The Nazi Economy

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

WSWS : Book Review
75 years since the Nazi assumption of power
Hitler’s “intelligible response” to the contradictions of global capitalism
The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze
By Stefan Steinberg
8 February 2008

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the 
Nazi Economy, Allen Lane: 2006, 832 pages, now available in German 
translation

Seventy-five years after the taking of power by the National Socialists 
in Germany the phenomena of the party led by Hitler and the enormous 
destruction wrought by his movement in the space of just over a decade 
still remain a source of mystery for many commentators.

In its special edition to mark the anniversary of the Nazi takeover (14 
January 2008), the prominent German news magazine Der Spiegel headlined 
its main article “The Triumph of Madness.”

Writing in the January 24 edition of the London Book Review the veteran 
Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm struck a similar note: “The fact is 
that no one, right, left or centre, got the true measure of Hitler’s 
National Socialism, a movement of a kind that had not been seen before 
and whose aims were rationally unimaginable ...”

There can be no doubt that Hitler fascism was responsible for a degree 
of human depravation and brutality which quite rightly continues to 
shock and horrify today, but that does not mean his movement was 
incomprehensible. In fact, there has been a great deal of scholarship in 
recent years that has thrown important new light on the emergence and 
rise to prominence of National Socialism.

Utilising new sources, including important archives opened up by the 
fall of Stalinism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, the British 
historians Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans have both published 
multi-volume works which considerably broaden our understanding of the 
social and political background to Hitler’s own rise to power—Kershaw’s 
two-volume biography of the dictator (Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, and 
Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis) and the three volumes by Richard J. Evans on 
the Third Reich (the third volume of the series is still to be completed).

A third very valuable contribution to the current wave of research into 
National Socialism is the volume by a British historian based at 
Cambridge University, Adam Tooze—The Wages Of Destruction, which is now 
available in German translation. In his book Tooze sets out to identify 
and examine the economic driving forces behind the National Socialist 
project and in so doing presents the first extensive investigation of 
this type for many decades.

Tooze begins his book with the famous quote by Karl Marx whereby people 
“make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do 
not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances 
existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Tooze then notes 
that Marx in his famous text The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 
(1852) then proceeds to deal with a host of political and ideological 
aspects dealing with the rule of Louis Bonaparte rather than merely 
presenting a discourse over economics and modes of production. By the 
same token, Tooze goes on: “it is with good reason ... that recent 
writing on the Third Reich has been preoccupied with politics and ideology.”

However, such concentration on politics and ideology also comes at a 
cost. For far too long there has been no serious research into the 
significance of economic issues in the ascension to political prominence 
and power on the part of the National Socialists. Tooze undertakes to 
set the record straight and examines the explosive economic 
contradictions that played such a crucial role in determining the path 
of National Socialism.

It is only on the basis of studying the significance of such economic 
issues that one can explain the support won by Hitler’s movement from 
important sections of the German business and political elite.

In the introduction to his book Tooze puts forward his basic thesis:

“The originality of National Socialism was that rather than meekly 
accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated 
by the affluent English speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilise 
the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to 
this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the 
previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its own imperial 
hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East it would create the 
self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform 
necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the 
United States.... The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be 
rationalised 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.”

It is only on the basis of grasping this “intelligible response” by the 
Hitler regime, which was shared by broad layers of the German ruling and 
military elite, that one can explain the ultimately crazed nature of 
Hitler’s military campaign whereby Germany and its fascist allies 
conducted a series of simultaneous wars against all of the major 
imperialist powers.

As Tooze explains later in his book, other aspects of the National 
Socialist strategy which are also often dismissed as simply 
incomprehensible—such as its campaign against European Jewry and the 
eventual mass destruction of the Jews—can only be fully understood in 
connection with the imperial aims laid down by the leading National 
Socialists in their program and policy statements. As Tooze notes in his 
introduction: “I emphasise the connections between the wars against the 
Jews and the regime’s wider projects of imperialism, forced labour and 
deliberate starvation.”

full: http://wsws.org/articles/2008/feb2008/book-f08.shtml