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The Wages of Destruction: Difference between revisions
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* [[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, when Germany shifted to requiring far more resources than he knew was financially feasible, leading him to make this ignored plea for sanity:
{{quote|'''''You expect from me that I should procure the necessary foreign exchange for your needs. I must respond that under current conditions I can see no possibility of doing so . . . if the demand is now . . . for increased rearmament, it is of course far from my mind to modify the support I have given for years to the greatest possible rearmament, both before and after the seizure of power. It is my duty, however, to point out the economic limits that constrain any such policy.}}
** Carl Goerdeler, who had been commissioned to evaluate the currency situation of Germany circa 1936 in regards to international markets, rather bravely wrote an honest report effectively pointing out the dangers of continued Nazi-led subsidy that dumped exports on the world market and even advocated reaching a modus vivendi on many issues the Nazis would have consider verboten, such as military rebuilding and anti-Semitic policies. Given he would become part of the later resistance that tried to kill Hitler in 1944, this was an early bold step that put him in grave danger even then.
* [[Paper Tiger]]: In many ways, the Nazis had economic issues so vast they were downright laughable, which they only partially were able to conceal at best, but this concealment failed almost completely post-1943, revealing their economy to be even more pathetic than towards the end of WWI.
* [[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.
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