Here's a fascinating book review in the Financial Times of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze. In his book, Dr. Tooze explores how economics defeated the Nazis:Read the whole thing!
Based on solid statistical foundations, his central and perhaps most counter-intuitive finding is that the Germany that went to war in 1939, steeled by six years of hectic rearmament, was no mighty industrial steamroller but a weak economy, starved of resources and foreign exchange and crippled by an oversized and utterly unproductive agricultural sector. Despite rapid industrialisation in the late-19th century, standards of living in 1938 Germany were only half those in the US and two-thirds of the UK’s.
Far from the juggernaut that lives on in popular imagery, Adolf Hitler’s country from the mid-1930s onwards was teetering on the brink of collapse. By 1940-41 it had reached crisis, failing to commandeer the steel and fuel to reverse the unfavourable and fast-degrading balance of power between its underfunded military and that of the Allied powers. For most of the period covered, from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to the regime’s downfall in 1945, Germany’s economic policy boiled down to scarcity management. It was this, Tooze contends, that dictated the Blitzkrieg nature of the 1940 offensive against the west. The state of Germany’s limited stocks of oil, coal, steel, manpower, ammunitions, vehicles and weapons created bottlenecks so it could not win a war of attrition against its better equipped opponents. Once forced into a defensive position after the attack on Russia ground to a halt in the winter of 1941, the war was lost.
If the economic managers of the Third Reich had any success at all, it was in ensuring that the conflict lasted four more years. This came at extraordinary human and moral costs. Occupied territories, mainly in the east, were ruthlessly looted for raw material, food and workforce - as the war effort climaxed, Germany had as many foreign workers on its soil as it does now. Civilians and prisoners of war were worked to death as Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine descended into competition for resources.
One of Tooze’s most fascinating conclusions is how much Hitler’s economic understanding was informed by the US. Roosevelt’s America was not only the ultimate enemy, dominated as the Nazis thought by Jewish capitalism, but a role model. More than France’s and Britain’s colonies, it was America’s vast territory and internal market that informed and, in his eyes, legitimised Hitler’s view that Germany could only prosper through the colonisation of the east.
This Lebensraum theory, whereby local populations would be driven away or eradicated as the American Indians had been, was the Nazi answer to America’s frontier mentality. In fact, many aspects of Hitler’s economic thinking were nothing but a distorted interpretation of the US economic model. Even the dictator’s irrational belief in the “power of the will” over adversity echoed the proverbial American optimism.
Hattip The New Economist
No comments:
Post a Comment