National Socialism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

National socialism is a political ideology that rose to great popularity across Europe during the interwar period. National socialism espouses supremacy of the state’s interests as defined by the leader and total obedience by all classes to the state. In most cases, national socialist parties and movements embraced racist and ultranationalist ideologies. Out of the chaos surrounding Germany’s collapse at the end of World War I (1914–1918) sprang the German Workers’ Party. This party, which would eventually become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was formed on January 5, 1919, in Munich under the leadership of Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer.

Rise Of National Socialism And Adolf Hitler

Over the span of a few years, the German Workers’ Party grew in size, attracting a heterogeneous following. One of the party’s early recruits was Adolf Hitler. Between 1920 and 1921, Hitler established his complete authority over the party. He added the words National Socialist to the party’s name (it became known as the Nazi Party) and adopted the swastika as the party’s symbol and flag, and in February 1920 the party issued its official twenty-five point program. It called for the union of all Germans within a greater Germany, repeal of the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, establishment of colonies for Germany’s surplus population, exclusion of Jews from citizenship, appointment of only competent citizens to official posts (without regard to party affiliation), state promotion of the welfare and economic activities of its citizens, an end to non-German immigration, improvement of national health and fitness levels through obligatory physical activities, and promotion of the common interest above self-interest.

With regard to economic issues, the party demanded abolition of the “thralldom of interest,” confiscation of war profits, nationalization of syndicates and trusts, introduction of profit sharing in industry, improved old-age insurance, establishment and protection of a healthy middle class of artisans and merchants, implementation of land reform by means of “confiscation without compensation,” abolition of interest on mortgages, and prohibition of land speculation. The twenty-fifth and final point of the program called for the establishment of a powerful central government, along with diets and vocational chambers to implement the laws proclaimed by the Reich and the various German states.

The Nazi Party polled a meager 2.5 percent of the national vote in the 1928 election. The first major Nazi electoral breakthrough occurred in the general elections of September 1930. The party received 6,400,000 votes, or 18.3 percent of the total, and gained 107 seats in the Reichstag. After the general elections of July 1932, the Nazis replaced the Social Democrats as the largest political faction in the Reichstag, with 230 seats. In the July 1932 election, the party received 13,750,000 votes, or nearly 38 percent of the total. The Nazi Party’s exclusion from government ended on January 30, 1933, when President Hindenburg changed his thinking about a Hitler-led government and appointed the Nazi leader chancellor of Germany.

Appeal Of National Socialism: Prejudice And Keynesian Economics

Examinations of the ideology of national socialism have focused largely on Hitler’s writings in Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”).Thus, it comes as no surprise that most treatments of Nazi ideology stress the primacy of general nonmaterial themes such as racism, anti-Semitism, anticommunism, hyper nationalism, and xenophobia. We must ask, however, whether millions of Germans would have supported a party that offered only vacuous promises and generalities. The party positions that were enumerated in the official Nazi Party programs have been too often ignored. Unlike the frequently vague and outlandish ramblings of Mein Kampf (which relatively few people read before 1933), the party programs taken together are characterized by a substantial degree of coherence and considerable emphasis on material themes. This is not to say that racism, anti-Semitism, hyper nationalism, and xenophobia played no role in Nazi ideology; nor that many people found the Nazi Party attractive because of its stance on these themes. By themselves, anti-Semitism and other racist and nationalist themes would not have made the Nazi Party into the most popular party in Germany. The Nazi Party leaders were savvy enough to realize that pure racial anti-Semitism would not set the party apart from the pack of racist, anti-Semitic, and ultranationalist movements that abounded in post-1918 Germany. The Nazi success can be attributed largely to the economic proposals found in the party’s programs, which, in an uncanny fashion, integrated elements of eighteenth and nineteenth century nationalist-etatist philosophy with twentieth-century Keynesian economics.

Nazi economics sought to create a “third path” between Marxist centralized state planning and laissez-faire capitalism. The Nazis were not the first in Germany to advocate or even to implement both nationalist-etatist and Keynesian economic principles, but they were the first to merge the principles of both schools in a seemingly coherent and innovative program. Nationalist etatism is an ideology that rejects economic liberalism and promotes the right of the state to intervene in all spheres of life, including the economy. Among the ideas that the nationalist-etatist school contributed to Nazi economic planning were state socialism, economic protectionism, and territorial expansion (Lebensraum). Nazi economists found much to their liking in Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which was critical of the Versailles treaty and the financial obligations it placed on Germany, brought Keynes to the attention of many members of the Nazi leadership as early as 1920. The Nazi Party agreed with Keynes that if governments and central banks hoped to maintain full employment and reduce the likelihood of economic recession, they should urge investment in new capital goods, ensure a cheap money policy, and initiate public investment. Much has been written about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s adoption of the Keynesian notion of “pump priming” in the mid-1930s as a means to jolt the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. What may be less well known is that the Nazi Party had urged the use of pump priming to start the German economy several years before F.D.R. used it in the United States.

Nationalist-etatist principles and Keynesian economics made for a good match. Autarky was realizable, according to the thinking in the Nazi Party, through government-initiated investment in the nation’s infrastructure, including public works, residential reconstruction, resettlement, and reagrarianization. In the end, the marriage of nationalist-etatist thinking and Keynesian economics allowed the Nazis to design some rather novel but nevertheless concrete economic policies.

Bibliography:

Brustein, William I. The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925–1933.
New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996.
Carsten, F. L. The Rise of Fascism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Lipset, S. M. Political Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

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