Recent reading

[chickenfeet2003]

Adam Tooze The Wages of Destruction - The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

Looking at the cover of this one one would think one had strayed into Ilse, Shewolf of the SS territory rather than dealing with a massive 773pp, not including bibliography, scholarly tome. Rest assured, this is a serious and thought provoking piece of scholarship

Comments

[nancylebov]

I've heard that Hitler needed the money he confiscated from German Jews to kick start his war. Is this true? Plausible?

[chickenfeet2003]

That's an oversimplification. The Reich had a chronic balance of payments problem and some of the ways that were used to screw money out of the Jews helped with that but it's only part of the story.

ETA: There was also confiscatory taxation of Jews but, bottom line, there weren't nearly enough Jews or enough Jewish wealth in Germany to make more than a minor contribution to the huge cost of rearmament.

[sabotabby]

Hitler's model for Lebensraum was based on the United States. He saw this as a model for exterminating a "racially inferior" population and replacing it with settlers of higher culture.

I've heard this before, but only from rumour, without any sources to point to. I may have to give this a read-through.

[chickenfeet2003]

Apparently it's fairly explicit in the "Second book"; the unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf

[shezan]

Sounds riveting!!! (yeah, yeah, pun intended...)