Adolf Hitler, Economic Innovator

[queerbychoice]

"Glenview State Bank executives apologized to Jewish people on the bank's Web site Tuesday night, after a bank newsletter to customers praised Adolf Hitler as an economic leader of the 1930s."
from "Bank Apologizes for Citing Hitler"

Oh, but killing millions of people is profitable! It did help Hitler make a lot of money! We should try that! Let's start with the executives of Glenview State Bank . . .

Thanks to jkatj for the link.

Comments

flamebait.

[sankta.livejournal.com]

Of the 1930's? Well, one of the reasons the Nazis did so well was that economically, they did seem like a good alternative to the flakey post-war republic, under which inflation was out of control and prostitution was widespread as one of the few ways to make foreign money, money that would still be worth something the next day. Anti-semitism wasn't only Hitler's idea; Jews were the nation scapegoat by around 1914 and weren't terribly popular anywere in the world. Remember that boatload of Jews nobody would take? The Nazi economic system in the early 30's was a reaction to the Great Depression and widespread inflation, the same problems FDR was fighting in a similar way in the U.S. (government funded public works programs, etc.), as well as the addition problems of the Weimar Republic's legacy of a mark worth as little as one-trillionth its original value and a war debt on Germany estimated to be around three times what it was actually able to pay. Adolph Hitler was an economic leader of the Great Depression.

The Kristallnacht wasn't until 1938. The millions of people being murdered were

There is no such thing as an entirely evil person, or a person whose rule over a country is made up of only one practice. Claiming that Adolph Hitler's economic reforms are all directly products of his heinous mass-execution policies is like claiming that the communists were only able to jump-start the industrial revoltion in Russia through mass purges. It's trendy and PC to believe that dead people can be ultimately evil, but I can see absolutely no good coming of perfectly intelligent people being unable to separate economics from war policies and domestic policies. In fact, it creeps me out that we seem to be heading that direction, because just look how effective the blur as been for Americans -- Clinton bombing Iraq to take headlines away from his own indescretions, Bush waging war to distract from the economy, and no one in high places really complaining about the fact that the obvious solution to unemployment is government works projects like Americorps, which Bush is busy cutting funding from..

It's one thing to say "X is evil." It's much more important to know why. If Hitler's economic practices of the 1930's were evil (and in plenty of respects they were), be prepared to defend your belief that it was wrong of the bank to characterize Hitler as an economic leader of the 1930's.

[sankta.livejournal.com]

The Kristallnacht wasn't until 1938. The millions of people being murdered were largely yet to come, and not directly an economic policy, were they?

Re: flamebait.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

But I don't have any belief "that it was wrong of the bank to characterize Hitler as an economic leader of the 1930's."

To praise him as an economic leader of the 1930s, however, is disturbing, all the more so when the bank apparently did not even add any qualifiers such as "regardless of his other atrocities and the ways in which his oppression of Jews and other groups may have partially contributed to his economic success . . ."

Adolph Hitler's economic reforms don't have to have been "all directly products of his heinous mass-execution policies" in order for their successes to have still been helped along somewhat by oppressing people.

[chisparoja.livejournal.com]

Oh slave-labor is quite profitable. When you have millions of racial inferiors making munitions and tanks for you to conquer the world with and all you give them is a cup of potato soup and a slab of concrete to sleep on, you make a lot more money than you do with cranky labor unions and silly notions of human dignity and equality and your economy instantly becomes the envy of ruling classes and Ubermenschen everywhere. Yes that Hitler, what an economic mind.

Which leader in Latin America was it who reported to a US government inquiry in the 1980s, "Oh, the economy is doing great; but the people aren't."

~chisparoja

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

have you checked your hotmail account yet? :p

oh, and i need somebody to read the latest list mail and tell me whether i'm right to be afraid to read it myself right now. >_

[socialismnow.livejournal.com]

Although "until late 1938 there were few Jews, as Jews, among those imprisoned, tortured and murdered in the camps", the concentration camps already existed for years before that (pre-1938, the camps held mainly socialists, Communists, and trade unionists) (Novick, "The Holocaust and Collective Memory"). Although the worst horrors came in the later years of the regime, there were undoubtedly atrocities from 1933 onwards.

You may be right that the above was not an economic policy (I am not sure at what stage forced labour was introduced). As I understand it, Hitler's strategy for economic growth relied massively on his rearmament programme. His economic strategy was also directed by an oligarchical, dictatorial state.

[socialismnow.livejournal.com]

Many big banks were fans of Hitler in the 30s too. So were big oil companies. And some US government officials.

The Hearst newspaper chain used to fire any journalist who wrote anti-Hitler articles. The president of Texico was a notorious Nazi. Henry Ford was also sympathetic. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Even if there was no forced labor, didn't they confiscate the property of the people they put in the camps? That in itself would be profitable.

[sankta.livejournal.com]

I hate Hitler, too. I just also hate the way that whenever Hitler is mentioned, it means Holocaust and nothing else.

Forgive me, I'm in a terrible mood.

[socialismnow.livejournal.com]

It's OK. I have used my Marvin pic in sympathy with you.

[sankta.livejournal.com]

I love that icon madly.

[epanastatis.livejournal.com]

Reading the quotes from the article, it sounds like what the bank was praising were the Nazi regime's 1933-1938 policy of raising productivity and keeping wages down. How? By taking those pesky Communists and Socialists and trade union leaders and throwing them in prison camps, and doing the same to any other worker who had the nerve to speak out about anything.

Why shouldn't a bank praise that? In conditions of economic crisis, terrorizing the working class is always the best possible solution for capitalists.

If, like Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet, Hitler had confined himself to jailing, torturing and shooting workers, it would be quite respectable to praise fascist economic policy. It may well be once again.