Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who wo… - Götz Aly

[A]1942 levy required property owners to pay ten years of the tax in advanced in a single lump sum. Because property owners were prohibited from raising rents, they alone bore the burden. In addition, the Reich appropriated other revenues that had previously belonged to local authorities.All told the state collected the considerable sum of 8.1 billion reichsmarks (in today’s currency the equivalent of around 100 billion dollars) in additional revenues in 1942-43. The financial newspaper Bankwirtschaft hailed the windfall as ‘a satisfactory result in terms of both limiting consumer spending power and improving the state budget.

Hitler was able to maintain general morale by transferring Germany’s military offenses into an increasingly coordinated series of destructive raids aimed at plundering other peoples. The Nazi leadership established a framework for directly sharing the spoils of the military victories with the majority of Germans—the profits derived from crippling the economics of occupied and dependent countries, the exploitation of work performed by forced laborers, the confiscated property of murdered Jews, and the deliberate starvation of millions of people, most notably in the Soviet Union. Those benefits, in turn, made the recipients amenable to Nazi propaganda and gave them a vested interest in the Third Reich.

The policy of plunder was the cornerstone for the welfare of the German people and a major guarantor of their political loyalty, which was first and foremost based on material considerations. The unshakable alliance between the state and the people was not primarily the result of cleverly conceived party propaganda. It was created by means of theft, with the spoils being redistributed according to equalitarian principles among the member of the ethnically defined Volk.