The Wages of Destruction: Difference between revisions
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* [[Brutal Honesty]]: William Darre, as early as 1936, had this to say about how Germany (in his role as the German agricultural ministry leader) could solve it's agrarian issues, which was a pretty clear statement of intent prior to 1939:
{{quote|'''''The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people.'''''}}
{{quote|'''''Herr Pleiger, if, due to the shortage of coking coal the output of the steel industry cannot be raised as planned, then the war is lost.'''''}}
* [[Can't Catch Up]]: Due to the backwards agricultural sector of the German economy, under their existing system and due to the limited amount of arable land available to German farmers, they were doomed to this trope. Hitler's war plans were intended explicitly to remedy this.
** 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|'''''For every shell you fire, your father has paid 100 Reichsmarks in taxes, your mother has worked for a week in the factory . . . The Tiger costs all told 800,000 Reichsmarks and 300,000 hours of labour. Thirty thousand people had to give an entire week’s wages, 6,000 people worked for a week so that you can have a Tiger. Men of the Tiger, they all work for you. Think what you have in your hands!'''''}}
* [[David Versus Goliath]]: Tooze uses the United States to draw a line of comparison between the economic strength of Germany from 1870-1945 to it's American counterpart, noting they started out with the US at a slight disadvantage, but otherwise the US was definitely the economic goliath.
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** 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 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 Germany economy was either going to implode or he could bank on conquest relieving the financial strain by seizure of foreign assets. He got lucky with Poland and France to the point
* [[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 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|'''''I am not interested in the Jews. Whether or not they get any fodder to eat [fuettern] is the last thing I’m concerned about . . .'''''
'''''The second category is made up of the Poles [perhaps as many as 10 million people] in so far as I can make use of them. I shall feed these Poles with what is left over and what we can spare. Otherwise, I will tell the Poles to look after themselves . . . I am only interested in the Poles in so far as I see in them a reservoir of labour, but not to the extent that I feel it is a governmental responsibility to give them a guarantee that they will get a specific amount to eat. We are not talking of rations for Poles but only of the possibilities of feeding them.'''''}}
* [[Even Evil Has Standards]]: Goering, while
{{quote|'''''I have had enough of these demonstrations! They don’t harm the Jew, but me, who am the last authority for coordinating the German economy.'''''}}
* [[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.
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** 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 sponsored plot to make sure Germany paid up and the Weimar officials who went along with it were the same ones who sold out the Germans and thus Germany needed to severe any economic dependence on that system. This resulted in Germany being denied otherwise viable sources of foreign capital that it could have used but was not considered at all under Nazi policy.
* [[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 economy functions going generally required the functional equivalent of kicking German farmers to the bottom of the priority pile, especially due to the fact Hitler was absolutely adamant about remilitarizing and that became the tail that wagged the rest of the economic dog of the German economy, often resulting in grave disadvantage to the agrarian sector anyway.
* [[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:
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** 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 1943, but ws also the lone optimist keeping Hitler's wishes going despite all pessimism otherwise from anyone else.
* [[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 to the Weimar Republic Germany always wanted to rearm in direct defiance of the Versailles Treaty, the economic side was initially well hidden and the scale of the plans were fairly modest to invoke this trope. By the time of [[Nazi Germany]], they quit trying to even pretend this trope was in effect and by 1934 an imbecile could tell exactly what they were doing, pathetically weak denials to the contrary.
** Tooze notes Albert Speer got as light a sentence as he did at Nuremburg because he combined the use of this trope with the fact the records that could have much more deeply implicated him in Nazi atrocities were, at the time of the Nuremburg trials, not very easy to find. This allowed Speer to play the cooperative one and receive a rather merciful sentence. [[You Bastard|It's also obvious Tooze holds Speer in a fair bit of contempt and he finds every chance the book affords to provide receipts spiking Speer's own official record of events to correct what he considers Speer's whitewash of what he actually did swallowed by earlier historians.]]
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{{quote|'''''Bonuses of various kinds were widely used by German employers. But Guenther Falkenhahn, the Generaldirektor of the Plessschen Werke, a mine that supplied IG Farben’s Silesian chemicals complex, took bonuses to a new, existential level. Under a system he dubbed Leistungsernaehrung, or ‘performance feeding’, he divided his Ostarbeiter into three classes. Only those achieving an adequate, average performance would receive the normal ration. Those underperforming would have deductions made from their rations. These deductions would then serve as bonuses for the above-average performers. The system was designed to manage scarcity. It implied no overall increase in the food ration. It simply rewarded the strong at the expense of the weak.'''''}}
* [[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 1930's Germany in an economically regressed state in the long-term despite outwards signs of growth. The second item would be a chicken come home to roost later in the WWII period, as Germany found itself even more destitute than it was after WWI.
* [[Urban Legend of Zelda]]: The "autobahns" were commonly assumed to be a massive success and and an active part of the Nazi regime's internal construction. As Tooze points out, it proved to be of negligible importance due to funding and labor issues, despite a bunch of early noise and hoopla given the program, though said propaganda was effective enough to make the trope a reality anyway.
** 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 Hitler might have never risen to power had the circumstances
{{quote|'''''One of the many extraordinary features of German politics in the aftermath of World War I is that throughout the existence of the Weimar Republic the German electorate faced a choice between a politics centred on the peaceful pursuit of national prosperity and a militant nationalism that more or less openly demanded a resumption of hostilities with France, Britain and the United States. Since most of this book will be taken up with a dissection of the way in which Hitler harnessed the German economy in pursuit of this latter option, it seems important to begin by clearly establishing the alternative against which his vision was framed and how that alternative was pushed out of view by the disastrous events leading up to Hitler’s seizure of power.''''''}}
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