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Tooze's The Wages of Destruction is the definitive book on the Nazi economy. It is as gripping as these kinds of books get, but at the end, still an economic history, and therefore rather dry and specialized reading.
Germany post-WW1 was a country of middling prosperity by per capita measures, lacking raw resources, and dealing with the legacy of war reparations and the immediate post-war hyper-inflation. Through the 20s, the German finance ministry steered a moderate course, maintaining a balance trade, and relying on American loans to pay off war reparations to France and Britain, which were then used to pay Allied war loans. The system worked up until 1929, when the Great Depression hit and global financial markets tanked. Hitler came to power in 1933, at the same time as Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard, which preventing some kind of coherent international response to the Nazis in the early 1930s.
Nazi ideology, as expressed in Mein Kampf and Hitler's "Second Book" had a coherent economic policy. German should be the center of a continental system, revitalized on the basis of lebensraum in the Eastern frontier. It was an explicit recreation of the American frontier mythos, with Poles and Russians replacing Indians, along with extreme antisemitism. Starting in 1936, Hitler launched an ambitious rearmament campaign, with the goal of a European war sometime in the 1940s.
The Nazi economy of the 1930 was overheated and generally weak, failing to raise German standards of living. It lasted only though a series of desperate improvisations in financial markets. But it did succeed in increasing German military spending from 1% of GDP to 20% of GDP. The army that took over Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, and finally conquered France, was by no means qualitatively superior to the allies, but they were boldly lead and very lucky, particular in the Battle of France. 1940 was the high water-mark of the Nazi empire, as the gambit of Operation Barbarossa failed to knock Russia out of the war, and Pearl Harbor brought in American resources firmly on the Allied side. The burden of production in labor, steel, coal, oil, was 4 to 1 or greater. Nazi defeat was inevitable.
But that didn't mean that they couldn't drag the war out, and kill as many people as possible in the process. Hitler's empire turned to mass enslavement to get labor and resources out of conquered territory. Lacking the ability to feed everyone, the Hunger Plan proposed mass starvation for millions, starting with the Jews. If there's a villain to this book, it's Speer. Tooze demolishes Speer's self-serving memoirs, revealing him as a vulture rather than organizational genius, someone who took credit for production changes other had started, and who 'armament miracle' was little more than delusion. Speer's talents, if any, were exporting Nazi brutality from the concentration camps to the ordinary shop floor. He was absolutely complicit in the Holocaust, and made others complicit.
The Nazi economy failed entirely by 1944, done in by inflation and the deployment of the nation-wrecking force of the Allied strategic bomber offensive, which in the last months of the war essentially severed the industrial areas of the Ruhr valley from the rest of Germany. The balance of powers, in the end, was as it was in the beginning. Germany against the world, and Germany simply not wealthy enough to defeat the entire world.
I was hoping for more stories of Nazi procurement fuckups, as in this amazing series on the Amerika bomber program and related inability to make an actual heavy bomber. According to some historians who I trust, there were lots of examples of vaunted Nazi engineering which simply didn't work: interleaved wheels on their heavy tanks made track repair a multi-hour nightmare, uniforms which looked great in photos but were too hot in summer and too cold in winter, resources diverted to super-heavy tanks, experimental rifles, and superweapons like the V-2 which lacked the ability to shape the direction of the war. Tooze glances at these, but doesn't get in to the metal shavings of machining a panzer drive train.
This is a great book. I'm glad I read it, and that's on sale nowish. I don't know who else should read it.
Germany post-WW1 was a country of middling prosperity by per capita measures, lacking raw resources, and dealing with the legacy of war reparations and the immediate post-war hyper-inflation. Through the 20s, the German finance ministry steered a moderate course, maintaining a balance trade, and relying on American loans to pay off war reparations to France and Britain, which were then used to pay Allied war loans. The system worked up until 1929, when the Great Depression hit and global financial markets tanked. Hitler came to power in 1933, at the same time as Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard, which preventing some kind of coherent international response to the Nazis in the early 1930s.
Nazi ideology, as expressed in Mein Kampf and Hitler's "Second Book" had a coherent economic policy. German should be the center of a continental system, revitalized on the basis of lebensraum in the Eastern frontier. It was an explicit recreation of the American frontier mythos, with Poles and Russians replacing Indians, along with extreme antisemitism. Starting in 1936, Hitler launched an ambitious rearmament campaign, with the goal of a European war sometime in the 1940s.
The Nazi economy of the 1930 was overheated and generally weak, failing to raise German standards of living. It lasted only though a series of desperate improvisations in financial markets. But it did succeed in increasing German military spending from 1% of GDP to 20% of GDP. The army that took over Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, and finally conquered France, was by no means qualitatively superior to the allies, but they were boldly lead and very lucky, particular in the Battle of France. 1940 was the high water-mark of the Nazi empire, as the gambit of Operation Barbarossa failed to knock Russia out of the war, and Pearl Harbor brought in American resources firmly on the Allied side. The burden of production in labor, steel, coal, oil, was 4 to 1 or greater. Nazi defeat was inevitable.
But that didn't mean that they couldn't drag the war out, and kill as many people as possible in the process. Hitler's empire turned to mass enslavement to get labor and resources out of conquered territory. Lacking the ability to feed everyone, the Hunger Plan proposed mass starvation for millions, starting with the Jews. If there's a villain to this book, it's Speer. Tooze demolishes Speer's self-serving memoirs, revealing him as a vulture rather than organizational genius, someone who took credit for production changes other had started, and who 'armament miracle' was little more than delusion. Speer's talents, if any, were exporting Nazi brutality from the concentration camps to the ordinary shop floor. He was absolutely complicit in the Holocaust, and made others complicit.
The Nazi economy failed entirely by 1944, done in by inflation and the deployment of the nation-wrecking force of the Allied strategic bomber offensive, which in the last months of the war essentially severed the industrial areas of the Ruhr valley from the rest of Germany. The balance of powers, in the end, was as it was in the beginning. Germany against the world, and Germany simply not wealthy enough to defeat the entire world.
I was hoping for more stories of Nazi procurement fuckups, as in this amazing series on the Amerika bomber program and related inability to make an actual heavy bomber. According to some historians who I trust, there were lots of examples of vaunted Nazi engineering which simply didn't work: interleaved wheels on their heavy tanks made track repair a multi-hour nightmare, uniforms which looked great in photos but were too hot in summer and too cold in winter, resources diverted to super-heavy tanks, experimental rifles, and superweapons like the V-2 which lacked the ability to shape the direction of the war. Tooze glances at these, but doesn't get in to the metal shavings of machining a panzer drive train.
This is a great book. I'm glad I read it, and that's on sale nowish. I don't know who else should read it.