Bernd
07/13/2019 (Sat) 23:12:12
No.27996
del
And on the Autobahn network, Tooze's argument rests on his evidence that it was thought in military terms by the leadership. He does neglect to mention that they didn't have much military use, and does kind of mention they weren't used much by civilians either as car ownership wasn't widespread. But the highways were certainly a boon for postwar German civilians.
>the Nazis had only vague ideas what to do with the economy once they are in power. They were kinda whatever works.
That's more or less correct. They had economic promises in their programme upon taking power, such as reviewing the relationship between local and national budgets and work creation, the latter a recent point, but not a full plan. Hitler did have in hand Schacht, a "dark wizard" of economics who had been by his side since the last years of the Weimar republic, and other specialists. They tackled the critical issues facing the country -within the constraints of political aims- one by one with bureaucratic means, and then had to create more and more bureaucracies to tackle the new issues arising from their solutions to the old ones. And the regime as a whole faced a number of crisis, the first one already in 1934. See imports, foreign currency was rationed to save the balance of trade but after a couple years this created the threat of inflation, so raw materials also had to be rationed. Or inflation, which arose once conditions meant recovery would cause it: price and wage controls kept it in check but eliminated market reallocation of labor, so new measures had to be taken to bureaucratically reassign workers.