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 Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20457241 .
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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.
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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.
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."
