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

by Adam Tooze

By the early 1940s, as we shall see, German industry was benefiting from an investment boom like no other in its history. The Nazi regime also paid concerted attention to its ‘human capital’. Improvements to the system of industrial training had been discussed intensively in the 1920s. And from 1933 onwards apprenticeships and on-the-job training were given massive state support. Amongst other requirements, an entirely new workforce of skilled metalworkers had to be created for the factories serving the Luftwaffe. In line with its rhetorical revalorization of German labour, the Third Reich established the norm that every German youth should aspire, at the very least, to the status of a semi-skilled worker.27 And these were not mere words. In 1939 only 30,000 male school leavers entered the workforce as unskilled labourers, as compared to 200,000 in 1934. For many working-class families, the 1930s and 1940s were a period of real social mobility, not in the sense of an ascent into the middle class, but within the blue-collar skill hierarchy, prompting one author to speak of the ‘deproletarianization’ of the German working class.