Volume 11, Number 11 · December 19, 1968
Hitler's Welfare State
By Heinz Lubasz
Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939
by David Schoenbaum
Doubleday, 336 pp., $5.95
Hitler, as every schoolboy ought to know, made no revolution, political, economic, or social. He left the old establishment in its entrenched positions in the economy, army, and the state. He erected, at the side of the old establishment, a new, predominantly middle-class, Nazi establishment, with its own bureaucracies, armies, even its own economic enterprises. He corralled the working man by smashing his economic and political organizations, and subordinating him to the joint authority of his employer and the new Nazi Labor Front. He then coordinated and mobilized the whole into that predatory and dynamic warfare society whose glorious national mission—the subjugation and exploitation of non-German (or, rather, 'non-Aryan') populations—was to become the cornerstone of Hitler's grand design and the substitute for the revolution he never made.
Review, 2281 words
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