572Chapter 28- The regime strongly encouraged motherhood,
which had long been a central theme of the Nazi pro-
gram. This led to pronatalist policies ranging from
grants for large families and strict laws against abortions
to punishments for remaining unmarried. World War II
later changed many of these policies, bringing women
back into the workplace and the universities, but Nazi
ideology remained antifeminist.
Hitler, like Mussolini, kept a capitalist economy in
the narrow sense that it accepted private property and
individual profit; however, he quickly converted Ger-
many to a government-planned and -directed economy.
The Nazi Four Year Plan of 1936 outlined German
autarchy—a self-sufficient economy. Some industries,
such as the Krupp Works and IG Farben, willingly
collaborated with the Nazi plan and profited from
government backing (and slave labor). Self-sufficiency
made striking progress in some fields, such as gasoline
production, which was 44 percent synthetic by 1938.
Some industries, such as Ruhr coal, profited from
Nazi help, such as forced labor, yet kept independent
policies.
Nazi economic policies ended German unemploy-
ment. The unemployment rate of 30.1 percent in 1932
hit 4.6 percent in 1937, while the rest of the industrial-
ized world remained in double digits. This was achieved
through compulsory programs: conscription for military
service, employment in state-funded armaments indus-
tries, drafted labor in public works projects (such as
building the highway system known as the autobahn),
and labor camps for young men and women. The
regime financed this with other extreme measures:
renouncing reparations payments, forcing involuntary
loans to the government, and confiscating Jewish wealth
(initially a 20 percent tax on Jewish property in 1938).
Dictatorship thus achieved a form of recovery. Coal
production, which stood at 110 million tons in 1933,
reached 188 million tons in 1939 (a 71 percent in-
crease); steel production rose from 7.6 million tons to
23.7 million tons (a 212 percent increase).Stalin and Soviet Communism,
1924–39
Among the dictatorships that characterized Europe in
the 1930s, none was more harshly totalitarian than the
dictatorship that Joseph Stalin built in the Soviet
Union. Historians cannot say with certainty how many
people died as a consequence of Stalin’s horrifying poli-
cies of the 1920s and 1930s, but numbers between ten
million and twenty million are usually suggested.
After a decade of war, revolution, and civil war, the
Russian economy lay in ruins in 1921. The output of
mining and heavy industries stood at 21 percent of the
prewar level, compared with figures closer to 50 per-
cent in Belgium, France, or Germany—Russian pig iron
production in 1921, for example, amounted to 100,000
tons, compared with 4.2 million tons in 1913. Exports
(and the capital that they raised) had virtually ceased,
standing at 1.3 percent of the 1913 total. To address
this crisis, Lenin and the Politburo leadership adopted a
New Economic Policy (NEP) that mixed communist
theories of state ownership and planning with capitalist
theories of private ownership and the free market. TheIllustration 28.4
Nazi Anti-Semitism.Anti-Semitism
was a central element of Nazi doctrine
long before the party came to power,
and this led to anti-Semitic policies from
the earliest days of the regime. One of
the most ominous moments came on
November 9, 1938, known as the Kristall-
nacht(“night of the broken glass”). Nazi
hooligans attacked Jews (killing more
than one hundred), burnt synagogues,
and trashed more than seven thousand
Jewish businesses—whose broken win-
dows, shown here, gave Kristallnachtits
name.