Quality of life in the Greater Germanic Reich?

The Reich wins the war and stretches from the Urals to the English Channel like the novel Fatherland or the AANW TL.

What would the quality of life be like for German citizens?

What about those living in France, Norway, the Low Countries, the Balkans etc?
 
Basically three levels of "quality"
Germans/Aryans get excellent schools, medical care etc. Cities kept clean by untermenschen slaves. Vacations etc subsidized. The better off may have house slaves, for farmers whether in Reich or Ostlands you have slave laborers. For non-Aryans in occupied lands, they are obvious second class citizens, but life is OK as long as you follow the rules. The best of everything goes to the Reich, trade/currency deals make this favorable for the Germans.

For the untermenschen life is a variety of Hell. Those who have survived are little better than animals - some may be treated decently by their Aryan owners, for others their conditions make the worst of the antebellum south or Belgian Congo look good.
 

CalBear

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For Aryans it will be good, at least until the Nazis manage to crater the economy with their greed and lack of common sense.

In the Western Occupied zones things will be anywhere from tough to "the cow dies and we have sell one of the children so we don't starve" bad.

In the East, the plan was to kill anywhere between 50% and 85% of the population be working them to death (i.e. Extermination through labor) while leaving the rest as illiterate serfs whose lives are less valuable than a dog.
 
In the Western Occupied zones things will be anywhere from tough to "the cow dies and we have sell one of the children so we don't starve" bad.
It seems like the Reich truly only cared about German Aryans as opposed to their public goal of caring for the Aryan Race as a whole whether they be French or Belgian or Norwegian.
 
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CalBear

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They did and the didn't.

The reality was that the Reich was so damned inefficient and riddled with corruption from Goring on down that maintaining any sort of "middle class" lifestyle for the people of the "Inner Reich" required that the Occupied countries be bled dry to support the Reich's population. In theory the lands to the East, where the German "settlers" would go would provide the food and materials needed. That was doubtful, especially since the Nazis were bound and determined to kill six of ever seven Slavs in Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine leaving too few people to perform all the hard labor.
 
By 1942 Germany was basically a command economy, with nationalizations, government-led economic planning in the form of Göring's Four Year Plan, extensive government control over private industry, and laws against "economic sabotage" that gave the Reich the authority to seize property, goods, set prices, stop hoarding of goods, and carried the death penalty for those found guilty.

All the sensible economic experts of the Nazi regime, starting with Hjalmar Schatch, had been sidelined to give power over to the likes of Göring and Walther Funk, in fact one of the reasons Hitler chose Göring was the fact that he "knew next to nothing about Economics" which made him trustworthy in Hitler's paranoid worldview.

Thus we can expect a post-war victorious Germany to face many of the problems other command economies have faced in OTL - shortages, long breadlines, stagnating growth by the 1970s if not before, a slower pace of technological progress and poor resource allocation.

Sure, "Aryans" living in Germany or occupied Western Europe would enjoy good living standards, at the expense of the majority of surviving Slavs and other "untermenschen" who would be worked to death as slave labour in the mines and the fields. For these people life would be Hell on Earth.

But even for the "Aryans" the discomforts of a command economy will begin to pile up, and I can imagine something similar to OTL's perestroika.

Indeed, when members of the Eastern German and Soviet intelligentsia (diplomats, upper-rank bureaucrats, important Party members, etc.) visited West Germany, they were astonished to discover that life for the average lower-class German worker - with his Levi's jeans, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, full supermarkets selling all sorts of goods - was often equal if not better to their own as "upper-class" Soviet intelligentsia. This was one of the factors that prompted Gorbachev's reforms - discomfort from the upper echelons of power itself.

I can imagine something similar taking place in Germany by the 1970s and 1980s - with middle and upper rank "Aryans" leading a period of reforms to open up - if the regime doesn't collapse before that point.
 
Indeed, when members of the Eastern German and Soviet intelligentsia (diplomats, upper-rank bureaucrats, important Party members, etc.) visited West Germany, they were astonished to discover that life for the average lower-class German worker - with his Levi's jeans, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, full supermarkets selling all sorts of goods - was often equal if not better to their own as "upper-class" Soviet intelligentsia.
The quality of life was that bad in East Germany?
 
The quality of life was that bad in East Germany?
Well, they had jeans, but not Levi's which were a status symbol that had to be smuggled from the West. Their supermarkets had much less variety, home appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines were of lower quality and they had long waiting times to adquire them. The gap between living standards in Eastern and Western Europe grew larger after the 1970s, and the discomforts for the upper-echelons of Soviet leadership had piled up considerably so as to make the system intolerable even for them.

You may find this short tidbit interesting:
http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/
 
Well, they had jeans, but not Levi's which were a status symbol that had to be smuggled from the West. Their supermarkets had much less variety, home appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines were of lower quality and they had long waiting times to adquire them. The gap between living standards in Eastern and Western Europe grew larger after the 1970s, and the discomforts for the upper-echelons of Soviet leadership had piled up considerably so as to make the system intolerable even for them.

You may find this short tidbit interesting:
http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/
I wonder what the Politburo's reaction (or Stalin's) would have been if they had taken the trip to the same grocery store as Yeltsin.
 
They did and the didn't.

The reality was that the Reich was so damned inefficient and riddled with corruption from Goring on down that maintaining any sort of "middle class" lifestyle for the people of the "Inner Reich" required that the Occupied countries be bled dry to support the Reich's population. In theory the lands to the East, where the German "settlers" would go would provide the food and materials needed. That was doubtful, especially since the Nazis were bound and determined to kill six of ever seven Slavs in Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine leaving too few people to perform all the hard labor.

Hersh in his 1941 series 'Pattern of Conquest' describes the early nazi economic policies in France, Belgium, & Netherlands. Currency manipulation, price controls, rationing, & priority to 'German' purchasers of goods. Hersh was not allowed to visit Poland or former Cezch territories, but the observations of western Europe make it clear things were going rapidly pear shaped.
 

CalBear

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The quality of life was that bad in East Germany?
You could LITERALLY trade a used pair of Levi's for a car.

Granted, unlike the excellent cars built in the BDR, those manufactured in the DDR were beyond crap, but that is about as eloquent of a statement as exists.

The German government invested DM 50,000 per person between 1990 and 1995. Depending on the measuring category, that is between $56-93,000 in 2016 dollars. Put another way, the TOTAL U.S. Nation Debt as of this moment is ~$60, 530 per person.

What had been the BDR (i.e.West Germany) spent as much per person to bring East Germany economy up to Western Standards as the debt the U.S. has accrued since 1836 (last, and only, time the U.S. was actually debt free was in 1835). Note that this does NOT include the almost insane costs of cleaning up the environmental damage, once all other costs, for the period of 1990 to 2014 ($1.5-2.5T) are rolled in ,the figure is remarkably close to the German Nation Debt of $2.3T.

East Germany was a rat hole run by a murderous regime. The Stasi made the KGB look like Scotland Yard.
 

CalBear

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How many did the East German government actually imprison/kill?
Imprison?

The whole country was a prison. There was secret policeman/paid informer for every 166 residents of the Country (as a comparative the Gestapo had one for every 2,000 and the KGB one for every 5,800). When the Wall fell, a mob attacked Stasi HQ. The burned ONE BILLION documents from the files, that represented 5% of the total records. Think about that. The entire population of the DDR was ~16 million.

The official records indicate around 4,400 executions for political crimes. This doesn't begin to consider the number of suicides or early deaths caused by Stasi actions and from the knowledge that every word you uttered, every piece of paper you wrote on, had a good chance of being examined by the Stasi.
 

CaliGuy

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In the East, the plan was to kill anywhere between 50% and 85% of the population be working them to death (i.e. Extermination through labor) while leaving the rest as illiterate serfs whose lives are less valuable than a dog.
Question--how many Eastern Europeans did the Nazis want to keep alive but deport to territories east of the Ural Mountains?
 
It's unclear, but while the Nazis would have been OK with Russians taking themselves across the border, at least early on after the fighting ends, I doubt very much they would deport any. If they were going to spend any time and money on move Slavs around it would be to someplace where they would be worked to death, just exterminated, or enslaved. Costs of killing versus deporting, no comparison - and who spends any unnecessary money on Slavs in the Oslands.
 
Question--how many Eastern Europeans did the Nazis want to keep alive but deport to territories east of the Ural Mountains?
On Wiki in the table for the various nationalities and their percentages it states that 50 to 60% of Russians would be physically eliminated and another 15% deported past the Urals. Most likely the majority of those deported past the Urals (on foot or in unheated cattle cars) would die regardless due to starvation, exposure, or disease. The distance from Moscow to the Urals is 840 miles. The journey would not be pleasant, not factoring in the distance you have to travel once you get past the mountains.

I don't know whether or not there were also plans to deport past the Urals certain percentages of Lithuanians, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians etc in addition to those the Reich killed directly. I do know (CalBear can elaborate more on this) that the vast majority would be dealt with using "Extermination Through Labor" whether in Germany and the rest of the Greater Germanic Reich or in their home countries razing their own cities to the ground with their bare hands/basic tools.
 
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Imprison?

The whole country was a prison. There was secret policeman/paid informer for every 166 residents of the Country (as a comparative the Gestapo had one for every 2,000 and the KGB one for every 5,800). When the Wall fell, a mob attacked Stasi HQ. The burned ONE BILLION documents from the files, that represented 5% of the total records. Think about that. The entire population of the DDR was ~16 million.

The official records indicate around 4,400 executions for political crimes. This doesn't begin to consider the number of suicides or early deaths caused by Stasi actions and from the knowledge that every word you uttered, every piece of paper you wrote on, had a good chance of being examined by the Stasi.

Surviving STASI files continue to occupy 69 miles worth of shelf space. Even now, 29 years later, I'd bet only a fraction of this material has ever been examined.
 
Surviving STASI files continue to occupy 69 miles worth of shelf space. Even now, 29 years later, I'd bet only a fraction of this material has ever been examined.
Imagine what the Gestapo would be like if the Reich won the war and had to watch over a continent's worth of people.
 
The advantage the Gestapo/Reich would have over the Stasi is that the vast majority of the folks they had to control were slaves and expendable. In a Nazis win scenario, the Germans and other Aryans will have been living well and growing up under Nazi propaganda (proven correct by the victory) and the non-Untermenschen will almost always have a go along to get along attitude - this was the overall attiude among most occupied populations in the west early on until the tide began to turn. Of course, as in CalBear's T/L you'll have everyone under about 5 or 6 or even a little older being indoctrinated with fascist ideology as they grow up.

If the Nazi economy eventually implodes, like the USSR, things could change but until then the number of serious troublemakers in the west will be small and relatively easily dealt with. In the Ostlands, well you'll have Germans/Aryans who are heavily invested in the system, Untermenschen as illiterate slaves who can be executed at any time, and the dead.
 
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