Yes: Tooze disagrees with these people. And he proves his case with arguments and calculations based on detailed German records that they either did not have access to or bother to use.
That's the problem, if you actually read the footnotes of the works that Overy cites that Tooze criticizes him for, he doesn't rely on them unconditionally and raises all of the same concerns that Tooze does, which is why he doesn't says they shouldn't be taken as gospel, which Tooze accuses him of doing! And what new sources did Tooze bring to the table? Have you read the latest Overy book on Goering and his influence on the German economy? Its more recent than Tooze's book, which gives him access to all of the recent material.
Firstly, this is your interpretation. I do not trust you to be correct, and if you were, there is no reason to accept that the source you refer to should automatically over-rule Tooze. One would have to know what its argument was and what its sources were - in particular whether it actually made use of the archival material that Tooze is regarded as pioneering.
Regarded by whom as pioneering? Tooze because he says so?
I really don't think that you understand how history is researched. It's often the case that as new sources are used the analysis changes, and you can't (intelligently) contradict this by saying "But the older books don't say that!"
The problem is that the criticisms that Tooze raises of Overy's work are belied by reading what Overy actually is saying. Tooze claims that Overy overly relies on specific sources which are flawed, yet when reading Overy he says that those very sources are flawed and shouldn't be taken as definitive. Its not that older books aren't flawed in their own ways, but rather that the criticisms that Tooze relies on are at best straw mans of that older work, if not outright misrepresentations. (Edit: Wagenfuhr's numbers are the source the Tooze criticizes, which is what Overy also says)
Also what new sources did Tooze use exactly?
Edit:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3985296
I wish I had access to the whole review, but the part that is visible supports part of my point that Tooze is rehashing previously proven points, but the preview cuts off before getting into production during the war.
Here is another:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20457241
"The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze"
Review by: Harold James Central European History, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 366-371
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association
Sorry about the disjointedness of the posting, I copied relevant parts from a PDF, which does not copy and paste well.
...
Some of the repeated claims to novelty look a little contrived. There is by now a substantial industrydevoted to the dismantling of Albert Speer's self serving account of his role in the Nazi state, and even the late Joachim Fest, who helped Speer put together his exculpation, had second thoughts andacknowledged thathe had been duped by Speer. Other points are also simply not all that novel: in one instance,Tooze explains carefully and correctly that there were already signs of cyclical economic recovery in the second half of 1932, in other words before Hitler took power and could lay claim to an economic miracle. Tooze likes this point so much that he tells us that "This is a crucial point because it contradicts all subsequent portrayals of the German economy under National Socialism" (p. 31). All subsequent portrayals? Actually, buried in a footnote on page 698 it becomes clear that quite a number of accounts have made exactly this case.
The underlined happens a bit in his writings; Tooze likes to make bold claims like this that his own footnotes don't exactly back up.
...
After all the rubble from the historiographical demolition settles, an interpretation is left that looks much closer to the conventional wisdom of the 1930s, namely that Hitler was directing a powerful and efficient machine toward com plete mobilization forwar. Even Hitler's oddest strategic gambles, notably the invasion of the Soviet Union, had an underlying logic. To this interpretation, though, Tooze adds an odd twist that is not at all part of any conventional wisdom:that the underlying problem was simply that Germany was very poor at the outset of Hitler's effort.
The central part of Tooze's argument rests on his often-repeated statement that Germany in the 1930s was not a powerful industrial economy, but rather a poor state, profoundly lagging behind the United States and more on the developmental level of "modern Iran or South Africa" (p. xxiii), a "European economy of modest resources" (p. 461). "Clearly, in Hitler's Germany only a small minority of the population lived in circumstances which we today would describe as comfortable" (p. 143). This risks being profoundly ahistorical, especially when the picture of the United States that is conjured up as a contrast is that of modern, twenty-first century American consumerist prosperity.The real United States of the 1930s was that of the dustbowl, the Depression, and extreme poverty.Obviously, if modern Iran could somehow be transported back in time on a magic historical flying carpet to the middle of the twentieth century, it would have been the dominant superpower. There are also simply factual problems in the attempt to shrink Germany's economic position. Tooze goes on to make a contrast between German housing and the "facilities taken forgranted in the United States, such as separate bathroom and kitchen, indoor toilet, and runningwater." In fact, in 1930, only fifty-one percent of American households had inside flush toilets (in 1920, the proportion had only been twentypercent). Another anachronistic flavor is given in the comparative depiction of military potential through the problematical use of an artificial statistical currency (1990 U.S. PPP or Purchasing Power Parity dollars, a concept that few of Tooze's readers will understand):it overstates the relative power potential of poorer societies (such as those of eastern Europe or the Soviet Union) because services are very cheap there,but clearly form an important part of an estimation of purchasing power. PPP tells us little about the capacity to buy weapons or steel.
This last is a very important part of the problem of Tooze's analysis, as he makes statements out the German economy based on PPP, which is not the best tool to compare the strength of the different economy. He also cherry picks some stats to compare that favor his thesis and neglects to mention; Tooze loves to mention steel but neglects other items like Aluminum.
Some aspects of the story are left out in Tooze's account, sometimes rather oddly, because they might actually have strengthened his case, in other instances, however,because they fit uncomfortably with the overall thesis.Having made the argument thatsteel is at the center of the Nazi economic story,it is surprising that there isn't more discussion not just of the problems of access to iron ore and coking coal, but also to the metal ores needed for the production of specialty steel required for many engineering and military purposes. There is one reference (p. 312) to General Brauchitsch's complaint in 1939 that the inadequacy of rations of nonferrous metals amounted to a "liquidation of the army's rearmament effort," and another quotation in 1941 of General Thomas's fear that the invasion of the Soviet Union would lead to Germany losing its only source of manganese (p. 438). But otherwise the crucial story of steel alloys and more generally of nonferrous metals is left untold: there is no mention at all (as far as I can see) of wolfram. Yet these were vital necessities for the armaments economy, which could only be imported and for which Germany needed foreign exchange or gold.
Here again, Tooze is remarkably silent. Though there is a good deal of discussion of theReichsbank's (central bank's) gold and foreign exchange position in the 1930s and much reference to anti-inflationarypolicy during the war, the wartime acquisition of looted gold and its use (via Switzerland and partly also Sweden) for obtaining foreign currency and thus the ability to buy metal ores is not referred to at all. One of themost horrifying links between economics and the Holocaust is thus passed over, and SS-Captain Bruno Melmer (who made the deliveries of gold extracted from the dead and livingmouths of the victims of Germany's racialwar) makes no appearance in Tooze's pages. Neither is there any discussion of another episode that is important for the understanding of the relation of economic issues and the intensificationof the regime'smurderous persecution of Jews, and thathas been extensively docu mented by Yehuda Bauer and by Thomas Sandkiihler and Bettina Zeugin: the internment of wealthy West European Jews in special concentration camps (most notably Bergen Belsen) away from the eastern killing fields, where they might be used to extract ransoms from relatives in Britain or the United States. Again the most obvious German motive was the necessity of acquiring foreign exchange to pay for strategic imports.With Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war, this exercise became much harder, and Germany embarked on the whole sale annihilation of west European Jewry. Here was another occasion on which December 1941 constituted the fulcrum of the war.
Other surprising absences include the following: In the course of a narration of the political intrigues that allowed Hitler to consolidate power in the early months of 1933, we are not told about the Reichstag fire and how the subsequent banning of the communist party allowed the Nazis to control parliament. There is a detailed discussion of the economic gains that theAnschluss ofAustria brought (not enough to improveGermany's position), but no equivalent analysis of the very substantial contribution of the Czech economy after March 1939, with its prominent armaments sector. This omission makes it possible for Tooze to analyze a "severe setback toGermany's armaments effort" in the summer of 1939, which we are told is "fully revealed for the first time in this chapter" (p. 317). The discussion of the agrarian Nazis and their role is well handled, but there is no equivalent analysis of the Mittelstand Nazis, such as Otto Ohlendorf, or of the SS's attempts to out flank Speer and build up a socialist economy rather than the private-public partnership on which Speer relied.The narrating of these kinds of conflict was a central part of most efforts to depict internal tensions as a fundamental source of inefficiency in the German political and military regime. The controversial issue of how far in the last years of the war some parts of the German economy were preparing for a post-Nazi world is not tackled either, presumably because it would not fit either with the title or the theme of the Nazi economy as just another "European economy of modest resources."
And here we have my main point: Tooze neglects the major administrative problems of the Nazi state, which prevented production from being higher. Looking at specific sectors of the economy like the aero industry, we see how badly mismanagement reduced production; between 1939-41 production stagnated despite increases in resources, yet with the same raw materials and manpower Germany improved production 4-fold between 1942-4. With no addition of aluminum, steel, or other nonferrous metals Germany was able to hugely improve efficiency and boost output dramatically. Why? Udet committed suicide in late 1941, which meant Milch took over and improved everything to do with aircraft, while Göring was pushed out of economic management and was replaced by Albert Speer, who, as part of his new duties, centralized the economy under his command, something that had not yet been achieved prior to 1942; the resulting elimination of competing bureaucracies and the increase in authority over the economy ironed out tremendous problems in efficiency that help back production from 1937.
