In the fall of 1939, Germany witnessed a wave of panic buying. With the Nazi invasion of Poland, consumers began hoarding brand-name products and clearing store racks in the hope that these goods would retain some value if the currency collapsed. This “shopping psychosis,” as reported by the Society for Consumer Research, manifested itself in unexpected ways. Not only were there runs on stores in cities, but also farmers, who did not typically buy luxury goods, were purchasing one or even two grand pianos so that they could possess something of material value.

This frenzy was not a sudden expression of anxiety with the onset of war. Rather, it was the culmination of years of economic insecurity that had accompanied the implementation of the Four Year Plan for military readiness in 1936. If Germans were already on a war footing, however, they recognized after the invasion of Poland that their lives as consumers would inexorably change. The same can be said of producers. While the prior years had seen the increased regulation of consumer goods and the advertising of them, market professionals understood that war demanded a rethinking of selling strategies, now based even less on private business aims and more on supporting the military effort. This chapter focuses on the tense interrelationship between war, state ideology, commerce, and consumption. It first looks at the regime’s promotion and regulation of buying and selling during wartime. It then considers the challenges companies faced as they tried to adhere to the new demands that they no longer serve their own interests but those of the state. As we will see, despite a shrinking of the civilian economy, business elites continued the project of defining, understanding, and selling to the consumer, but they did so under the starker demands that they adhere to a wartime morality. A cluster of obligations – serving the state, serving the racial community, and serving the war – meant that companies had to curtail their own inclinations to address their private business needs first. Moreover, as World War II proceeded, shortages limited the range of marketing strategies, and the semiautonomy of economic elites was increasingly challenged, as they could not escape being drawn into the more violent aims of the regime. In short, after 1939 the contradictions inherent in the Nazi marketplace proved irreconcilable: the regime could not make war, engineer a new market sensibility, and provide rich consumer opportunities at the same time.