#hjalmar schacht

This myth is widely held as fact, and couldn’t be further from the truth. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took Germany’s economy, which had begun to stir from its deep, Depression-induced torpor thanks to the tireless work of the economist Hjalmar Schacht, and ran it into the ground.

Schacht had worked as Commissioner of Currency under the much maligned Weimar government, and had been remarkably successful in battling inflation. When Hitler seized power (more on that later), Schacht’s careful policies were largely swept aside in favor of forcing the German economy onto a war footing, a system which could only survive on a steady diet of war loot and assets seized from “racial undesirables” within Germany.

Even Hitler’s long term plans for Germany’s wealth were nonsensical trash. The end economic goal for the invasion of the East was to turn the area into some kind of bucolic plantation dream where sturdy German burghers oversaw toiling Slavic slaves, an economic model of autarky that had ceased to make any sense in the latter half of the 19th century.

In short, Hitler took an ailing economy on the road to recovery, and steered it toward certain ruin.