Когда речь заходит о Третьем Рейхе, касается она в основном либо эпических баталий, либо нечеловеческих зверств. Приземленные вопросы финансов, ресурсов и организации обычно остаются в тени (кстати, черного рынка в нацистской Германии не было до осени 1944 г.; почти всю войну немцы питались хорошо). Однако без рассказа об экономике понять каким образом Рейх так долго боролся с Союзниками, превосходящими его по ВВП в несколько раз, невозможно. В 2007 г. тема нашла достойного автора, получившего за этот полный откровений труд многочисленные книжные награды в Великобритании, а в этом году его, наконец, издают и у нас. «Книгой года» работу А. Туза назвали абсолютно заслуженно. Ему удалось избежать фокусирования на цифрах производства, добычи и ограбления в ущерб общему нарративу происходящего на фронтах, в дипломатических кулуарах и советах директоров ведущих фирм.

Некоторые элементы экономического чуда, последовавшего за приходом Гитлера и вытащившего Германию из пучин Великой Депрессии, до сих пор на слуху, например, «народный автомобиль» Volkswagen, автобаны (а еще были и «народная квартира», и «народный холодильник» - Volkskuehlschrank). Впрочем, спустя некоторое время фюрер заявил, что «Войну с Англией не выиграть кухонными плитами и стиральными машинами», и он не шутил. Расходы на оборону достигли неслыханной доли ВВП, налоги на прибыль для юрлиц выросли до 55%, сбережения граждан (если их не отобрали) предлагалось вкладывать исключительно в гособлигации. Наиболее драматичными были целенаправленные усилия государства по пресечению частного строительства – самой важной формы частных инвестиций. Осенью 1938 г. Рейхсбанк полностью запретил выдачу новых ипотечных займов.

Рассказ об экономике фазы войны не менее захватывающ. Аншлюс Австрии спас Рейх от банкротства. На следующий год плечо подставил СССР, ставший помимо поставок нефти и руд главным источником кормов для скота. Оккупированные страны платили ренту за оккупацию, а на самые лакомые их предприятия немцы старались наложить лапу. Получалось не всегда: голландские Philips, Unilever и Shell избежали немецкого проникновения, переведя права собственности в офшоры. Подробно освещена тема рабства – на предприятиях ВПК иностранцы составляли до 40%, а согласно шутке 1943 г. бомбардировщики Ju-87 «Штука» на 80% производились русскими. Приводится и таблица выгодности использования рабов – даже при производительности на 40% ниже немецкой оставались конкретные области, где они были выгоднее.

Химфирма IG Farben сыграла поистине незаменимую роль в качестве поставщика новых технологий: например, ее завод в Освенциме и сегодня является третьим по величине производителем синтетического каучука в Европе, удовлетворяя примерно 5% глобального потребления. Однако, как замечает Туз, если где-либо и произошло настоящее «оружейное чудо», то это случилось не в Германии, а на военных заводах Урала. ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2020-06.html#tooze ( )

The author is auditioning for the minister of economy in the next dictator's bid for world power. I would give him the job. ( )

I think that Adam Tooze may be my favorite economics writer. He somehow is able to wade through a massive amount of data and draw out a coherent, insightful, and innovative narrative.

I came across this book because it just recently became available as an audiobook. It is an overview of the German economy of the Third Reich. I've read some other histories of WWII, including one from the Japanese perspective, but this may be the most in-depth book I've read about WWII thus far.

The topic might sound dry, but I found the pacing and engagement of the book quite strong. Did you know that Germany started preparations for WWII in 1932? Or that England turned down a German truce in the beginning of the war? Or that Hitler's moral foundations were sourced directly from the US' frontier colonialism, to the degree that he even referred to Russians as Red Indians?

Tooze maintains an attitude of mourning the tragedy of the war through ample investigations into genocide and slavery. Apparently Hitler planned not only to exterminate the Jews, but most of continental Europe and Russia as well, to make room for his back-to-the-land Aryans.

One of the things in the back of my mind when reading this book (and when Tooze was writing it) has been the mobilization that organizers like Bill McKibben have been calling for, likening climate change mobilization to WWIII. What are economies really capable when they set their mind to it? In Tooze's latest book, on the COVID pandemic and the economy, he cited Keynes, to the effect of, "anything we can do, we can afford" (a sentiment that MMT economist Stephanie Kelton also enjoys).

If you'd like to hear the play-by-play of what enables and disables total war (or similarly grand works), you'll enjoy this book! ( )

For all its horrors, World War 2 is undeniably a really cool war to look at from a military perspective. However, anyone who plays the Could Germany Have Won game (or even a few rounds of Axis & Allies) is confronted sooner or later by the fact that a lot of Germany's military decisions seem a bit... eccentric, to put it mildly. Taking over Austria, yes; seizing the Sudetenland, sure; closing off the Polish Corridor, of course; but why go to war barely 6 years after taking power, way before your own rearmament timetable is done? Why fight Britain and France first off, when you don't even want their land? Why open up another front with Russia when Britain hasn't been beaten yet? In fact, why start a war at all with the countries around you, when every single one has an economy that's at least a match for your own? The traditional answer for questions like these is that Hitler simply wasn't a very good military commander, but while this is perfectly true, Tooze looks deeply into the economic background of Nazi Germany and finds that a lot of the wackier-seeming choices the Nazi leadership made do make a bit more sense given the economic options available to them, and even some of the more appalling facets of the Holocaust were driven as much by industrial considerations as by ideology. Tooze's decision to look at the war from an economic viewpoint is very refreshing, and allows him to bust a truly impressive number of myths, most notably for me the idea that Germany had any chance at all to win the war.

Though it's hard to appreciate now, Germany in the 1930s was not a very rich or developed country at all. The deprivation of World War 1, followed by Weimar hyperinflation, followed by Great Depression deflation, all overlaid on the fact that Germany had been a single unified country for barely a half-century, meant that though individual German firms were very competitive and productive, as a whole Germany was quite backwards in many ways (one graph on page 146 shows Germany in 1933 as having only 70% the income per capita as it had before 1914). The single goal of the Nazi Party was to transform Germany from the hemmed-in, middle-weight power it was into a true competitor to Britain, with its world empire, and America, with its continental resources. This primarily meant acquiring land, and Tooze assembles masses of agricultural statistics to show that the goal of Lebensraum, which strikes the modern reader as a bit weird (21st century Germany is much denser than even the most claustrophobic nightmares of Nazi planners), made a lot more sense in what was almost literally a peasant society in many regions. Expanding to the east would also have the benefit of allowing Germany to gather enough resources to be closer to self-sufficiency, a major concern for a country almost totally lacking in vital strategic materials like oil or steel. Removing the need to import important resources would have reduced the need to acquire foreign currency through export, as well as lessening the tension between production for domestic use and production for rearmament.

The beginning sections outlined Germany's struggles to emerge from the Great Depression with both a strong military and a robust consumer economy. They got fairly technical (it helps to know basic macroeconomic concepts like current account deficits, currency revaluation, or the relationships between deficit spending, taxation, and inflation), but they were necessary to understand why Germany chose to start the war in 1939, even though their own plans showed that they weren't ready. Putting yourself in the shoes of a Nazi economic planner, once you've taken the goal of Germany conquering all of Europe as a given, now you just have to figure out some way to implement it, and it would seem that waiting until you have a strong advantage would be the most prudent course. Unfortunately for Germany, despite their massive military spending at the expense of the civilian economy (much touted public works like the autobahn or the Volkswagen made surprisingly negligible contributions to Germany's recovery from the Depression), and even after years of treaty-defying rearmament, they were barely at parity with Britain or France. The reason for war beginning in 1939 was simply that waiting would have put Germany farther and farther behind those two powers, who were also beginning to accelerate their own military preparations.

Germany's stunning victory over Britain and France was both good and bad for them. Good, in that Germany at a stroke disabled the entire military of one of its enemies and most of the military of another. Bad, in that in a real way they were no closer to victory. Over the course of the war, though Germany helped itself to French tanks and military hardware, in an absolute sense captured French industry did not contribute very much materially to Germany's war effort, and Germany found itself in the position of having to expend its own resources on administering conquered territories. Tooze didn't use this metaphor, but I found myself reminded of a sort of military Ponzi scheme, where Germany kept having to conquer new territories to make up for the losses incurred in acquiring its last conquests. To make matters worse, different military initiatives required completely different production, so Nazi war planners found themselves jumping from priority to priority as targets shifted. There's a fascinating graph on page 148 of armament production from September 1939 to November 1941 that shows the sudden production surges and reversals, as well as the overwhelming focus on aircraft and ammunition. I had never realized that tanks were such a small percentage of the overall military budget, but as Tooze points out, aircraft gave by far the biggest bang for the buck.

Speaking of production shifts, I had always been under the impression that German war production had been dominated by political hacks, but Tooze makes a fairly convincing case that, aside from a few ill-advised late-stage "experiments" like the V2 rocket and the Type XXI U-boat, Germany's war economy ran about as well as could be expected, second only to the Soviet war economy, which he should definitely write another book about. More myths busted: that German women did not participate in the economy to the degree that their counterparts did for ideological reasons (false, German women were actually more involved), or that Germany did not have a total war economy until late in the war, also for ideological/propaganda reasons (false, Germany had been gradually letting its military cannibalize the civilian economy since day 1 of Nazi rule), or that people like Speer were miracle workers (false, production surges Speer took credit for were often statistical illusions or were due to other people). The main problem for German planners was that there was simply not enough of everything to go around; a precious resource like steel could be used for a gun, ammo for that gun, a railroad to transport that ammo, or a million other things, and there were just too many needs. By the end of the war Germany was being outproduced at least 4:1 in every single category, and even if every battle had been a crushing victory they still wouldn't have been able to last.

The most depressing parts of the book were where he discussed slave labor and Germany's economic relationship to its conquests. Here's how the logic went: Germany took basically all of its able-bodied men off the farm, and required huge food imports to avoid the mass starvation of World War 1. Those imports came from territories like Poland and Ukraine, directly at the expense of the Polish and Ukrainians, which meant that the Polish and Ukrainians had a direct incentive to help kill Jews, who were merely extra mouths to feed out of the leftover food. "... By comparison with a German ration of 2,600 calories in early 1940, the 'ration' for the inhabitants of Poland's major cities was set at 609 calories. Jews were provided with 503 calories per day." Of course, German factories also required extra labor for the same reason, and so there was a continuous stream of captive workers coming into concentration camps to be worked on substandard rations until they dropped dead, to be replaced by others. Even with millions of free disposable workers, by the end of the war Germany's economy was on its last legs and could no longer be sustained. While Tooze raised my opinion of the quality of German wartime economic planning, he really brought home what a stupid idea it was to try to conquer all of Europe. While individual military goals made more sense (even still-questionable ones like Barbarossa), from a practical standpoint Germany might as well have been trying to conquer the solar system. After having read this book, I don't think Germany ever could have won, but they could have failed even more spectacularly than they did in real life. ( )