Finding the tools to finish the job

This massive study of Hitler’s war economy runs to half the length of War and Peace, partly for the reason that the author shares with Tolstoy the annoying habit of repeating himself frequently and at length. Although I suspect the book will be cited more often than read and perhaps more often read than understood, it must all the same now be enrolled by any serious student of the second world war as belonging to the list of indispensable sources available. Adam Tooze’s formidable intellect and impressive industry certainly entitle it to that.

History may be regarded as a rope consisting of many strands of different strengths and sizes but all of which contribute to the whole resulting rope. Amongst the more obviously observable strands are the political, religious and ideological, military and economic. The detailed study of the strands in isolation from the rope makes little sense and is only grist for the mill of historians of the rope. But the more ambitious and useful of the specialist ‘strand’ historians seek to establish the relationship of their strand to the rope themselves. Such is the case of Tooze whose undoubted strand is economic but whose end product is general history. Thus, for example, the twists and turns by which Germany’s financial situation was managed so as to back an unprecedented scale and rate of armaments production without causing serious inflation is exhaustively examined and explained.

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So too, to touch on another aspect, are the extraordinary bursts of expanded production which were achieved at regular intervals culminating in the so-called Speer miracle of the end years. The way in which the German capitalist system was harnessed to authoritarian dictatorship in a titanic struggle to compete with the Marxist system in the Soviet Union and the democratic ‘Fordism’ of the United States makes fascinating and, because of its effectiveness, frightening reading.