centrally-unplanned:

I finished my reread of Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, a breakdown of the Nazi regime’s economic mobilization efforts and a personal “fuck you” to Albert Speer by the author. It was a great read, though you can tell where the scholarship isn’t quite perfect on the edges once discussion of the non-core topic comes up. You have moments like stating that Allied Lend-Lease was irrelevant to the Soviet war effort in 1942, which, while the extant of the aid’s impact is debated, is no longer at all the consensus but is exactly the kind of “myth” that the book spends its time debunking on the Nazi side. But time in academia marches on, and those errors don’t impact the core of the book, so you can’t blame him.

What stands out as the most compelling point of the book on this read is how fundamental globalization was to not only the conflict’s outcome but to how it was prosecuted. By the 1930′s Europe was not only no longer the center of economic power in the world, but had positioned itself as deeply dependent on international trade for its day-to-day functioning. Imports of oil, food, fertilizer, and ores were all necessary for their industries to operate at a basic level. But it was a one-sided globalization - the United States was, on the other hand, virtually self sufficient, and the USSR could at least cope under autarky. The Nazis were of course aware of this - it was in fact their entire raison d'etre for the conflict, to build a German state that was as self sufficient as the United States was.

That desire of course ran aground precisely on its premise - the lack of such self-sufficiency paralyzed efforts to win a war to obtain it. Whenever you play a Hearts of Iron or similar game, the ability to win as Germany is always built around conquering other European nations and channeling the conquered industrial capacity of those nations to punch even with the Allies. In reality the effort by the Nazi regime to mobilize the occupied industries floundered dramatically - occupied France barely contributed to the war effort on its own terms. Upon being occupied its GDP plunged to 48% of its pre-war levels and never recovered; its aircraft industries never achieved output any more than 5% (!) of German levels, despite being a world power before. And this was because France was just the end-point of a huge supply chain - producing little of the coal, metals, and fuel that such efforts required. It went down the chain for all of Germany’s allies, none of whom (besides Romania and neutral-ish Sweden) produced material inputs to match their needs. A perpetual “what-if” of the war often asks “why didn’t Spain join the Axis?” and a big part of the answer is that Germany openly did not *want* them to - if they joined, they could no longer import oil from the US and Germany had none to spare!

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the agricultural sector, with the most dire consequences. Another classic question of the war is “given the Nazi regime’s severe manpower constraints, why would you waste millions of lives on genocide?”. Of course ideology/insanity are core motives, but once you understand the food economy of Europe efforts like the Holocaust gain a macabre strategic sheen. Places like Germany and France were in peace time “agriculturally self-sufficient” only on paper - in reality they specialized, exporting some food while importing others, and Germany in particular had a terribly pre-modern agricultural sector, with productivity rates literally 50% that of the UK. Additionally, all the productivity they did have relied on fertilizer, equipment, etc, than none of them produced on their own terms in full. Once Germany & occupied Europe was stripped of its imports via the UK blockade while existing stocks of things like fertilizer & coal were instead being channeled to explosives and steel making, the European agricultural system collapsed. Meanwhile, Germany’s answer to its manpower shortages, and the one big contribution occupied Europe had to the war effort, was to draft literally millions of workers into Germany to man the factories so that native Germans could serve in the army - by the end of the war fully 34% of the industrial workforce was foreign. This massive import of people, particularly if they were going to be good, productive workers, needed to be fed off a backward and collapsing German agricultural base. It just wasn’t possible.

Unless, of course, you reduce the number of non-factory worker, non-farmer mouths to feed. Suddenly you realize Germany didn’t have a manpower shortage, but a manpower *surplus* - far more people in the Nazi “empire” existed than could credibly contribute to the war effort, given the limited economic capacities of the region. Mobilizing them a la the US into the economy wasn’t possible due to lack of resources & capital; throwing them as bodies into the front a la the USSR made no sense as they weren’t going to be loyal and they lacked the logistics to deploy them. The solution is obvious when, as the Nazi’s bragged about in their meetings and memos, you have actively embraced being the Bad Guys because it gives you a sort of edgy, “we are hard while our opponents are soft” vibe you can use to justify how your strategic position isn’t utterly hopeless.

I mentioned the Hearts of Iron genre of war sim before, and its pretty rare for those games to model food in the economy. It seems logical to skip it - after all for most combatants it appears like, in the “modern war” of World War Two, food was a sort of solved issue that didn’t affect the outcome. For the US and the UK, that is pretty true. For the USSR & China, it was far from true, but a topic for another time. But for the Nazi’s, it seemed true - the Nazi armed forces and German civilian populace never suffered widespread, long-term starvation until the regime had collapsed in 1945. And if you were playing Hearts of Iron, and you got a “conduct Holocaust?” pop-up, you would look at your manpower box and go “lol fuck no” and throw that decision away. Because the game isn’t modelling food, because it thinks that wasn’t a big factor in the outcome of the war.

Which it technically wasn’t, for the Nazis. They murdered or starved to death tens of millions of people to make sure of that.