Q. How has Hitler run his show without money, without gold, without foreign exchange? Can the Nazi economy continue to run indefinitely on its present basis?
A. The Nazi economy can continue to run only as long as the war lasts. This is the economic compulsion on Hitler to go on fighting. The Nazi economy is one of scarcity. There are not enough workers, since most able-bodied men are in the army; not enough food, or clothing, or fuel, or manufactured articles. Everybody not in the armed forces has to work very hard, very long hours in order to feed the colossal war machine and produce the minimum necessary for the civilians to subsist. Scarcity would normally shove prices upward; but not in the Nazi economy where the Terror makes price control really work. The Gestapo is a more potent backing for the currency than gold. The workings of a totalitarian economy seem queer to us only because we continue to think of Adam Smith’s “economic man,” and because we still believe that man will always act freely in accord with the law of supply and demand. But man under the Nazis is not free, does not act according to the law of supply and demand but according to the Nazi law. This compulsion by Terror makes a different kind of economic unit of him; our economic laws do not apply to him any more. In our bourgeois society when civil law condemns a man to go hungry, appetite is likely to make him break the law. In the totalitarian state the punishments of the concentration camp subdue almost every impulse to rebel.
For foreign trade the Nazis use an infinitely flexible, complex system of barter, often three-way. They confidently assert they have outgrown the use of gold; although one of the reasons Walther Darre advanced for a Nazi conquest of America was to lay hands on the American gold reserve at Fort Knox. The Nazis have demonstrated that they can do without gold, but this is no proof that gold is not more convenient than barter; it is proof only that anything can be used for money as long as the people believe in it, by natural inclination or by compulsion—wampum, cows, brass, paper, or the muzzle of a Gestapo pistol. It is one of our commonest fallacies to believe that financial considerations affect very much the beginning or the middle or the end of a war. Can you recall any war that had to stop because one side ran out of money? In wartime a nation becomes a collective and money a mere bookkeeping item. Only after the war when accounts are presented, does bankruptcy become real. Hitler inherited a bankrupt, bourgeois, peacetime economy and turned it overnight, from the moment he came to power in 1933, into a wartime economy. Real peace would mean the total collapse of Hitler’s totalitarian economic machine.
Q. Why do the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich?
A. Historically the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, the second was the one founded by Bismarck, and the third is Hitler’s. When I discussed this once with Dr. Jung, he pointed out deeper meanings. He said, “Nobody called Charlemagne’s kingdom the First Reich, nor William’s the Second Reich. Only the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich, because it has a profound mystical meaning.”
Dr. Jung said the Nazis feel a parallel between the Biblical triad, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the Third Reich, and that in fact many Nazis refer to Hitler as the Holy Ghost. “Again,” Dr. Jung continued, “consider the widespread revival in the Third Reich of the cult of Wotan, God of Wind. Take the name Sturmabteilung, Storm Troops. The swastika is a revolving form making a vortex moving ever toward the left—which means in Buddhistic symbolism sinister, unfavorable, directed toward the unconscious. All these symbols of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer, the prophet, the Fuehrer himself can foretell—and perhaps not even he.”
This psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters. They are products of that most hysterical, illogical, emotional mentality in Europe, the German.
Q. But I thought the Germans were stolid, phlegmatic, sensible people. How can you describe them as hysterical?
A. The commonest mistake the outside world makes about the Germans is to describe them the way you have done. We Americans seem to have judged most European nations exactly opposite from what they really are. We consider the Italian to be emotional, easily swayed, the Frenchman to be volatile, the Spaniard passionate, and so on. Well, all the Latin races are models of calm, common sense and middle-of-the-road, essentially stable people compared with the Germans. As Dr. Jung put it, “The Italians are stable. Their minds do not roll and wallow and leap and plunge through all the extravagant ecstasies which are the daily exercise of the German mind.” The Germans carry everything to excess.
What other nation in Europe would have been inundated in one decade by a wave of hysteria which was to sweep them into idolatrous worship of a former building-trades laborer and corporal and lift them into conquest of the entire continent of Europe and promise the conquest of the world? Surely this is the most extraordinary yielding by a great people to a mass emotion ever observed in our so-called civilized world.