Final solution Pre-Machtergreifung Post-Machtergreifung Parties Empirical methods Prescriptive and policy Like many other nations at the time, Germany suffered the economic effects of the Great Depression, with unemployment soaring after the Wall Street crash of 1929.

[13] The Nazi government developed a partnership with leading German business interests, who supported the goals of the regime and its war effort in exchange for advantageous contracts, subsidies, and the suppression of the trade union movement.

[39] There was no interference by the state in private industry as long as business leaders were willing to cooperate, but some uncooperative industrialists in areas important for the future war effort, such as aircraft manufacturer Hugo Junkers, were removed from their positions.

[39] An elaborate bureaucracy was created to regulate imports of raw materials and finished goods with the intention of eliminating foreign competition in the German marketplace and improving the nation's balance of payments.

[40] As the market was experiencing a glut and prices for petroleum were low, the Nazi government made a profit-sharing agreement with IG Farben in 1933, guaranteeing them a 5 percent return on capital invested in their synthetic oil plant at Leuna.

[48] State ownership was to be avoided unless it was absolutely necessary for rearmament or the war effort, and even in those cases "the Reich often insisted on the inclusion in the contract of an option clause according to which the private firm operating the plant was entitled to purchase it.

"[59] Adolf Hitler used Social Darwinist arguments to support this stance, cautioning against "bureaucratic managing of the economy" that would preserve the weak and "represent a burden to the higher ability, industry and value.

"[65] In exchange, owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce, collective bargaining was abolished and wages were frozen at a relatively low level.

[72] The rhetoric of the Nazi regime stated that German private companies would be protected and privileged as long as they supported the economic goals of the government—mainly by participating in government contracts for military production—but that they could face severe penalties if they went against the national interest.

[81] They condemned the welfare system of the Weimar Republic as well as private charity, accusing them of supporting people regarded as racially inferior and weak, who should have been weeded out in the process of natural selection.

[82] Nevertheless, faced with the mass unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression, the Nazis found it necessary to set up charitable institutions to help those they deemed to be racially-pure Germans in order to maintain popular support, while arguing that this represented "racial self-help" and not indiscriminate charity or universal social welfare.

Non-Aryans were excluded, as well as the "work-shy", "asocials" and the "hereditarily ill."[85] Successful efforts were made to get middle-class women involved in social work assisting large families,[86] and the Winter Relief campaigns acted as a ritual to generate public sympathy.

[89] Commenting on the labor stance of the Nazi Party, one study has argued that Anyone who had imagined that, given their anti-union propaganda, the National Socialists might certainly obstruct the trade unions but stop short of destroying them was deceived.

[97][clarification needed] By the late 1930s, the aims of German trade policy were to use economic and political power to make the countries of Southern Europe and the Balkans dependent on Germany.

[20] Measures enacted under Göring included slashing imports, instituting wage and price controls (with violations punishable by internment in a concentration camp), and restricting dividends to six percent on book capital.

[106] The "Four-Year Plan Memorandum" predicated an imminent all-out, apocalyptic struggle between "Judeo-Bolshevism" and German National Socialism, which necessitated a total effort at rearmament regardless of the economic costs.

In the memo, Hitler wrote: Since the outbreak of the French Revolution, the world has been moving with ever increasing speed toward a new conflict, the most extreme solution of which is called Bolshevism, whose essence and aim, however, are solely the elimination of those strata of mankind which have hitherto provided the leadership and their replacement by worldwide Jewry.

[109][110] Hitler went on to write that given the magnitude of the coming struggle that the concerns expressed by members of the "free market" faction like Schacht and Goerdeler that the current level of military spending was bankrupting Germany were irrelevant.

"[112] Autarky was to be pursued more aggressively, and the German people would have to begin making sacrifices in their consumption habits in order to enable food supplies and raw materials to be diverted toward military uses.

[113] Speaking to a meeting of his main economic advisers in 1937, Hitler insisted that Germany's population had grown to the point where the nation would soon become unable to feed itself, so war for the conquest of Lebensraum in Eastern Europe was necessary as soon as possible.

[115] In July 1937, the Reichswerke Hermann Göring was established as a new industrial conglomerate to extract and process domestic iron ores from Salzgitter, as the first step in a general effort to increase German steel production in preparation for war.

[119] The German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 enabled the Reichswerke to undergo another major expansion immediately prior to the war, by acquiring shares in Czech coal mines, armaments firms, and iron and steel manufacturers.

Until the declaration of war on the Soviet Union, the Third Reich received large supplies of grain and raw materials from the USSR, which they paid for with industrial machinery, weapons, and even German designs for a battleship.

"Undesirables" (German: unzuverlässige Elemente), such as the homeless, non-whites, homosexuals, and alleged criminals as well as political dissidents, communists, Freemasons, Jews, and anyone else that the regime wanted out of the way were imprisoned in labor camps.

[16] A network of slave-labor camps—457 complexes with dozens of subsidiary camps, scattered over a broad area of German-occupied Poland—exploited to the fullest the labor of their prisoners, in many cases working inmates to their death.

[149] The proportion of military spending in the German economy began growing rapidly after 1942, as the Nazi government was forced to dedicate more of the country's economic resources to fight a losing war.

The result was a dramatic rise in military production, with an increase by 2 to 3 times of vital goods like tanks and aircraft, despite the intensifying Allied air campaign and the loss of territory and factories.

[151] A major historiographical debate about the relationship between the German pre-war economy and foreign policy decision-making began in the late 1980s, when historian Timothy Mason claimed that an economic crisis had caused a "flight into war" in 1939.

[152] However, Mason's thesis was opposed by historian Richard Overy who wrote that Germany's economic problems could not explain aggression against Poland and that the reasons for the outbreak of war were due to the ideological choices made by the Nazi leadership.

[155] Tooze saw this as a reason for Hitler to attack the Soviet Union, because "[t]he Third Reich had no intention of slipping into that kind of humbling dependence that Britain now occupied in relation to the United States, mortgaging its assets and selling its secrets, simply to sustain its war effort".