Allen Lane £30 pp828

In the past 70-odd years, various explanations of Nazism have come and gone, notably those based on Marxism and its derivatives, even though some of the older argumentative frameworks have shown a surprising durability. The growth of scholarly specialisation has meant that while some fields, notably Nazi “biological politics”, have boomed in recent decades, others, including “the economy”, have become the preserve of experts whose eyes do not automatically glaze over at the sight of balance sheets and production statistics. While we learn more and more about the persecution of gays or Jehovah’s Witnesses, the bigger material and strategic picture have been neglected.

Adam Tooze has created a coherent and radical explanation of the limitations — and opportunities — that economic facts imposed on Hitler’s regime. Virtually every page of his book contains something new and thought-provoking, making the whole an impressive achievement, in which original research has been combined with critical scrutiny of a vast literature that seems ripe for such a re-examination.

Tooze restores the wider context of the Nazis’ frenetic economic activism, and then serially questions its effects. From today’s perspective, Hitler was correct in predicting the long-term decline of even the mightiest of the European colonial empires, and the rise of America as the dominant global power. Instead of accepting that framework, he ordered the largest peacetime transfer of economic resources to armaments in history, with a view to creating a continental empire (the size of Australia) to resist the ineluctable dominance of America, against which he held various racist prejudices.

The essential problem, even for a totalitarian regime in which senior industrialists could be threatened, while humble drones were punched in the face, was that, despite enclaves of high technology such as Bosch, Krupps or Siemens, Germany was more like present-day Iran or South Africa than the Germany of the post-war “economic miracle” or today. Large numbers of Germans eked out a primitive existence on subsistence farms, or lived four to a room in gloomy urban courtyards. In that sense, there was some truth to the slogan of Volk ohne Raum (“a people without space”). But headline-grabbing stunts involving auto-bahns, VW “Beetles”, and “people’s” radio sets could not seriously change any of that. In Hitler’s Darwinist view, only war to the death would do. Every other sector of the economy paid the price of directing costly resources, either imported or produced at uneconomic cost, to war plans that were spectacular in their wilful disregard for realities. After 1937, no German could get a mortgage (just as well since few houses were being built) while trains were covered in safety warnings because of chronic disrepair. The hugely beefed-up army slept in tents because of a failure to build barracks.

Ignoring all warnings about economic inadequacies, Hitler skilfully sought to isolate each opponent, prior to deploying limited resources for the killer blow. For behind the newsreel footage of screeching dive-bombers and purposeful panzers were armies that relied on horses to move equipment, chronic shortages of fuel, and limited ammunition. How, one wonders, did the RAF not polish off a 400-km traffic jam of German horses and vehicles stretching behind the Belgium border in 1940?

Economic problems continued even when the whole of Europe had been turned into a giant takeaway by the biggest thieves in modern history. Initially, fine generalship and the shrewd use of the Wehrmacht overcame an economy that was not only modest in relation to the enormous resources being mobilised by America, but careened between one insane objective and another.

It was entirely symptomatic that when German tanks came within striking distance of Moscow, confident that the USSR was on the verge of collapse, plans were already afoot to reallocate resources to giant ships and long-range bombers to attack America. Actually, the Germans had underestimated the scale of Stalin’s crash industrialisation of Russia, even as they were acutely aware that Roosevelt was serious when he ordered the building of 50,000 aircraft a year, that is 10 times Germany’s own output.

The chosen way out of these dilemmas was a murderous fantasy world that was all too real for its victims, actual or projected. Some populations were moved as latterday slaves; others were slated for destruction by evil little professorial types who had long wished for such a scenario. Economic desperation, as well as ideological fanaticism, was responsible for starving “surplus” mouths, which would have involved 30m or 40m Russian city-dwellers, most of the Poles, and, of course, 6m Jews, as well as 3.5m captured Red Army soldiers, who were reduced to eating grass — or each other — in frozen dugouts. None of this barbarity made the slightest difference to the basic facts of a contest in which the Germans were lucky to get away with Bomber Harris, avoiding the opening radiant glow of the nuclear age.

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