Coming to Terms with Autocratic Policy: Nazi “Welfare” Policy and the Failure to Compensate its Victims

The concepts of policy and policy-making are usually not applied to autocratic governments. Autocratic governments may “rule”, “repress” or “control”, they may “decree” or “impose” certain measures and “execute” them, however, these activities are rarely awarded the label of policy-making. Policy-making seems to be a specialty of democratic governments; its charged with notions of goal setting, problem solving, rationalized planning and ordering, pursing the public interest and the public welfare. Policies may fail or go wrong, but in principle it is considered a good thing for a government to have a policy and carry it through. Yet, autocratic governments may have goals too, they take particular courses of action and have their own ideas about problems, problem solving, ordering, planning, and pursuing the public welfare. If policy analysis is about finding out “what governments do, why they do it, and what difference it makes” (Dye), policy analysis can well be applied to autocratic governments, too. Once we think of policy this way, it becomes clear that policy-making, problem-solving and rationalized planning is not necessarily a good thing per se; everything depends on which goals, which problems and which constructions of public welfare are at stake. The Nazi state is certainly the most extreme case of autocratic government until today. Yet, the Nazis set policy goals and designed complex arrangements to implement them and carried through with their Nazi health, family, crime, employment, and welfare policy. There is a near consensus in the literature today that the Nazi state in significant respects exercised a form of high modernist welfare policy. It was driven by a combination of productivism and racial delusion and among the major problems it aimed to solve was the existence of “degenerates” and “parasites to the people”. This does not mean, that it did not pursue these goals in a rational, effective manner. The paper revisits the Nazi policy towards the so-called “asocials” as part and parcel of Nazi “welfare” policy and shows how workfare merges into elimination and policy becomes indistinguishable from persecution. Subsequently, it will examine the politics of the Federal Republic after 1945 of coming to terms – or not – with this type of persecution. It will show that the democratic state was to some extent willing to distance itself from racial persecution but not from persecution linked to workfare and productivism, thereby demonstrating that the latter, in principle, are still considered legitimate concepts that may inform public policy. Thus, exploring the darkest incidents of policy-making may also shed light on underlying continuities and enduring possibilities.