How did Nazi Germany finance itself

Germany was broke in 1933—so how did Hitler still build tanks, planes, and a massive army?

This video breaks down the hidden financial machinery behind Nazi rearmament—and why it was never a real “economic miracle,” but a trap powered by secret debt, forced banking, looted gold, and industrial-scale slavery.
We follow three numbers that connect the whole story:

MEFO bills (a shell-company IOU system) quietly masked roughly 12 billion Reichsmarks in off-the-books military spending.

After the 1938 Anschluss, the Nazis seized about 90 tons of Austrian central bank gold, plus around 15 tons of private gold—fueling imports when the Reichsmark couldn’t.

By 1944, roughly 12 million abducted forced laborers made up about one-quarter of Germany’s workforce, keeping war production alive when the “math” stopped working.

Along the way, you’ll see:
✅ How Hjalmar Schacht engineered “money creation that didn’t look like money creation”
✅ How banks were pressured into becoming pipelines for war finance
✅ How price controls and repression masked inflation and shortages
✅ Why “autarky” (self-sufficiency) was really conquest planning
✅ How looting from central banks, occupied states, and Jewish families became a core war funding stream
✅ Why the system began cracking by January 1939—before WWII even started
✅ What it means when a state can print credit… but can’t print oil, rubber, or iron ore

This isn’t just a history of numbers—it’s a step-by-step map of how an economy can look like it’s recovering while it’s actually being hollowed out from the inside.

If you’ve ever wondered how Nazi Germany financed rearmament while “broke,” the answer is ugly: hidden debt + coercion + theft + slavery—and a strategy that only worked as long as the Reich kept expanding.

📌 Watch to the end for the moment the illusion finally collapses—and why “Hitler’s war money” didn’t shatter like glass… it failed like a dam.

Keywords / topics: Nazi economy, MEFO bills, Hjalmar Schacht, Reichsbank, Four-Year Plan, autarky, Anschluss gold, looted gold, forced labor, WWII rearmament, Nazi war finance, Germany 1933, shadow budgets, economic history

#History #WW2 #Economics #NaziGermany #FinancialHistory #Geopolitics #WarEconomy