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

by Adam Tooze

Goering and Erhard Milch, Secretary of State at the Air Ministry. And the scale of what was agreed marked a dramatic break with all previous conceptions of German rearmament. The figure approved by Schacht was 35 billion Reichsmarks, to be spent over eight years, at a rate of almost 4.4 billion Reichsmarks per annum. To put this in perspective, annual military spending by the Weimar Republic was counted not in billions but in hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks. Total national income in 1933 had slumped to as little as 43 billion Reichsmarks. Even allowing for a rapid recovery, Schacht’s programme called for between 5 and 10 per cent of German GDP to be devoted to defence for the next eight years. By comparison with the present day, this is two or three times the defence burden of most Western countries, to be borne by a country with a much lower level of per capita income.