The Wages of Destruction: Difference between revisions

* [[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.]]

* [[Reality Ensues]]: This trope kneecapped a lot of what the Nazis wanted to do because they were often trying to secure much more resources than they could on a shoestring budget, and the results of this was an obvious deficit of actual return for investment in industry, jobs, and general long-term solvency.

** Hitler wanted Germany to have as little economic obligation to foreign markets as possible. He got his wish, and that included the natural circumstance that since he effectively declared Germany a faithless debtor, even if absolute desperation demanded they play nice even temporarily for foreign capital to prop up the domestic currency reserve, Hitler had doomed Germany to being stiffed by creditors who saw Germany as a terrible risk as a natural consequence.