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

by Adam Tooze

beyond, the disaster of the Weimar Republic will always stand as the most stark illustration of the consequences that follow from placing too much faith in the self-healing properties of the free market, a rhetorical connection that was put to extensive use in the long rearguard action that Keynesians fought against the intellectual forces of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s.89 Germany’s history between 1929 and 1933 can certainly be made to serve this purpose. But if we seek to understand Hitler’s regime outside this anachronistic frame of reference the emphasis on work creation as the key to understanding Nazi economic policy seems misplaced. Work creation in fact emerged as a subject for intense discussion on the right wing of German politics only in the second half of 1931. The Nazi party did not adopt work creation as a key part of its programme until the late spring of 1932, and it retained that status for only eighteen months, until December 1933, when civilian work creation spending was formally removed from the priority list of Hitler’s government. Despite the claims of Goebbels’s propaganda and despite the preoccupations of later commentators and historians, civilian work creation measures were clearly not a core agenda item for the nationalist coalition that seized power in January 1933. In fact, amongst the coalition partners of January 1933, work creation was highly divisive.