The Wages of Destruction: Difference between revisions

no edit summary
No edit summary
No edit summary
Line 8:
{{tropelist}}
* [[All There in the Manual]]: Both ''[[Mein Kampf]]'' and the "Second Book" (the follow-up to Mein Kampf) are extensively referenced for Hitler's specific economics related statements.
* [[Attack Its Weak Point]]: The Ruhr valley was a massive one for the Germans. Despite attempts to mitigate the damage, as Allied bombers kept hitting the Ruhr, it crippled manh=ymany resources critical to all of the German war industry and a even civilian needs by a considerable margin.
* [[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'']] and would not take no for an answer. Those who insisted on saying no risked everything from their careers to their personal safety, especially in the latter years of the Nazi regime.
* [[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.
Line 21:
* [[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.
** 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 devil 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 at least the German economy wasn't hovering deep in the red for another few years at least.