10,161
edits
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
(7 intermediate revisions by 3 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{work}}
{{Infobox book
[[File:The Wages of Destruction.jpg|frame]]▼
| title = The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
| original title =
| caption = First edition cover
| author = Adam Tooze
| central theme =
| elevator pitch =
| genre = Nonfiction, [[Economics]]
| publication date = June 29, 2006
| wiki URL =
| wiki name =
}}
'''''The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy''''' is a book of historical non-fiction about the economical history of [[Nazi Germany]] by Adam Tooze. Starting after [[World War I]], he traces the economic history of of Germany from the potentially different path the Weimar Republic pursued and then the Nazi government's economic policy until the end of 1945's ignominious end of [[World War II]]. Unlike many other histories, in which economics were subsumed into discussions of broader topics such the politics of the Nazi state, this book remains almost entirely focused on the economic aspects of the Nazi regime, with all other subjects secondary.
Line 7 ⟶ 18:
{{tropelist}}
* [[All There in the Manual]]: Both ''[[Mein Kampf]]'' and the "[[Zweites Buch|Second Book]]" (the follow-up to ''Mein Kampf'') are extensively referenced for Hitler's specific economics
* [[Attack Its Weak Point]]:
* [[Bad Boss]]: '''Hitler'''. He was prone to making demands on industry for quotas that at times ''[[Holy Shit Quotient|''exceeded the global capacity of the entire world
* [[Bait and Switch]]: As Tooze explains, a common myth was the Nazis
* [[Brutal Honesty]]:
{{quote|
{{quote|
* [[Can't Catch Up]]: Due to the
** Because of the conscious decisions of Nazi ideology, the possibility of the German economy becoming anything other than an outlaw nation scheming to make up for
* [[Conspicuous Consumption]]: [[Defied]]. One would think, even if you didn't know Hitler was planning for another war, that the
{{quote|
* [[David Versus Goliath]]: Tooze uses the United States to draw a line of comparison between the economic strength of Germany from 1870-1945 to
* [[Deal with the Devil]]: The alliance between the Nazis and big business happened this way. Hitler essentially offered them absolute domestic control of
** Himmler used a variant of this logic to make sure the Gauleiter (regional leadership) did not consider welshing on helping the German war effort. He essentially reminded them in 1943 they were all parties to the Final Solution already, and that the blood was already on their hands, they had nothing to gain by trying to quit, and everything to lose, as they had already made their deal with the devil.
* [[Deconstruction]]: Tooze deconstructs a lot of commonly held myths about the German economy, including Albert Speer's supposed "economic miracle" and the difference between what Germany produced during the Nazi period versus what it actually needed to produce and how the difference was much more profound than earlier histories indicated, often by a severe degree.
* [[Desperation Attack]]: Economically, Hitler had no choice but to go to war in 1939; the
* [[Divide and Conquer]]: Germany managed to welsh on
** The Nazi regime achieved a similar use of this trope in seeking South American markets to replace the markets of the United States. It essentially scotched any attempt to cut Germany off at the ankles and the favorable terms encouraged places like Brazil to stiff the US with little consequence. End result was German markets free of a lot of US dependency and the US market position splintered on the Southern American front.
* [[Driven to Suicide]]: Quite a few people wound up killing themselves when they realized the writing on the wall over how they
* [[Dying Like Animals]]: Hans Frank, when discussing the allocation of labor in Germany involving Poles and Jews, invoked this sentiment as to why he did not care about their ability to thrive past what Germany needed them for:
{{quote|
* [[Even Evil Has Standards]]: Goering, while
{{quote|
* [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]]: The Hunger Plan. This was a plan by the Reich Ministry for Food and Wehrmacht economists to deliberately starve over 30 million Soviets to death in order to free up food for German use, spelled out in very exact terms and with that name on the plan itself in 1941.
* [[Fascist but Inefficient]]: This was noted as a recurring issue. Just because Hitler ran a state that gave him nigh absolute power did not translate into making any issues he faced in terms of resource allocation magically disappear. If anything, the biggest weakness of the Nazi regime was that when the economic system had problems, they nigh always had a physical problem that could not wish away by simple ideology. Tooze does, however, concede that the nigh absolute power Hitler and his cronies exhibited did give them great latitude for assigning resources at will, but even this was limited by what they had available at the time.
* [[For Want of a Nail]]: While Tooze is careful to avoid generalizations, for the most part, one of his big assertions is that Germany might have never taken Hitler seriously had the Depression not made him look like a prophet.
* [[Greedy Jew]]: Tooze makes perfectly clear if you want to have a starting point to understand the Nazis in
* [[Insane Troll Logic]]: The Nazi ideology outright prevented Germany from making any pragmatic changes to economic policy that would have been beneficial if it in any way conflicted with Hitler's preconceptions about the Jews. Due to Hitler's belief the United States was a key focus
** Part of the basis of all Hitler's economic logic that would follow was his contention the economic loans provided by the United States to assist in the reparations system set up after the Treaty of Versailles was little more than a Jewish banker
* [[Irony]]: Hitler and the creed of the Nazis heavily promoted the dignity and importance of the German farmer and the agrarian sector of the economy as the backbone of the German state. However, achieving the goal of keeping most of the other
* [[It Got Worse]]: Economically, the fate of Germany was sealed as soon as the pipeline of regular American funding and European loans
** For Hitler, the war went from barely manageable to basically lost when the United States joined in, something he even was willing to admit was the likely case prior.
* [[Magnificent Bastard]]: Hjalmar Schacht. During the 1930s, he found a deviously clever way to secure export capital without devaluing the German Reichsmark via direct policy. As Tooze explains:
{{quote|
* [[The Man Behind The Man]]: Hitler was convinced, in an economic sense, the United States fit this goal, and Tooze notes, to a considerable extent, given the US did prop up the European economy, Hitler had a point insofar as their economic influence in securing markets went. Tooze does note Hitler went off into [[Conspiracy Theorist]] territory when he injected anti-Semitism into this logic, but he wasn't entirely wrong either.
* [[Obstructive Bureaucracy]]: The Nazis loved this trope to the point the economy became so tied up in red tape they were the only ones who could make sense of it. While it bought limited stability during the peacetime years after some initial confusion, it all disintegrated later in the war because the resource squeeze left too many bureaucrats with too few resources to keep the economy moving.
* [[Only Sane Man]]: Hjalmar Schacht was an early supporter of Hitler's economic policies when they remained remotely reasonable, although he never joined the Nazi Party. His first major break with cooperation, which led to his eventual sacking, was in 1936
{{quote|
** Carl Goerdeler, who had been commissioned to evaluate the
** Schwerin von Krosigk and Ludwig Beck had a brief moment of success in their roles as Reich Finance Minister and Chief of Staff. In 1938, Germany was simply not ready for a war and both men knew it, and while Hitler only backed down reluctantly at the last minute, both manage to stall for enough time to get him to reconsider for military and economic reasons. By the next year neither was in a position to do the same again, [[Foregone Conclusion|and Hitler was not taking no for an answer then]].
** Hans Kehrl of the Armaments Ministry might have been a diehard Nazi, but even he realized Germany was screwed and tried to convince Albert Speer as much in 1943, only to have his pleas fall on deaf ears. As for Speer himself, it was more ambiguous. He was willing to admit things were bad post
* [[Paper Tiger]]: In many ways, the Nazis had economic issues so vast they were downright laughable, which they were only partially
* [[Plausible Deniability]]: [[Discussed]] and ultimately mocked. While even back
** Tooze notes Albert Speer got as light a sentence as he did at
* [[Poor Man's Substitute]]: One thing the Nazis tried to do to ensure autarky was to make synthetic fuel oil and steel, often using very inferior grades of coal and iron ore. As Tooze notes, it wasn't entirely ludicrous on its face. It was feasible, it was just a long-term investment that secured little to no immediate gain where they needed it most at the time the crash programs for both were implemented.
* [[Reality Ensues]]: This trope kneecapped a lot of what the Nazis wanted to do because they were often trying to secure much more resources than they could on a shoestring budget, and the
** Hitler wanted Germany to have as little economic obligation to foreign markets as possible. He got his wish, and that included the natural circumstance that since he effectively declared Germany a faithless debtor, even if absolute desperation demanded they play nice even temporarily for foreign capital to prop up the domestic currency reserve, Hitler had doomed Germany to being stiffed by creditors who saw Germany as a terrible risk as a natural consequence.
** The Reichsmark as a tool of foreign exchange was hobbled out the gate because, unlike many other countries that removed their currency from
* [[Right for the Wrong Reasons]]: When Hitler's Jew paranoia was stripped away, Tooze notes Hitler did have many salient and relevant observations about the economy, albeit even this was through a heavily slanted lens aimed at Hitler's specific long-term objectives.
* [[Pyrrhic Victory]]: The Nazi regime initially wanted to encourage Jewish emigration and did just that early on. Unfortunately, economics made the victory a pointless one. To secure a visa for a foreign nation, the Jews who left had to be allowed to leave with enough hard currency to purchase one, which directly contributed to a massive drain on the Reichsmark reserves of the German banks, which they could not afford since during the period of 1933-34 especially, they were teetering on utter bankruptcy, so the victory was not only hollow, it even became a bigger problem than the solution by ultimately reducing emigration.
** Conquest was not the cure-all for German resource issues, simply because to make good use of the conquered areas, they were forced to divert resources to
* [[Sadistic Choice]]: The Germany economy in the 1930s constantly hovered between one. Either scrap rearmament and provide more for the consumer sector
* [[Social Darwinism]]: Hitler utterly believed in this in
{{quote|
** To manage the rations for prisoners forced to do work, the Nazis relied on a very brutal program based on this trope that became their nationwide practice throughout the Reich:
{{quote|
* [[Stealing From the Till]]: The Nazi regime found a quasi-legal way to do so from their own citizens for most of the war. By freezing the civilian sector goods production while uncapping the wartime production caps, they encouraged people with cash that they could not spend to place it back in the banks and savings loans financed by the Reich itself. This kept the wartime production account pretty far into the black by using the excess funding consumers could not spend as their own personal slush fund.
* [[Sunk Cost Fallacy]]: In ''spades'', both for the German economy under Hitler and the subsequent war in particular.
* [[Too Clever by Half]]: Not long after Hitler took power, he sought to remove the economic shackles that bound Germany to the American and European markets. It succeeded, which was essential to preventing what he considered an economic straitjacket that would otherwise apply later on where those parties could squeeze Germany dry. However, it succeeded a bit too well, as it made Germany an outlaw nation in terms of financial credit, cutting off several sources of funding that otherwise could have bolstered the economy later, and still left late
* [[Urban
** Tooze spends a fair amount of time deconstructing one that was built up concerning how Albert Speer was credited with keeping the Nazi economy going in the later half of the war. He does note the substance of the myth wasn't, by itself, lies, as Speer did wield great influence over the economy and did implement actual measures to reform the economic system, but most of what actually applied to the practical implementation was firmly in the realm of this trope, as Tooze explains in exhaustive detail.
* [[What Could Have Been]]: Tooze notes that Hitler might have never risen to power had the circumstances
{{quote|
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Pages Original to All The Tropes]]
[[Category:Nazi Germany]]
[[Category:Non-Fiction Literature]]
[[Category:Literature of the 2000s]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wages of Destruction, The}}
|