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

by Adam Tooze

Simple arithmetic suggested that even a wholesale programme of land reform could not satisfy the ambition of the German agrarians, to bring about a fundamental change in the balance between rural and urban society. If all the land held by farms over 500 hectares in 1933 had been comprehensively expropriated and used to create family farms of 20 hectares, the total number of new homesteads created would have been no more than 500,000. This would have enabled the consolidation of the most precarious peasant population on holdings of below 10 hectares. However, it would not have halted the long-term decline of the agricultural population. Indeed, even if the entire farmland of Germany had been available for redistribution, it would have been sufficient to provide each of Germany’s 3 million farming families with an average of only 13 hectares. The conclusion was inescapable. Even under the most favourable assumptions, the