Read Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State for Free Online Page A

in freely dictated, multiple-page letters explaining the intricacies of the Third Reich’s wartime budget.
     
    Von Krosigk’s deputy, Fritz Reinhardt, came from an altogether different background. The son of a Thuringian bookbinder, Reinhardt was born in 1895 in far more humble circumstances. He attended trade school in the town of Ilmenau and became a salesman. After the outbreak of World War I, Reinhardt was arrested in Riga as an enemy alien by the Russian army and deported to Siberia. Fred after the war, he founded a school for export trade in 1924 in the Bavarian town of Herrsching am Ammersee. The school received little support from the Weimar Republic’s educational bureaucracy, and two years later a disillusioned Reinhardt joined the Nazi Party and started a booking agency for party speakers. An expert in budgetary politics, Reinhardt was later appointed the party’s financial spokesman. He was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi deputy in 1930.
     
    Reinhardt served as deputy finance minister from 1933 to 1945. A diligent worker with vast specialized knowledge, he expounded his political goals in hundreds of speeches, pamphlets, and articles. Driven by a desire for greater equality in German society, he introduced countless tax breaks for lower- and middle-class Germans, many of which remained in effect after 1945. Ordered by the Nazi labor minister in 1941 to narrow the gap in pensions between blue-collar and white-collar workers, Reinhardt responded simply, “Good!” 32 He lowered the standards for entrance into various branches of the civil service and introduced mandatory supplemental training for Finance Ministry employees, taking the unprecedented step of founding a series of government-run financial “academies.” 33 “Reinhardt may be an irritatingly pedantic little schoolmaster in his approach to problems,” Goebbels remarked, “but by and large he knows how to solve them.” 34
     
    The duo in charge of the Finance Ministry represented a marriage of opposites typical of National Socialism: the aristocratic and apolitical minister who had enjoyed the finest education and his parvenu deputy who had acquired his expertise as a conscientious, politically driven autodidact. Reinhardt saw himself as embodying progress toward a more egalitarian, classless, social welfare state. Von Krosigk, on the other hand, represented thousands of civil servants, military officers, scientists, and intellectuals who succeeded, working from the inside, in rationally codifying the nebulous and self-contradictory ideology of National Socialism.
     
    National Integration
     
    Contrary to what is generally assumed today, and despite his intolerance of socialists, Jews, and nonconformists, the German people perceived Hitler not as a strident social divider and excluder but rather as a great integrator. The peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, which prohibited Austria and Germany from merging into one state, were widely seen as unjust. When Nazi Germany defied those treaties and incorporated Austria in March 1938, the dream of a Greater Germany, which had existed since the failed revolutions of 1848, was finally realized. The new German nation-state was not, of course, the liberal one envisioned in the nineteenth century, but its formation was nonetheless greeted with considerable popular enthusiasm. Though this period in German history is often interpreted as a deviation from “normal” development, in the late 1930s it was seen, equally broadly, as a difficult, even torturous process toward the national unification of a linguistic and cultural community, not unlike what had taken place in many other European states.
     
    It was in the spirit of nationalist enthusiasm that the Judenstrasse (“Street of the Jews”) in the Spandau district of Berlin was renamed for Carl Schurz, a leading revolutionary of 1848. (A second street was named for Schurz’s fellow nationalist Gottfried Kinkel.) Hitler always defined