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

by Adam Tooze

process of the expansion were only loosely controlled by corporate headquarters and many of them were divested after 1941. Since the expansion of the Reichswerke was mainly due to acquisitions rather than internal investment, it added little to the overall dynamic of the armaments driven economy. Though Pleiger’s technological gamble paid off and the Salzgitter steelworks produced perfectly acceptable steel, it never acquired the dominant position in the steel industry that Goering and Pleiger had aimed for. The one crucial sector in which the Reichswerke did establish a leading position was in coal. Here Pleiger profited both from a series of ruthless Aryanization deals orchestrated by Friedrich Flick and from the seizure after 1939 of extensive Silesian mining interests.120 In the 1940s it was coal not steel that was to make Paul Pleiger into a pivotal figure in the organization of the German war economy.