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 … - Götz Aly

[The Nazis] handed out billions in price subsidies to farmers…. As early as December 1939, a high-ranking financial administrator complained that the privileging of farmers ‘is in many case so grotesque that it can scarcely be kept secret from the rest of the populace, segments of which are being called on to make real sacrifices.’

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.

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.