Hitler achieved notable economic and diplomatic successes during the first five years of his rule. Hitler substantially revived the economy. Unemployment, so pivotal in bringing him to power, had dropped from 6 million to less than 1 million between 1933 and 1937, this at a time when the US was still wallowing in the Depression. National production and income doubled during the same period. This was partly owing to Hitler's rearmament policy, but also to more benign forms of public spending. The world's first major highway system, the autobahns, began snaking across the country, and there was talk of providing every citizen with a cheap, standardized car, the people's car, or Volkswagen.
Nazism took root in the world's most powerful scientific culture, boasting half of the world's Nobel Prizes and a sizable fraction of the world's patents. German science and medicine were the envy of the world, and it was to Germany — the "land of scholars and poets" — that many academic hopefuls flocked to cut their scientific teeth.
The Third Reich cannot be thought of as an icebound retreat into intellectual slumber: think of television, jet-propelled aircraft, guided missiles, electronic computers, the electron microscope, atomic fission, data processing, industrial murder factories, and racial research—all of which either were first developed in Nazi Germany or reached their high point at that time. There are innovations in the area of basic physics (nuclear fission, discovered by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in 1938), hormone and vitamin research, automotive engineering (the Volkswagen was supposed to be the "people's car"), pharmacology, and synthetic gasoline and rubber (I. G. Farben in 1942 controlled more than 90 percent of the world's synthetic rubber production). The nerve gas sarin and the chemical warfare agent tabun are both I. G. Farben inventions of Third Reich vintage — as is the opiate methadone, synthesized in 1941, and Demerol, created about this time with the name "pethidine."
There are many other examples. Nazi aeronautic engineers designed the first intercontinental ballistic missiles—never actually assembled—and it was Germans in the 1940s who built the first jet ejection seat. German engineers built the world's first autobahns, and the world's first magnetic tape recording is of a speech by Hitler. The first television broadcast strong enough to escape the planet featured Hitler's speech at the opening of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The Hitler regime introduced major changes in individual programs and program administration. In 1934 the regime dismantled the self-governance structure of all social insurance programs and appointed directors who reported to the central authorities. The regime made many improvements in social insurance programs and benefits, but these changes were conceived to serve the regime rather than the population. In 1938 artisans came to be covered under compulsory social insurance, and in 1941 public health insurance coverage was extended to pensioners. In 1942 all wage-earners regardless of occupation were covered by accident insurance, health care became unlimited, and maternity leave was extended to twelve fully paid weeks with job protection.
During the Hitler era (1933-45), the economy developed a hothouse prosperity, supported with high government subsidies to those sectors that Hitler favored because they gave Germany military power and economic autarchy, that is, economic independence from the global economy. Hitler claimed to have achieved full employment in Germany by 1939. There were still five million Americans unemployed at the end of 1941. Hitler's Germany had long since absorbed its unemployment by building arms and German infrastructure.
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