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and Krüger (1980), nor does it include any of my books or essays, none of which are referenced in any way in the body of the text either.

In 2010, Timothy W. Ryback published Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, in which he quotes Hitler's childhood friend August Kubizek: "Books, always more books! I can never remember Adolf without books ... Books were his world.' And Hitler's passion for books, according to another early associate, had nothing at all to do with "leisure or pleasure. It was deadly serious business.'45 Hitler was an enthusiastic collector and his library ultimately contained some 16,300 books.46 In fact, expenditure on

books was the third largest tax deduction on Hitler's tax declaration.47

Hitler claimed to read one book per night, sometimes even more.48 The largest sections of his collection were made up of 7,000 military volumes, roughly 1,500 titles from the fields of architecture, theatre, painting and sculpture, and a large selection of titles on nutrition.49 Hitler's library also included a relatively large number of sociological works,50 along with a wide selection of Karl May books, biographies, detective stories and books on spiritualism and success.51 In contrast, the library was "noticeably lacking in literature and almost totally devoid of drama and poetry'.52

The fact that Hitler was such a voracious reader, especially at night, is beyond dispute, although it does remain difficult to determine exactly which books he actually read. Ryback's study, while revealing Hitler's personal preferences, contains little valid information about the development of his worldview. It is difficult to determine which books truly influenced Hitler's thinking, especially in his later years. Some scholars, for example, fall into the trap of focusing only on the sources

that left a noticeable intellectual footprint on Hitler's Mein Kampf and use these to infer the books upon which he based his worldview - ignoring the fact that Hitler read the bulk of the books that most shaped his thinking only after he had written Mein Kampf. This weakness also applies to Ryback's research, which concentrates on Hitler's "verifiable readings, especially during the "revolutionary period" and, as far as possible, also traces the reading habits of the young Hitler'.53


The Götz Aly Debate - Hitler's Beneficiaries

2005 saw the publication of Hitler's Beneficiaries by the German historian Götz Aly. The book garnered a great deal of attention, far beyond expert circles, and was reviewed and discussed in Germany's leading daily and weekly newspapers. Aly's book, unlike

this book or the work of Krall, did not focus on Hitler's worldview, but on the connection between the National Socialist regime's crimes and the loyalty the party engendered among large sections of the population. Aly's answer, however, exhibits many parallels to the theses of my book about Hitler's perception of himself as a revolutionary. It is for this reason that Aly's contribution to the field will be discussed in more detail below. The NSDAP, according to Aly, framed its program to propagate "two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity. That was the key to the Nazi's popularity.'54 As Aly observes, "it is necessary to focus on the socialist aspect of National Socialism.'55

Aly notes that one reason for the popularity of National Socialism was "its liberal borrowings from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left'.56 In his memoirs, Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the mass murder of the Jews, repeatedly affirmed: "My political sentiments inclined toward the left and emphasized socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones.'57 For millions of Germans, the appeal of National Socialism lay in "the promise of real equality', asserts Aly. He continues:

For all those who legally belonged to the German racial community

- about 95 percent of the population - social divides became ever smaller. For many people, the regime's aims of leveling out class distinctions was realized in the Hitler Youth, the National Labor Service, the major party organizations, and ultimately even in the Wehrmacht.58

In this book, I show that Hitler saw himself as a social revolutionary who was as strong in his emotional hatred of the "cowardly bourgeoisie' as he was in his repeated praise of the working class, to whom he promised future prosperity, social advancement and equal opportunities. On the other hand, I do not, or at best only marginally, examine the extent to which Hitler's ideological convictions actually corresponded with the social changes that were implemented between 1933 and 1945. This is, however, among the subjects Aly does address: Hitler knew

... that the confiscation of assets both of German Jews and, during the war, of foreign nationals, was necessary because the Nazi leadership desperately wanted to avoid any broad-based tax hikes

- the usual means for financing massive military activity ... One Reich strategy, then, was to shift responsibility for funding the Nazi war machine to the citizens of conquered lands - while continuing to spare the majority of its own populace any increased tax burden.59

Aly explains how, when it came to decisions on wartime taxation, the Nazi leadership "intervened to protect lower- and middle-income Germans'.60 He even refers to "tax breaks for the masses'.61 At the same time, the regime pursued a parallel policy Aly refers to as "tax rigor for the bourgeoisie', which massively increased the financial burden on the social group which Hitler - as explained in Chapter III.3 of this book - despised almost above all others. Aly puts forward many examples of the government's readiness to tax businesses and the country's wealthy, including the so-called Hauszinssteuer (real estate inflation tax), which cost German property owners 8.1 billion reichsmarks in 1942 alone.62

In the case at hand, the Nazi leadership at no point even considered legislation that would have placed a comparable burden on working people. On the contrary, discussions of the property tax were framed by the general principle that materially better-off Germans were to bear a considerably larger share of the burden of war than poor ones.63

Aly highlights the correlation between social egalitarianism on the one hand and brutal "Aryanization' on the other and analyses the extent to which Jewish owned assets were nationalized for the benefit of the German majority population. The extermination policy for one and the sociopolitical initiatives for the other were not opposites, they were deeply interlaced:

The Nazi leadership established a framework for directly sharing the spoils of its military victories with the majority of Germans - the profits derived from crippling the economies of occupied and dependent countries, the exploitation of work performed by forced

laborers, the confiscated property of murdered Jews, and the deliberate starvation of millions of people, most notably in the Soviet Union.64

National Socialism, according to Aly, joins the ranks of other totalitarian welfare systems:

Upward mobility for the common people - in various forms and not infrequently at the cost of others - was one of the fundamental political innovations of the twentieth century. The Nazi brand of socialism was part of this tradition.65

How do the theses put forward by Aly relate to those of my work? In my book, I demonstrate that leftist, socialist policies played a far greater role in Hitler's thinking than had previously been admitted. My work does not focus on Hitler's theories on race, since there are already a number of highly reliable works on his racial and foreign policy ideas. Aly sheds light on how closely the strands of Hitler's racial ideology and his social-revolutionary goals were interwoven. When I read Aly's book, I was struck by the considerable amount of common ground between Hitler's Weltanschauung, as reconstructed in my work,66 and the social reality of the Third Reich described by Aly.

Nevertheless, Aly's theses did not go unchallenged. A number of critics denied that life had improved at all for the working class in the Third Reich. For example, Rüdiger Hachtmann's review of Aly's book argues that, in 1943, nominal gross wages and - even more so

- net earnings remained significantly below where they had been in 1929.67 Above all, Hachtmann questions whether the changes in Germany's social structure were anywhere near as far-reaching as Aly claims. Further research will be required in order to confirm whether or not Aly overstated the true impact of the National Socialist regime's social and wealth redistribution policies.

Those engaged in the debate surrounding Aly's book often targeted their criticism at claims he had not even made. For example, some critics raised the point that the Third Reich did not create a classless society or totally eradicate social conflicts.

Hachtmann took issue with both Aly's notion of the "accommodating
dictatorship' and the established view (held, for one, by Hans Mommsen) that the Volksgemeinschaft (national community) was primarily a propaganda product and possessed only demagogic quality. The traditional elites, according to Hachtmann, "did not want to be leveled down' and no one in the NS regime had ever seriously proposed that "the economic and scientific elites, for example, should be subsumed into a faceless mass with other workers'.68 In raising this objection, Hachtmann has created a straw man argument based on an interpretation that neither Aly nor I nor other authors have ever advocated.

Rather, what Hachtmann writes tallies precisely with what I identify as Hitler's social objectives in this book, namely that society (without abolishing class distinctions) "should be a socially permeable meritocracy offering "upward mobility for the productive"'. At the same time, the National Socialist state differed from other highly industrialized societies in that it "explicitly excluded "inferior races"'.69 In this respect, I fail to see any contradiction between Aly's theses - which Hachtmann criticizes - and the findings of my own research on Hitler's worldview.

Among the criticisms I fail to comprehend are those offered by

Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt. For example, Michael Wildt writes:

Contrary to Götz Aly's argument that socialist equality was the defining characteristic of the Volksgemeinschaft, the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft was built upon new inequalities, not least as a result of the processes of large-scale exclusion that went along with the inclusion of the Volksgenossen.70

At no point had Aly denied any of these points, a fact that entirely negates Bajohr's and Wildt's opposition.

Winfried Süß's particularly negative review also cites a number of self-evident facts that, in truth, represent the consensus and are thus unsuited as objections to Aly's theses:


National Socialist social policy was not aligned with the welfare state's fundamental principles of comprehensive inclusion; it was

marked by a brutal differentiation between inclusion and exclusion, even to the point of physical annihilation.71

And when Süß writes that "Hitler's Volksstaat' was "fundamentally different from the universal welfare state of the Weimar Republic',72 I am fairly sure that Aly would not disagree.

As is unfortunately so often the case in the study of contemporary history, the debate on Aly's theses was, at least to some extent, shaped by political bias. For example, Aly asserts that the NS leadership had implemented the principle that "strong shoulders should bear much, weak ones less, ... more efficiently than any social democratic government of the post-war period'. Historians with a political affinity for the Social Democrats took this as a provocation. Wehler, for example, criticized Aly's work for being run through with a "continuous, but peculiar, line of criticism against the welfare state'. In contrast, Wehler argued that he regarded "the social state - the taming of a natural private capitalism - to be the greatest achievement of European political culture in the last century'.73 Hachtmann added his voice, accusing Aly of deploying "historical arguments to buttress the current dismantling of the welfare state to carve out another opening for neoliberalism'.74

In my opinion, political arguments and ideologies - no matter what stripe - are deleterious to historical debate because they provide us with a window into the personal political opinions of the disputants but ignore the exhortation of Leopold von Ranke to "simply tell how it was'. And yet this is precisely what any debate should focus on - not the political creeds of the researchers.



Volksgemeinschaft - Myth, Promise, Reality?

Despite all the differences, the most recent research on National Socialism largely agrees that the focus of interest has shifted from terror and opposition to other issues. "Today,' argued Peter Fritzsche in 2009, "the dominant interpretation has shifted in the opposite

direction, stressing the overall legitimacy of the Nazi revolution.'75 In 2011, Ian Kershaw observed that

the older literature, with its emphasis on class structures, limited social change, opposition to the regime, "top-down' approaches, and the political functions and processes of Nazi rule, often made it hard to see the reasons for the popularity of the regime in the 1930s, to grasp the sheer excitement, euphoria, sense of going places, building a future and personal commitment of millions who saw the years from 1933 to 1939 as "good times'.

It is hard to deny that National Socialism's utopian vision contributed much to the regime's popularity and success until the middle of the war.76

One increasingly prevalent approach in recent years has been to examine the reasons for National Socialism's widespread popularity rather than restricting the focus to the twin elements of resistance and repression. In 2011, Ulrich Herbert stated:

The question of to what extent the German population were repressed is no longer in the foreground. Rather, attention has shifted to the question of why the regime, especially in the period from 1936 to 1943, was supported by such broad swathes of the German population.77

The book you are now reading aims to contribute to a better understanding of the attractiveness and mass popularity of National Socialism by focusing on the social objectives and revolutionary motives that informed Hitler's worldview. In Chapter III.4 (The Definition of Volksgemeinschaft in Hitler's Weltanschauung), I focus on the pivotal role of the concept of Volksgemeinschaft in both Hitler's thinking and in the mass appeal of National Socialism.

In 2011, Ian Kershaw alleged that "the Volksgemeinschaft concept had become omnipresent in discussions of the Third Reich', whereby he indicates three "separate ... ways' in which the term Volksgemeinschaft is used. First, it is employed to denote changed social and power relations; second, it is used as a term of "affective integration', emphasizing its mobilizing force and the inspirational

power of the vision of a better society; and third, as a vehicle of exclusion, discrimination and persecution as defining characteristics of National Socialist society.78

I have already made reference to the anthology Volksgemeinschaft. Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus, which was edited by Bajohr and Wildt and published in 2009. In the introduction, they observe that "the vision of a Volksgemeinschaft possessed an enormous power to mobilise the German people to the benefit of the NSDAP, not just during the pre-1933 struggle to power, but perhaps even more so in the years after the party came to power'.79

Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann outlines two "extreme positions' in the research debate:

Was it [Volksgemeinschaft] really nothing more than a "false promise', a largely unsuccessful myth conjured up by the regime, like a mantra, but without substantial relevance? Or did the attitudes and convictions of the people during the National Socialist regime, their practices in everyday life under the dictatorship, actually represent something akin to a psychological or even "social revolution'?

Like many other authors, Schmiechen-Ackermann appeals for a synthesis between these two positions. He rejects both the classic approach, which regards Volksgemeinschaft as nothing more than a propagandistic slogan devoid of content, and the thesis of the National Socialist "social revolution'. Describing these two approaches as "extreme positions', he suggests that an intermediate position between these two poles "would amount to the thesis of a vision of community, heavily anticipated in people's minds, but which, in fact, was scarcely ever realised in social reality'.80

Norbert Götz adopts a similar approach when he declares that the widespread view, which allows Volksgemeinschaft to be dismissed as a "simple myth' or a mere "promise' of National Socialism, is as short-sighted as the view that claims that the Third Reich implemented the concept of Volksgemeinschaft as a social reality.81 In any case, according to Götz, the concept of

Volksgemeinschaft has "the advantage that it takes the historical actors' own views of the concept seriously and thus avoids the trap of hermeneutic argumentation, which leads to obvious conclusions'.82

Götz asserts that Hitler was enamoured by the concept of Volksgemeinschaft and claims that it was even "one of Adolf Hitler's favorite words', a term he used excessively in his propaganda.83 As early as Mein Kampf, Götz argues, the notion of Volksgemeinschaft was a key component of Hitler's ideology, although, "in Hitler's thinking as Reich Chancellor and Führer, the vision of Volksgemeinschaft assumed an even greater significance than it had done in Mein Kampf ".84 Götz differentiates between the political perspective, in which Volksgemeinschaft was a myth and a "promise' romanticized in National Socialist propaganda and a historiographical - and particularly constructivist - perspective, which regards such assessments as wholly inadequate. The critical analysis of National Socialism, Götz explains, could not

ignore the specificity with which terms were used without also losing substance. Moreover, an examination of the history of the concept demonstrates that the Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric of National Socialism by no means counteracted its political practice, but was certainly redeemed by it.85

The term Volksgemeinschaft, Götz continues, represented "an attractive and effective concept of society'.86
Rolf Pohl agreed, stating that Volksgemeinschaft was a key concept that underpinned National Socialist ideology and that it would be wrong to speak only of the Volksgemeinschaft as little more than a "socio-political charade'. On the contrary, Pohl argues, the partial implementation, both symbolic and real, of the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, combined with its promises of a golden future, had been "one of the most important instruments the NSDAP used to appeal to the emotional loyalty of the Volksgenossen and, through building agreement and consensus, secure their loyalty to the regime'.87

Riccardo Bavaj describes Volksgemeinschaft as a "social experiment'. He argues that National Socialism was a "political-modernist movement, intent on social- technological renewal'.88 The scope of socio-structural changes implemented by the regime, he concedes, were narrow, largely because of the restrictions associated with arming the nation, preparing for full-blown war and running a wartime economy. However, Bavaj also cautions researchers, advising that any analysis of "social-statistical datasets' needs to be complemented by a consideration of the history of experience. And it is precisely here, Bavaj continues, that, with the exception of the final years of the war, there was indeed a deep-seated "collective consciousness' in the Third Reich:

This consciousness, which went hand-in-hand with a "sense of social equality' and a belief in promises of social advancement, had very real consequences, because it contributed to the social acceptance of the National Socialist regime.89

Although the precise meaning of the term Volksgemeinschaft is still fiercely debated, there is much to be said for the findings published by Schmiechen- Ackermann in 2012: "Interpretative approaches that completely ignore the efficacy and at least short-term integrative power of the Volksgemeinschaft phenomenon will no longer be deemed plausible.'90 From the term Volksgemeinschaft we can see that Hitler's worldview on the one hand and the mass popularity of National Socialism on the other were closely related - which chimes with one of the theses of my own work. This was also a conclusion drawn by Frank-Lothar Kroll in 2013. From the very beginning, Kroll concludes, the concept of Volksgemeinschaft had been "one of the central, perhaps even the core leitmotif' of Hitler's political system.91 By using this term, Kroll stresses, National Socialism had "clearly distanced itself from the epoch of the bourgeoisie's supremacy', a claim he supports by making direct reference to my research findings.

According to Kroll, Hitler's worldview was based on the principles of

granting equal opportunities for advancement to members of all social classes, eliminating status-specific privileges for professional appointments, improving living and housing conditions for workers, increasing the amount of paid vacation and expanding the scope of old-age provision for the weakest members of society.

These principles would, Kroll explains, be particularly relevant in shaping the post-war order of the future, which was to deliver on National Socialism's promises of renewal.92 In combination, this denotes a "specific aspect of National Socialist modernity, which only a highly ideological and blinkered researcher would seek to deny,' states Kroll in a highly critical response to Hans Mommsen.93

Hitler's vision of a Volksgemeinschaft, however, not only played a central role in fostering support for the Third Reich among the working class, it also contributed to the rise of National Socialism in the Weimar Republic, as Kroll observes:

It was not racism or anti-Semitism, not the hegemonic imperialist desire for new Lebensraum nor even the backward-looking pseudo-idyllic promises of an agrarian utopia based on the "Blood and Soil' ideology, nor was it anti- Bolshevism, anti-liberalism or a social-Darwinist dogma of survival-of-the- fittest that determined public perceptions of Hitler and his followers well into the 1930s. To a far greater extent, it was the programmatic vision of a National Socialism that united Germany's Volksgenossen into a firm, indissoluble community of destiny.94

This conclusion corresponds with the results of my own research, as presented in this book. Meanwhile, the thesis proposed by Hans Mommsen, on the other hand, that Volksgemeinschaft was nothing more than a "myth' and that the term has no place in a serious analytical context,95 corresponds just as little to the state of research as does Hans-Ulrich Wehler's pronouncement that the "propagandistic cliché of the equality of all comrades under the new German "Community of Meritocracy" ... on closer inspection turns out to be nothing more than a "chimera"'.96

More recent research has moved beyond the views put forward by Mommsen and Wehler. Over the last decade, Volksgemeinschaft

has become a significant research concept. In 2014, Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto stated that, "In recent years, Volksgemeinschaft has had a greater impact on the debate about the social history of the National Socialist dictatorship than any other concept.'97 They rightly state that "the basic justification and usefulness of the term ... is hardly ever denied' and conclude:

It has long since ceased to be a question of exposing the hollowness of the specific or implied promises of social equality or higher living standards made in the regime's propaganda by measuring them against socio-statistical findings on inequality and deficits in care ... Even the narrowing of the term to include the socio-psychological impact of community staging or demonstrative social betterment has been overtaken by the reality of the current debate.98

In 2014, Moritz Föllmer reflected that socio-historical research had in the past focused on exposing Volksgemeinschaft as a myth, repeatedly citing evidence of persistent class differences and unredeemed promises of consumption.

More recently, the research landscape has undergone a fundamental shift as Volksgemeinschaft has come to denote a type of conceptual umbrella under which those historians who emphasise a high degree of approval and participation in the "Third Reich' have gathered.99


How Modern was National Socialism?

As early as the 1960s, Ralf Dahrendorf and David Schoenbaum highlighted the modernizing effects of National Socialism100 - and thereby influenced the entire field of National Socialism research and Hitler biographies, including the work of Joachim Fest. What was new about my book, therefore, was not the thesis that National Socialism had a modernizing effect, but rather the proof I provided that - contrary to the assumptions made by Dahrendorf - this did not

occur as an unintended side effect of Hitler's intentions, but was both intended and corresponded to his central goals.

My argument did not go unchallenged. As early as 1990, Hans Mommsen spoke of a "feigned modernization' and, in doing so, not only registered strong opposition to the theses put forward by Michael Prinz and myself, but in part also the views of Dahrendorf.101 In Mommsen's view, the clampdown on trade union organizations and the suppression of active political participation by the population in the Third Reich both speak against the modernization thesis. His dictum seems somewhat flat: "If one wants to speak of modernization in the Third Reich, then its specific forms were the perverse applications of medical theories as well as mass extermination engineered with technical means.'102

According to Mommsen, as far as Hitler is concerned, National Socialism had "no unambiguous and substantive objective ... The patchwork of National Socialist ideology was borrowed, served primarily as a vehicle for propaganda and was, inherently, purely destructive.'103 Ultimately, these - unsubstantiated - assertions stem from the fact that historians such as Mommsen simply were not willing to subject Hitler's ideas to closer examination. Indeed, some historians even went as far as to firmly reject any form of engagement with Hitler's ideas and goals. This is an extremely unusual approach for historians to adopt, particularly as the science of history normally focuses on the thought processes and worldviews of central figures in history.

As early as 1993, Norbert Frei offered a critique of historians who called attention to the modernizing effect of National Socialism in an article, "Wie modern war der Nationalsozialismus?' ('How Modern was National Socialism?'). According to Frei, the issue of National Socialism and "modernity' was experiencing a "bewildering, even irritating comeback' among contemporary German historians. His criticism was directed equally against the views held by Götz Aly and myself. According to Frei, despite all the differences, both approaches are in some respects comparable, because: "Both

variants require decontextualisation and the deconstruction of the complex historical reality of National Socialism.'104

Frei observes:

The issue of Hitler's own "modernity' was of distant concern to early socio- historical researchers of the NS regime, those who followed in the immediate footsteps of Dahrendorf and Schoenbaum. The most likely reason for this is the simple realisation that an intense preoccupation with the dictator's personal desires and predilections, as propagated by Zitelmann today, has little to contribute to the proper analysis of modernization processes that took place or failed to take place.105

In order to appreciate the polemic nature of this debate, a debate that disregarded even the simplest rules of logic, it is well worth analysing these two sentences more closely: Frei first, and correctly, points out that Dahrendorf and Schoenbaum did not focus in detail on the goals pursued by Hitler and the National Socialists and instead devoted their attention to the objective effects of National Socialist policies. Since Dahrendorf and Schoenbaum argued, however, that the objective modernizing effects of National Socialism stood in direct contradiction to the goals and intentions of National Socialism, it would have been entirely logical to subsequently address this very issue in order to determine whether the opposite of what had been intended was actually achieved.

It should be clear that it is impossible to study National Socialism's goals without also considering Hitler's ideas and thought processes. When Frei speaks of an "intense preoccupation with the dictator's personal desires and predilections', allegedly "propagated' by me, and one strips this formulation of polemics, it is clear that Frei is opposed to any analysis of Hitler's goals and belief system. But, surely, no one would seriously dispute the fact that such analysis is precisely what is needed in order to understand the objectives of National Socialism. How can anyone seriously claim that there is a direct contradiction between specific developments or achievements and the true objectives of National Socialism without actually analysing these objectives? Frei argues that studying Hitler's goals

and thought processes in this way contributes "little' to clarifying our understanding of the modernization processes that took place or did not take place. I would like to add my agreement to this. In fact, I would go even further: studying

Hitler's goals and thought processes contributes nothing to clarifying the extent of National Socialism's modernizing effect. But that was not in any way a focus of my work. The notion that National Socialism did have an objective modernizing effect was a thesis that had been widely disseminated in research - ever since the days of Dahrendorf and Schoenbaum - and has since been more than confirmed by subsequent research (a fact which, as I will show below, is no longer disputed by Frei). However, until the publication of my book, this thesis always appeared together with the qualifying remark that the modernizing effects were the opposite of what Hitler intended. The analysis of this topic remained a research desideratum - a fact which was highlighted in a majority of reviews of my book.

In Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1914-1949 , Hans-Ulrich Wehler adopted a negative stance toward the thesis that National Socialism had - intentionally or unintentionally - triggered a surge of modernization. "In the same way as it makes no sense to speak of a direct modernization policy as the result of National Socialist intentions', he argued, "it is equally meaningless to refer to a successful "social revolution" ... Little remains of intentional and objectively measurable modernization effects.'106

Wehler's scepticism is presumably derived from a politicized historiography that uses the term "modernization' in a normative sense, with the positive connotations of modernity and social progress. Wehler explains: "It is inevitable that judgments on all aspects of modernization are loaded with normative associations.'107 Why this should be "inevitable' remains a mystery. I, for one, have never used the term "modern' in a normative sense.108 Although Wehler cannot completely deny the modernizing effects of the Third Reich, he believes that upward mobility was "not the result of


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