The “Racial Community” as a “Warrior Community”


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Economically, Germany under Hitler had prepared itself for a war from the start. The German populace’s consumer demands had conflicted with the preparations for war since 1936 when the “Four Year Plan” was launched. The populace was already accustomed to a poor diet and bottlenecks in the supply of consumer goods to a certain extent when war broke out. The war intensified this conflict of objectives but also furnished an opportunity to justify extraordinary measures to the populace.


The mood in the German populace was not euphoric when war broke out. The “Führer”, who had achieved so many foreign policy aims until then without armed conflict, lost his reputation as “General Bloodless”. All at once, the modest prosperity that had arrived during the preceding years of consolidation appeared threatened again. Many Germans also had memories of the hardship and privation during World War I reawakened.


The regime therefore put great effort into avoiding a rigid rationalization and rationing policy like the one during World War I. One of the Nazi government’s top priorities was to continue supplying the members of the “Aryan” Volksgemeinschaft sufficiently with food and consumer goods and to maintain the appearance of normal everyday life.


Nonetheless, certain cutbacks occurred: important food was already rationed as of September of 1939 and certain consumer goods were only still obtainable with ration coupons and in limited quantities. Altogether, rations remained relatively ample, though. The rationing system functioned well for a long while, not least because the conquered and occupied territories were exploited systematically and the victims of persecution were plundered.


The reversal in the war against the Soviet Union and the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 in particular had serious repercussion on the mood among the populace. From then on, the reversal of the course of the war could no longer be concealed, even though the Nazi regime attempted with great effort to recast the defeat propagandistically as a heroic epic to mobilize the masses for Total War (Goebbels in a speech at the Berliner Sportpalast on February 18, 1943).


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