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

himself not just as German chancellor but as leader of the entire German people, including ethnic Germans living outsid the boundaries of the state he ruled. On March 15,1938, Hitler proclaimed in Vienna: “As leader and imperial chancellor of the German nation, I announce before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.” A short time later in Frankfurt, the city that had hosted the failed German national assembly of 1848, Hitler presented himself as the man who had finally achieved the German people’s age-old dream: “The great work for which our forefathers struggled and shed their blood ninety years ago can now be considered complete.” 35
     
    The euphoria into which the nation was whipped only increased with Nazi Germany’s early military triumphs. Germany’s catastrophic defeat in World War I seemed to have been a blessing in disguise. Victory in 1918, many Germans felt, would merely have preserved the outmoded Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies, at the cost of millions of war casualties. (Hitler liked to refer to the Austro-Hungarian empire as “the Habsburg state-cadaver.”) 36 Now it was the revolutionary young nation-state of Greater Germany that was achieving victory, led by a representative of the common people who had risen up through the social ranks. Suddenly the incalculable human suffering of World War I and the years that followed no longer seemed to have been in vain. Defeat was reinterpreted as a prelude to a grandiose triumph. In November 1939, when Hitler called together his generals to prepare for the blitzkrieg against France, he did so with the words “All in all, this represents the completion of the world war, not a specific campaign.” 37
     
    German troops had occupied Prague on March 15 of that year. Hermann Voss, a professor of anatomy who was later the recipient of numerous honors in Communist East Germany, noted in his diary: “Charles University—the oldest German university and the mother of the one in Leipzig—once again in German hands! It’s hard to believe. What a blow for the Slavs and what a boon for us. We are living in a great age and should feel privileged to experience such things. What does it matter if butter is in short supply, coffee is sometimes unavailable, or you sometimes have to do one thing or another that you don’t completely approve of? Weighed against such progress, these problems are laughably trivial.” 38
     
    Germany’s early series of military triumphs, combined with the appearance of economic recovery, decisively weakened opposition to Hitler on the home front. Protests against his policies by pragmatists like army chief of staff Ludwig Beck, Reichsbank director Hjalmar Schacht, and former Leipzig mayor Carl Friedrich Goerdeler faltered, their appeals to moderation and compromise no match for Hitler’s wildly popular invocation of a bold, historic transformation, of a high-stakes battle between polar opposites. The Third Reich was not a dictatorship maintained by force. Indeed, the Nazi leadership developed an almost fearful preoccupation with the mood of the populace, which they monitored carefully, devoting considerable energy and resources toward fulfilling consumer desires, even to the detriment of the country’s rearmament program. 39
     
    To put the level of Nazi state coercion of its citizens into perspective: Communist East Germany would later employ 190,000 official surveillance experts and an equal number of “unofficial collaborators” to watch over a populace of 17 million, while the Gestapo in 1937 had just over 7,000 employees, including bureaucrats and secretarial staff. Together with a famaller force of security police, they sufficed to keep tabs on more than 60 million people. Most Germans simply did not need to be subjected to surveillance or detention. By the end of 1936, four years after the Nazis had become Germany’s largest political party and once their initial period of terror and violence against