The Total War Economy of the Third Reich
My Chicago Boyz fellow blogger, Dan from Madison, posted up on an important book – an economic history of Nazi Germany during WWII by Adam Tooze entitled The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
“Book Review – The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy”
….I have just finished up a book by Adam Tooze called The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
This book is simply outstanding. The beginning portions in particular are very dense and will require a basic understanding of economics to comprehend. I had to re-read several portions, especially in the first two hundred pages. Carl, who recommended the book to me, is an expert in economics and admitted to me that he even had to re-
read portions. That aside, after you immerse yourself in this book you are in for a real treat and will learn a lot.
Too many times students of WW2 like myself tend to think of things happening in a vacuum. As an example, I knew that the Germans stormed across Europe in 1939 and 1940, but gave very little thought that this massive army didn’t just “appear”. The German economy had to be managed very effectively for them to be competitive on the world stage.
It was fascinating how the German economic minds managed their production in the thirties, all the while trying to escape from under their war reparations. In detail it is discussed how these minds bashed each other on how to manage their currency, trade, and raw materials.
Also interesting are many predictions by those close in Hitler’s circle of people that once the US got into the war on the side of the Allies all was lost. Germany simply could not produce enough of everything for long enough. After reading this book I can say with relative certainty that even if D-Day had failed, eventually the Allies would have prevailed, simply from the numbers involved. Not to mention Berlin would have been nuked, but that is certainly grist for another post.
Albert Speer, who for a time when he enjoyed Hitler’s favor as the Reichsminister for Armaments and War Production, was able to rationalize the crazy-quilt, quasi-planned, neo-autarkic Nazi economy by pushing decentralization (“industrial self-responsibility”) in the face of opposition by ambitious rivals (like Sauckel), corrupt gauleiters, the SS leadership and Nazi radicals. Such was Speer’s organizational abilities and skill at bureaucratic intrigue that Nazi Germany was actually becoming more industrially productive in the face of Allied bombing and invasion – to a point. Eventually, as Speer realized, critical resources such as wolframite, chromium and oil would simply become unavailable and the war machine would have come to a sudden, screeching, halt in late 1945, early 1946 at the latest, regardless of the progress of the Allied armies.
Economic strength and efficiency does not predetermine victory in war but the longer the war, the greater the weight economic power will have on the outcome.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Thanks for the shoutout Zen. You will enjoy the book. I would send you mine but it is going to be part of my permanent collection, a place that many authors would like to have but few attain. 😉
June 13th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
I ordered it yesterday.
Another way to look at Spears achievement is this. The Nazi economy was so out of whack, due its own disorganization, that even in the face of massive Allied bombing, there was lots of room for improvement.
One of the great what-ifs is this: What if Hitler had decided early and firmly to mobilize the Nazi economy for a long war? What if Speer’s 1942-45 reforms had begun in 1938 or 1939? A longer, harder war for the Allies, possibly a defeat for the Allies.
Probably it ends up with a sustained nuclear war against Germany by the USAF in the late 1940s, using B-36 bombers based in Iceland — a mirror image of the island-based nuclear attack on Japan with B-29s.
June 14th, 2008 at 12:11 am
As an interesting aside, Tooze takes the Speers miracle economy "myth", as he calls it, apart. You are in for a good read, Lex.
June 14th, 2008 at 5:05 am
I’m fairly certain, had the Nazis managed to last a few more months, that we would have rained atomic bombs on German cities in greater numbers than we had used on Japan – to the acclamation of most of Europe.
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I’m definitely buying a copy of Tooze, thanks for highlighting it Dan!
June 14th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
I agree that we would have nuked them. I have nothing to back me up here, but I would guess that Berlin would have been first, to take out the leadership, then offer the separate generals who were left scattered about surrender terms.
June 14th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
There is zero reason to think we would not have nuked Germany. That is the whole reason we built it — to get it before they did.
There is a childish Leftist notion afoot which you sometimes see, suggesting that we only used The Bomb on Japan because American leadership was supposedly racist and we therefore would not have dropped it on white people such as the Germans Given what we did do to Germany, with conventional bombs, that is pretty funny. Dresden was apparently a gesture of intra-caucasian solidarity. More seriously, the hatred felt for the Germans during World War II — justified hatred, really — it not fully appreciated by most people who now opine about the war. Hundreds of millions of people would have wept tears of joy if the USAAF had put a nuke on Berlin.