En contra de lo que creen los propios alemanes, que se amparan en el pánico a la hiperinflación para su austerismo, fue la deflación posterior la que llevó a un tercio de los votantes a elegir a Hitler, como muestra este artículo del Economist:
A study of hyperinflation published earlier this year by the British historian Frederick Taylor has confirmed that the Nazis benefitted much more from deflation than they did from rising prices. Although hyperinflation played a role in destabilising German politics and weakening its institutions in the 1920s, it was deflation and depression during the early-1930s that "brought the toxic plant into fruit" in the form of Nazism.
The hyperinflation of 1923 created winners and losers among the middle classes (those with mortgages or debts found some relief while those with savings lost them). Middle-class votes subsequently splintered between several different parties, such as the Economic Party of the German Middle Class.
Yet virtually all classes lost out when Brüning’s government reacted to a projected fiscal deficit and gold outflows in 1930 with deflationary policies. The resulting economic tailspin hurt most groups in German society. Unemployment surged among both the working and middle classes. Businessmen went bankrupt. Civil servants were either laid off or had their wages repeatedly slashed. Creditors lost their savings and debtors had their homes repossessed when the banking system collapsed in 1931. The experience of deflation made Hitler’s promises to conquer unemployment and stabilise prices by any means necessary attractive to a wide range of groups in German society, making it into a mass political movement across Germany for the first ever time in the early-1930s. The rest, as they say, is history.
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