The effect on the West German economy was electric. Wallich wrote: “The spirit of the country changed overnight. The gray, hungry, dead-looking figures wandering about the streets in their everlasting search for food came to life” (p. 71).
Shops on Monday, June 21, were filled with goods as people realized that the money they sold them for would be worth much more than the old money. Walter Heller wrote that the reforms “quickly reestablished money as the preferred medium of exchange and monetary incentives as the prime mover of economic activity” (p. 215).
Absenteeism also plummeted. In May 1948 workers had stayed away from their jobs for an average of 9.5 hours per week, partly because the money they worked for was not worth much and partly because they were out foraging or bartering for money. By October average absenteeism was down to 4.2 hours per week. In June 1948 the bizonal index of industrial production was at only 51 percent of its 1936 level; by December the index had risen to 78 percent. In other words, industrial production had increased by more than 50 percent.
Output continued to grow by leaps and bounds after 1948. By 1958 industrial production was more than four times its annual rate for the six months in 1948 preceding currency reform. Industrial production per capital was more than three times as high. East Germany’s communist economy, by contrast, stagnated.
Because Erhard’s ideas had worked, the first chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, appointed him Germany’s first minister of economic affairs. He held that post until 1963 when he became chancellor himself, a post he held until 1966.