“By 1939 the national debt had reached 37.4 billion marks. The reemployment of millions of jobless and the rearmament of German military forces had been financed by borrowing gigantic sums of money. Even Goebbels, who otherwise mocked the government’s financial experts as narrow-minded misers, expressed concern in his diary about the exploding deficit.”

Source: Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007), p. 39

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Götz Aly10

German journalist, historian and social scientist 1947

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