As we have seen
in this series, while the rest of the world quickly rebounded from the brief
recession following World War I, Germany, Austria, and Hungary plunged into
what seemed a bottomless pit of despair.
If there is any question as to why a people so eminently civilized as
the Germans permitted someone like Adolf Hitler to come to power, one need look
no further than the unmitigated horror that the nation endured in the early
1920s. Ground between the upper and
nether millstones of reparations and hyperinflation, people were willing to
follow anyone who could promise them order and security again.
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| Hitler's rival Ernst Roehm (liquidated). |
There is
nothing special or inhuman about the German people that caused them to support
Hitler. He promised order, and he
delivered once he gained power . . . after he “liquidated” potential rivals in
the Nazi Party during the “Night of the Long Knives.” As people everywhere still do today, the
Germans were ready to give up everything to gain even the smallest scrap of
security and predictability. Hitler managed
to give hope to people who believed themselves past it, and were terrified that
the hyperinflation and the chaos would return in the 1930s as the Great
Depression began spreading its effects throughout the world. How he did it was another matter.
While the
Weimar Republic was socialist, it did not go as far as Hitler was prepared to
take the new Third Reich. The Nazi
conception of landed property, Wunderlich,
is indicative of the new Chancellor’s economic and social policies, as well as
his stand on basic human rights.
Briefly, this provided that actual ownership of landed property was
abolished, and land (and, by extension, other productive assets) was only
considered to be in the temporary custody of whoever could make it productive. Only workers had a right to own, and then only as long as they could work. Once that ability ceased, title was to be
taken away, as was life itself for anyone deemed a "useless eater," i.e., who consumed without producing, such as the mentally and physically disabled, or those engaged in occupations deemed useless, such as any journalist who said the wrong thing in print.
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| Reparations demands helped get Hitler elected. |
Of course, the
industrialists and financiers supported Hitler simply because he promised order
and to maintain a stable currency at a time when Keynesian economic and
monetary policy was starting to make its inroads on the soundness of the U.S.
economy, and to get rid of the reparations payments that shackled economic
growth and recovery. They knew that,
ultimately, Hitler was a socialist, but as national
socialist opposed to international communism, he would do nothing to undermine
their wealth and power . . . as long as it was used to support Hitler, the
glory of the Third Reich, and world conquest. Only bad
Germans, useless eaters, inferiors, non-Aryans, and everyone else had anything to worry about.
And those who
opposed the power of the German state had a lot to worry about, aside from
their lives and liberty. As early as
1927, Weimar jurists identified a “natural weakness of property” in unwritten
law, and abrogated to the State the administrative power to restrict ownership
rights.[1]
They also
emphasized the old Germanic idea of “social duty,” a more conceptually sound
idea related to the limitation of the exercise of rights when constrained by
the common good. More dangerous was the
idea that, “the cultural development of the history of law” was a process “placing
more and more objects outside of private property,” and demanded the abolition
of rights that conflicted with Der
Zeitbewußtsein, “the consciousness of the epoch.”[2]
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| Keynes: "euthanasia" of the "functionless investor" who doesn't work. |
Nazism denied
the absolute character of property, and imposed obligations conditioning
property tenure, i.e., producing something that contributed to the security or needs of the State. Property without
function was to be abolished, shades of Lord Keynes’ hostility toward the rentier (someone who lives off the income of his or her investments), or, as he referred to the small
property owner, “the functionless investor”[3] because he consumes what he produces instead of saving it to invest in new capital to create wage system jobs. The acquisition of legal title was a “continuous
process” of which legitimate use was the essence. Ownership was not a right that stood by its
own virtue, but a trusteeship for the discharge of the aims of the
community. “All property is common
property. The owner is obliged to administer
it.” Property rights could be
justifiably revoked when those functions were not fulfilled. This was connected with the romantic
agrarianism which contrasted the “creative” peasant with the “parasitic and
destructive nomad”[4] such as the Jews (a.k.a., "culture destroyers"), and
which demanded Bodenstandigkeit, “rooting
in the soil,” for the farm population and, by extension, anyone engaged in
production.[5]
#30#
[1]Wunderlich,
the National Socialist Conception of Landed Property, 12 Social Research 60 at
61, 66, 72 (1945), quoted in Howard R. Williams, Cases and Materials on the Law of Property, Brooklyn: The Foundation Press, Inc., 1954, pp. 46-48.
[2]Ibid.
[3]“I
see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which
will disappear when it has done its work.
And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides
will suffer a sea-change. It will be,
moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that
the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing
sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen
recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.” Keynes, The
General Theory, VI.ii.
[4]See
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, New York:
Houghten-Mifflin, 1971, pp. 287 - 296.
[5]Williams,
loc. cit., Hitler, op. cit., pp. 138, 142.
