In 1932, unemployment accounted for 30 percent of the workforce. By 1936, full employment was restored. However, because of the Nazis' repression of labor, real wages did not increase, and unlike Sweden, practically all the improvement was due to the fiscal stimulus of armaments. As Adam Tooze has shown, the much-touted work-creation programs of the Nazis were a propaganda sideshow. What really made the economy boom was the drive toward total war. As Keynes noted with regret in 1940, "It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment which would prove my case—except in war conditions."

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 533