HITLERS GERMANY: DRIVEN MORE BY GREED THAN BY HATE. David Frum writes in The National Review Online about Gotz Aly's book Hitler's Beneficaries on the real story behind Hitlers Germany. As Frum relates Aly's findings, the evil of the Holocaust in part came down to an issue of dollars and cents:

The secret of Nazi popularity was not—repeat not—the allegedly fanatical anti-Semitism of the German people. Rather, Hitler and the Nazis built a welfare state that delivered real benefits to German families. This welfare state was paid for by plundering first Germany's Jews and then the conquered nations of Europe.

Hitler often gets credit for pulling Germany out of the Depression. This claim is false: Germany in 1938 remained a poorer country than the Germany of 1928. Hitler launched a military buildup and created major social programs that Germany could not afford. By 1939, the Nazis were spending 20.5-billion marks on the military and 16.3-billion marks on civilian programs—all supported by only 17-billion marks in tax revenue.

...That debt crisis prodded Hitler to launch the Kristallnacht pogrom in November, 1938. After the pogrom, he demanded a 1-billion mark "atonement" payment from Germany's Jews. Confiscated Jewish wealth averted a Nazi debt default.

Aly presents a different picture of what Hitler's Germans were like--Germans who were not so much driven by fanatical hatred than by greed:

...Aly offers an important corrective to Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. In Aly's telling, relatively few Germans felt the psycopathic anti-Jewish hatred that drove Hitler and his associates. Millions and millions of them, however, were prepared to share in the spoils from the Nazi persecution program. For example: German families who lost their apartments to Allied air bombing were compensated with furnishings stolen from deported Jews.

David Frum's actual review of Hitler's Beneficaries appears in The National Post.

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