A FAILURE OF CAPITALISM

A Failure of Capitalism



A FAILURE OF CAPITALISM

Introduction

Third Reich has benefited from the fact that the regime's archives became open and available to historians almost from the moment of its collapse. Since 1946, nearly all the major crimes of the regime have been documented in outline, beginning with the Nuremberg war crimes trials which included important supplementary criminal proceedings.1 These trials presented massive documentary evidence for the nazi extermination of the Jews and for the regime's war of aggression and extermination in eastern Europe.2 In addition, the participation of German companies in the nazi system was described in detail by the reports of the Office of the Military Government of the US (OMGUS) in postwar western Germany.3 The system of concentration camps as the real nucleus of the nazi state had already been analysed by Eugen Kogon; but his report was thought to be unsuitable reading for young Germans up until 1960.4 On the other hand, case studies and regional monographs remained few up until the 1970s, or even later.5 The relative absence of detailed scholarly research gave the authors of textbooks a free hand in many respects.

Discussion

In the backdrop, to be sure, there lurked the terror of the Gestapo and the fear of the engrossment camp for those who got out of line or who had been Communists or Socialists or too liberal or too pacifist, or who were Jews (William, 2002). The body-fluid Purge of June 30, 1934, was a warning of how ruthless the new managers could be. Yet the Nazi terror in the early years influenced the lives of relatively couple of Germans and a freshly reached observer was rather surprised to glimpse that the persons of this homeland did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they sustained it with authentic enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country (Grunberger, 1974). Hitler was liquidating the past, with all its frustrations and disappointments. Step by step, and rapidly (as we shall see in detail later), he was freeing Germany from the shackles of Versailles, confounding the victorious Allies and making Germany militarily strong again.

In those days, and though many a party leader, Goering above all, was secretly enriching himself and the profits of ...