Page 143 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

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1945/1946 – STUPOR AND

SEARCH FOR DIRECTION

From this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society,
that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution
by preparing the road to a new type of planned order.
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(Karl Mannheim, 1945)

The end of the Second World War left Germany in an unprecedented
state of defeat, destruction, and disorganisation. Administration virtually
disintegrated and German political and economic life had reached ‘point
zero’. Although there was no Stunde Null (zero hour) and anarchy, this
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notion closely describes the perception of ordinary as well as informed
contemporaries. Never did the future of Germany seem less viable, never
the chaos more ubiquitous. When US President Harry Truman
commissioned a group of experts, led by former President Herbert
Hoover, to assess the economic and political situation in post-war
Germany on-site, one of the economic experts, Gustav Stolper, reported:

This, then, is the picture of Germany [...] after the unconditional
surrender: A nation irremediably maimed in its biological structure –
with a long-term sharp decline of the population inevitable, with a
huge preponderance of women and the old, a fateful absence of
young, able-bodied men who are indispensable for the regeneration
of a race, its intellectual power, its productive efficiency, its moral
resistance; a nation intellectually crippled by the horrors of twelve
years of Nazi despotism, by isolation from contact and intercourse
with the outside world, by a monstrous system of pseudo-
philosophical, mystical abstrusities inculcated with the help of police
and subservient teachers in schools ruthlessly purged of their