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

by Adam Tooze

The precondition for cooperation, however, was an end to unilateralism. Germany would need the support of the British and French. It would need to bring its military spending under control. And Goerdeler went further than that. He believed that concessions would also have to be made on the ‘Jewish question, freemasonry question, question of the rule of law, Church question’: ‘I can well imagine that we will have to bring certain issues . . . into a greater degree of alignment with the imponderable attitudes of other peoples, not in substance, but in the manner of dealing with them.’51 One is tempted to say that, given the mood prevailing in London and Paris, Goerdeler exaggerated the price that Germany would have had to pay for an economic accord. Moderation of rearmament certainly was a sine qua non. But the idea that the British and French would have made the anti-Jewish laws of 1935, or the treatment of the Churches, into a sticking point seems far-fetched.