During the 1980s, research into Nazi Germany was enlivened by extreme left “alternative historians” from Berlin and Hamburg. They were often journalists, social workers and psychiatrists; one or two had sufficient affinities with West German terrorist circles to have served time in jail. Contemptuous of the theoretical debates that exercised mainstream academics, this new school had a talent for ferreting out new and unusual sources, such as the Baedeker guide to occupied Poland, or for investigating neglected victims of the Nazis such as the disabled, mentally ill, gypsies, Soviet POWs and foreign forced labourers.

Given the political hinterland of these historians, certain generic preoccupations can be identified. Many were eager to smear German big business with the crimes of the Nazi era by writing books that resembled communist-regime agitprop. A further theme was the unexplored role of mid-level professional people in providing rational coherence to the Nazi leadership’s insane vision of a racially ordered empire. This enabled the alternative historians to highlight such phenomena as amoral careerism, although it is striking how many of these historians have themselves advanced to such careers in the past 20 years. Götz Aly, for example, is a professor at Frankfurt University.

Hitler’s Beneficiaries triggered a storm of controversy when it originally appeared in Germany chiefly because Aly called his wartime fellow countrymen “well-fed parasites”. Breaking with the conventional left-wing “workerist” perception of the German working class as Hitler’s passive victims, Aly depicts them as the principal beneficiaries of egalitarian welfare policies that were funded by Hitler’s conquests. According to Aly, racial conflict was used as an antidote to class conflict.

During the war, German corporate taxes and windfall taxes on house-price inflation and share dividends all rose so as to soak the rich, while everything was done to ameliorate the lot of deserving “national comrades”. Old-age pensions were increased, rents were controlled, and even bailiffs were reminded of their social responsibilities. Wartime separation payments to soldiers’ wives were so generous (at 85% of the husband’s previous earnings, compared with 38% in Britain) that many working-class women could give up factory jobs. The regime even paid hire-purchase instalments and newspaper subscriptions on behalf of absent soldiers.

Germany did this by imposing a vast system of licensed larceny on a continent; a claim that Aly illustrates with such sources as the war diaries of Heinrich Böll, the future Nobel prize-winning leftist novelist, who seems to have been an especially greedy Wehrmacht private in occupied France. Equipped with devalued local currencies and Reichsmarks sent from home, German soldiers went on a sustained shopping spree, sending packets of coffee or cigarettes back home, and struggling with suitcases overflowing with butter, geese, bacon, knickers and shoes whenever they went on leave. Special shoulder straps had to be introduced so that these overloaded figures could still manage a salute when they encountered their superiors.

Less originally, for Alan S Milward, the British economic historian, passed this way before, Aly shows the crushing costs that the Nazis imposed on occupied Europe. To take a minor example, Belgium’s entire state revenue was between 11 and 16 billion francs per annum; the Nazis levied 25 billion a year by way of spurious occupation costs, as well as stealing 18,500 vehicles, 1,000 locomotives, 22,000 freight cars, and 41 tons of gold reserves. The main assets of Jews were liquidated and rolled into occupation budgets, while everything – from their gold teeth, jewellery and watches (resold in Switzerland) to the clothes on their backs, which surfaced in German charity and pawn shops – was chalked up to the Reich’s central budget.

Furniture and fridges found their way into German homes, including, apparently, some of the fine antiques amid which Aly himself dwells. Two-thirds of the cost of the war were defrayed from such “external funds”; the overwhelming part of the remaining third paid by Germans fell on upper-class German taxpayers. Middle- and working-class Germans were liable to increased indirect taxes only on tobacco, beer and sparkling wine, since the local plonk was state-subsidised. This huge corrupt operation was the squalid reality of the “master race”.

Several economic historians have questioned the statistical underpinning of Aly’s book, arguing that the “external” funds were more like a quarter than two-thirds. That may be. But there is also a tendency to substitute the utilitarian effects of policy, as seen by economists and finance officials, for the cause as seen by a racist megalomaniac. Hitler did not kill the Jews to upholster the German working classes, but because he regarded them as an existential menace. Besides that fact, the statistics perhaps reveal far less than Aly would like them to.

HITLER’S BENEFICIARIES: How the Nazis Bought the German People by Götz Aly
Verso £19.99 pp448
Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.99 (inc p&p)

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