ABSTRACT

Economic ideology Although the National Socialists had some economic concepts it would be an exaggeration to speak of a coherent economic doctrine or even a theory.1 The ideas and principles put forward were vague-and deliberately so. They were designed to give everything to everybody; they changed their meaning like a chameleon changes its colours if representatives of pressure groups insisted on demanding clear definitions of national socialist slogans. In spite of the “unalterable 25 points” of the economic programme of 1920 Hitler took some pride in declaring: “the basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all.”2