Four year plan

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The four-year plan describes the National Socialist economic program based on Adolf Hitler's mandate to achieve economic and military capability for war within four years from 1936 through self-sufficiency and forced armament . For this purpose, a corresponding four-year plan authority was set up under Hermann Göring from the end of 1936 .

Emergence

On October 18, 1936, Hitler issued the ordinance for the implementation of the four-year plan , which gave Hermann Göring the general power of attorney for the control of all economic measures that were necessary to achieve military capability.

Under Göring the four-year plan was institutionalized as a supreme Reich authority. Its purpose was to create self-sufficiency and the ability to fight war in the German economy . The plan was announced at the Nazi party rally in September 1936. Göring led the authority from the Prussian State Ministry and presented it to the public in October 1936 in the Berlin Sports Palace as the commissioner for the four-year plan . The plan primarily serves to ensure food security for Germans.

The National Socialist regime itself described the four-year plan institutionalized in 1936 until the end of the war as the “second four-year plan” in order to tie in with a propaganda motif that had been tried and tested since 1933. Even before the March elections in 1933, Hitler had advocated on various occasions that he needed four years to eliminate unemployment, and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels instructed the press to always report under the heading "Give me four years". The four-year plan 1936 to 1940, according to Goebbels, is now based on this “first four-year plan”.

The plan

    Average gold and foreign exchange holdings in Germany in million Reichsmarks
1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936
2.405 2,506 2,806 1.914 975 530 165 91.0 75.0
Reichsgesetzblatt of October 19, 1936: Ordinance on the implementation of the four-year plan

The aim was to orient the economy towards accelerated armament and self-sufficiency , since Germany, with its dependence on raw materials from abroad, would otherwise not be able to wage a long war.

Memorandum on the four-year plan

The four-year plan was ordered by a secret memorandum of Adolf Hitler , written around August 1936 . Hitler introduced this with the thesis that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable.

The central demands in Hitler's memorandum were:

  1. "The German army must be operational in four years."
  2. "The German economy must be capable of war in four years."

Before his final conclusion in the memorandum, Hitler had explained why and for what purpose the army and the economy were to be primarily operational and ready for war in 1940: “We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves on our own basis [...] The final solution lies in an expansion the habitat or the raw material and nutritional basis of our people. It is the task of the political leadership to solve this question one day. "

Hermann Göring presented the memorandum to a cabinet meeting on September 4, 1936. He discussed the plans with the words: "It is based on the basic idea that the confrontation with Russia is inevitable." He closed the cabinet meeting with the note:

"All measures must be carried out as if we were in the stage of imminent danger of war."

Development and implementation

At the organizational level, Göring's decree of October 22, 1936 provided for the establishment of a small council of ministers for economic and social policy departments for fundamental decisions, while a general council consisting of the respective state secretaries was to function as “an executive coordinating body”. Since the Council of Ministers met rarely, the General Council, which was actually subordinate but met weekly and discussed all the problems of the four-year plan, became “more important than the Council of Ministers”.

The methods were characterized by the allocation of raw materials, investments and management of labor input. Among other things, it was the goal to achieve the self-sufficiency of the German economy with the help of the unprofitable production of synthetic raw materials ( synthetic gasoline , Buna , explosives and fertilizer ).

As part of the four-year plan, the Nazi government founded, among other things, the Reichswerke Hermann Göring , which served the mining and smelting of poor iron ore. Goering was appointed as the person responsible. The four-year plan was not organized very effectively. Nevertheless, the economic output could be increased considerably. From spring 1942 to February 1943, under the direction of Albert Speer, the output of armaments was doubled, but this was mainly due to a greatly increased allocation of steel.

Goering announced the four-year plan to the public on October 28, 1936 in the Berlin Sports Palace, among other things as a concept for securing food for the people .

On December 17, 1936, Goering gave a speech to over 100 industrialists in the Prussian House on the implementation of the four-year plan; in this speech he said:

“The struggle we are facing requires a huge amount of efficiency. There is no end in sight to armament. The only decisive factor here is victory or destruction. [...] We are already mobilizing and at war, it is just not shot yet. "

According to Hitler's memorandum, the four-year plan was only to be viewed as a temporary solution (“The final solution lies in expanding the living space or the raw material and nutritional basis of our people”). Accordingly, from 1941 onwards, planning under Fritz Todt and, after his death, from February 1942 under Speer, was completely converted to a total war economy .

On October 18, 1936, Hitler appointed Göring as "Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan", which further increased his power in the National Socialist German Reich . The plan replaced Hjalmar Schacht's new plan . The appointment of Göring curtailed the power of Hjalmar Schacht, who resigned from his post as Minister of Economics at the end of November.

From this point onwards, when Göring was appointed by Hitler, Dietmar Petzina differentiates between three phases for the development and implementation of the four-year plan , in which Göring acted as a “dictator in the field of business”: 1.) A rather broad and still quite general planning and activity between October 1936 and summer 1938. 2.) The period of an economic policy based entirely on military mobilization from July 1938 to the beginning of the war in September 1939. 3.) The phase of merging the four-year plan with the war economy from autumn 1939 to 1942. The plan is “for the political freedom of movement of the regime was very important ”and, through the creation of economic independence, was supposed to enable Hitler to“ foreign policy of threats and blackmail ”.

In 1940 Hitler extended Göring's power of attorney for the four-year plan , which since the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 had also extended to the territories occupied there. The four-year plan was also of great economic and political importance during the World War. The plans worked out by the authority were reflected and a. in the green folder for the Barbarossa company . For this purpose, Göring used the "Staff General Bührmann", named after his commander, Major General Robert Bührmann. He was appointed by Göring's decree of November 28, 1939 to be the representative for raw material supply in the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the East; the basic tasks were determined by Bührmann on November 30, 1939. From 1940 he was appointed inspector for the supply of raw materials in all occupied territories and as a general representative of the four-year plan.

literature

  • Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): German History 1933–1945. Documents on domestic and foreign policy (= Fischer 50234 The time of National Socialism ). Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-50234-9 .
  • Dietmar Petzina : Autarky Policy in the Third Reich. The National Socialist four-year plan (= series of the quarterly books for contemporary history , volume 16). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1968 (at the same time: Mannheim, business school, dissertation, 1965: The National Socialist four-year plan of 1936 )
  • Wolfgang Schieder : Spanish Civil War and Four-Year Plan. On the structure of National Socialist foreign policy. In: Ulrich Engelhardt, Volker Sellin , Horst Stuke (eds.): Social movement and political constitution. Contributions to the history of the modern world. Festschrift for Werner Conze on December 31, 1975 (= Industrial World. Special volume). Ernst Klett, Stuttgart 1976, ISBN 3-12-901850-6 , pp. 832-856.
  • Arthur Schweitzer : The original four-year plan. Yearbooks for Economics and Statistics , Volume 168 (1956), pp. 348–396.
  • Wilhelm Treue : Documentation: Hitler's memorandum on the four-year plan 1936. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 3, issue 2, 1955, pp. 184-210, online (PDF; 5 MB) , (in contrast to Michalka and others, contains Hitler's memorandum in full Text).
  • Anton Zischka : Science breaks monopolies. Goldmann, Leipzig a. a. 1936 (numerous editions, also in foreign languages; Nazi propaganda pamphlet for the four-year plan)

Web links

Wikisource: Regulation for the implementation of the four-year plan  - sources and full texts

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Dietmar Petzina : Autarky Policy in the Third Reich. The National Socialist four-year plan (= series of the quarterly books for contemporary history. Volume 16). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1968, p. 57 f.
  2. ↑ a b Dietrich Eichholtz : Four year plan , in: Wolfgang Benz , Hermann Graml , Hermann Weiß (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . 5th, updated and expanded edition. Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-34408-1 , p. 851 f.
  3. ↑ Tim Schanetzky : "Cannons Instead of Butter". Economy and Consumption in the Third Reich . CHBeck, Munich 2015, p. 150.
  4. ↑ Tim Schanetzky: "Cannons Instead of Butter". Economy and Consumption in the Third Reich . CHBeck, Munich 2015, p. 150f.
  5. ↑ Monthly report of the military economic staff on the “state of the economic situation. 1.2.1938 “BA-MA Wi IF 5/543. taken from: Friedrich Forstmeier, Hans-Erich Volkmann (Hrsg.): Economy and armaments on the eve of the Second World War. 2nd Edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1981, ISBN 3-7700-0399-3 , p. 85.
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): German History 1933–1945. 1999, p. 112. Wilhelm Treue : Documentation: Hitler's memorandum on the four-year plan 1936. 1955.
  7. ^ Wilhelm Treue : Documentation: Hitler's memorandum on the four-year plan 1936. 1955
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): German History 1933–1945. 1999, p. 112 f.
  9. ↑ Dietmar Petzina: Autarky Policy in the Third Reich. The National Socialist four-year plan (= series of the quarterly books for contemporary history , volume 16). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1968 (at the same time: Mannheim, Wirtschaftshochschule, Diss., 1965: The National Socialist Four-Year Plan of 1936 ), p. 58f.
  10. ↑ Tim Schanetzky: "Cannons Instead of Butter". Economy and Consumption in the Third Reich . CH Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67515-7 , p. 218.
  11. ↑ in the Berlin “Sportpalast” ( memento of the original from October 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ip-klaeden.selfhost.eu
  12. ^ Nuremberg Document NI-051, quoted from: Wilhelm Treue : The Third Reich and the Western Powers in the Balkans. On the structure of the foreign trade policy of Germany, Great Britain and France 1933–1939. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , vol. 1, issue 1, 1953, pp. 45–64, here pp. 53 f., Ifz-muenchen.de (PDF; 5.1 MB); Abstract. ( Memento of July 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  13. ↑ Nuremberg Trial, day one hundred and twenty. Friday, May 3, 1946 (interrogation protocol)
  14. ↑ Dietmar Petzina: Autarky Policy in the Third Reich. The National Socialist four-year plan . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1968, p. 57.
  15. ↑ Dietmar Petzina: Autarky Policy in the Third Reich. The National Socialist four-year plan . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1968, p. 194.
  16. ^ German Historical Institute Warsaw - Michael Alberti
  17. ↑ Dieter Herrmann: Generalgouvernement of the occupied Polish territories (GG) 1939 to 1945. (PDF) In: Uni-Hamburg.de. June 28, 2012, accessed January 1, 2019 .
  18. ^ Joachim Scholtyseck : Freudenberg: A family company .
  19. ^ Federal Archives Freiburg - Military Archives