harold james on tooze

Adam Tooze has written a well-crafted and fast-flowing account that ties together economic history and political, military, and diplomatic history. It is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to demonstrate the fundamental economic underpinnings of Nazi policy and to discover an underlying logic of Hitler’s geopolitical strategic planning. The key to understanding Hitler’s worldview, according to Tooze, is not anti-bolshevism but anti-Americanism. This had an ideological side, in that Hitler saw President Franklin Roosevelt as a puppet of a world Jewish conspiracy. It also had an economic side, in that Hitler and the Nazis thought that the only path to prosperity lay in becoming more like America: not only in the adoption of advanced production methods to satisfy consumer needs, but also in the political and social basis provided by substantial homestead farming communities. Such farms would be a source of social stability, but they would also feed the people. Germany in the frontiers of Weimar or even of Imperial Germany did not have enough Lebensraum to be American, and Hitler’s ambition was thus a war of conquest in eastern Europe. Some aspects of this thesis are of course not new: elements appear in the work of Saul Friedlander, and the foreign policy logic of the obsession has been spelled out in numerous and quite well-known works by Klaus Hildebrand (though not apparently consulted by Tooze). The central claim in Tooze’s work, that Operation Barbarossa was part of an effort ultimately directed against Britain and the United States, has also been made into a dazzling book by John Lukacs, Duel (again, not consulted by Tooze). What Tooze does, however, is make very clear the links between the overall vision of Hitler and the implementation of war plans as they affected Germany’s productive process. Tooze brilliantly shows how the agrarian ideologues, in particular Herbert Backe, moved seamlessly from planning a managed agrarian economy in the 1930s to proposing a Hunger Plan, in which Slavs and Jews would be starved to death in order to create the right balance between population and resources in Germany’s new empire. He also graphically demonstrates how Albert Speer took a central part in such planning and how close the relationship was between Speer and the SS. Most notably, Speer addressed the Gauleiter at Posen with an impassioned plea for greater productivity and an explicit threat to use the SS to fight economic sabotage at the same meeting (October 6, 1943) in which Heinrich Himmler explicitly discussed the killing of Jews and made an explicit parallel between the “clearing of ghettoes” and the rationalization of the German war economy. Tooze gives a novel and completely persuasive account of this notorious meeting and its importance in the mobilization of Germans for total war. Other parts of the book ably link the apparently large fluctuations in armaments output to the overall German economic strategy. In the course of this exercise, Tooze tries to overturn almost every conventional interpretation of the Nazi economy and often succeeds in making telling points. The account is revisionist to the last detail, including, for instance, the insistence that the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was concluded on August 24 (because it was signed in the early hours of the morning). Alan Milward’s notion of the Blitzkrieg strategy, imposed by resource constraints that made it impossible for Germany to mobilize economically “in depth” for a protracted BOOK REVIEWS 367 war, is shown to be false for 1939 and 1940, though Tooze also concedes Blitzkrieg elements in the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. The extensive history of the Second World War published by the German Milita¨rgeschichtliches Forschungsamt is deeply flawed, because it does not adequately account for the elements of planning before the advent of Albert Speer. Almost all of Richard Overy’s interpretations are demolished by Tooze: the Nazi economic recovery had little to do with peaceful motorization, as Overy had claimed, but was always directed toward military ends. More importantly, Overy’s interpretation that after 1936 Hitler was preparing for long-term and deep military capacity, but that the effort was consistently undermined by bureaucratic infighting (or the Polykratie identified by many German scholars) is presented as a grotesque exaggeration, and Tooze concludes that German planning was much more logical and successful than usually thought. Given this interpretation, received wisdom about a Speer “miracle” also fades away in Tooze’s account: the armaments figures for 1943 and 1944 were clearly an outcome of policies launched earlier. More recent interpretations of Nazi economics are treated equally scathingly, in particular Go¨tz Aly’s claim in Hitlers Volksstaat that the Nazis were embarking on a big experiment in welfare economics based on looting occupied Europe. Werner Abelshauser is firmly rapped on the knuckles for suggesting that investments in the Nazi era might have contributed to the postwar Wirtschaftswunder. But even Ian Kershaw’s monumental Hitler biography is criticized by Tooze as flawed for ignoring the centrality of steel (and more generally economics) for Nazi war planning (p. 243). Some of the repeated claims to novelty look a little contrived. There is by now a substantial industry devoted to the dismantling of Albert Speer’s selfserving account of his role in the Nazi state, and even the late Joachim Fest, who helped Speer put together his exculpation, had second thoughts and acknowledged that he had been duped by Speer. Other points are also simply not all that novel: in one instance, Tooze explains carefully and correctly that there were already signs of cyclical economic recovery in the second half of 1932, in other words before Hitler took power and could lay claim to an economic miracle. Tooze likes this point so much that he tells us that “This is a crucial point because it contradicts all subsequent portrayals of the German economy under National Socialism” (p. 31). All subsequent portrayals? Actually, buried in a footnote on page 698 it becomes clear that quite a number of accounts have made exactly this case. After all the rubble from the historiographical demolition settles, an interpretation is left that looks much closer to the conventional wisdom of the 1930s, namely that Hitler was directing a powerful and efficient machine toward complete mobilization for war. Even Hitler’s oddest strategic gambles, notably the invasion of the Soviet Union, had an underlying logic. To this interpretation, though, Tooze adds an odd twist that is not at all part of any conventional 368 BOOK REVIEWS wisdom: that the underlying problem was simply that Germany was very poor at the outset of Hitler’s effort. The central part of Tooze’s argument rests on his often-repeated statement that Germany in the 1930s was not a powerful industrial economy, but rather a poor state, profoundly lagging behind the United States and more on the developmental level of “modern Iran or South Africa” (p. xxiii), a “European economy of modest resources” (p. 461). “Clearly, in Hitler’s Germany only a small minority of the population lived in circumstances which we today would describe as comfortable” (p. 143). This risks being profoundly ahistorical, especially when the picture of the United States that is conjured up as a contrast is that of modern, twenty-first century American consumerist prosperity. The real United States of the 1930s was that of the dustbowl, the Depression, and extreme poverty. Obviously, if modern Iran could somehow be transported back in time on a magic historical flying carpet to the middle of the twentieth century, it would have been the dominant superpower. There are also simply factual problems in the attempt to shrink Germany’s economic position. Tooze goes on to make a contrast between German housing and the “facilities taken for granted in the United States, such as separate bathroom and kitchen, indoor toilet, and running water.” In fact, in 1930, only fifty-one percent of American households had inside flush toilets (in 1920, the proportion had only been twenty percent). Another anachronistic flavor is given in the comparative depiction of military potential through the problematical use of an artificial statistical currency (1990 U.S. PPP or Purchasing Power Parity dollars, a concept that few of Tooze’s readers will understand): it overstates the relative power potential of poorer societies (such as those of eastern Europe or the Soviet Union) because services are very cheap there, but clearly form an important part of an estimation of purchasing power. PPP tells us little about the capacity to buy weapons or steel. Some aspects of the story are left out in Tooze’s account, sometimes rather oddly, because they might actually have strengthened his case, in other instances, however, because they fit uncomfortably with the overall thesis. Having made the argument that steel is at the center of the Nazi economic story, it is surprising that there is not more discussion not just of the problems of access to iron ore and coking coal, but also to the metal ores needed for the production of specialty steel required for many engineering and military purposes. There is one reference (p. 312) to General Brauchitsch’s complaint in 1939 that the inadequacy of rations of nonferrous metals amounted to a “liquidation of the army’s rearmament effort,” and another quotation in 1941 of General Thomas’s fear that the invasion of the Soviet Union would lead to Germany losing its only source of manganese (p. 438). But otherwise the crucial story of steel alloys and more generally of nonferrous metals is left untold: there is no mention at all (as far as I can see) of wolfram. Yet these were vital necessities for the armaments economy

which could only be imported and for which Germany needed foreign exchange or gold. Here again, Tooze is remarkably silent. Though there is a good deal of discussion of the Reichsbank’s (central bank’s) gold and foreign exchange position in the 1930s and much reference to anti-inflationary policy during the war, the wartime acquisition of looted gold and its use (via Switzerland and partly also Sweden) for obtaining foreign currency and thus the ability to buy metal ores is not referred to at all. One of the most horrifying links between economics and the Holocaust is thus passed over, and SS-Captain Bruno Melmer (who made the deliveries of gold extracted from the dead and living mouths of the victims of Germany’s racial war) makes no appearance in Tooze’s pages. Neither is there any discussion of another episode that is important for the understanding of the relation of economic issues and the intensification of the regime’s murderous persecution of Jews, and that has been extensively documented by Yehuda Bauer and by Thomas Sandku¨hler and Bettina Zeugin: the internment of wealthy West European Jews in special concentration camps (most notably Bergen Belsen) away from the eastern killing fields, where they might be used to extract ransoms from relatives in Britain or the United States. Again the most obvious German motive was the necessity of acquiring foreign exchange to pay for strategic imports. With Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war, this exercise became much harder, and Germany embarked on the wholesale annihilation of west European Jewry. Here was another occasion on which December 1941 constituted the fulcrum of the war. Other surprising absences include the following: In the course of a narration of the political intrigues that allowed Hitler to consolidate power in the early months of 1933, we are not told about the Reichstag fire and how the subsequent banning of the communist party allowed the Nazis to control parliament. There is a detailed discussion of the economic gains that the Anschluss of Austria brought (not enough to improve Germany’s position), but no equivalent analysis of the very substantial contribution of the Czech economy after March 1939, with its prominent armaments sector. This omission makes it possible for Tooze to analyze a “severe setback to Germany’s armaments effort” in the summer of 1939, which we are told is “fully revealed for the first time in this chapter” (p. 317). The discussion of the agrarian Nazis and their role is well handled, but there is no equivalent analysis of the Mittelstand Nazis, such as Otto Ohlendorf, or of the SS’s attempts to outflank Speer and build up a socialist economy rather than the private-public partnership on which Speer relied. The narrating of these kinds of conflict was a central part of most efforts to depict internal tensions as a fundamental source of inefficiency in the German political and military regime. The controversial issue of how far in the last years of the war some parts of the German economy were preparing for a post-Nazi