Economic History Lessons- Part 2

History tells us that before World War I Germany was a prosperous country, had a prosperous economy, and a world leader in chemical, optics, and machinery. It was also the most populated country with the Jews in any country in Western Europe when Hitler came to power.

In fact, a small part of them were architects of its Constitution, a fact that Hitler exploited. The German republic had just come from a severe economic hardship it experienced after World War 1.

German’s inflation was triggered by a huge increase in the money supply because of the heavy reparations assigned to Germany after losing World War I. The German government chose to pay its debts with cheap marks, printing as many as needed to stem the crisis. When the initial injections of newly printed money failed to work, the government’s response was the same: print more unbacked paper money.

By late 1923, 300 paper mills and 2000 printing presses worked around the clock printing German marks. This created massive inflation and depression in 1929 which worsened Germany’s problems. On average prices doubled every three days. In a single month, prices exploded more than 32,000% higher enough to drive prices up by a factor of 320 in a single, 30–day period.

German sank into the most severe hyperinflationary period in recorded history after printing 1.3 trillion marks. This translates to about 4 trillion in today’s dollars. According to one expert, that is almost exactly the same amount of money the United States government has printed since 2008.

An article from Wikipedia about the Weimar Republic describes how this hyperinflation happened very quickly:

When the German people realized that their money was rapidly losing value, they tried to spend it quickly. This increase in monetary velocity caused still more rapid increase in prices which created a vicious cycle. This placed the government and banks between two unacceptable alternatives: if they stopped the inflation this would cause immediate bankruptcies, unemployment, strikes, hunger, violence, collapse of civil order, insurrection, and revolution. If they continued the inflation they would default on their foreign debt. The attempts to avoid both unemployment and insolvency ultimately failed when Germany had both.

There is a story of a student at Freiburg University that ordered a cup of coffee for 5,000 marks. He decided to order a second cup. When his bill was 14,000 marks, he protested but was told, “If you want to save money and you want two cups of coffee, you should order both of them at the same time.” One’s grandparents sold their restaurant in order to retire. However, by the time formalities were completed, all they received was enough to buy a loaf of bread.

There is another story, though perhaps not a true story, of a woman who filled her wheelbarrow with German marks and left them outside the store, confident that no one would bother stealing the money. When the time came to pay for her groceries, she walked outside only to discover that the bundles of money were left on the ground but the wheelbarrow was gone!

In 1995 and 2010, Dr. Erwin Lutzer published two frightening books titled: Hitler’s Cross and When a Nation Forgets God. In Hitler’s Cross, Lutzer wondered why the Church was seduced by false promises of a greater and glorious Germany.  He said, “the eyes of the angry people wanted a savior from their economic problems. This is when Hitler arrived.” Lutzer then illustrates his point by saying:

We should not be quick to condemn those who gave Hitler a chance, given the economic chaos that spread throughout Germany after World War I. He could never have come to power if the German economy would have remained strong after World War I. He rode to victory simply because he promised to rebuild the collapsing German mark and put the nation back to work. He cleverly exploited the economic crisis that postwar Germany was experiencing. Yes, it was the economy that gave rise to National Socialism.

Hitler’s success in the first few years rested not only on his foreign policy, which brought so many bloodless conquests but on German’s economic recovery, which brought admiration from even among economists abroad.

Unemployment was reduced by putting the unemployed back to work by means of greatly improved public works and giving stimulus packages to private corporations. Government credit was furnished by the creation of special unemployment bills, and tax reliefs were given to firms which raised their capital expenditures and increased employment.

He made Germans feel important and made sure they were well cared for by the state. He gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits and made sure that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry.

During his 12 years of constant warfare, he never once raised taxes for working-class people. The German soldiers were also offered more than double the salaries and benefits to what the Americans and British received.

The economy seemed to be working at least for the first few years. He definitely never let the financial crisis go to waste. Unfortunately, those who welcomed Hitler’s regime because they expected to practice unhampered free enterprise were disappointed, and the Church was no exception.

Church, State, and the Economy

So what does this have to do with the Church today? Everything! A strong section of the church also believed that Nazi regime was the answer to all their prayers. It was all about the economy. In examining the lessons that may be learned from studying the German church, Dr. Lutzer writes,

Nothing else seemed to matter, under no circumstances were the Christians allowed to sit down and reflect how all this could be handled. The church did not heed the lone voices crying in the wilderness. The churches were nationalized under Hitler. The government said the churches needed repairs, so a “church tax” was created. Pastors were put on government salary, and therefore they were subject to state authority.

This led to the silencing of pastors because they feared they would lose their funding if they spoke out. The church in Germany appeared to be too preoccupied with the problems of the nation and the economy to see what was happening before its eyes. The religion of blood and soil had replaced the religion of humility and prayer.

Though burdened with unemployment and the physical hardship of its dejected people, the church, for the most part, still refused to repent and turn wholly to God….The church mistook the temporal benefits of the swastika for the spiritual benefits of the cross of Christ.

Whoever Has the Gold Has the Rule

The marriage of church and state according to Lutzer is “always detrimental to the mission of the church. Either the church will change its message to accommodate the state’s political agenda, or the political rulers will use the church to their own ends. Regardless, the purity of the church is compromised. This unholy unity contributed to the paralysis of the church during the Hitler era.”

At the moment when the Church should have been condemning the politics of the day with one unified voice, the church found its existence dependent upon the goodwill of the state……The economy often trumps matters of liberty and principle because money is so integral to who we are and, of course, we need money to live. Unfortunately, sometimes it also trumps those values that are eternally important, such as one’s honor and witness for the Gospel.

The so-called golden rule applies: Whoever has the gold has the rule. Given our penchant for wanting to live and not suffer deprivation, we are prone to do exactly what the German people did, and that is to overlook eternal ideals for the sake of temporal survival.

Hitler became a god for millions of people in Germany. It seems much of the nation had come under a spell of a man who was hailed as the long-awaited savior of a people who had become weary of poverty and humiliation. It is been noted that at one of the Nuremberg rallies, a giant photo of Hitler was captioned with the words:

In the beginning, was the word.” The Lord’s prayer was changed by some to read, “Our father Adolf who art in Nuremberg, hallowed be thy name, the Third Reich come….”If you did not say, “Heil Hitler!” when you entered a restaurant or a business establishment, you would not be served. Although dictators are usually hated by most, this one was, for the most part, adored, obeyed, and worshipped.

Those who have studied Albert Einstein’s writings have come to a concluding idea that Albert Einstein was religious in a conventional sense, but his concept of God was not that of a personal God which is what most believers have–a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

When the German professor William Hermanns asked Albert Einstein whether “it isn’t only human to move along the line of least resistance” during the dark period of the Holocaust, Einstein responded:

Yes. It is indeed human, as proved by Cardinal Pacelli, who was behind the Concordant with Hitler. Since when can one make a pact with Christ and Satan at the same time? And he is now the Pope! The moment I hear the word “religion”, my hair stands on end. The Church has always sold itself to those in power, and agreed to any bargain in return for immunity. It would have been fine if the spirit of religion had guided the Church; instead, the Church determined the spirit of religion. Churchmen through the ages have fought political and institutional corruption very little, so long as their own sanctity and church property were preserved.

Today it is the same thing, the institutional church in Europe (Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelicals) is supported through taxes. In some parts of Africa, it’s even worse. As far as the Bible is concerned, church and state should be separate and independent, and each was meant to perform their God-ordained duties.

This independence gives an elder of a church, an opportunity of showing that he does not preach with a view to personal financial gain, but solely in the service of the Church of Jesus Christ.

This was desperately needed in the Church in Germany because some who had joined the state church pointed out that joining the Confessing Church would jeopardize one’s funding.  The Confessing Church was slow to recognize how perverted the political order had become as we shall finally examine in Part 3