Many people think of Nazi Germany as having been an incredibly wealthy nation, albeit by looting the treasures of a conquered Europe. Popular culture has certainly reinforced this view of an opulent Nazi Germany. Countless movies and television shows have used the trope of hidden Nazi treasure as a plot device. And the phrase “rich as a Nazi” has definitively entered the vernacular, denoting an individual of incredible wealth.
But the reality behind the myth is somewhat different. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime had come to power in German in 1933, in part by promising to reverse the economic and political humiliation imposed by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. And for a while this appeared to be the case. Hitler initiated a massive domestic infrastructure building program, including construction of the famous Autobahn highway. The Nazis also simultaneously spent lavishly on rearming the depleted Wehrmacht, or German army.
So while the rest of the world slogged through the Great Depression with high unemployment rates and weak economies, Nazi Germany prospered. Rich as a Nazi indeed! But the German economic boom was largely an illusion. In reality, Germany was endowed with few of the key natural resources necessary for a modern military power. Therefore, Nazi Germany was forced to buy these vital raw materials – oil, tungsten and chromium – abroad. And its foreign trade partners would not accept German Reichsmark as payment, but only hard foreign currencies, like dollars or pounds, or gold.
By early 1938, Germany was rapidly running out of both gold and negotiable foreign reserves. The Anschluss – Germany’s forced union with Austria in the spring of 1938 – gave the Nazi State a temporary reprieve. Germany emptied the Austrian central bank’s gold reserves, which were about 100 tons. This gave Hitler the monetary breathing room he needed to successfully launch his blitzkrieg war against first Poland in the east and then France in the west.
In contrast to the Nazi German government’s hand to mouth lifestyle, the United States, despite having been hard hit by the Great Depression, was a truly wealthy nation. By the beginning of widespread hostilities in 1940, U.S. gold reserves amounted to a staggering 21,000 tons.
On the other hand, Nazi Germany only managed to steal a grand total of about 600 tons of gold after looting nearly the entire European continent. And by the time Germany capitulated in 1945, it only had about 300 tons left, the rest having been used to purchase critical war supplies abroad. The vast amounts of wealth available to the U.S. would have been almost unimaginable to the Nazi officials in charge of Germany’s national budget during World War II.
And these massive differences in wealth between Nazi Germany and the U.S. were apparent in everyday life as well. In the lead up to World War II, Germany’s small denomination coins were alloys of bronze, aluminum-bronze or nickel. Once war started in 1939, these coins were switched to cheaper zinc or aluminum in order to preserve every last bit of nickel and copper for the armament industry. The larger denomination 2 and 5 Reichsmark coins, both made of silver, were discontinued after 1939 to conserve the precious metal.
The United States faced some of the same pressures that Nazi Germany did in the global conflict. Specifically, the military’s demand for copper to use in wiring and shell casings was insatiable. However, the United States, being almost obscenely rich during the mid 20th century, pursued radically different solutions to these problems than Germany did.
Most U.S. coinage during the 1930s was made from an alloy of 90% silver and 10% copper. Not only did the U.S. Government not change this alloy during World War II, but they also added precious metal to the nickel, or five cent coin! These silver war nickels employed a unique alloy of copper, silver and manganese to save precious copper and nickel for the war effort. The only coin the U.S. mint truly debased during the war was the penny, replacing its bronze alloy with a zinc-coated steel composition.
During the development of the atomic bomb, copper was in such short supply that the Manhattan Project borrowed over 14,000 tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury to use in wiring and other electrical equipment at the famous Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility. That’s right. The U.S. Government was so insanely rich during World War II that it actually substituted silver wiring in place of copper wiring on an unprecedented, industrial scale. The term “rich as a Nazi” is beginning to seem like a misnomer. The German government couldn’t hope to compete with the U.S. level of wealth.
Our final wealth metric, and one that is particularly important for military powers, is oil production. Nazi Germany was not blessed with substantial oil reserves. Consequently, its domestic oil production was a paltry 4.5 million barrels annually in 1939. Realizing this was insufficient to fulfill his military ambitions, Hitler directed German industry to first research and then mass produce synthetic fuel. By 1941, Nazi Germany was creating some 31 million barrels of synthetic fuel per annum.
At first glance, this impressive level of fuel production lends credence to the idea of fantastic, rich as a Nazi wealth. And while it was a tremendous technical achievement, it simply paled in comparison to the oil output of the United States during the same period. In 1940, the U.S. produced approximately 1,460 million barrels of oil domestically, over 40 times the combined synthetic and natural German production levels!
Now it is true that the Nazi military machine thoroughly looted Europe, emptying many museums and private homes of famous paintings and sculptures, as well as central banks of their gold. And this plunder certainly made a few high ranking Nazis incredibly wealthy. In that respect, rich as a Nazi was a perfectly legitimate turn of phrase. But the German State, as well as much of the German population, was actually rather poor during the Nazi era, at least compared to the United States.
