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

by Adam Tooze

There can be no doubt that the regime paid a serious political price for the economic difficulties of 1934. All the evidence we have on public opinion, mainly from confidential reports by the regional offices of the Gestapo, confirms that in the summer of 1934 the German population was unsettled far more by the economic problems resulting from the foreign exchange crisis than by the violence of the Night of the Long Knives. The simplistic cliché, which sees the Germans as having been won over to Hitler’s regime by the triumphs of work creation, is simply not borne out by the evidence.87 The economic recovery, rapid as it was, was incomplete, even in the first half of 1935. There were still millions of unemployed, many of whom had known nothing other than poverty for years. Their best hope in the first three winters of the Third Reich was the new National Socialist Winter Charity, which distributed hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks’ worth of free food to the poorer Volksgenossen. Furthermore, after the crisis of 1934, the lopsidedness of Germany’s economic recovery was acute. Millions of people who depended for their livelihoods on the consumer goods industries faced an outlook of short time and shortened wages.