This article is a few years old, but its points need to be repeated over and over: Hitler was a feel-good people's dictator, capitalising on collective greed to build his version of a shakedown socialist society.

In that version, the socialists were never going to run out of other people's money as they had established a legitimized pillaging mechanism for fleecing the Jews, the neighboring countries, and the Jews inside those neighboring countries. If the plunder were to stop, the Third Reich would have quickly gone bankrupt.

It was a never-ending populist utopia of social benefits, progressive taxation, free healthcare, state-run education, pensions, vacations, daycare, and other wonders of collectivist society. All that was asked from its beneficiaries in return was, to dismiss the notion that theft of other people's property was immoral.

Hitler and the Nazis introduced a new moral code, liberating the people from the shackles of old religious commandments - and the people repaid them with with adoration, loyalty, and obedience, surrendering their liberty and personal responsibility to the all-powerful State.

Sound familiar?

A German historian Götz Aly has written a book about it, also available in English: Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State.

A more exact, if less politically correct translation of the title should be Hitler's People's State - Plunder, Race War, and National Socialism (Hitlers Volkstaat - Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus). But, perhaps, keeping the original title would have been hitting too close to home for liberal American publishers.

The author starts with a simple question: why did the vast majority of Germans support Hitler? The answer he discovered was this: Hitler's National Socialism wasn't merely a propaganda slogan - it was actually being implemented in real life.

Here is an incomplete list of Hitler's pre-war social policies: paid vacations for all employees, doubling the vacation days, support of mass tourism, the creation of the first affordable "people's car" Volkswagen, the introduction of state-regulated pensions and progressive taxation... And the list goes on. When the war began, families of German soldiers received double the amount that British and American military families were paid by their governments.

Even during the war, Nazism ensured that the German people enjoyed the world's highest wages, best welfare benefits, social equality, and upward mobility. That was why the monstrous Nazi regime, says Goetz Aly, was so wildly popular with the masses.

Read more: New Holocaust Book, New Theory: How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer

And for those who read Russian: Народное государство Гитлера.

This is a real education. I thought the German people loved Hitler because he was cool, like Obama.

Dedhedvedev wrote:This is a real education. I thought the German people loved Hitler because he was cool, like Obama.

Or the ultra-cool Justin Bieber:

I won't ask for approval by the Party Section or the Collective, (who don't even look at a book not plugged by Oprah), to read this as I don't need to. The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kippling covers it in spades.
And what's going on here? Nobody's working. But everybody's EATING.
Tick, tick, tick...