Professor of Economics Richard Wolff briefly introduces us to the history of Germany’s fall into fascism.
June 1, 2023
In the following video, Professor Richard Wolff gives an edifying explanation for the reason why Hitler found fertile ground for his ideology, which later (in 1933) brought him to power in Germany.
The transcript of this video is reproduced below:
Between 1914 and 1929 (which is not very long, a mere 15 years), the Germans suffered three crushing destructions of their economy and above all of their middle classes and working classes.
Number one:
They lost WWI. They had not expected to do that. They were defeated and badly damaged.Number two:
In 1921, 1922, and 1923 they experienced inflation, not the kind of inflation that most of you are familiar with, but a kind of inflation that goes into the history books. Let me give you a rough idea. In late 1919, $1 got you 48 Deutsche Mark. That was the name of their currency. By late 1922 (3 years later) $1 got you 7,400 Deutsche Mark. And by one year later, late 1923, $1 got you 4 trillion 210 billion Deutsche Marks. People would get paid at lunchtime each day, run home to their spouse, hand off the money like a relay runner so that the spouse could run to the store and spend the money, because if you didn’t it wouldn’t be worth anything by that afternoon. Because prices were doubling every half hour in the stores. That is an inflation.
And what it meant was, over the previous 70 years as German families (very frugal) had accumulated savings, those savings were not worth a quarter pound of butter. And that all happened in a few months. The decimation of that.
It was in the autumn of 1923, at the apogee of that inflation, that a right wing military leader named Adolf Hitler tried to march on the city center in Munich, Bavaria in what became to be known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He had planned to take over the city of Munich in the South of Germany and march and take over the whole society, he and a kind of rough and ready bunch of mostly young, white, men. If it sounds familiar, that’s the point. He was arrested, he was jailed, he went to jail and was let out after 9-10 months (Europeans don’t put people in jail for long periods of time the way we do). He went on to organize when he realized that this kind of assault on a big building doesn’t work real well (it gets you in trouble, gets you arrested, gets you jailed), and that you have to do this in a different way. You have to mobilize large numbers of people so you have a mass movement. He got out in 1924.And then the third of the crushes hit Germany: the Great Depression of 1929.
It was too much. The German working class was wiped out.
Half of them went to the left and became very radical left-wingers. Socialists and the new communist party got them. And the other half went to the right. They called themselves “socialists” because to appeal to a German worker you had to be one or another kind of socialist. But they called themselves “National Socialists.” The German word “National,” that’s where Nazi comes from. And they became the fascist basis for Hitler.
Capitalism was destroyed too. The working class, the vast majority, split into two. The capitalists suddenly confronted that they were a small minority. They had no mass base. They had to ally with one of the two mass organizations of the people. They were scared of the communists and socialists, so they invited Hitler in to run the government.And the rest is the horror of Nazism in power, which destroyed the communist and socialist parties, killing large numbers, etc.