Sixty-five years after the end of the Third Reich, historians are still trying to understand the appeal of National Socialism. Recent scholarship has detected in Nazism a set of values that many Germans came to accept in the 1930s and 1940s. Rather than simply offering a negative story of a homeland beset by political and racial enemies, Nazism offered an affirmative – if corrupted – ethos, based on racial superiority, economic and military might, and the promise of affluence. Many Germans were open to the principles of National Socialism and “thought themselves into” the Volksgemeinschaft because it offered them both ideological clarity and material comfort. Whatever appeals Germans found in the Nazis’ vision, however, it was still, to use Geoff Eley’s words, a “morally coercive” one, and understanding the relationship between free will and duress under National Socialism remains one of the tasks of the historian.

In this book I have attempted to study a site of both autonomy and coercion in the Third Reich, namely the marketplace. From 1933 to 1945 the regime forcibly steered the economy along ideological lines. Most obviously, it geared the country’s resources toward war and expelled Jews from German commercial life. But in more mundane areas – in the selling and consuming of everyday necessities and luxuries – the Nazis sought a balance between persuasion and force, between pragmatism and ideology. They tried to promote the positive features of consumer society, such as healthy competition and the wide provision of goods and services, and expel what they perceived to be its decadent features, such as overindulgence and ethnic heterogeneity. For business leaders and everyday Germans, the regime’s promotion of a racially and morally sanitized consumer capitalism translated into a certain freedom to pursue their own interests in the market. The Nazis’ regulations about advertising, merchandising, and retailing did not stop manufacturers from gauging public demand or consumers from responding to advertising campaigns.