In a reference work, Adam Tooze attempts to reread the history of IIIe Reich – from the fight against unemployment to the genocide of the Jews – through the prism of the economy. It shows that the armament effort and the war effort were financed by taxation, forced savings and the exploitation of occupied territories in Europe.
When it was published in English and German, in 2006 and 2007 respectively, the very voluminous work by the British historian Adam Tooze sparked praise and some debate. Its recent publication in French has attracted less attention, perhaps because the numerous references and ideas that the author wants to challenge are less familiar to the French-speaking public, including historians. Neither the economic history of IIIe Reich, nor military history, have made the ordinary French debates on Nazism.
Trained at Cambridge, now a professor at Yale University, Adam Tooze carried out an ambitious project: not only to write a complete and detailed economic history of Nazi Germany – and this project was greatly welcome – but also , more problematically, reread the entire history of IIIe Reich (notably its diplomatic and social history, as well as the Shoah) through the prism of economics. Insisting from the outset on the idea – hammered out throughout the book – that our current perception of the German economy distorts our historical knowledge, he states straight away:
“ The fundamental thesis of this book, perhaps the most radical, is that these interrelated movements in our historical perception require a recasting of the history of IIIe Reich, which has the disturbing effect of making the history of Nazism more intelligible, in truth mysteriously contemporary, and at the same time putting its fundamental ideological irrationality into even greater relief. Economic history sheds new light on both the motives for Hitler’s aggression and the reasons for its failure – its inevitable failure » (p. 21).
However, this assertion is partly refuted in the book itself, which offers in-depth, extremely detailed and often brilliant analyzes which suggest that the economic choices which determined Nazi policy were rational, pursuing a precise objective.
The American obsession
This objective is defined from the outset by Adam Tooze who highlights not My Kampfbut Hitler’s second book, written in 1928 and which remained unpublished until 2003. In this text, the future chancellor displays his obsessions with the United States, first and foremost. His anti-Semitism and his anti-Bolshevism thus seem to fade into the background. Hitler, if we follow Tooze, wanted Germany to develop the same economic power as the United States, and thus be able to double the standard of living of its inhabitants to reach that of its rival. This goal was not to be achieved so much by rapid industrial development as by the modernization of agriculture. Tooze uses the beautiful statistical series developed, he explains, by the Weimar Republic, to emphasize German backwardness, or at least the delay accumulated since the end of the First World War. German agriculture, in particular, was not very productive and the great industrial successes described at length, such as that of the chemical trust GI Farben, with its 200,000 jobs, masked low productivity in the economy in general. Hitler would therefore have wanted to create a gigantic German internal market.
This obsession with the United States, rather than Britain and its maritime empire, is not really demonstrated in the book, except through a series of coincidences of economic and political decisions, and the fact that Hitler had in his youth he was a reader of Karl May’s novels which depicted the conquest of the West. This desire to catch up economically with the United States would have determined all the choices (or almost all) in the conduct of the war.
Some of the “ myths » histories that Adam Tooze wants to break down in his work had been done for a long time by other historians. Thus, from the idea that unemployment had been effectively combated by major civil works programs, including the construction of highways (Autobahnen) would have been the most emblematic. This program, so well put forward by Goebbels’ propaganda, in fact only employed 38,000 German workers. However, the decline in unemployment, which did not really begin until 1935, was the result of a recovery initiated in the fall of 1932, therefore before Hitler’s arrival in power, and above all of a vast rearmament policy. early. The percentage of GDP dedicated to rearmament reached 10% in 1935 (compared to 1% in 1933) and 20% on the eve of the Second World War.
As for the gigantic war effort, it was largely financed by individuals and businesses. It was also caused by a headlong rush by large German companies towards debtor commitments which could only be covered in the event of total victory and therefore economic exploitation of enslaved Europe. By developing this with supporting figures, Adam Tooze undermines the demonstrations of the historian Götz Aly, who attempted to show that ordinary Germans had benefited greatly from the pillaging of Jewish property and the economic exploitation of the occupied countries. , the Third Reich having laid the foundations of the welfare state.
Financing by disguised credit, in fact a parallel circuit of drafts which made it possible to limit visible inflation, had been described for a long time, but Adam Tooze puts it in its rightful place. Mefo GmbH was formed with capital of one million Reichsmarks provided by a consortium of steel manufacturers. The drafts that the company issued became bonds accepted by the Reichsbank. “ For a small discount, companies working for rearmament could cash their Mefo drafts at the central bank “. It was a sort of parallel currency.
Financial and supply imbalances
As Adam Tooze describes very well, the German economy under the Third Reich was constantly on the verge of a serious crisis, either because of difficulties in supplying foreign currency or because of various deficits. It was up to Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank and Minister of the Economy, to find ingenious and authoritarian solutions to ward off these threats. More than the “ magician » which he claimed to be in his memoirs, he was in fact a talented manipulator of prices and figures. From 1933, the Defense budget was placed outside the control of the Ministry of Finance.
The enormous armament effort was in reality financed by these discreet credits, but above all by taxation, forced savings imposed on households, then by the occasional exploitation of the annexed and occupied territories. Inflation was also exported to the margins of the empire. “ The silent war financing system established in the fall of 1939 works well », writes the author, before adding:
“ The increase in tax levies in 1941-1942, combined with ever-increasing contributions from the occupied territories, allowed the Reich Ministry of Finance to finance 54% of expenditures in 1942 and 44% in 1943 from its revenues. tax revenues were so flourishing that the Reich was indeed able to reduce its dependence on borrowing compared to 1941. Until 1943, moreover, household savings were sufficient to finance at least 17% of total public expenditure through secure long-term loans » (pp. 613-614).
The Wages of Destruction extensively reports on the major aggregates of the German economy and Adam Tooze is never more at ease than when commenting on them. His first work focused on the development of statistics in Germany. It shows how all Nazi economic policies – and no major decisions could be made without Hitler’s agreement – were determined by financial and supply imbalances. THE Volksproduktenational products, ersatz in particular, proceeded from this logic.
We will follow him less in his analysis of a causality that is too automatic, it seems to me, in the course of the war itself. Was the Blitzkrieg strategy really chosen because stocks of raw materials were once again at their lowest? ? As for Operation Barbarossa, it of course stemmed from a desire to get their hands on agricultural land, with an insane project of continental colonization. But the determinations of this project were multiple, in particular deeply ideological. Recent research has reassessed the ideological dimensions of the Nazi project, which Adam Tooze does not really reject – he admits on numerous occasions and, without detailing it, Hitler’s crazy anti-Semitism.
Weakness of the Nazi economy ?
Ultimately, this almost automatic causality in the book should help explain the Shoah. We will follow with interest the innovative explanation that Tooze gives of Kristallnacht: the lack of foreign currency limited the emigration of German Jews, who wanted to leave with at least part of their assets. ; the pogroms and destruction organized throughout the Reich pushed them into immediate exile. We will also follow him in the assessment he gives of the spoliation in the limited financing of the German economy.
On the other hand, his explanation of the genocidal decision appears much more problematic to us. The genocide was part, according to the author, of the desire to reserve the food supply for Aryans only. According to the already old research of Christian Gerlach, this point would have been one of the factors in the decision to assassinate the Jews of Europe. But this does not explain the European dimension of the genocide, even if it were to be part of the “ general plan East », which planned the assassination of 30 million Slavs. However, the plan was never implemented (Tooze admits this in passing).
The Wages of Destruction represents a masterful work, and it is already a reference work. Among the historical myths that the author likes to correct, we can cite that of Speer, to whom many pages are devoted. Albert Speer, in the memoirs he published after twenty years in prison, imposed a particular story, entirely to his glory, which recounted how he had succeeded in mobilizing with talent the war industry of the Reich. However, if the mobilization and the production effort were remarkable, reaching a maximum in 1944, it was thanks to the measures to control the economy and drain resources put in place several years earlier.
Reading the details of the many weaknesses of the Nazi economy, the reader ends up wondering how the Reich was able to hold out for so long against the formidable Allied armada. This was through the exploitation of slave labor, explains Adam Tooze, but also through the mobilization of the population, on which he gives few details. Because, he explains, Nazi Germany was entirely mobilized behind the Führer. Tooze does not highlight the rivalries within the system, this polycracy which has been studied so much in recent decades, as a driver of radicalization. The Nazi economy is described as a gigantic and formidable machine. This was also how it was perceived by contemporaries.
Finally, reading the author’s apocalyptic description of the destruction suffered by Germany in the last years of the war, the reader wonders if he is not trying to refute one last myth, that of an industrial fabric that remained partly intact despite the Allied carpet bombs, and on which the economic miracle of West Germany was built.