END OF GERMAN CAPITALISM
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lenged by the Nazi bureaucracy with increasing strength all
through the period. (3) October, 1936 to the present: inaugura–
tion of the Second Four Year Plan; elimination, by the beginning
of 1938, from key posts of the representatives of the big bour–
geoisie, the junkers, and the traditional Army leaders; concentra–
tion of all power-economic, political, military-into the hands
of the bureaucracy; creation of a non-capitalist, planned, totali–
tarian, production-for-use economy.
Of the first period (1933-1934}, I need only say here that I
agree in general with the analysis of such Marxists as Dutt and
Guerin: that big business put the Nazis into power, that the petty–
bourgeoisie masses who followed Hitler were dupes, and that in
the first year of State power, the Nazi top leadership was primarily
the tool of finance capital.
The second period began with the appointment, a month after
the 'blood purge,' of Dr. Schacht as Minister of Economics. (He
retained his presidency of the Reichsbank, thus controlling the two
key posts in the economy.) For the next two years Schacht, in
closest collaboration with the Army, heavy industry and finance
capital, directed and reshaped the German economy. The "New
Plan" he evolved represented the kind of economic policy these
conservative groups wanted. Its most radical departures were in
the field of foreign trade, where Schacht was forced to take the
first giant step towards a totalitarian economy: the creation of
what was in effect a State monopoly of foreign trade. Inside
Germany, the 'New Plan' was much less drastic.
It
resembled the
contemporaneous New Deal recovery program in many ways: vast
sums were spent on roads and public buildings; jobs were 'made'
by using as much hand labor as possible; the decisive control was
in the hands not of the politicians but of Schacht and the still–
powerful trade associations. The conservative nature of the Plan
is indicated in
Fortune's
comment on it: "Hitler only took longer
steps where his predecessor had taken shorter ones." Thus much
of the public works program had been planned by the preceding
governments of Bruning, Schleicher and Papen, and the crucial
sector of price control was left to the same official who had been
Bruning's Price Commissar-which is to say prices were not effec–
tively controlled.
Schacht's "New Plan" failed to solve Germany's economic
