Just to treat the fuckwits who voted for 1933 as if they weren't simply fuckwits, even if only for a moment...
Most working-class German families under Hitler in the 1930s still existed on a very modest standard of living. Even in 1938, German families actually ate less wheat bread, meat and meat products, bacon, milk, eggs, fish, vegetables, sugar, and beer than they had under the Weimar Republic in 1927. The only things they were eating more of after five years of Nazi government were rye bread, cheese and potatoes. (Source: The Nazi Economic Recovery, 193238 by Richard J. Overy, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1996.)
Meanwhile, German GDP per capita in the 1930s was lower than that of the USA, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, The Netherlands, France, Denmark or Belgium. (Source: The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze, Penguin, 2006.)
Even by 1937, the economy was only just above the level reached some twenty-five years before, and from 1936 onward all the indices of growth began to slow down. Was a bit of extra rye bread, cheese and potatoes worth a regime like Hitler's? Fuck that. But I guess that at least the regime allowed and encouraged you to hate, hate, hate, and for a lot of people the sheer fun of constant hating made living under the regime worthwhile and outweighed the relative lack of material benefits.
Thanks for this. I didn't know that because I've mostly heard that the one good thing Hitler did was pull that country out of a depression (albeit in an extremely bad way cause they targeted Jews as the source of all their problems). I didn't know they were still that financially fucked at that point.
I'm currently traveling in Europe and am in Leipzig right now, and hot damn, this place is rad. Their infrastructure is mindblowing with all their wind power farms and public transportation and shit. It goes to show that when you put your focus on just being better instead of hating the other guy, you can get a lot of shit done right!
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I wrote a horror novel, called "Spare Parts." A whole damn novel! You can check it out, and other free short stories at http://www.aarondeck.com