Is this true?

In a word, no.

The net result of Hitler's war was the dismemberment and division of Germany, the loss of sizable territories, and sizable reparation payments. Additionally, there is a psychic scar that German crimes that lays upon German politics and identity.

It is tempting to look back on the West German Wirtshchaftswunder and see it as a legacy of Hitler. After all, the signature export product of the resurgent German export economy, the VW Beetle, was initially the KdF-Wagen, a proposed Nazi attempt to provide cheap cars for the working man. But this is deceptive. There were legacies of the Third Reich that did play a role in Germany' postwar development. Despite Allied bombing and land invasion, Germany ended the war with more machine tools than it began and Nazi economic policy led many German firms to reinvest profits into their own businesses. The wartime mobilization trained millions of Germans in technical matters, which helped them in the postwar period.

But the resurgent economy was not a foregone conclusion after 1945. One of the reasons why West German industrial exports were able to reestablish themselves was that Marshall Plan aid eased key infrastructure bottlenecks. By the same token, France's rapprochement with Germany helped its steel industry get back on track. These policies were not foregone conclusions in the postwar period; many policymakers expected the Americans to withdraw from Europe and few expected one of Germany's victims, France, to push for German economic reintegration into Europe. In the case of the future Volkswagen, the KdF factory survived partly due to Allied occupation initiatives. This was part of a broader tack of the Western allies to backpeddle on German reparations as the Cold War set in.

Given the depth of anti-German sentiment among all the Allied powers, the somewhat "soft" occupation in the West was a surprise. The Soviet occupation was what most contemporaneous observers expected from all the occupiers with wholesale expropriation of German industrial plant. Not surprisingly, this had a deleterious impact on the East German economy and it was not until the mid to late 1950s that living standards within the GDR approached the 1938 benchmark.

Not that the 1930s were anything for the average German to brag about. Although Hitler had more or less reduced unemployment, the side-effect of a rearmament-driven economy on scale seldom seen in peacetime among capitalist economies. Hitler wanted a large army as quick as possible, and he did get it. But at a huge price. To call German finances in 1938 precarious would be too generous. The Third Reich used a number of "creative" accounting practices to budget for its rearmament. The average German might not have seen his taxes increase much, but wages largely fell flat or silently depreciated. Import-export controls meant that access to consumer goods fell steadily through the 1930s. While some Germans benefited from rearmament and there were non-material reasons for Germans to support it (nationalism, destroying the Versailles system, national pride, etc.), the Third Reich's economic recovery offered very little in material terms to the average German. One of several reasons why a post-Hitler Nazism gained little ground among the West German public was that West Germany delivered on promises of prosperity.

Moreover, the legacy of Hitler and his war cast a long shadow on this prosperity. Germany was a major economic power before Hitler and remained one even with the reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty. German engineering and science had a sound base and its educational system had few peers. For all the popular image of Nazi super-science, the Third Reich probably impeded German scientific development. Not only was there a brain-drain of intellectuals opposed to Nazism (although this has been exaggerated a little in popular memory), reestablishing German scientific and research institutes was a challenge in the postwar years. Something like a Franco-German economic rapprochement was not entirely unthinkable before Hitler, but the memory of Nazism has been far more durable in this relationship than either the Franco-Prussian War or WWI. There are other ways the memory of Nazism cast a baleful legacy. German political culture both before and after reunification cannot be too forceful and functions best as a junior partner to a stronger ally. Some wags have termed postwar Germany as a "paradise of mediocrity" in which Germans must hew to a humble image lest other Europeans think they are simply awaiting their next Hitler. This caricature goes too far and postwar German rejection of Hitler does have a certain smug, self-satisfied tone to it.

The long and the short of it it Hitler left little for Germans in the postwar period. His modernization of the country was economically unhelpful and unsustainable. The structures of the postwar recovery were present before Hitler took power and were in danger of being erased by the Allied powers because of the nature and scale of Hitler's war. There was little of a direct legacy of the Third Reich but rubble and shame.