| Description |
During the 1930s the world's industrial nations were desperately searching for a means of escaping the longest and most devastating economic downturn ever: The Great Depression. This paper examines the responses of the United States and Nazi Germany to the dismal economic conditions that each faced during the Depression years. Of all the nations that passed through the depression Nazi Germany was the most successful at recovery. Germany attained 1928 production and; unemployment levels by 1936, faster than any other nation. Even the United States with its phenomenal production potential and superior resources of capital and labor could not climb out of the depression's grip faster than the Nazis. In fact, Germany was the only nation that was able to reinvigorate its economy without the wartime spending of World War II. The explanations for the German recovery include well-known rearmament theories, but this paper also looks at the role of domestic social spending in the German economic revival. An examination of the American policies enacted under Franklin Roosevelt is presented and compared with the German policies. The two phases of the New Deal are considered separately so as to distinguish between the reluctant Roosevelt, before 1938, and Roosevelt after he is convinced to follow a compensatory fiscal policy. An attempt is made to discover the unique role of the individual in both the American and the German recoveries. Henry Morgenthau, Marriner Eccles and Hjalmar Schacht are presented as influential policy-makers and quite responsible for much of their nations' economic success or failure, depending on their advice. The two recoveries are discovered to be similar in theory in that both nations depended on much of the same economic logic. Yet in practice the Nazis were able to enact a more unified and energetic response due in large part to their totalitarian control of Germany. The Roosevelt administration came to the conclusion that a long-term fiscal stimulus was the way out of the depression too late to effect any significant recovery before spending for war preparations rescued them despite their ignorance. |
