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

by Adam Tooze

of German business, on the other hand, was far more ‘liberal’ in flavour. Though German industry was by no means averse to tariffs, the Reich industrial association strongly favoured a system of uninhibited capital movement and multilateralism underpinned by Most Favoured Nation principles.12 In the case of heavy industry this advocacy of international trade was combined with visions of European trade blocs of varying dimensions.13 In important industries including coal, steel and chemicals, international trade was organized within the framework of formal cartels, sometimes with global reach.14 Siemens and AEG divided up the global market for electrical engineering through understandings with their main American competitors.15 However, all of these were arrangements freely chosen by German businessmen and their foreign counterparts, independent of state interference. In this sense, though hardly liberal they were at least cases of voluntarist business self-administration. Meanwhile, large parts of German foreign commerce remained free of cartel regulation of any kind, most notably textiles, metalwares and engineering, with the machine-builders association, the VDMA, being a particularly aggressive exponent of free trade.