The Wages of Destruction: Difference between revisions

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* [[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 devildeal 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.