Why a row about the rise of Hitler has erupted in the German press

A debate is playing out in the German-speaking media about whether inflation or deflation was behind the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Conservative economists have been arguing that public overspending and the 1923 hyperinflation destroyed the middle class and thus paved the way for the National Socialists. Most recently, Hans Werner Sinn, a well-renowned economist and former chairman of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, reiterated that argument in an interview with Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), saying: ‘People lost their savings and life insurances which became worthless. Ten years later, Adolf Hitler became chancellor. I don’t say that something like that will happen again, but we need policies that prevent it from the outset. We need tighter budget limitations.’

But not everyone agrees with that analysis of how Hitler came to power. In an op-ed for business newspaper Handelsblatt two weeks later, Philipp Heimberger from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies argued that the response of the German government under chancellor Heinrich Brüning to the Great Depression was mainly responsible for the election results in the early 1930s which saw the National Socialists winning up to 43.9