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

by Adam Tooze

However, the RNS’s influence was enormous, since it controlled the prices that the processers paid for their raw materials. Taking agriculture and the food industry together, the RNS was a truly formidable organization. Exercising more or less direct control over more than 25 per cent of German GDP, it was, Darré boasted, the largest single economic unit in the world, with sales of more than 30 billion Reichsmarks.50 As well as a total of 6 million independent producers, it controlled more than 40 per cent of the total German workforce. The RNS had an even more direct impact on German households, since it controlled the prices at which they purchased their food and drink, which on average accounted for almost 50 per cent of family budgets.