Matt Yglesias

The Real German Resistance to Hitler: The Social Democrats

In the course of an interesting article denouncing Valkyrie and The Reader, Ron Rosenbaum says:

And then there was Cruise’s character, Claus von Stauffenberg, very brave, it’s true, in 1944. But back during the brutal war crime that was the 1939 invasion of Poland (the British magazine History Today reminds us), he was describing the Polish civilians his army was slaughtering as “an unbelievable rabble” made up of “Jews and mongrels.” With friends like these …

Moral: Don’t go looking for heroes in the largely mythical “German resistance” to Hitler. The German resistance was not much more real or effectual than the French Resistance—its legend outgrew its deeds after the war.

I think this is too quick. There was very real German resistance to Hitler. It just didn’t come from the army or other elements of the German conservative establishment. And it wasn’t able to stop anything in 1939 or 1944 because it had already been crushed. The opposition came primarily from the German Social Democratic Party. Rosenbaum knows this because it wrote about it in his book, but for the purpose of this article he’s glossed over it. But emphasis on Germany complicity in Nazi atrocities shouldn’t obscure the fact that a large swathe of the German public tried—very hard—to prevent Hitler from coming to power throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. The problem was that they were undercut by a non-trivial Communist Party that absurdly alleged that there was no difference between social democracy and fascism (they used the term “social fascists”) and by the fact that when the chips were down, both the Catholic political movement and the traditional Protestant conservatives didn’t like Hitler but preferred him socialism.

In Prussia, for example, Otto Braun’s SDP coalition was happily in power through democratic means until July of 1932 when the federal Chancellor Franz von Papen decided to abrogated constitutional government, kick Braun out of power, and start running the state himself. Papen also re-legalized the previously banned Nazi SA paramilitary organization in an effort to lure them into supporting his coalition, and then eventually agreed to serve as Vice Chancellor in a Hitler-led cabinet. After the reichstag fire, the conservative and centrist parties voted for the Enabling Act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers, but the SDP voted no, even though they knew they were doomed to lose the vote. At this point their leaders either went into exile (like Braun) or were generally sent to concentration camps. This, unlike the von Stauffenberg plot, was legitimate ahead-of-the-curve resistance to the Nazis.

The Case Against Direct Emulation of Nazism

This seems like a silly case to need to make, but Tyler Cowen steps up to the plate with an argument that Adolf Hitler’s fiscal policies did not serve the public interest. Shocking, I know. The conclusion:

In other words, Nazi fiscal policy boosted measured gdp rather than driving a recovery with higher real standards of living.

He wants us to draw the broader conclusion that this should make us skeptical about the ability of spending-side fiscal stimulus to improve living standards. But the puzzle can be solved in this brief excerpt included in his post from a Robert J. Gordon paper:

Tooze confirms previous findings that relatively little of the expansion in public expenditures took the form of public works like the autobahns, while over 80 percent consisted of spending for rearmament. Abelshauser (1998, p. 169) calls this “military Keynesianism on a large scale.”

But of course I don’t think anyone ever thought that armaments expenditures increases living standards. When a country produces more HDTVs, more people have HDTVs and living standards go up. When a country produces more tanks and military explosives, none of the tanks or military explosives go into private hands (we hope!) so living standards are unchanged. But producing HDTVs doesn’t increase your ability to conquer France, whereas tanks and explosives are useful for conquering France. Hitler’s policy objective was to prepare for conquering France. And his policies worked quite well (though Ernest May reminds us not to neglect the importance of French intelligence failures), they just served Nazi objectives. But I don’t see why Hitler couldn’t have spent the money on something else.

If we use fiscal policy to raise measured GDP primarily through building tanks, we’ll have higher GDP and more tanks. But if we use fiscal policy to raise measured GDP primarily through repairing existing roads and building new mass transit and high-speed rail lines, then we’ll have higher GDP, better roads, and more mass transit and HSR systems. It seems to me that living standards would therefore be higher.

Cowen’s post does illustrate a point that often goes missing in American discussions, namely the fact that our habit of spending a much bigger share of GDP on the Pentagon than do our rich democracy peers has a substantial negative impact on American living standards. If that money were either spend on public sector programs that people could use, or invested by the private sector in creating goods and services that people want, most people would be better off. We’re used to thinking of ourselves as the most prosperous people on the planet, but between our massive expenditures on military hardware and medical waste and the highly inegalitarian distribution of our income, that’s increasingly not the case.