Anyone read ‘‘The Wages of Destruction’’ by Adam Tooze?
Tooze sets American industrial might against German financial crises in his account of the Nazi regime, says James Buchan in this review…
James Buchan
Guardian
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and the Breaking of the Nazi Economy
by Adam Tooze
800pp, Allen Lane, £30
Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler’s short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing. For the economic historian, the great pitched battles of the second world war, from Stalingrad to Midway, are not primarily exercises in strategy, brutality or heroism but the titanic amassing of capital and human beings and their concentration on a point of space and history.
Economic historiography has thrown rays of haggard light into some of the blackest corners of the Third Reich, even where, as in the case of the memoirs of Hitler’s last minister of armaments, Albert Speer, much was concealed or distorted. In his long new book, the Cambridge historian Adam Tooze presents the Third Reich as an engine doomed to smash itself to smithereens not, as for Speer, from bureaucratic turf wars and Hitler’s chaotic office habits, but from its own birth defects.
To sum up: Hitler’s Germany was always too hampered by shortages of raw materials, notably crude oil and rubber but also iron ore and coal, animal feed and fertiliser, foreign currency and even labour, to attempt an independent industrial and commercial existence in peace, let alone a campaign of European conquest. For all the ingenuity of cynical opportunists such as Hjalmar Schacht, at the Reichsbank until 1939, and Speer, at Armaments after 1942, Germany passed through a succession of hair-raising financial and resource crises that hampered its armies and helped to bring on the final collapse.
As if from a commanding height, Tooze points out for the reader fields and factories and autobahns, the delusive investment in radios and passenger cars, the financial and credit market subterfuges of the 1930s, and the scramble for military aircraft and battle tanks and ammunition. He shows how German business was won over to armaments by the high return on capital that Hitler permitted. The German public, with nothing in the shops to spend their savings on, had to lend to the government and thus provided the “noiseless war finance” (geräuschlose Kriegsfinanzierung) that kept the bloody show on the road.
As the war turns against Hitler, the air becomes dark and bitter cold, and we pass into Speer’s subterranean armaments factories and on to the selection ramp at Auschwitz. For this reader, it took a day or two for a certain depression of spirit to lift. One wonders how its author fared.
The originality of the book, and what labels it as a performance of the 21st century, is the overwhelming role Tooze accords the United States as a figment of Hitler’s fears and imagination. He ignores Hitler’s prison testament, Mein Kampf (1924), with its anti-capitalist and anti-Jewish ranting, in favour of the so-called Zweites Buch (Second Book), written four years later but not published until the 1960s.
In the Second Book, Hitler strikes the anachronistic, anti-American pose of a Chávez or Bin Laden. “Due to modern technology,” Hitler wrote, "and the communication it makes possible, the international relations among peoples have become so close that the European, even without being fully conscious of it, applies as the yardstick for his existence the conditions of American life … "
Faced with this longing for American amenities, but without the vast scale of the American land mass or market to supply them, European states must be reduced to the status of a “Switzerland or Holland”. A cooperative union of the European states, such as was promoted after the war, did not accord with Hitler’s racist obsessions. Instead, he found another justification for the conquest of the east - known as Lebensraum - in the scale of the American internal market.
Following on from this, and far more controversially, Tooze argues that given the disposition of industrial power in the world and his racist ideology, Hitler was correct to act as he did. Aware that it was only a matter of time before the American giant stirred, Hitler was wise to act with such precipitate haste, to launch the arms race, to annex Austria and the Sudetenland, to exploit a sudden diplomatic opportunity to invade Poland, to smash westwards in 1940, even to invade the Soviet Union the following year. “Once we appreciate,” Tooze writes, “the scale of the international escalation that Hitler had set in motion in 1938, it is possible to reconstruct an intelligible and consistent strategic logic behind Hitler’s actions.”
This sort of provocative self-confidence may just be the economist’s way of mastering ghastly material and keeping it out of his dreams. On the credit side, Tooze’s search for a reasonable explanation to German conduct in addition to racism allows him to bring the Reichskristallnacht, the Holocaust and the other German brutalities in the east into the realm of Nazi political economy. Without in any way belittling the persecution of the Jews, Tooze reminds us that the Holocaust was an aspect of a campaign of mass murder which involved the forced starvation of Soviet prisoners and cities to feed the German population.
For Tooze, there was after 1941 a “compromise”, or rather a succession of them, between exterminating people and setting them to make ammunition or aircraft. He reminds us that many of the Jews of Budapest, the last great Jewish community to be liquidated by the Nazis, went into aircraft factories. Camp workers swung from the rafters to terrorise their fellow-inmates on the V2 rocket production lines in the Mittelbau. For this reason, and for countless others, Tooze cannot stand Speer and seems genuinely baffled that the man saved his neck at Nuremberg.
On the debit side, a sequence of rational actions will often end in complete delusion, as the German poet Christian Morgenstern told his Wilhelmine readers. It is all very well for Tooze to say that Hitler was wise in 1942 to concentrate his forces towards the Caucasus, so as to secure oil supplies to fuel new aircraft to fight the British and Americans, but somewhere a sort of geographical common sense has fallen away.
Tooze’s emphasis on American industrial power, illuminating as it is, has the effect of downplaying the Soviet Union, and reducing the fight with Britain to a sideshow. Britain, which sacrificed its empire to defeat Germany in the war, is for Tooze merely a forward marshalling yard for the factories of Detroit and the American midwest. British victories are foregone conclusions. The Battle of Britain was, “in retrospect, an extremely one-sided affair”. The outcome of Alamein “was never in doubt”. One wonders if Tooze has ever spoken to his parents about the war or to the men who fought those hard fights. They did not think the outcomes pre-determined.
Much of it has been covered before, but this might be ‘‘the’’ book on the subject, it gets rave reviews.
Hitler jumped into war in an ad hock fashion, before Germany exhausted its foreign exchange reserves, and became, along with other European states, being reduced to the status of a “Switzerland or Holland” and before the Soviets, and particularly, the U.S. had time to flex too much muscle.
But the insane baggage the Nazis carried with them virtually doomed Germany from the get go.