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

by Adam Tooze

The German economy could not live without imports. To feed its densely packed population, Germany needed imports of fats and animal feed. Nineteen million German households could not satisfy their immense appetite for meat, milk and butter from domestic sources. Germany’s giant herds of pigs and cows could only be sustained through the import of huge quantities of high-energy animal feed. Huge industries such as textiles depended entirely on imported cotton and wool. The blast furnaces of the Ruhr were fed with iron ore from Scandinavia, a dependence made worse by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918. The one resource that Germany did have in abundance was coal. But Germany’s growing fleet of cars, trucks and aircraft burned oil and they rolled on tyres manufactured from imported rubber. Given this dependence, the level of imports was the best indicator of the vigour of the German economic metabolism. In 1928, when the Weimar Republic had been close to full employment, the real volume of imports, allowing for the very sharp fall in global commodity prices,