Wirtschaftswunder: Was The Nazi Economic Miracle A Lie?

What this episode is about

The discussion explores the reality behind the so-called Nazi economic miracle, revealing that the apparent industrial success and military prowess of Nazi Germany were built on financial strain and exploitation of occupied nations. Although Germany mobilized its industry effectively during the war, it faced significant shortages of resources, relying heavily on pillaging and forced labor rather than sustainable economic practices.

Key takeaways

• The Nazis' economic engine ran on a twisted blend of exploitation and extreme resourcefulness.
• Pillaging occupied territories was not just war strategy; it was a survival tactic to sustain German morale.
• Frozen purchasing power kept inflation at bay while the regime printed money like it was going out of style.
• Food was the ultimate propaganda tool—German rations fed on the misery of conquered peoples, ensuring domestic support.
• Hitler's empire dreams clashed with grim realities, as resource shortages pushed him to invade the Soviets in desperation.

What is discussed, and when

1. 5:00 – 10:00: Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler
2. 10:00 – 15:00: Vanzay conference
3. 15:00 – 20:00: Herbert Baka, Pearl Harbor
4. 20:00 – 25:00: Fritz Todd
5. 25:00 – 30:00: Heinrich Himmler, Reich
6. 30:00 – 35:00: Heinrich Himmler, Stalingrad
7. 40:00 – 45:00: Heinrich Himmler, Third Reich

Notable quotes from "Wirtschaftswunder: Was The Nazi Economic Miracle A Lie?"

• Germany broke the non-aggression pact.

  about Operation Barbarossa · at 7:34

• Between June and December 1941, the Third Reich was in its heyday.

  about Third Reich · at 9:18

• So, it's shocking because this is 12 months before the famous Vanzay conference. This is 12 months before even euphemistic talk of the total annihilation of the Jewish…

  about Vanzay conference · at 14:23

• It was Herbert Baka who was chiefly responsible for the hunger plan. The minister of agriculture was a technocrat and a radical Nazi.

  about Herbert Baka · at 16:32

• He was a rapid replacement for Fritz Todd, who had died in a plane crash.

  about Fritz Todd · at 21:06

• On February 2nd, 1943, the Red Army inflicted a resounding defeat on the Vermacht at Stalingrad, and Allied bombing brought the battleground to German factories and.

  about Stalingrad · at 31:23

• Surrendering to the demands of the total war effort. And that's where Hinri Himmler comes in because Hinrich Himmler provides you with the muscle and the informant network and the spies to go into every factory in Germany.

  about Heinrich Himmler · at 34:08

• Under Spear's leadership, death was just another variable which production had to deal with.

  about Albert Speer · at 42:56

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Albert Speer — Person · Referenced senior administrator / war-economy organizer · 6 mentions
  Presented as the key organizer of armaments rationalization from 1942, tied to forced labor and collaboration with the SS to sustain production.
• Heinrich Himmler — Person · Referenced SS leader / coercive apparatus · 5 mentions · first at 9:41
  Depicted as architect/executor of SS violence and planning (Generalplan Ost) and as Speer’s coercive partner enabling discipline, forced labor, and genocide.
• Herbert Baka — Person · Referenced technocrat / policy architect · 1 mention · first at 16:32
  Identified as chiefly responsible for the Hunger Plan—using agricultural and rationing policy as a weapon tied to genocidal planning.
• Fritz Todd — Person · Referenced predecessor (armaments/engineering administration) · 2 mentions · first at 21:06
  Mentioned as the official Speer replaced after a fatal plane crash, marking a shift in war-economy management.

Companies & orgs

• IG Farben — Company · Business focus · 3 mentions
  Discusses the role of IG Farben in the Nazi war economy and its involvement in the Holocaust.
  In February 1941, the chemical giant IG Farbin agreed to hand over an industrial zone to the SS, an area of 24 km to the east of Awitz, which had only been a prisoner of war camp at the time.

Concepts & topics

• Third Reich — Concept · Core topic · 3 mentions · first at 8:23
  Central theme of the episode, discussing the political and economic entity under Nazi rule.
• Reich — Concept · Key argument · 1 mention · first at 27:41
  Discusses the economic and political entity of the Reich under Nazi rule.
  The contract with the SS for concentration camp labor and especially Jewish concentration camp labor isn't a contract for individual workers. It's a contract for a flow of labor. And so if.

Places & events

• Operation Barbarossa — Event · Key argument · 3 mentions
  Discusses the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a pivotal event in WWII.
• Stalingrad — Event · Key argument · 1 mention · first at 31:28
  Discusses the pivotal battle where the Red Army inflicted a resounding defeat on the Vermacht.
• Vanzay conference — Event · Key argument · 1 mention · first at 14:26
  Discusses the conference where the Nazis planned the annihilation of the Jewish population.
• Pearl Harbor — Event · Key argument · 1 mention · first at 17:40
  Discusses the event that led to the US entering WWII, impacting Nazi Germany's war efforts.
  And after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the US entered the war. Germany was therefore forced to fight a much longer war.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:12 Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. From September 1st, 1939, Hitler started launching his troops across Europe.

0:30 Inside their tons of armored steel was an instruction manual for the crew of the Pancers. This small illustrated guide stated on the last page. For every shell that you fire, your father has paid 100 Reichkes marks in taxes. Your mother has worked a week in the factory and the trains have traveled 10,000 km. The tank's total cost was 800,000 Reichkes marks and 300,000 hours of work. 30,000 people will have given a week's salary. 6,000 people will have worked a whole week so that you could have an armored combat vehicle.

1:11 Everyone has been working for you, the tank crew. Think about what you have in your hands.

1:24 At the heart of this German war machine, a symbol of a powerful, organized, and invincible nation, the Nazi regime was obsessed with money, working hours, and taxes. The resounding victories of the Blitzk were the result of an unprecedented mobilization of German industry. They were also won by a financially belleaguered regime. The true colors of the Nazis economic miracle, which had won over the whole nation and the majority of German industrialists in 1933 were now plain to see. Germany was short of everything. Food, raw materials, money, and military equipment. In the defeated and occupied countries, there was organized pillage.

2:25 The eagerness with which Germany drew on the resources of occupied territories is testimony to the degree to which domestic consumption had already been squeezed before the war and continued to be squeezed after the war broke out. It's true that food stuffs were rationed in national socialist Germany. Meat, butter, or any other items could only be bought in limited quantities. But these rations were nevertheless largely sufficient even for hard laborers.

3:13 During the war, Germans never went hungry, mainly because huge quantities of food stuffs were brought into the Reich from occupied territories. So materially speaking, it was clear that the German population were living at the expense of the occupied.

3:40 Theft and pillage consolidated the political stability of the regime. Nazism fed its people. It was food that enabled Hitler to maintain the support of the Germans. In fact, during the war, wages were at a very acceptable level. Nevertheless, all sorts of products were impossible to get hold of, even for money. Many consumer goods were just not being produced. As a result, Germans could do nothing else with their money apart from put it in the bank where they theoretically accumulated large sums. In the end, they could seldom buy anything with this money.

4:46 Fore. One way of thinking of the cycle of finance in the Nazi war economy is that war workers are paid for production in armaments factories. Soldiers are paid, their widows are paid. There is a very considerable flow of money from the state, new printed purchasing power to the German economy. Now, if all of that money was spent on the limited supply of goods that were available during the war when up to 40% of GDP is being transferred to the war effort, it would have produced inflation. So, the crucial thing to do is to stabilize to freeze that purchasing power.

5:46 They are issuing currency to pay war workers, but if you prevent people from spending their purchasing power, you don't get the price effect. But to do that, you have to maintain their confidence in the system.

6:07 While the Germans were saving money, money printing was at full capacity. It helped reimburse the MEO bills. It paid wages and it paid the industrialists bills. And so then you have a closed loop in which money generated in the first round generates wages, generates savings and generates a flow of money back to the state. The crucial advantage of that is that it operates without propagandistic bruhaha. It operates continuously and if it works it generates price stability. it generates uh uh uh in uh zero inflation and if you have price stability then people will also be willing to continue with this flow.

6:56 The Nazi economy was voracious. The German savings, the plundering and spolations in the occupied territories were not enough to support the war effort. The regime was in need of new places to conquer, new areas from which it could obtain the necessary resources. Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union. On June 22nd, 1941, Gerbles announced the start of Operation Barbar Roa.

7:34 Germany broke the non-aggression pact. and German troops entered the Soviet Union. The initial military successes against the Red Army were emphatic. I think for Hitler, the key thing was she'd had always wanted to have an empire that matched the British Empire, for example. Maybe you could do it. you could defeat the Red Army quickly and then you would have this large area which could then be populated by Germans and where you could draw raw materials and food and so on.

8:23 In the spring of 1941, the Third Reich was waging three wars. one against the Soviets, one against the United Kingdom, supported by the US, and a racial war. Nazi genocidal violence was unleashed on the Jewish populations of the invaded territories to the east in Poland and Ukraine. People were shot in mass executions and the building of extermination camps began. In February 1941, the chemical giant IG Farbin agreed to hand over an industrial zone to the SS, an area of 24 km to the east of Awitz, which had only been a prisoner of war camp at the time.

9:11 Genocidal obsession began to converge with economic necessity. Between June and December 1941, the Third Reich was in its heyday.

9:33 was the point at which Hitler really thought that this imagined empire of his would actually become a reality. Uh and so he asked Himmler um and group of SS academics around him to plan a vast new German empire. Himler draws up a plan, general plan O, general plan east. And the object is to find a way of changing the geography of this area completely. You're going to drive all the Slavs out or great many Slavs out. Those who remain are going to be kind of forced labor force like a like a colony really. And you're going to get German businesses to go in and start using Soviet or material resources.

10:18 So into this space of colonial settlement and struggle, the Nazis very specifically imagine moving millions of German settlers from the overpop populated regions of southern Germany where you have tiny little farms eating out a miserable living in the Rhineland for instance but also resettling German ethnic groups that were scattered around Eastern Europe and finding new farms for them there.

11:09 By laying claim to this living space for settlement, it meant that the millions of people who were already living there would lose the right to live there as well as lose their possessions. The concept of lean at the heart of Nazi ideology was unavoidably linked with theft. The two things went hand in hand. In the propaganda films, German settlers were shown arriving in the occupied territories and settling into their new homeland.

12:12 Hallelujah. The last great European colonial project, the master plan for the east, was only implemented in Poland. A more urgent issue for the Reich was to feed its population and its army. over 3 million troops, 600,000 horses, all of these have to be fed. And so the extraordinary implication that dawns on the German planners in the spring of 1941 with more and more clarity is that the urban population of the Soviet Union will have to be starved to death so that the German armies can be fed from the territory of the Soviet Union.

13:43 At the heart of general plan is so-called hunger plan. the idea that the area that Germany has conquered is full of so-called useless eaters. They don't contribute anything. They eat food and you don't need them. And so already in 1941, you're beginning to impose on the Soviet population almost a level of starvation. Supplies, for example, for the city of Kief are deliberately withheld. Food is is instead used by the armed forces or sent back to Germany. Um, at the heart of a hunger plan is the idea that, yeah, 30 million people will probably perish of starvation, perhaps even more.

14:23 So, it's shocking because this is 12 months before the famous Vanzay conference. This is 12 months before even euphemistic talk of the total annihilation of the Jewish population begins in planning documents. And this is being talked about openly across the entire German military. We're talking about 20 to 30 million people who are going to be starved to death in the cities of the Soviet Union. The two things are nested together because the Jewish population predominantly lives in the cities. It doesn't farm. And so when you occupy a Soviet town, you have the problem of how you feed the Jewish population. And they are the first people who will be cut out of any supply.

15:04 And I have seen in the planning bureaucracy of the rice agency that deals with grain a spreadsheet in which they spell out the allocation of grain to the different populations within Germany itself from the highest um uh ration allocations to mine workers all the way down to the inmates of concentration camps based on this calculus of preferential feeding. This does not at any moment mean that the ultimate reason for the destruction of the uh Jewish population of Poland is economic. That's not the point. The point is that if you have the plan to kill the Polish the Jewish population of Poland and you have a food shortage and you've got to decide who's going to starve, you move from deciding that you're going to starve the urban population of the Soviet Union to an accelerated, deliberately accelerated, this is the other telltale sign. We can see how the Nazi planners accelerate the Polish Holocaust in 42. Why are they

16:05 doing that? Why are they increasing the pace? because they know that the harvest is critical and the rations in Germany are being cut and they need to reallocate. It was Herbert Baka who was chiefly responsible for the hunger plan. The minister of agriculture was a technocrat and a radical Nazi. Led by people such as Baka, the modern economic methods were put to use to serve the regime's genocidal obsessions. Human beings were objectivized and turned into commodities. They would be added to the Nazi economy's equations.

17:09 Racial accounting was created where people were calculated, measured, added up, planned for, rationed, starved. It was all written down. Food became a war weapon as did the slide rule. The Red Army was starting to fight back by the autumn of 1941. And after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the US entered the war. Germany was therefore forced to fight a much longer war.

17:56 Equipment that had been destroyed had to be replaced and new tanks built with supplies of munitions. The army's needs were never ending. Industrialists fought over raw materials which were in short supply. Thousands of orders were left unclaimed. The military, engineers, planners, and civil servants were all confused as to which way to turn. The German economy was unable to keep up.

18:25 German industry because of military intervention has become extremely uh inefficient. Productivity falls between 1939 and 1941. Largely really because of of military intervention. The military want the the best the highest quality. They want this then they want that. You stop producing this, you start producing that. They literally in December 1941 decide that rather than continuing to muddle through, it would be better simply to shut all the factories in Germany and reboot in 1942. They literally power down. They say we can't make any of our planned allocations work. We'll declare a holiday in 1941 right at the very end and then restart again in 42 on a new basis. rethinking the whole priority set, bringing in foreign labor, morphing the hunger plan and the ganide plant ost rejigging those around the new drive in 1942.

19:22 For one week, in the middle of a world war, the arms industry shut down. Plan after plan of extravagant aims, constant ideological incitements, improvisation and constraint, corruption and spoliation had turned the German war economy into total chaos.

19:58 By the time that you're fighting not just the British Empire and the Soviet Union, but the United States as well, it's obvious to anyone that Germany is massively inferior in terms of its economic resources. So, you need some answer. You need some plausible answer. And the answer comes in the form of rationalization. We will make more with the same amount. In December 1941, Hitler passes a so-called rationalization decree in which he says that everything has to be simplified. You must stop demanding the best weapons. Uh we need to move towards mass production like the Americans and the Russians.

20:41 The Nazis believed in the miracle of technology and the strength of their ideas. Short of money and trade and permeated with racial ideology, the engineers and laborers were forced to ignore reality and the laws of economics. This kickstart, both ideological and technological, was initiated by Albert Spear in February 1942. He was a rapid replacement for Fritz Todd, who had died in a plane crash. Hitler says to spare look you succeed tote and you will have my complete backing. Anything you want to do in the war economy you will have my complete authority.

21:29 Now doesn't really know how to run a war economy. So he takes all the plans that to have developed and he begins to put them into practice. That means reorganizing German industry in a series of so-called main committees and rings. Uh so that the industrialists are involved in planning mass production and how to achieve it rather than the military. He introduces uh a central planning agency um which again is basically civilian agency um in order to be able to redirect raw materials everything from coal to iron and steel to aluminium to where it is needed.

22:19 Immediately focus is put on mass production. You cut back the number of models that are being produced. Through time and motion studies, you find ways of improving labor productivity. You prevent wastage.

22:40 All of this means that by 1944, Germany is producing roughly three times as many weapons, but it's only using, say, 20 or 30% more materials and labor. There's been an extraordinary revolution in the productivity of the German war economy between 1942 and 1944.

23:10 From 1942, prices were fixed by the authorities. The market had vanished. High-ranking Nazis reached out directly to engineers such as Ferdinand Porsche, famous designer of car engines, and put him in charge of the construction of new assault tanks.

23:42 General Hehart Milch in charge of rationalization in the aviation sector forced the major companies Junkers, Meshersmidt and Hankle to design simpler and easier to produce planes. Between the beginning of 1942 and 1943, Milch succeeded in doubling the monthly production of planes without increasing the use of aluminum. His secret, rationalizing and exploiting thousands of forced laborers. At the end of May 1943, the production of arms had increased by 120% compared with February 1942. So the huge surge in armaments production that we see after 1942 which Albert Spear will claim as his armament's miracle is in fact anything but I mean it's basically relying on investments that were made early on in the war in long-term productive capacity in armaments factories and on the other hand the massive mobilization of forced labor

24:52 and with the expansion of the war economy and the recruitment of very large numbers of people into the armed forces is and in the end some 17 million people are drafted into the German armed forces. Where are you going to get the labor? Who's going to run the farms? Who's going to work in the arament factories? Um and so forced labor is the is the only answer. And between 1940 and 1945 around about 13 million people from outside Germany are brought back to the Reich uh to perform some kind of forced labor. In France, Belgium, and Denmark, recruitment campaigns operated initially on a voluntary basis, but then made obligatory by the forced labor service.

25:43 Fritz Salo, General Plenty potentiary for labor deployment, was in charge of a severe recruitment program across Europe. Civilians of both sexes, prisoners of war, Poles, and then Russians were all encouraged to work for the Reich, voluntarily or forcibly.

26:07 The Slav populations were the most badly treated. There was a civil administration in the occupied territories, particularly in Ukraine, with regional commissioners who sent recruitment gangs into the small towns and villages. These recruitment teams enforced and compelled sometimes entire age groups to be sent to Germany to work. It was vital to enable the war economy to function. But it also explains the radicalization of the occupation of these territories. It was based on the idea that the Slavs were in any case inferior to the Germans and that they were obliged to work for the Reich.

26:55 prisoners of war, civilian conscript uh men and women drafted from the Ukraine, volunteers from Italy, volunteers from the Benelux countries and volunteers from France uh sucked into uh the German industrial apparatus such that by 1944 45 the ethnic, cultural, national complexion of a major German industrial city is much as it is today. Uh, in other words, at that point, Germany's labor force is in fact more cosmopolitan than it is today.

27:33 While Sul was working day and night to select and transport the slave labor, Hinrich Himmler and the SS were murdering millions of Jews, thus depriving the Reich's factories of a precious workforce. In the second half of 1942, 2.4 million workers, laborers, and crafts people were killed in the extermination camps simply because they were Jews. The destruction of 6 million people, many of whom were highly productive workers, is is an extraordinary waste of human potential. There's no way around that. Um, and it would be absurd and obscene to to deny that. But the question of course is what kind of logic, what kind of rationality does the regime impose on this project? And we're talking at that moment about the Holocaust in its purest form. If one can speak in those terms, this is not the Holocaust, Pabal. This is not the executions in the killing fields of Eastern Europe. This is Trebinka, Kelno,

28:37 Soibbor, and then Avitz. These are the industrialized killing centers of the Holocaust. Um and they are being fed with people at an accelerated pace in 4243 with a view to clearing out the Polish food balance such that Poland moves from being an area that can takes food from Germany which is what it had been in the early stages of the occupation to being an area that can deliver food. And the reason why that problem is so urgent is that there are reports coming in from the Reich of valuable Ukrainian workers falling down effectively dead at their workstations across uh the factories of Germany because Germany cannot deliver the food that's necessary. So you see a direct linkage there between the imperatives of the armament economy, the imperatives of forced labor and the imperatives of food.

29:31 The needs of the economy and the genocidal obsessions revolved around the issue of food. Killing the Jews enabled the slave workers who were exhausted in the Reich's factories to be fed. Death became the engine which drove the Nazi economy. Industrialists saw starving and mistreated forced laborers arriving in their factories. The management of the middle deutschae motor and verka the MIMO a company which built airplane engines for junker and measures expressed their worries in a sober report to the reich's aviation ministry.

30:18 If in the case of earth moving work, we employ 2,000 Russians and due to insufficient supplies, we lose several hundred of them each quarter, it's easy to replace the missing workers by new ones. However, in the process of building an arms factory, it is simply impossible to replace a man who works on special machinery quickly enough.

30:48 Forced labor was a solution as brutal as it was beneficial to the war economy. In factories, it was impossible to spot the boundary between racial ideology and cynical managerial organization. The death of workers was just part of the Nazi industrial equation.

31:16 The efforts to rationalize, however, could not save the Reich. On February 2nd, 1943, the Red Army inflicted a resounding defeat on the Vermacht at Stalingrad, and Allied bombing brought the battleground to German factories and towns. If you look inside the apparatus of the spare ministry in the spring of 1943 as the allied bombers above all the RAF begin sustained bombing of the RUR in the northwest of Germany which is the heavy industrial heartland of Germany there can be no doubt that it in fact sabotaged all of their efforts to increase armaments production in 1943.

32:02 They're completely explicit about it and you can see in the statistics of the armament's ministry there is no sugar coating this that armament's production flatlines. It doesn't collapse but it stops going up which is of course the promise of the spare ministry that it will go on up endlessly.

32:29 Hitler's dictatorship was characterized by continuous upheaval. Faced with military defeats with the disorganization and slowdown of its economic machine, the regime could only respond by upping the stakes. In 1943, total war was decreed.

32:58 THE DIRT and gun in the factories as well as on the battlefields. War just had to go on. Behind the superlatives and provocative language of total war, an unwavering alliance was forged between Spear and Himmler. The extreme violence of the SS became a tool of management and organization. Shpar will get on in the meantime with fighting for the endseek and for the promise of final victory come what may against whatever the odds and what he needs for that is the promise of technology this volunteerist vision of rationalization and he needs the means of coercion. He needs to be able to threaten everyone in Germany. And that actually centers on the demand to discipline German factories and German workers and German businesses into surrendering to the demands of the total war effort. And that's where Hinri Himmler comes in because Hinrich Himmler provides you with the muscle and the informant network and the spies to go

34:18 into every factory in Germany. Milch told the aeronautical engineers and factory managers, "Strike down whoever gets in your way. We will back you up." He traveled up and down the country in a train which served as a paripaetic court in which factory managers were put on trial for not meeting their objectives. German bosses learned to use violence to keep productivity going. By 4243, memos are circulating about the best practice of using foreign labor, which include the new idea of performance feeding. So, one way, it turns out, you can get the best out of your workforce, if you've got um 4,500 calories to allocate, you can allocate 1,500 to three workers. Um each one of them uh will be basically malnourished and incapable of sustaining hard physical labor. Or you can run a competition between the foreign workers and as one of them declines relative to the other two, strip his or her rations away and

35:27 reallocate it to the high performing workers. And by the time you're feeding one of them 3,000 calories and the other down to 750 each, you've got at least one high productive worker. There's a knowledge process that goes on here. The German employers and managers learn about human nutrition. They learn about base metabolism. they begin to understand that it's important not just to feed them great big uh you know uh cauldrons of soup consisting largely of sugar beet and potato. You actually have to find some scraps of meat to provide them with protein otherwise productivity declines over time. You you have a highly cynical process of learning that goes on and optimization that is documented throughout the managerial apparatus of industrial Germany.

36:25 I like you. The ideological ranting of total war and the radical accounting and management systems of spear were unable to fully hide the reality of the economic figures. However hard propaganda heralded the new Tiger tanks, which were heavier and more powerful than the American Lee tanks, the statistical reality of industrial production was incontrovertible. In 1943, 18,300 assault tanks left German factories against a total of 54,000 produced by the Allies. The US, the Soviet Union, and the UK produced four times more planes than the Nazi regime. The game was up for Germany.

37:47 by 194344 when it was already clear that Germany was unlikely to win the war. Many industrialists kept going but they also began to make plans for what would happen afterwards. you know, they wanted to find some way, you know, in which they might be able to integrate themselves again into the world market. So, in some cases, they began to hide away machinery. Uh they would hide it in bunkers and things like this so that the the military couldn't see it. We see companies shifting their IP, their intellectual property to branches they might have in Stockholm or a branch they might have in Zurich. you just do a little very below the surface kind of accounting transfer where we say we know we're not going to be able to save our factory but what we'll do is we'll transfer the engineering blueprints to the office in Stockholm. So you see those kind of moves beginning to take place where companies are not explicitly

38:44 opting out of the war effort but preparing the basis for some kind of recovery after the end of the the war. After the Normandy landings on June 6th, 1944, Nazi Germany, despite a last effort, started to implode.

39:11 Nazism sought salvation once again in technology. Spear, a consmate organizer, coordinated the production of miracle weapons, electric and diesel-powered submarines, which were faster and quieter. The V1 ballistic missiles and V2 rockets, the Methosmid Me262 jet fighters and human torpedoes. All these miracle weapons were meant to bring about victory. The combination of the ideology of the fighting German spirit with the technical know-how of engineers was implausible. The miracle arms were too expensive, unreliable, and failed to change the course of the war.

40:00 A war that was never ending because the collusion between Spear, Himmler, and the major industrialists ensured that the regime held on resolutely until the final defeat. And then in 44 as the regime really hits the buffers and is facing the end um there is the widespread dispersal of concentration camp inmates and even Jewish concentration camp inmates to high status armaments production. The most notorious and the most famous of which are the underground project uh factories for the V1 and the V2 rockets.

40:42 If you ask about the logic of this system, I think it has two basic drivers. One from the point of view of the SS is the ultimate annihilation of this population. And then the other is the maintenance of production in the Third Reich under increasingly impossible conditions until the very end. And so it's out of that that you that emerge these extraordinarily inefficient, irrational production lines buried deep into the mountains of Churing where you're producing weapons which can have no more than a symbolic effect on the outcome of the war with humans who can barely stand.

41:31 There is a real imation at that point between the final stages of the of the final solution and the final last stitch efforts to maintain armaments production. In the summer of 44, there is a hotline, a telephone line between the ramp at Avitz and the command centers of Albert Bear's ministry in which they daily discuss the level of deliveries of human material that Awitz is receiving from Hungary and how many of those have been judged on the ramp fit for immediate deployment to high priority armaments factories and they're going overwhelmingly to Lufa production and to Felton to V1 and V2 production.

42:16 The contract with the SS for concentration camp labor and especially Jewish concentration camp labor isn't a contract for individual workers. It's a contract for a flow of labor. And so if somebody is used up and no longer usable, you just simply expect the SS to replace them with another body.

42:39 Right up until the end, the Nazis were obsessive in their pursuit of their number one priority, the mass killing of European Jews. This objective was taken up by the factories of the Reich, turning them into instruments of death by work. Under Spear's leadership, death was just another variable which production had to deal with. And then fundamental questions begin to arise about do we conceive of a future for the German population beyond the end of the war. The truly crucial decision is taken, however, to allocate all of the available chemical raw materials to the production of ammunition, which has a disastrous impact for Germany because it means that none is left for fertilizer production. And so Germany faces from the summer of 1945 a year of agriculture with no fertilizer. So they're planning the collapse of food supply uh beyond beyond the summer of 45. This is an explicit decision taken

43:44 by the spare ministry weighing up as it were the costs and benefits of continuing the war uh or providing the basis for the continued production of the of food. The ultimate victims of Nazism were the Germans themselves.

44:04 In December 1944, Gerbles exhorted workers of the necessity of continuing production in a factory without electricity. For over 12 years, the scramble to go to war had been built on credit. A huge amount of credit, at first hidden by the MEO bills, offset by spoliation and confiscation, fueled by the recourse to unlimited money printing, producing cash that just stagnated in savings accounts. In this headlong rush, the regime had enlisted business leaders, engineers, managers, and accountants. On May 8th, 1945, Germany capitulated.

45:04 National socialism had invented nothing new. Anti-semitism, eugenics racism colonialism and forced labor were all ideas that had existed in European culture for centuries and were just recycled by the Nazis and radicalized. Nevertheless, Hitler's regime was capable of inventing an economy, a system of production, and finance built around plundering, theft, and death.

45:39 In Allied occupied Germany, hundreds of billions of Reichkes marks printed by the Nazi regime during the war were released from savings accounts and flooded the partly freed economy. Inflation soared.

46:03 The Germans understood that it was better to spend a fortune on food on the black market than to hang on to cash that would have no value the following day. And some things had a real currency to them. Cigarettes for example, you know, people were desperate for cigarettes, real cigarettes, cuz they'd had fake tobacco for a lot of time. real cigarettes. And you know, this could be used as a as a bargaining tool. You know, you would change 20 cigarettes if you had them for a for a loaf of bread.

46:43 The real German currency in 1945 was cigarettes. It's a a truth that's I think quite difficult to swallow. Um but there's no doubt at all that um in terms of brute capital accumulation the Nazi regime increased the productive capacity of the German economy or the territories that were German in 1938 and then become Polish for instance after 1945. If you look at the estimates of installed capital, machine tools, industrial plant that we have for 1938, then still in 1948, so 10 years later after reparations, after dismantling, after bombing, the total quantity of capital available is larger than it was at the beginning of the war. large parts of the gigantic chemical industrial uh uh zone which the German the Nazis built in Sillesia because it was out of the range of allied bombers early in the war ends up as the core the kernel of the heavy industrial complex of the new Polish state after 1945.

47:59 Awitz is part of that complex. The Avitz rubber plant um continues to function all the way down to the present day. It's one of the largest synthetic rubber plants in Europe. Industrial capitalism had adapted itself to Nazism. It had managed to integrate the genocidal obsessions of the regime into its means of production. It had survived bombing and like a phoenix from the ashes rose again to carry on doing what it knew best, productivity come what may.

Questions about this episode

What is "Wirtschaftswunder: Was The Nazi Economic Miracle A Lie?" about?

The discussion explores the reality behind the so-called Nazi economic miracle, revealing that the apparent industrial success and military prowess of Nazi Germany were built on financial strain and exploitation of occupied nations. Although Germany mobilized its industry effectively during the war, it faced significant shortages of resources, relying heavily on pillaging and forced labor rather…

What is mentioned in this Timeline - World History Documentaries episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Albert Speer, Heinrich Himmler, Third Reich, Operation Barbarossa, Herbert Baka, Reich. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Wirtschaftswunder: Was The Nazi Economic Miracle A Lie?"?

The episode runs 49 min; the transcript is about 5,582 words in 64 timestamped sections.

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