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

by Adam Tooze

In any given year, the value of the grain harvest alone was equal to the annual output of German heavy industry–coal mining, iron and steel. And yet the difference in the organizational effort devoted to the two operations was spectacular. The backwardness of much of German agriculture betokened a chronic lack of expert management and supervision, a deficit which the RNS sought to put right with an endless stream of lectures, educational material and courses as well as more direct interventions into peasant farming practice. From an economic point of view, one of the most significant innovations of the RNS was that it extended not only to the farms but to all associated industries. The RNS included in its remit the credit cooperatives from which the farmers obtained funds to buy their annual stock of seed grain, the cooperatives and merchants to whom the farmers delivered their produce. It also included the dairies, mills and factories that processed food for consumption in