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The Wages of Destruction: Difference between revisions
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* [[Bait and Switch]]: As Tooze explains, a common myth was the Nazis wanting to sponsor job creation programs for workers. The reality was that such had been considered and discredited under the Weimar regime as well as the Nazis, and when they finally were enacted, their true purpose was to jump start industry of military value, though sold to outside observers as an attempt to employ more labor that was unemployed.
* [[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 it's shortfalls via conquest was this. Tooze notes that by shunning foreign credit and their obsession with autarky the Nazis guaranteed the Germans would have little enough extra capital to raise the standard of living of the average German or promote enough trade to make prices go down enough to make many items considered luxuries become competitive enough to be affordable to most standard workers.
* [[Conspicuous Consumption]]: [[Defied]]. One would think, even if you didn't know Hitler was planning for another war, that the rearmarment was just a way for Germany to flex it's industrial strength in some ways, but this excerpt from a tank manual that Tooze quotes makes it very clear the Germans were acutely aware of the money that went into the arms they built:
{{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.
* [[Deal with the Devil]]: The alliance between the Nazis and big business happened this way. Hitler essentially offered them absolute domestic control of their industries they had been dreaming about since the early 1920s, and they had to support his regime in return. They took this deal, with the full knowledge it came with the rider of establishing a huge slush fund for the Nazis to use however they saw fit and that the Nazis held the whip hand in making sure they could not back out of the deal later.
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** 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.
* [[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 term of economics, you must acknowledge they took this trope in absolute seriousness and patterned all their assumptions after it, no matter how true it actually was.
* [[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 on the "Jewish conspiracy", any attempt at any form of modus vivendi in either the peacetime or war years was utterly off the table, even though all the proof of Hitler's contentions existed nowhere outside his own mind. Tooze even lays out evidence Hitler's beliefs were formulated very early based on the Weimar Republic years and being set in stone by the 1930s, which made this trope the prevailing condition of his regime.
** 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.
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