The last decade has seen the publication of a growing body of research on the history of consumption, consumer cultures, and the politics of consumption in Germany since the nineteenth century. Within this literature, there has been a general consensus that Nazi Germany was hardly a consumer paradise. Many scholars have argued that “military Keynesianism” lifted the German economy from the Depression and restored full employment by the mid-1930s, but consumption levels and standards of living in Germany still lagged behind those in the United States and Britain during the same period. The regime's war preparations and autarkic economic policies resulted in shortages of consumer goods by the mid-1930s, particularly imported luxury goods. Sporadic shortfalls of a variety of foodstuffs and clothing materials only grew worse under the Four-Year Plan thereafter.

If they were not targets of the Nazis, ordinary Germans were “enticed” to support the Nazi state despite such deprivations by promises of “virtual” consumption in the future, as embodied, for example, in the Volkswagen that Hitler promised to average consumers. An influx of looted goods from occupied Europe eased the situation somewhat during the first years of the war, but by 1943, Germans faced constant shortages that grew steadily worse and led consumers to rely increasingly on black markets even before the regime's collapse in 1945.

Pamela Swett's deeply researched and beautifully illustrated study supplements the historiography summarized above by focusing on both the advertising industry and commercial culture, “the territory that mediates between production and consumption” (5), the day-to-day world of buying and selling in Nazi Germany. Her book also offers well-supported and careful correctives to the previous literature, arguing that while durable goods remained generally out of reach for most Germans during this period, many nondurable products and brands continued to be produced, and did so later than has been previously assumed. The advertising industry adapted and survived well for most of the period, even though the industry had “Jewish” associations and often strove to push products for which the regime was actually trying to suppress consumer demand. In the process, both advertising and the world of age-old and trusted brands helped support the regime, articulating a vision of consumption that was well aligned with the Volksgemeinschaft.

Full-service advertising agencies, though common in the United States, were not able to establish themselves widely in Weimar Germany and most left rapidly after 1933. Advertising was generally created in-house by German firms and often supported by networks of traveling sales representatives. Joseph Goebbels created a Werberat (Advertising Council) to oversee the industry after 1933, but Swett finds that little policing by this agency “from above” was necessary. Instead, “the business community [came] to National Socialism largely on its own” (251), self-policing its own images and content, and cooperating readily with the Gleichschaltung of both management personnel and individual firms' choices of trade partners. Companies ranging from Mercedes Benz to Osram lightbulbs were eager to sign contracts with party agencies and the military, and linked themselves in their advertising to Nazi projects that were useful for their brands, such as the autobahn and mass electrification.

Some of the most interesting sources Swett uses come from traveling sales representatives from a number of firms, whose reports back to headquarters demonstrate how personal relationships remained crucial to buying and selling under the Four-Year Plan. These salesmen were not merely reporters of grass-roots commercial culture, however. Swett shows that they sometimes acted as “contacts, advisors, and scouts for new owners” (179) in the process of the forced “Aryanization” of Jewish-owned businesses across Germany. While rationing and shortages undoubtedly affected some kinds of consumption, particularly the consumption of foodstuffs, Swett argues that other sectors and products benefited from Nazi policies (e.g., mass electrification), or continued to produce and sell well into the war years. The advertising industry experimented with new media “platforms” for advertisements, including radio and—after radio ads were banned by Goebbels—short films and slides.

In the first years of World War II, advertising could be used to “present the war to Germans in an easily digestible way” (193), as shown in a series of ads for Nivea skin cream presented as “letters” to husbands in the military and showing photos of sunbathing wives and children. But long after their products were in short supply or largely unavailable, the Werberat continued to support ad campaigns from firms that tried to maintain brand awareness among consumers, even when their goods were no longer on shelves. Advertising was only really throttled back in 1943, and many types of ads were banned in 1944. Swett concludes that the virtual disappearance of brands and ads in the end stages of the war benefitted firms over the long run, in fact. Their absence from the public eye during the most brutal period of the regime's rule meant that postwar consumers did not associate them with the Nazis. Instead, the rapid reappearance of brands like Nivea, Bahlsen, Salamander shoes, Mercedes Benz, and BMW after 1945 was welcomed as a sign of peacetime and the resumption of “normal” consumer culture by West Germans, who quickly returned to brands they had known and trusted long before 1933.

Selling under the Swastika demonstrates that the collapse of the consumer market after 1943 was thus “instrumental to the postwar rehabilitation of Germany's consumer goods industries” (14). Swett carefully elucidates the ways in which the social contract embodied in the West German “economic miracle” had prewar roots, showing how the advertising industry and the brands that flourished in West Germany had reinvented and modernized themselves during the Third Reich. After 1945, “commercial culture was ready to step forward in postwar Germany as a unifying project that could take the place of a disgraced political culture” (14). This study is a provocative and useful addition to the literature on Nazi Germany that should also be welcomed by those who study West Germany's political and consumer cultures.