LogFAQs > #974015163

Eat_More_Beef posted...

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.

The German economy under Hitler may look like it enjoyed a strong upturn when seen against the very low baseline of the depression years of 192932, but Nazi economic policy was definitely not a miracle formula.

Tooze (The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy) writes:

"By 1935 German GDP in real terms had recovered to roughly the same level it had stood at in 1928. This was no doubt a rapid recovery. But it was not vastly superior to the recovery achieved in the United States under a very different policy mix. Nor, in terms of the rate of growth, was it superior to the rebound from the Weimar Republic's first serious recession over the winter of 192627, when the twelve-month growth rate was higher than at any time during the Third Reich. It is possible therefore to imagine a similarly rapid recovery taking place even under a very different policy regime. In this strict counterfactual sense, Nazi economic policy cannot claim to have 'caused' the German economic recovery."