Details of the event have been amalgamated or changed to protect identities.

The author grew up on a diet of war films of good vs evil. Allies vs Axis in WWII. North vs South in the American Civil War. The Rebel Alliance and the Empire in Star Wars. And, for a time, Israel vs the Arabs. These things were, in the beginning, understood with a passion that a child has when told by their parents and other authority figures what is right and what is wrong.

Later as various nuances were introduced some of this was reinforced but mostly it was weakened. Morality, good and bad were relativised. There was slavery, but also Sherman’s march to the sea. There was the Blitz and the massacres of the allied prisoners by the German armed forces, but also the strategic bombing campaign of Germany. There was the Bataan Death March and there was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I learned about the Nakbah and ugly attitudes among Israeli Jews towards Muslims and Arabs. I learned about European colonialism and the Belgian Congo. I continued to study and be repulsed by fascism. I played and enjoyed Wolfenstein: The New Order but I had come to far more intellectually feel about how bad Nazism was, rather than believe that sentiment as profoundly as I should have. I had fully subscribed to the West as victimiser paradigm.

Then I met a Nazi.

They were from an Arab country. They were a colleague. They were erudite, well educated, cosmopolitan. They spoke more languages than I knew small phrases in. They gave encouraging words to others and had a warm smile. I looked up to them and thought about how assured, educated, competent and worthy they were.

Then someone mentioned getting along with Israel. Their warm, cosmopolitan mask cracked like an egg being rudely dashed on the rim of a frying pan. They expressed their indifference to the Holocaust. They said they identified with the position many Arabs had that the Holocaust was either fictional or a Good Thing.

First came the confusion, the shock, the denial. Then came feelings of nausea, feelings of flight or fight. It became hard to focus. But above it all, instead of the normal warm smile, there was the sneer of absolute certainty on their face. The focused hatred in their brown eyes. There was the utter lack of empathy and identification in their eyes. There was the clear desire to inflict pain, death and suffering on a grand scale – should circumstances ever allow them to carry out their wishes, and all without hesitation. Anything else was how they acted in polite company and clearly hoped that the parameters of how they needed to behave in polite company would change.

Before I saw this there had been something unreal about the Nazis. Something singular. They were a particular set of people from a particular time. Those that claimed their mantle openly were pathetic losers. Badly educated, with beer bellies, tattoos everywhere, no jobs, no future. No one, or indeed no one of such deep education, such wide traveling and cultural experience, no one of their professional quality would ever even think such things. Such at least, was how I thought. Watching or reading about the Nazis do horrible things was one thing. It was in the past. It was on screen as pixels. It had been real but it had been. And even where there were such prejudices, it would not be extended, surely, to people they knew and had displayed kindness and warmth to and had those same qualities returned.

Then this music began playing in my head and the feelings of nausea, flight or fight, heightened to anger. I heard myself breath and felt it more acutely. ‘Calm down’, said my brain. I did not remain calm but I did remain passive. I am sure though the look on my face was less one of disgust and more one of anguished betrayal.

The disgust and the coldness came later, but with it came reading. Lots and lots of reading. Reading about the complete expulsions of Jewish populations from Arab countries. Reading about Arab imperialism and the destruction of the remnants of the Roman world by the Arabs, and the Arab suppression of if not destruction of cultures. Reading about the not always progressive, often repressive and brutal Cordoba caliphate. Reading about the cruelties of Brahmin caste at the zenith of Hindu led civilisation in India. Reading about German barbarians crossing the Rhine and inflicting such a catastrophe that contemporaries often wrote as though they were in the midst of the apocalypse itself. Reading once again about the Nazis, their origins, their practices, but a lot more importantly their helpmates, their collaborators – particularly in eastern Europe and how many ‘colonised’ peoples cheered silently and sometimes not so silently for the Germans to win. Reading about the indifference to, if not celebration of the Holocaust in the Muslim world, indeed in most of Asia. Reading sneering Nazi dismissals of Roman law, Jewish and Christian morality (mostly one and the same to the Nazis), and hearing some echoes of the same in denunciations of western centric, enlightenment inspired thinking on the right but also on the left. Reading about people remembering every real or imagined injustice inflicted upon them and glorying in the injustices they inflicted upon others.

And with this madness mantra of reading came reconsidering previous actions, previous statements in a whole new light. Not just of this person but of many others. Appreciating just more fully how fully intended expressions of desire to conquer, to hurt, to be cruel to others were. Just how sincerely conservative desires to not care for the weak, the sick, the unfortunate were.

Several months later, I had to leave. They remained and were promoted. In the meantime, I have had difficulty sleeping. I am confident they, and the millions if not billions like them sleep well.

In the article dated 26 July Background to the Franklin Expedition the author stated that the purpose of the expedition led by Captain Sir John Franklin consisting of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror was to navigate the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. This is only part of the reason the expedition took place.

Then as now governments were loath to spend any money. Then as now naval expeditions were expensive. By 1844 it was well established that even if the Northwest Passage were navigated it would be commercially useless given how few good months for sailing there were in the Arctic. Very likely any ships trying to use it would be icelocked and have to winter over for at least one winter, hardly a commercially viable proposition. While discovering it did have a certain romantic allure, it was by itself far from sufficient by 1844 to provide a reason for the government to give a budget to an expedition in the Arctic.

Far more compelling and commercially important reasons were offered by the chance to do geological surveys of the region, to map out ice floes and the location of icebergs, recording these phenomena was relevant to help ships in the North Atlantic keep a watch for and predict potential hazards. This also was not sufficient to prompt an expedition given the expense for any naval vessel at sea, much less two, still less a fully equipped expedition into the Arctic.

Of far greater relevance was geomagnetic readings that could be done in the Arctic. Very close to magnetic north the expedition could take tens if not hundreds of readings each day to gather data on how compasses behaved, how far compass readings deviated in calculating position compared to other methods such as astronomy, and how compass readings changed as ships passed near magnetic north. Recording this data could only be done in the Arctic and could only be useful if it were taken at multiple locations. It was known that compass readings were imprecise and could be affected by the increasing use of iron in ships as the age of iron hulled and steamships began. Gathering data would help navigators determine their positions more precisely and help naval and commercial vessels save both time and difficulty in navigating the high seas. The data yielded from further observations could also help in the design of superior magnetic instruments. Gathering data from the Arctic and Antarctic was of keen interest in the British scientific community.

There were also questions of national prestige and claims to sovereignty on the line. Between the Napoleonic Wars and the end of the 19th Century Russia and Britain were locked in tense competition over spheres of influence in Central Asia and, until the purchase of Alaska by the United States, over the Arctic. For both the Russians and the British claims to territory could mean claims to potentially lucrative fishing or mineral rights. From the south, the United States was also bringing increasing pressure to bear as America began to industrialise, and expand both westward and northward. While nowhere near the strength of the Royal Navy, the days when the Royal Navy could halt, and board American vessels at will had gone. And America too was interested in the North Atlantic and potential sovereignty over any part of Canada that was not explicitly claimed by Britain. In the scientific realm, from observatories in Paris and Berlin, French and German scientists were taking magnetic and celestial readings and coming very very close to accurately predicting geographic locations without undertaking expensive naval expeditions. However, the Antarctic expedition of 1839 – 1843 commanded by Sir James Ross and his second in command Francis Crozier – yes that Crozier – had succeeded in obtaining both more precise magnetic readings, but had actually found the geographic location of the South Pole. And the actual location of the South Pole was quite a few miles away from where the observatory in Berlin had calculated it to be. Expensive naval expeditions thus made Britain a world leader in science and navigation that helped reinforce Britain’s naval dominance and reaffirmed Britain’s status as the preeminent European power.

All of these reasons taken together were enough to persuade the government to fund the largest, best equipped Royal Navy expedition through the Arctic to date. Navigating the Northwest passage was the headline event, providing the expedition with the glamour and glory of discovery, of putting things clearly on the map and symbolically opening the world. As will be covered in a subsequent article, it is no accident that John Franklin commanded the expedition. Not only was Franklin an Arctic veteran but he had begun his naval career recording magnetic and celestial data near Australia. After his second Arctic expedition, Franklin had, in addition to a successful deployment to Greece as Captain of HMS Rainbow, thrown himself into the latest studies and developments in magnetic science and kept abreast of all the changes. When Franklin was Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) he had consistently taken magnetic readings to help further the efforts of British science to more effectively understand Geomagnetism.

The Franklin Expedition was therefore a serious navigational and scientific endeavour. As has been mentioned, it was the best provisioned and equipped. Preparation for the Expedition took into account all the bitter experiences of previous expeditions and it would be equipped and prepared to minimise any risks to the men who comprised it and to help ensure that the ships would be able to return.

In 235 AD with the assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus by his own troops, following difficult and – it might be assumed- inept campaigning against the Persians, the Roman Empire entered a protracted crisis that, save for brief interludes, it would not emerge from until 284 AD with the proclamation of Diocletian as Emperor. Even then, the broad political stability and especially the economic prosperity that had characterised the Roman period between approximately 30 BC and 235 AD would never return. Indeed, it is arguable that western Europeans did not fully recover Roman standards of living until the late 17th Century, perhaps even beyond then.

These events, which are often forgotten or not even taught to westerners today, are unknown on the other side of the planet in East Asia where a crisis of similar magnitude was unfolding at approximately the same time. Equally, as the dramatic events in Europe are unknown and would excite almost no interest in Asians, so too are the following events unknown to and unlikely to excite the imagination of Europeans.

In 189 AD the Chinese Emperor Liu Ling of the Han dynasty – so named for the river in the area from which the Liu family came – died. He left two prospective heirs to the throne, two boys well below the age of 18. The Emperor was officially revered but by the time Emperor Ling died as Mark Edward Lewis notes with a quote from a contemporary observer “orders from the provincial and commandery governments arrive like thunderbolts. Imperial orders are put on the mantle.” The Han dynasty’s fiscal base had been eroded by powerful clan family networks refusing fiscal burdens. These were clan family networks the throne under weak leadership had dared not challenge. On the other side, courtiers had used the weakness of a succession of child emperors to accrue considerable power and had eroded the proper flow of the funds that did reach the Imperial Treasury. The most infamous group of courtiers were the maligned eunuchs.

In an attempt both to stamp out corruption and grab more power for themselves officials aligned with the powerful clan families attempted to murder the Eunuchs, and brought in military units to assert their power. In desperation, the Eunuchs murdered the ring leader of the clan families – He Jin – and kidnapped Emperor Ling’s two sons. They were slaughtered to a man, but in the chaos the frontier General Dong Zhuo found the two royal children and put the younger one on the throne. He began to act as a tyrannical regent. In response a coalition of notables assembled and through their strength defeated Dong Zhuo in eastern China. In response Dong Zhuo burned down the capital city of Luoyang and relocated with the Emperor to the former capital of Chang’an to the west. Bickering among themselves over who had cost them potentially unquestioned victories the leaders of the coalition split among themselves. While not acknowledged at the time, this effectively ended the Han Dynasty and ushered in a 90 year period of civil war.

The extraordinary, almost concurrent crises of the two great world civilisations is remarkable, and while distant, it is arguable that there are commonalities between our current era and the events which preceded the twin Crises of the Third Century.

In both our time and back then civic duties have become civic options. At the beginning of the Han there was universal military service based on small and medium sized farmers giving themselves over for military service, often for two years. However, as farmers became increasingly squeezed by encroaching largeholders and landlords the state, in an effort to not burden the people it depended on for most of its taxes – small and medium holding farmers – ended universal military service. From the beginning of the first century to the its end in 190 AD the Han armies would be made up of mercenaries, criminals, the unwanted, and barbarians. It was this army, under Dong Zhuo, that ended the Han. In the Roman world while there was an increase in the size of the military, it increasingly became an employment of the marginal, and even barbarians – even if the loyalty of ‘barbarian’ soldiers remained solid even when fighting their own kin. Nonetheless it was a duty that rulers of both empires did not want – for a variety of reasons – to bother their people with.

In our own era armies are becoming smaller but very much the preserve of the marginal and even in the case of the United States of non-citizens filling the ranks. In the case of the Han, criminals, the unwanted, and assorted professionals and barbarians filled the ranks. In the case of the Romans while, given that the armies of Emperor Majorian in 457 AD must have come considerably from the Italian peninsula, the military profession was not as marginal, there were consistent complaints about the number of non-Italians and even outright ‘barbarians’ in the ranks. It should be noted though that in the case of the Romans, more so than the Han, the ‘barbarians’ served Rome loyally unless – as in the 410s after the murder of Stilicho – they were badly mistreated. In our own era the military profession is unwanted and forgotten, as it was in both empires but especially under the Han. Even in China where the military forms an integral pillar of the ruling clique’s power structure, the military’s numbers are eroded and in a population of 1.4 billion China struggles to man a barely 2 million man military.

In both empires the tax base of the empire had been eroded. In both cases land taxes were often pitifully assessed or not assessed at all on those of the powerful. The Romans could have endured this but as small and medium farmers were squeezed out, it started a fiscal death spiral for the Han. As the Imperial court received less revenue it delegated more power to influential clan family networks, that in turn gave them increased power to accumulate more land or refuse paying taxes in return for providing loyalty to the court. The result was that the Han were obeyed less and less. For the Romans the need of the Severan Emperors to increase the size of the Army and increase the meager salaries soldiers received led them to reducing silver content in their coins. The crucial mistake they made was issuing lower valued silver coins, but then not accepting these same coins as sufficient specie to pay taxes with, resulting in money progressively losing its value and leading to ever increasing inflation.

Broadly speaking though, in both empires, the same thing happened. The lower and middle classes were squeezed to the benefit of the rich, who then refused to pay taxes. In our time tax evasion by the wealthy has become a persistent and increasing problem.

Both empires and our own period are characterised largely by a sense of enduring complacency. As Bryan Ward Perkins notes in his book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation the Romans thought their world would go on forever. Indeed in a lecture delivered in India he specifically states that he entitled his book in part ‘the End of Civilisation’ as opposed to ‘the End of a Civilisation’ because the process of societal collapse that followed Rome’s fall shows us what would happen, only on an inconceivably more vast and horrific scale, if our civilisation were to end. Despite all our many problems, a collapse would be so much worse than the status quo and we need to have a certain care for our civilisation.

Equally despite the dislocation of the Guangwu interregnum as Wicky Tse argues in The Collapse of China’s Later Han Dynasty the Chinese of the time thought of what is sometimes called the Eastern Han (because of the move of the capital east from Chang’an to Luoyang) or Later Han as being the same Han dynasty since 202 BC. The Han had unified and held onto China. The prosperity, wealth and culture of China were great indeed, arguably exceeded only by Rome. The empire had brought the troublesome Xiongnu barbarians to heel, and had even brought what had been considered the barely Chinese south into its domain. Its writ extended to the Korean peninsula. That it, in its wealth, splendour, and peace for most, could end was a nightmarish and inconceivable prospect. And yet the Han Empire ended more readily than the Roman Empire which had an agonising, drawn out death. And even then, under Justinian in the East in the 6th century, it refused to die for several decades after the end. The Han simply splintered, imperial authority was smashed to pieces. Cao Cao – the greatest, most able, and most competent of all the warlords who emerged – invoked imperial authority in vain. The only thing that mattered were the numbers of swords, spears, bows, and the capabilities of the men who wielded them and the men who commanded them. In the Han, power had become completely privatised. State structures and power had been privatised. Thus the regime did not merely fall, the entire state – having no real institutions of any kind of independence – collapsed. Though it may be embarrassing to certain sensibilities the end of the Han shares as much in common with the end of Rome as it does with state collapse in Liberia and Somalia in the early 1990s.

In our own time public functions are increasingly privatised. Even world development goals are no longer expected to be met by governments, but by the private sector. Governing itself is being completely privatised and people are expected to look to local grandees, not governments for help. A new kind of feudalism could be said to emerge.

In the end, we have bear in mind that our world, which is already undergoing wrenching and often unpleasant changes, could go through a new crisis. Things do not always turn out for the better as the people of Rome and China found out in the 3rd century AD. That things turned out, ultimately, for the better, as a result of WWII, was not foreordained. Our forebears had to fight harder than we can imagine to stem the tide of darkness, and then make sure the aftermath brought peace instead of still greater strife. If the time comes that we ourselves are so challenged, we should remember the fate that befell the Han and Roman Empires, and vow not to let ourselves suffer the same fate. For the sake of those to come after us, for the sake of ourselves, should we be so challenged, we must not falter.

Far Right ideologies, to and including fascism, are not only resurgent, they have gained open endorsement and respectability from some quarters, and tolerance in others. An example of endorsement is U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement on the August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ march in Charlottesville, Virigina that “You also had some very fine people on both sides ” at a march where torch carrying fascists yelled “Blood and Soil!”

There has been tolerance for fascism in respectable liberal and conservative quarters when it comes to Eastern Europe. The celebration and veneration of fascists is ignored, downplayed, or dismissed in countries such as Latvia and the Ukraine because those countries are anti-Russian. This permissive attitude has even involved, more or less, turning a blind eye to attempts by those countries to prosecute WWII veterans for killing fascists in Lithuania and Ukraine. It is also no accident that the authorities in both these countries have chosen to hound two Jewish veterans.

It can therefore, unfortunately, be said that the Third Reich and its supporters are enjoying a resurgence. A fact all too alarmingly underlined by the electoral rise of the Far Right in Germany and Austria.

It is therefore, for anti-fascists, all the more necessary to reaffirm not just the crimes of the Third Reich but also how even the supposed achievements of the Third Reich in the area of the economy are largely the construction of inordinate propaganda. This is illuminated very clearly by Adam Tooze in The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy about the economic history of the Third Reich and by Richard J Evans in The Third Reich in Power the second in his trilogy on the Third Reich.

Tooze starts out with a controversial, if verifiable, assertion in his book that the German economy in the early 20th century was not nearly as strong as it is often supposed. He points out that, according to the available statistical evidence, on a per capita basis Germany was not only poorer than the United Kingdom. It was poorer than France – often derided for being an ostensibly languid economy in the early 20th century. This was mostly due to the weakness of the German agricultural sector which was characterized by inefficiency and grinding poverty and also contributed to the extent of German dependence on food imports. This sense of weakness and vulnerability was something that German policy elites of all stripes felt acutely. The Nazis therefore sought to eliminate this vulnerability through the conquest of ‘the means of existence.’ Land for food and raw materials for industry were the goal of German expansionism. To make that reality, however, would require extensive rearmament due to the limits imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty and advancing military technology. Rearmament required industrial might and to make industrial might a reality, inputs were needed, inputs that needed to be imported from abroad. Germany needed foreign currency reserves and substantial exports to make these imports for rearmament possible.

As Tooze demonstrates, Hitler was dealt a weak economic hand when he was handed power on 30 January 1933. This was the result of three factors: the world economic crisis started by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the deflationary economic policy of Chancellor Heinrich Bruning, and the aggressive foreign policy of Bruning and his successors. Germany was heavily indebted to the outside world and ran considerable trade deficits under the Weimar Republic. To service these debts Germany could either export or stay on Gold to be able to turn over an acceptable asset to its foreign creditors. In a Depression, exports were out of the question, so to stay on the Gold Standard Bruning launched several rounds of deflationary price and wage cuts. Still capital flight continued in 1930. In 1931 with the Depression gathering pace the French government offered to extend Germany gold loans to help it meet its debt servicing costs. In effect the French were offering the Germans the money with which to pay war reparations to the French. It was nearly free money. Bruning responded by “slamming shut the door to Franco-German cooperation” and a few months later with his second deflationary decree loudly demanding an end to reparations. This provoked a run on the German banks and increasing capital flight. The banking crisis of 1931 drained the Reichsbank currency reserves to such an extent that Bruning had to enact an import quota system, thereby ending any kind of free trade, to stop further hemorrhage of foreign currency. In 1932 the Germans defaulted on war reparations payments and provoked a further run on their banking system, draining the Reichsbank’s reserves further. By the time Hitler came to power imports had been very substantially forced downward from their 1928 levels. Given Germany’s import dependence, this gives a good idea of how squeezed overall welfare was. It was only to get worse.

Hitler and the German political elites wanted to rearm. But to rearm they needed to import substantial raw materials. To import raw materials they needed to export to earn foreign currency, and to be able to export they needed access to foreign markets. They could only get access to foreign markets if they serviced Germany’s debts to its major trading partners. But servicing Germany’s debts meant foreign currency and Gold that could import more inputs necessary for rearmament was instead spent on debt service, on debts the Germans had no intention of honouring in the long term. German elites thought an aggressive export drive would result in other countries putting up tariffs and quotas – so they faced a dilemma. It was one they could have gotten out of had they chosen to be reconciliatory and dropped their revisionist foreign policy, but the latter was never an option for the German political Right.

Instead they opted to squeeze imports even further while promoting exports as much as they could and servicing debts only to the extent that Germany did not completely lose access to overseas markets.

Bruning’s policies had alienated Germany’s major trading partners, and while Germany had gone off Gold the others -except France, had gone off Gold and devalued. The Reichsmark therefore remained overvalued compared to other currencies. A situation that only worsened throughout the period. Devaluation would have increased both debt servicing costs and the costs to import raw materials for rearmament. Hitler’s economic Tsar of 1933-1938, Hjalmar Schacht, used various export bounties to support exports. This was a kind of stealth devaluation done at the expense of the Treasury. Generous Reichsmark bounties were also offered to companies that used their foreign held assets as collateral to assist with importing raw materials for rearmament. It also served the autarchy drive as it was designed to make companies focus more on the domestic German market. However, brash statements about not intending to service debts in the long term – often made by the ostensibly respectable Schacht himself – meant that furious creditor countries refused to overlook export subsidies and often imposed either increasing tariffs or ever stricter quotas on German exports. German persecution of Jews and other minority groups also provoked an ever increasing outcry against buying German goods. Rather than scale back the anti-Semitism, the Germans – of course – blamed the Jews for the economic difficulties Germany was facing that the Germans had themselves created through their own policy choices. Part of the reason for the Nazis tormenting German Jews during their peacetime six years in power was so that they could get their hands on Jewish assets, as it was assumed Jews had substantial assets. In fact this was not the case as most Jews were either poor or modestly middle class, and so were hounded for money and assets they did not have. Theft of assets and financial fraud to service the trade elements needed for the rearmament drive characterized German policy in the 1933-1939 period.

Financial fraud was by no means confined to German treatment of foreign creditors and sleights of hand to promote exports. Rearmament itself was paid for by financial fraud. Unlike in Fascist Italy where taxes were raised and put into sinking funds to service debt issued to pay for Fascist Italy’s military campaigns and rearmament, taxes were not substantially raised in Germany. Despite Tooze saying that taxes rose and the Reich government was reluctant to squeeze Germans even further, Germany’s income tax remained lower than the UK’s. Partly this can be offset against the relative poverty of Germany but even so, there was clearly some room to raise revenue. Instead, to put much of the expenditure on rearmament off budget, Schacht had some of the largest German industrial firms set up a shell company. The Metallurgical Research Corporation (Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft in German) with a capital of 1 million reichsmarks. This ‘research corporation’ then issued on the back of this capital, debt instruments called ‘mefo bills’ which were accepted by the Reichsbank and often bought by the Reichsbank. These mefo bills often were commercial paper with very low or even no interest rate payments on them. Essentially German private savings were confiscated instead of taxed to pay for rearmament. It is true that many of the entities buying Mefo bills benefited far more from armaments contracts than they lost through purchasing Mefo bills, nonetheless, the Mefo bills were an astounding form of confiscation and financial fraud.

The ever increasing demands of rearmament badly affected other areas of the economy. While industry as a whole boomed due to rearmament orders, textiles, which made up a significant portion of total industrial employment, was squeezed as it was mostly cut off from cotton imports and had to make due with synthetic materials and domestic wool. Often these were also directed to military output too, meaning that certain kinds of clothing were hard to come by in the Third Reich, even during peacetime. Agriculture provides an excellent point of reference for the economic costs of rearmament, particularly as self-sufficiency in agriculture was a long term Nazi policy goal, and also of military necessity to avoid a repeat of the hunger and sometimes starvation that afflicted Germany in World War I.

The priorities of needing to squeeze imports while rearming and still feeding the German people could only be met if more resources were scrounged up from within Germany itself. It was to this end, promoting the use of German made resources to minimize the dependence on trade, that huge synthetic fuel and rubber plants were financed by the Reich and which went to the company capable of producing them – IG Farben. German agricultural policy was undercut by repeated bad harvests due to bad weather and the rearmament drive’s priority meaning resources that could have been used to promote further efficiency in German agriculture were simply not available. Although overall food production in Germany increased respectably between 1933-1938 it was more than offset by rising demand both from a growing and more employed population which wanted to convert its wages into better food on its table. This meant that some foodstuffs simply were not available for long periods in the shops as demand outstripped supply. By the end of the period there were classes for housewives on how to make ‘Hungarian fish Goulash’ because beef was often in short supply, and because the regime refused to spend limited foreign currency on importing fruit, households often had to make due with dried fruit throughout much of the year as fresh fruit simply was not available. Worse for Agriculture Minister Darre, the lure of higher wages drew a lot of farm labour from the countryside to the cities, and because almost all metallurgical production went to the rearmament drive, Darre’s requests for more agricultural machinery to replace lost workers was outright refused. In the end, often to make up labour deficits, Polish migrant labour was employed to pick the harvests and the German farmers – often women – who were not employed in the factories and left behind on the fields were more than happy to wield the whip to make sure the harvests were collected.

The fate of agriculture was the fate of almost every sector of the German economy in the face of the Nazi war machine demands. Whereas before Germany had imported wheat from France, the British Empire, the United States and Argentina, to squeeze imports and as an agreed presaging of the conquest of lebensraum im dem osten the Germans purchased as many raw materials as they could from impoverished European countries and squeezed imports for everything else that was not necessary for the rearmament drive. As rearmament consumed more and more of the economy, despite the economic boom in Germany military expenditure consumed more and more of the economy every single year, even German metallurgical production was stretched thin. It could not satisfy civilian and military needs. This was part of the reason why Goering’s ‘Four Year Plan’ was introduced, to set up an administrative system to implement steel rationing. In large part also because of the rearmament drive housing construction was substantially below Weimar levels in the peacetime years of the Third Reich and such construction as there was relied more on private finance, and tenants were expected to pick up the tab, in contrast to more generous support and rights tenants had under Weimar.

Finally, while most people suffered under increasing shortages and restrictions, the paladins of the Nazi regime lived lives of ever increasing luxury and impunity. The Nazi German Labour Front, was infamously corrupt due to Nazi Party officials siphoning off the Labour Front dues for their own use, in particular its head Robert Ley. Goering’s extravagance was well known. Even relatively ‘honest’ members of the regime such as Goebbels enjoyed huge, often untaxed incomes. In Goebbels case it was a figure of 200,000 Reichsmarks. Almost always this was paid for at either taxpayer expense or by compelled private donations. Hitler exempted himself from taxes and charged a royalty fee on each use of his image, amassing himself a considerable fortune that he used to pamper himself and to shower members of the regime with gifts to bind them ever more to himself. Meanwhile in Munich at Easter in 1938, due to high demand, there were no eggs to be had in the shops and many consumers had to do without.

As Germany ran pell mell towards a war that was entirely of its own choosing in 1939, rather than any kind of ‘happy volksgemeinschaft’ even if we ignore the horrible plight of the persecuted, the Third Reich was a country characterized less by plenty and more by shortages. It had a wartime economy with military expenditure equalling 21% of the economy. To put that in perspective when Mikhail Gorbachev announced in 1988 that the Soviet Union was spending 16% of GDP on military expenditure, the Soviet High Command was stunned – they had no idea they had been consuming that much of the economy and agreed – albeit too late – to cut back on military size and expenditure. By contrast in 1939 policymakers in Germany wanted to push military expenditure even higher, even without a war. Even worse, German rearmament plans had no relation to any kind of reality. The Navy wanted six full on battleships, and the fuel demands of these alone would have required a substantial increase in German fuel production that was far beyond the capacity of Germany to undertake in 1939. The Air Force wanted a fleet of 20,000 planes. It was not just that such a figure required obscene quantities of metal and fuel but that, even at the height of armament production, German air fleet strength never exceeded 7,000 aircraft. Even the Soviet Air Force at its wartime height only managed to field 17,000 aircraft. A fleet of 20,000 aircraft was therefore utter fantasy. And while the Germans felt pressured due to military buildup in France, the United Kingdom and above all the United States, these buildups had begun precisely because of German rearmament and German non-cooperation on defense policy. German hostile intentions had provoked the very thing that made them feel pressured. And once again rather than blame themselves they blamed the Jews.

The Third Reich, even before the outbreak of war, was therefore a highly constrained society in every way, characterized not just by increasing regimentation, but increasing shortages. It was, even for those not persecuted by the regime, a grim place to live.

On 16 March 2019, the Princeton University labour economic Alan Krueger apparently committed suicide.

It is worth remembering that Krueger died before he reached the age of 60 and before he had reached the age of 40, in 1992, he had co-written an economic research paper with David Card on the effects of minimum wage increases.

Krueger and Card examined the effects of two neighboring U.S. states – Pennsylvania and New Jersey – to study the effects of minimum wage rises on employment. New Jersey had raised its minimum wage and Pennsylvania had not. Prior to this 1992 paper standard economic theory held that raising the minimum wage, all things considered, would lead lower levels of employment. If you raise the price for something, there will be less demand for it. Since wages are the price of labor, raising wages was thought to reduce overall relative levels of employment.

Krueger and Card proved that assumption wrong in their paper. They demonstrated that New Jersey experienced a relative increase in employment over Pennsylvania. Therefore minimum wage increases were not a policy harmful to employment.

Krueger’s paper has been cited ever since it was released, and it has been used by the American Left since 1992 whenever the argument over not only the minimum wage but wages in general has come up. Krueger’s paper has influenced the ‘Fight for 15’ – i.e. raising the US Federal minimum wage to $15.00 an hour, minimum wage hike campaigns in every major U.S. state and affirmed that the purchasing power of labor is an integral part of driving the economy.

Krueger served in both the Clinton and Obama Administrations. He was an accomplished man and a dedicated public servant. His loss is a blow.