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

by Adam Tooze

In this sense, despite the questions about a possible devaluation, the dramatic increase in state control could be seen as an inevitable product of ‘historic necessity’ rather than conscious political choice.57 In any case, given the limited recovery of world trade in 1934 and 1935, there was no reason for impatience. Businessmen had little to lose by concentrating on Germany’s booming domestic markets. Anxieties only really became acute in 1936–7 when it seemed as though the rest of the world economy might finally be returning to prosperity. Furthermore, though it is important to do justice to the shift in power relations between the state and business that undoubtedly occurred in the early 1930s, we must be careful to avoid falling into the trap of viewing German business merely as the passive object of the regime’s draconian new system of regulation.58 As we have seen, profits were rising rapidly after 1933 and this opened attractive future prospects for German corporate management.