regime:

The economic growth that Germany experienced in the early 1930’s came out of the Nazi New Order.  The Nazi New Order was developed from the economic, political, and ideological shifts in the German reality after World War I.  It was deeply steeped in the Nazi ideology in foreign, domestic, and economic policy.

The foreign policy of the Nazi New Order depended on the creation of what Nazi leaders believed would be the New World Order.  The New World Order was determinant on German’s expansion into the power structures of Europe as well as the rise of empires in other parts of the world.[1]  It “presupposed Greater East Asia under Japanese hegemony, a US dominated Pan-America, and a German dominated Eurasian Heartland with a Mediterranean-North African subregion under the shadow rule of Italy.”[2] In addition, it applied social Darwinism to geography, by envisioning the strongest nations thriving through ever expanding borders at the cost of weaker countries.

Domestically, the Nazi New Order was a doctrine that attempted to control every aspect of public and private life.  However, this resulted in an “impression of control”[3] rather than true command.  Germany was caught between the influences of the West and East.  The political institutions of the Weimar Republic were a marriage between the Western democratic system and the Eastern authoritarian tradition.  This meant the Weimar Republic was a representative government on paper, like Western democratic governments, but with more centralized power than was seen in those Western democracies and republics.

It is important to note that the Weimar Republic never stepped far from the bureaucratic power of the Second Reich.  While it is true that the monarch gave up power after World War I, the center of power shifted from “the monarch to the high civil service without creating representative institutions.”[4]  This meant that once the Nazi’s had control of the high civil service, there was little in their way when they began expanding.

Due to the late industrialization in Germany, the tradition of a strong bureaucracy developed before capitalist markets.  Because of this, markets introduced by German industrialization were seen as a threat to bureaucratic power[5] because industrialization shifted decision making power from absolutist rule to “decisions made by private entrepreneurs, using profit and capital accumulation as major yardsticks.”[6]  However, this shift did not destroy the economic reliance on bureaucratic structures within Germany.  For example, faced with the economic destruction after World War I, the Nazi New Order attempted to relieve economic fears by shifting industry focus towards consumer goods that were determined via bureaucratic and government-controlled propaganda rather than capitalistic markets.[7]  With the historical legitimacy of the government playing these roles it was not hard for the Nazi Regime to move into these roles when looking to control the economy and social sphere once in power.

[1] Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography, (New York: Random House, 2012), 85.

[2] Ibid. 84.

[3] Wilhelm Röpke, “Fascist Economics,” (Economica, New Series, 2, no. 5 1935), 90.

[4] Jurgen Kocka, “Capitalism and Bureaucracy in German Industrialization before 1914.” The Economic History Review, New Series, 34, no. 3 (1981): 454.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Volker R. Berghahn, American Big Business in Britain and Germany: A Comparative History of Two “Special Relationships” in the 20th Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.