Germany's Hyperinflation-Phobia and The Rise of the Nazis
With all the "Trump is a Nazi" rhetoric, I thought now would be a good time to repost this diary.
The only thing worse than forgetting history is misremembering it.
Getting your history wrong can cause important mistakes.
For instance, people wonder why Germany is so insistent on austerity measures in Europe despite the continent sinking into deflation.
The reason given usually looks like this.
have a look at Germany, 1933.
In that year, Germany's democratic Weimar republic was foundering under economic depression, mass unemployment and raging hyper-inflation.
Actually that isn't what happened at all. Germany's hyperinflation and the rise of Hitler were two different issues and two different time periods. Nevertheless, the Hyperinflation = Hitler myth still exists in Germany.
Present discomfort within Germany with policies designed to reflate the euro-zone economy has been stoked by the assertion of a linkage between hyperinflation and the rise to power of the Nazis in the early-1930s. For example, in 2009, at the nadir of the global recession, Der Spiegel published a special issue focusing on the history of money, which explicitly linked the disaster of the early 1920s to Nazism
The hyperinflation of 1923 had both winners and losers. The losers were anyone with a savings or pension.
The winners were anyone with debts, like home mortgages.
The reality is that what ushered in Nazism wasn't inflation, but deflation. The economic measure that rose with Hitler's prospects wasn't the CPI, but 30% unemployment and economic depression.
The Nazis only won 32 Reichstag seats in the election of May 1924, and just 12 in 1928. Five years after the hyperinflation the Nazis were a political party without a future.
They were circling the drain of history, polling at less than 3%. They were an afterthought.
So what happened?
Germany embraced a conservative economic policy of austerity through the finance expert Heinrich Brüning.
Brüning's austerity policies were repeatedly opposed and defeated in parliament by the socialists and communists (an event that was considered a "failure of parliament" by conservatives), which led to pushing the austerity measures through by presidential decrees (Brüning called it "authoritative democracy").
These austerity measures included:
* rolling back salaries to 1927 levels
* hiking interest rates
* dramatically increasing taxes on labor
* gutting unemployment and pension benefits
Except for interest rates, this is a list of what Germany has currently imposed on southern Europe.
Most German capitalists and landowners originally supported the conservative experiment more from the belief that conservatives would best serve their interests rather than any particular liking for Brüning. As more of the working and middle classes turned against Brüning, however, more of the capitalists and landowners declared themselves in favour of his opponents Hitler and Hugenberg. By late 1931, the conservative movement was dead and Hindenburg and the Reichswehr had begun to contemplate dropping Brüning in favour of accommodating Hugenberg and Hitler.
What happened was center-right and center-left parties backed austerity measures that crushed the life out of the middle class. The Social Democrats in particular undermined their own supporters.
When workers turned to any extremist party who could stop them, one that also hated communists and socialists, the conservatives jumped on board.
As Paul Krugman has pointed out, “the 1923 hyperinflation didn’t bring Hitler to power; it was the Brüning deflation” of the early-1930s.
But the story doesn't end there.
What brought Germany's economy back from the brink under the Nazis? Government spending.
In the 1930s, Germany had high unemployment, but Germans’ memories of that, and especially of how they exited from it – via a classic Keynesian fiscal expansion – is largely forgotten, as the fiscal injection was Hitler’s rearmament.
In other words, the exact opposite of the conservative economic agenda was what allowed Nazi Germany to recover from the Depression. It's also what could have stopped the Nazis from ever taking over in the first place.
A selective memory of the past may prove worse than no memory at all.
Comments
deflation
Which President flirted with deflation more: Trump or Obama?
I just know that Mr Obama pulled the rug out from under the "$100 beater" market, and now I can't buy a cheap car to take my laundry to the laundromat.
Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long
I learned something, good history lecture, but today's Germans
are always scared of something. phobia this and phobia that. And the majority has no clue about the things you are talking about. It's book knowledge and those who lived through those times are long gone. It can't explain a general attitude that shows Germans always worried, always complaining and always "knowing better than everybody else".
So there must be something else in the air (or blood or genes) with them being phobistas.
Just saying it's just the time has come were folks don't mind anymore to be openly racist, rude and ready to be violent. The shit has already hit the
fanthe German average citizen and the train of reasonable behavior has left the station more often than those trains arriving back.https://www.euronews.com/live
Germany of the late '20's, early '30's
was a ripe brew of socialists, communists, Nazis, conservatives, monarchists, all wrapped up in a 'decadent', jazz age skein of suffering the moment. The Weimar Republic was a still birth.
And then Uncle Adolf came along with really nice uniforms for all.
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
Hyperinflation doesn't sound so bad
Beware the bullshit factories.
meanwhile, the most deflationary currency in the history
of currency had a pretty bad day of inflation, after experiencing two long weeks of gradual inflation.
all it took was for the most powerful government in the world to say get a clue
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Nazis, Nazis, Nazis!
I suppose it's a good thing that we remain as traumatized as we are about the collapse of a modern civilization in such a shockingly short span of time (5 years, maybe?) in Germany, but it's a bit tragic that we misremember the details so significantly.
I was once at a school board town hall type thing, where they were debating taking a particular book out of the curriculum -- not out of the library, but just the curriculum -- in response to complaints from very sincere christian types, including a woman whom, I have to admit, I very much liked on a one-to-one personal basis, despite the enormous gulf in our spiritual outlooks. and, i might add, a woman who had endured personal tragedy at such a level that I promise you, not one person on this blog would trade places with her. nonetheless, I felt obliged to speak against the motion.
When my allotted 3 minutes came up, I began by pointing out that in pre-Nazi Germany, public education was organized by faith. The government collected taxes from Lutherans, and gave those taxes to the Lutheran churches to educate Lutheran children. It collected taxes from Catholics, and gave the revenue to the parishes to educate Catholic children. It collected taxes from Jews, and gave the revenue to the synagogues (or other Jewish authority?) to educate Jewish children.
And nobody ever had to worry that their children would ever come in contact with any ideas -- or children -- who made either the children or the parents feel the least bit uncomfortable about their theology. They didn't even have to worry that their own taxes might be funding the promulgation of anathemas.
Of course, in the long run turning the entire institution of public education into a system of religious ghettos worked out really, really badly for one of the groups involved, and in the big picture it worked out pretty fucking badly for almost everyone in Germany -- but I bet that right up until it all went south, a very large proportion of them were happy happy happy that their kids weren't sharing desks with any of those people.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
redacted - I fear I have to say something disagreeable
https://www.euronews.com/live
I guess there's misremembering
and there's being mis-educated, cause that's how I learned it.
What I don't understand is
Alt-right, Nazis, Neo-Nazies, KKK, Militia, et al.
What are there, a couple thousand, a couple of tens of thousand out of a population of 340+ million?
And somehow, these nut jobs are a significant threat to the county and civilization in general?
Alt-left, Antifa, BlackBloc, BLM even less. They wear masks and carry base ball bats and molotovs and seek to be violent against those righties and btw destroy capitalism and the constitution while they're at it, Oh my.
IMHO this all media bullshit. Generated to keep normal citizens cowering in their homes because it's scary out there. You need the help of more Gubmint depending on what they convince you is happening and which political whoring party you currently think you support. BTW there is only one Party and your "vote" is total bullshit.
Top Down. Bottom Up. Inside Out.
But, the good news is that cases of water and bread are back on the shelves of Houston supermarkets.
Rest easy.
Carry on.
Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!
Firesign Theater
Stop the War!
A question about the "Budget of the Reich" table.
I know it's not your table, but how exactly is new debt calculated? When total expenses are subtracted from total income for each year in the table, the result is neutral or surplus in 3 years and a small deficit in the other 3 years, except 38/39 where the deficit is 3 billion. But new debt for 38/39 is shown as 27.4 billion. How is that possible?
@edg
Dunno but maybe this has something to do with it?
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/07/big-banks-funded-the-nazis-and-la...
And further regarding the criminal elements taking over finance, government and the world,
much of the information below (assuming it all to be accurate, something of which I'd have no idea) relates not to the past but to what's going on now, with details of which I'd heard nothing, (not that this means much, lol,) and would be very interested to hear our resident experts expound upon. The following certainly sounds like a major cause of our global ills involving an evil essential to shut down - and information which I'm afraid may disappear off the net.
Also, this authors books, mentioned at bottom, would seem to be potentially a good and interesting investment for those still able to afford to buy books.
(Emphasis mine)
https://cosmolearning.org/documentaries/banking-with-hitler-1998/
This fits into and explains so much. I have no idea as to how to verify such details and must rely upon those here who can, but if this psychopathic group is a/the root enemy of life on the planet, we non-experts need to know, too.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.