The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

by Adam Tooze

But there can be no doubt that in the summer of 1938 the leadership of the Third Reich believed itself to be threatened by a crisis in the national food supply. For the agrarians, a significant lobby in their own right with vital connections to the ideological heart of the Nazi party, the problems of agriculture called into question the entire achievement of Hitler’s government. Above all, there was alarm in RNS circles about the way in which farming families were responding to the labour shortage. Farm women were the most overworked group in the rural population, and reducing the number of children was the most obvious way to cut their work burden.74 In Niedersachsen, the very heartland of the German peasantry, the number of children per couple had fallen by as much as 33 per cent in a single generation.75 At the same time the labour shortage was also threatening the efforts of the RNS to raise domestic production. Already in 1937 the harvest had borne all the hallmarks of an emergency ‘Aktion’.76 The regular farm workforce had had to be supported by Labour Front draftees, soldiers, convicts and schoolchildren.