The Wages of Destruction Quotes

“The Third Reich made it its mission to use the authority of the state to coordinate efforts within industry to devise standardized and simplified versions of key consumer commodities. These would then be produced at the lowest possible price, enabling the German population to achieve an immediate breakthrough to a higher standard of living. The epithet which was generally attached to these products was Volk: the Volksempfaenger (radio), Volkswohnung (apartments), Volkswagen, Volkskuehlschrank (refrigerator), Volkstraktor (tractor).34 This list contains only those products that enjoyed the official backing of one or more agencies in the Third Reich. Private producers, however, had long appreciated that the term ‘Volk’ had good marketing potential, and they, too, joined the bandwagon. Amongst the various products they touted were Volks-gramophone (people’s gramophone), Volksmotorraeder (people’s motorbikes) and Volksnaehmaschinen (people’s sewing machines). In fact, by 1933 the use of the term ‘Volk’ had become so inflationary that the newly established German advertising council was forced to ban the unlicensed use of the term.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“But what Hitler and his government did promise was an end to parliamentary democracy and the destruction of the German left and for this most of German big business was willing to make a substantial down-payment. In light of what Hitler said on the evening of 20 February, the violence of the Machtergreifung should not have come as any surprise. Krupp and his colleagues were willing partners in the destruction of political pluralism in Germany. And the net effect, by the end of 1934, was precisely as intended: a comprehensive popular demobilization.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“if there was any power in the 1930s and 1940s that exemplified the Fascist slogan of the ‘triumph of will’ over material circumstances it was not Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy, but Stalin’s Marxist dictatorship.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The basic reason for Germany’s lack of competitiveness, however, was not political in this crude sense. The basic problem was the uncompetitive exchange rate of the Reichsmark. As we have seen, this fundamental misalignment had first emerged in the autumn of 1931 after the devaluation of sterling. The second shock had come in April 1933 with the devaluation of the dollar. By 1933 only 20 per cent of world trade was still conducted between countries with currencies fixed in terms of gold. Germany’s failure to follow this trend meant that the prices of its exports, translated at the official exchange rate of the Reichsmark, were grossly uncompetitive. This was not a matter of particular industries or sectors. It was not a matter of high wages, or excessive taxes and social levies. At prevailing exchange rates, the entire system of prices and wages in Germany was out of line with that prevailing in most of the rest of the world economy.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Of the growth in total national output in Germany between 1935 and 1938 almost half (47 per cent) was accounted for directly by the increase in the Reich’s military spending.15 If we add investment, of which a very large part was dictated either by the priorities of autarchy or rearmament, the share rises to two-thirds (67 per cent).”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“In the fateful last week in September, with Europe poised on the brink of war, a snatch squad apparently stood ready in Berlin to storm the Reich Chancellery and to arrest Hitler and the Nazi leadership.110”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The chronic shortage of oil, the debility of the European coal mines and the fragility of the food chain, made it seem unlikely that Germany would in fact be able to ‘consolidate’ its conquests of 1940 without falling into excessive dependence on the Soviet Union.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Drafting conscript workers was one thing. But unless they were adequately fed they were useless. There was no industry in the 1940s in which the correlation between labour productivity and calorific input was more direct than in mining.91 But after 1939 the food supply in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal.92 As was true of Germany, the high-intensity dairy farms of France, the Netherlands and Denmark were dependent on imported animal feed. Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed.93 Of course, France was a major producer of grain in its own right. But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The reason why Hitler gambled everything on a massive attack in 1940 was not because he was worried about making excessive demands on the German population, but simply because he thought that this was the only way that Germany could win the war.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalized as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today. But at the same time an understanding of the economic fundamentals also serves to sharpen our appreciation of the profound irrationality of Hitler’s project.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“To purchase a Volkswagen, customers were required to make a weekly deposit of at least 5 Reichsmarks into a DAF account on which they received no interest. Once the account balance had reached 750 Reichsmarks, the customer was entitled to delivery of a VW. The DAF meanwhile achieved an interest saving of 130 Reichsmarks per car. In addition, purchasers of the VW were required to take out a two-year insurance contract priced at 200 Reichsmarks. The VW savings contract was non-transferable, except in case of death, and withdrawal from the contract normally meant the forfeit of the entire sum deposited. Remarkably, 270,000 people signed up to these contracts by the end of 1939 and by the end of the war the number of VW-savers had risen to 340,000. In total, the DAF netted 275 million Reichsmarks in deposits. But not a single Volkswagen was ever delivered to a civilian customer in the Third Reich. After 1939, the entire output was reserved for official uses of various kinds. Most of Porsche’s half-finished factory was turned over to military production. The 275 million Reichsmarks deposited by the VW savers were lost in the post-war inflation. After a long legal battle, VW’s first customers received partial compensation only in the 1960s.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“given the startling superiority of much of the Red Army’s weaponry, the Wehrmacht needed an entire new generation of tanks and infantry weapons.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“It was also the Luftwaffe that would be the first to face the terrifying industrial might of the United States.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Reading contemporary sources, there can be no doubt that the Battle of the Ruhr marked a turning point in the history of the German war economy, which has been grossly underestimated by post-war accounts.29 As Speer himself acknowledged, the RAF was hitting the right target.30 The Ruhr was not only Europe’s most important producer of coking coal and steel, it was also a crucial source of intermediate components of all kinds.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Barbarossa can legitimately claim to be the end point of a European tradition of operational warfare that stretches back at least to the eighteenth century.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“the strongest arguments for rushing to conquer the Soviet Union in 1941 were precisely the growing shortage of grain and the need to knock Britain out of the war before it could pose a serious air threat. The significance of the Blitzkrieg strategy adopted in 1940–41 was not that it allowed the overall level of mobilization to be kept to a minimum, but that it allowed the German war effort to be split into two parts. The factories producing for the army directed their efforts towards providing the equipment for a swift, motorized Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the rest of the German military-industrial complex began to gird itself for the aerial confrontation with Britain and America.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“It may seem anachronistic to refer to these production figures in a discussion of the summer of 1940, but this is precisely the point. Though the mobilization of the American economy after Pearl Harbor is the stuff of legend, it did not start in December 1941. The foundation of the Allies’ overwhelming aerial superiority was laid as early as the summer of 1940, in direct response to Germany’s victory over France. Whether the bombers would be flown by British or American pilots remained to be decided, as did the embarrassing question of finance, but the bombers were coming in any event.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The vast majority of German troops invaded France, Belgium and the Netherlands on foot, with their supplies moved forward from the railheads in the classic nineteenth-century manner, by horse and cart.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“In retrospect, it suited neither the Allies nor the Germans to expose the amazingly haphazard course through which the Wehrmacht had arrived at its most brilliant military success. The myth of the Blitzkrieg suited the British and French because it provided an explanation other than military incompetence for their pitiful defeat. But whereas it suited the Allies to stress the alleged superiority of German equipment, Germany’s own propaganda viewed the Blitzkrieg in less materialistic terms. Technological determinism, after all, would have been fundamentally at odds with the voluntarist and anti-materialist axioms of Nazi ideology.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Too often our knowledge of the extraordinary victories achieved by the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1940 obscures the precariousness of Hitler’s situation over the winter of 1939–40.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The best-equipped infantry divisions, numbering 17,700 men, were provided with between 500 and 600 trucks, 390 cars and a similar number of motorcycles. But for the bulk of its transport the German army relied on horses.39 As compared to a wartime complement of 120,000 trucks, mainly drafted from private business, Fromm allowed for 630,700 horses, one animal for every four men in the active field army.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“What Darré said next was rather more specific and rather more startling: The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The calculations of RNS agronomists suggested that to achieve full self-sufficiency with current technology and at the current standard of living, the Third Reich would need to add 7–8 million empty hectares of farmland to the 34 million hectares currently within its borders.77 It may seem far-fetched to suggest that it was the difficulties of German agriculture that drove the progressive radicalization of Hitler’s regime. But when Hitler did attempt to give concrete meaning to his concept of Lebensraum it was to agriculture that he turned.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“It is this epic of globalization that we should have in mind when we turn to the analysis of National Socialism and in particular its agrarian politics. Too often the preoccupation of Hitler and his followers with problems of Lebensraum, food and agriculture is seen as prima facie evidence of their atavism and backwardness. This could not be more wrong. The search for greater territory and natural resources was not the outlandish obsession of racist ideologues. These had been common European preoccupations for at least the last two hundred years.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The state also provided the other critical preconditions for the Luftwaffe expansion. On 10 June 1936 the Air Ministry signed a second major contract with IG Farben, this time to build a plant at Leuna capable of turning out 200,000 tons of air fuel per annum. The highly toxic tetraethyl lead additive required to boost the fuel’s octane rating was supplied courtesy of IG’s patent-sharing agreement with Standard Oil of New Jersey.97 Standard transferred the technology to Leuna, regardless of protests from the State Department in Washington. In return, and with the full agreement of the German authorities, Standard received the secrets of IG’s new synthetic rubber technology.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The basic and possibly most radical contention of this book is that these interrelated shifts in our historical perception require a reframing of the history of the Third Reich, a reframing which has the disturbing effect both of rendering the history of Nazism more intelligible, indeed eerily contemporary, and at the same time bringing into even sharper relief its fundamental ideological irrationality.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy