Various critics, mainly at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, charged Parsons with the inability to understand social change and with normative determinism. This criticism has been aptly contradicted in the 1980s. However, such recent rehabilitation of Parsons's ability to analyse conflict in society, epitomized by his views on National Socialism, still misses out on some important issues. One is that, visible even in the guise of the abstract formulations of The Social System, he not only used National Socialism as a subject of historical reference, but also developed a sociology of National Socialism in the 1940s. In it, systems theory addressed the practical problems of the day and attempted to contribute to their solutions by means of social-science analysis. An article published in 1945 was an obvious occasion where he made visible how his sociology of Nazism could contribute to a policy programme for the post-war democratization of Germany. That this involved economic integration of Europe as a most desirable strategy he explained in a number of memoranda written in 1945 for a government agency. These have not been analysed hitherto. In this context of economic planning for peace he devised some cogent suggestions that are strikingly similar to the ideas which subsequently inspired the Marshall Plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]