An anachronistic empire of slave labor

My apprehension of World War II is colored by ancestry, though I was not born until shortly after. That is, I grew up knowing that "The War," meaning the war in Europe to defeat fascism and Nazism, was the central and defining experience of my mother's life. Perhaps the 9/11 attacks played a similar role in some current generations' lives -- an historical experience which colors deeply all that comes after.

My mother experienced The War as an extended crisis. Unusually for her class and location -- I think because she encountered emigre Germans, refugees from the Nazis -- she viewed Hitler as a threat not only to her Jewish and German friends, but also to her own way of life. When I read Erik Larson's In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, I realized that she was almost certainly in the audience for the diplomat William E. Dodd's anti-Nazi speaking tour after he returned from Germany.

What made The War such a long, draining crisis for people like my mother was that her fellow citizens didn't see the threat coming or didn't want to look. Mother was a moderate Republican; she was out of phase with her peers, agitating against German expansionism throughout the 1930's, watching in horror as Hitler absorbed Austria and Czechoslovakia, listening on the radio to the fall of France to Hitler's armies, and to the bombing of London. "America First" politicians were slow to take up what she feared was a uncertain fight to preserve human decency. It was an agonizing time to be her kind of engaged citizen. Was Nazi barbarism about to overrun everything?

The central insight of economic historian Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy was that this terror was somewhat misplaced. Hitler's terrible Aryan empire never had a chance against the productive capacity of American arms, shipped first to Britain and later to the Soviet Union. In fact, even a Russia degraded by vicious Stalinist purges and erratic central planning, had the economic capacity to resist and defeat the Germans. The German state was a second rate economic power that Nazis tried to organize to overshoot its actual strength -- and its eventual collapse was all but inevitable.

For all the misery and murder, barbarity and brutality, Nazism was not going to win The War or the future. I found Tooze's book fascinating, but this may be an acquired taste. He proves his case in vast detail and summarizes in broad strokes.

Once Germany had engaged both Britain and the Soviet Union and once the United States threw its weight fully into the scales, the odds against the Third Reich were bound to be overwhelming. In 1941, before the German invasion of the Soviet Union but also before the American economy hit full stride, the combined GDP of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States exceeded that of Germany by a factor of 4.36 to 1. Similarly, in the 1930s the combined steel output of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States had been almost exactly four times greater than that of Germany and that at a time when American industry was well short of its productive peak. By 1944 the ratio of steel output, even if we add the output of Belgium, France and Poland to the German side, was 4.5 to 1 against Germany. What Germany faced by 1944 was simply the crushing material superiority that German strategists had always feared.

Tooze demands recognition that, in addition to Nazism's ideological and all-too-successful attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews, German economic planning was also based on starving or murdering the continent's Slavic people's to make room for German imperial expansion. The Nazis were envious of French and British colonial empires and looked for potential slave labor of their own.

The point is not that Germany’s imperialism in Eastern Europe represented a regression into atavistic barbarism. The Nazi programme of genocide was certainly barbaric. But, as we have seen, it was tied to an ambitious project of colonial settlement and violent modernization. The point is not that Nazi racism was atavistic. The point is that it was anachronistic. ... 

[Germany's invasion of Russia] was a belated and perverse outgrowth of a European tradition of colonial conquest and settlement, a tradition that was not yet fully aware of its own obsolescence. ... 

... By the 1940s, the nineteenth-century map of economic and military power, centred on the established states of Western Europe, no longer existed. This was the most basic fallacy underpinning the effort by the Third Reich to create an empire in the East. America’s emergence as an economic superpower on the one hand and the explosive development of the Soviet Union on the other had fundamentally altered the balance of global power. ... 

... Whereas the incarceration of more and more potential workers in murderous concentration camps was clearly irrational from the point of view of the overall war effort, from the point of view of the individual employer the concentration camps were often a godsend. Even in 1944, Himmler was still able to provide new workers. Though these people were quickly worn out, the advantage of the SS was precisely that they were able to offer their industrial clients an apparently limitless flow of new inmates.

Tooze concludes that it is inadequate to concentrate entirely on the Nazi's ideological intent; the economic order they aspired to impose was almost equally murderous.

Obviously, ideology was decisive in the last instance, especially in relation to the Judaeocide. There could be no other reason for killing one group with such awful thoroughness. The assumption of a racial struggle was an unalterable given in the Nazi worldview. On the other hand, it is also clear that, as the war ground on, sustaining the war effort increasingly came to override every other preoccupation of Hitler’s regime.

I found this book broadening. As far as I can tell, Tooze's estimation of the Nazism's essential economic weakness is now generally accepted by historians, a change in emphasis from previous accounts. We see differently as we move farther away in time. My mother wouldn't have accepted Tooze's thesis for a minute -- the danger seemed too immediate.