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

by Adam Tooze

had major interests in German oil refining and distribution. The British tyre firm Dunlop had a considerable investment in the German rubber industry.104 ARBED, the quintessentially European heavy industrial conglomerate, with its main base in Luxembourg, had significant cross-border interests both in coal and the Felten and Guilleaume cable works. All of these industrial investments in various ways profited from Hitler’s economic recovery. The more they detached themselves from their foreign parents and the more closely they collaborated with the regime, the better they did. The regime for its part, particularly in its early years, went out of its way to reassure representatives from Ford, GM and ITT of their position in Germany. Wilhelm Keppler advised ITT to appoint the banker Baron von Schroeder, one of the men who had brokered Hitler’s appointment to power in January 1933, to its board.105 Ford had extremely pro-Nazi management at its plant in Cologne. And Opel probably profited more than any single car-maker from Hitler’s motorization boom. At the same time as acknowledging this important foreign involvement in the Nazi boom, one cannot ignore the fact that the cumulative total of direct investment in Germany was dwarfed by the billions that were in default to American and European banks and bond holders. And on the crucial question of repatriating the capital they had invested or the profits