Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY 665This progress had been bought with the loss of free suffrage, therenunciation of free speech, with a press dominated by lies, withconcentration camps for a minority and atrocities that could not beconcealed.Did this price have to be paid? In 1933, unemployment began todecrease all over the world. In the United States, according to anestimate of the American Federation of Labor, unemployment fell fromthirteen millions to ten millions. The official German Institute forBusiness Research (Konjunkturforschung) noted in July, 1933, that inLatvia unemployment had decreased by 31 per cent from the secondquarter of 1932 to the second quarter of 1933; in Rumania, by 23 percent; in Germany, only by 9 per cent — for the figure of two millions,apparently a third, or 33 per cent of the total unemployed, wasmisleading, since it could be ascribed mainly to regular summer rise inemployment. In Great Britain, the labor market had registered animprovement of 6 per cent in the course of a year. According to theindex of the International Labor Office in Geneva, the level ofemployment for nineteen large countries had fallen from 100 in 1929 to75 in 1932; in 1933, it rose to 78; in 1934 to 84; in 1935 to 88, or anincrease of 173 per cent in three years; during the same period theGerman level of employment, according to German figures, rose from12,500,000 to 15,900,000, an increase of 27 per cent. In a word: the'National Socialist miracle' was neither entirely National Socialist norentirely a miracle, but largely a part of a world recovery; though inGermany, it must be admitted, this recovery was experienced with apassion equaled nowhere else. The German Institute for BusinessResearch also found that of the two millions who had returned to workin Germany by the end of August, some 1,400,000 would have done sowithout the intervention of the state, in consequence of the usualsummer revival; and roughly 300,000 to 700,000 in Germany owedtheir re-employment to the general world prosperity. The measures ofthe Hitler government, properly spoken — still according to theestimate of the Institute for Business Research — would only have sent300,000 back to work.But what was world prosperity ? No longer a product of economic,but of political, forces; in most countries it had been accelerated,