Source: SS Leitheft, No. 2. 1938
The task of the economy is to support the state in its struggle to safeguard the vital principles of the people.
In the liberal age, no area of life has moved further away from our ideology than the economy. But since the economy is made up of human actions and results, and since any worthwhile action is only the result of a strong ideology and a responsible way of life, economic activity must also be the mark of a specific ideology and way of life. Even today, many ‘practitioners’ scoff at this requirement. It is seen as ‘fuzzy idealism’ or ‘romanticism’, when they demand harmony between economy and ideology and claim that the economy follows its ‘internal law’, which has very little to do with ideology.
The ‘internal law’ of the economy
National Socialism rejects such ideas because it has the good of the whole people constantly and everywhere in view. It clearly recognised that the term “internal law of the economy” was intended only to prevent the political management of the economic tasks of our time, which was regarded as an “unjustified encroachment of the state into the economy”. But it should not be forgotten that the consequences of this law were the absence of political authority, the collapse of the international economy, the misery of the peasantry, the scourge of unemployment and the annihilation of the people’s purchasing power, thus the total destruction of the economy.
When, on the other hand, National Socialism declared that the necessary political authority and control of the economy are the basic principles of all economic policy, it did away with the chimera of the internal law of the economy. The economy, too, can know only one law: to serve the good of the people. The more it follows this law, the more it submits to the vital needs of the people, and this makes it all the easier to establish a concordance between ideology and economy. For serving the people is the supreme law of our ideology.
When we try to outline in a few words the whole of our ideology, the following principles emerge: we believe in the law of soil and blood, the law of duty and honour, and the law of the people and the community. If we look at the past economic form and compare it with some of our fundamental laws, we must agree that practice and economic science have not recognised these laws. The dominant economic liberalism was much more in line with the English thinking of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and. The economic founder of this vision was Adam Smith. These ideas were as destructive in Germany as those of the French Revolution from the West. Even today, this English doctrine is often referred to as “classical” in Germany, which is more or less the same as calling parliamentary democracy a “classical” form of constitution. Today, this concept can no longer be considered to have any real value. Unfortunately, the ideas of the English school still prevail in the field of economics.
The pioneers of a German national economy
At the time, it was completely forgotten that a national and particular economic conception had also emerged in Germany. Friedrich List had disapproved of Adam Smith in the strongest terms. Gustav Ruhland had castigated the destructive consequences of the exploitative capitalist economy in his System of Political
Economy, previously published by R. Walther Darre. However, Ruhland was ignored. List was indeed favourably quoted, but his refutation of the English doctrine was not taken seriously. Finally, the great German philosopher Fichte, who had laid the foundations of patriotic liberation in his Discourses to the German Nation and who had presented important suggestions for economic policy in his “Autarkic Commercial State”, was not taken into consideration.
But a wrong lifestyle necessarily develops from a wrong doctrine. Foreign ideas can never produce a life-style that benefits the people. This is shown by the economic development before 1933.
The decline of the German economy
It was precisely in the economy that the assimilation of the Jews had the most disastrous consequences. While the foundations of any truly characteristic form of life and economy should be the goal, pride and duty, the type of the honourable merchant was replaced by that of the cunning tradesman. The peasant, whose work feeds the people and thus represents the basis of all economy, was described as inferior and despised. The social situation of the worker, who was increasingly adopting the idea of class struggle, was getting worse by the day. It was crushed by the palaces of the big banks and department stores. Capital, whose task was to serve the economy, was entrusted to its masters and the management of capital itself was handed over to anonymous powers. People spoke of the “infinite extension of the economy” and neglected the large tenement buildings and the slums of the big cities that they had created. They spoke of the “international economy” and failed to see that the internal foundations of the economy, the peasantry and the working class were terribly affected economically. The basis of the German food and raw material economy abroad had been changed because import and export were not carried out according to national points of view, but remained subject to the arbitrariness of the individual. The fact that the international powers had got their hands on the most important raw materials was overlooked. But also overlooked was the fact that the economic war against Germany had begun in 1914—and was continued in a different form. Germany’s tribute payments on the basis of the Dawe and Young plan, the private indebtedness ofthat country through a policy of foreign borrowing, the sudden deduction of short-term foreign credit in 1931 brought the whole front system crashing down. The boycott of Germany, but at the same time the entry of foreign capital, was in fact the most important economic struggle of all time.
National Socialism as the foundation of a new order
By saving the peasantry and the workers with the first four-year plan, the Führer thus laid the foundations for a new German economic order which could only be created on German soil by German labour. The second four-year plan logically continues this creative work: increasing efficiency in all areas of the economy, managing the foreign economy, organising work according to national goals, protecting and improving purchasing power and thus national power through responsible price management. All these measures are designed for the people and for the protection of the country. The second four-year plan encourages the people to work and express their determination, sets great goals that arouse the moral will of the individual and the creativity of the community in the service of the nation, and thus shows that the struggle is the origin of all that exists.
A new attitude, the result of a new worldview, is also beginning to emerge in Germany in the economic sphere.
SS-Hstuf. Dr Merkel