I teach history at a junior high school in Orinda. I talk to my students fairly often about widely held historic myths. Some historic myths are harmless, but others are dangerous. When people believe that a historic myth is true, they will sometimes act on that myth with terrible consequences. I think this will be a big year for historic myth making. This is a presidential election year, and presidential candidates are always a major source of historic misinformation – especially when talking about people in the other party.

One of the most persistent and dangerous of all historic myths is the myth of Nazi efficiency. According to this often-told story, the Nazis were ruthlessly efficient. The logic of this myth is that since the Nazis were not constrained by moral considerations, they were able to maximize economic production through a system of slave labor and confiscation of resources. I have heard this story all my life, and I know people who believe that it is true. While the myth of Nazi effciency sounds logical, it is completely wrong. The Nazis were not ruthlessly efficient; they were just ruthless. For the Nazis, economic efficiency never came first. Proving that their racial theory was correct always came first. As a result, a lot of competent workers and managers were removed from their jobs by the Nazis simply because they weren’t ‘pure Aryans’, a term that was never clearly defined. These people were often replaced by incompetent Nazi party members simply because they had ‘Aryan Certificates’ proving their ‘racial purity’, not because they knew how to do their jobs. Incompetent Nazi party officials took positions of power throughout German industry. Graft, cronyism, nepotism, and bribery were so rampant that the economy of Nazi Germany was never really on a wartime footing. Throughout the war, German factories continued to produce luxury consumer goods for people with money or party connections. Incredibly, many German aircraft and tank factories operated from 9 to 5 and were closed on weekends right until the end of the war. In the United States, on the other hand, the aircraft factories never closed. They operated 24 hours a day, every day, 7 days a week. In Nazi-controlled Europe, trains and airplanes badly needed by the German army were used throughout the war to transport luxury consumer goods to Germany from the occupied countries, including perfume from France, lobsters from Norway, and stolen art from all over Europe. Trains transporting Jews and others to death camps had the right-of-way over troop and ammunition trains headed for the front, and millions of Jews Poles, and Russians with valuable job skills, like doctors and engineers, were simply murdered. After the war was over, economists from the United States, England, France, and Russia went to Germany to study the Nazi economic system. They all returned home with the same conclusion – there was nothing to learn from the Nazis about how to run an economy. The reason that the myth of Nazi efficiency is so  dangerous is that the people who believe that the myth is true think that the way to stimulate a stagnant economy is to ‘go Nazi’, and that is a terrible idea!