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

Author:Tooze, Adam [Tooze, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2008-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Source: M. Harrison, ‘Resource Mobilization for Workd War II’, Economic History Review (1988), 184

III

Hitler’s dismissive views about the degeneracy of American society are well documented, but so is the clear awareness in Berlin of the threat posed by America’s industrial potential and the need to counter it with decisive action.45 Nor was America merely a material threat. Roosevelt, as we have seen, had been pictured since January 1939 as the archenemy, the most dangerous exponent of the world Jewish conspiracy. Anti-Semitism suffused every aspect of the German strategic assessment. The first line of the report from the Washington embassy on lend-lease, received by the Foreign Ministry, the Wehrmacht high command, the army and the Air Ministry, stated bluntly: ‘The Lend-Lease Act currently before Congress . . . stems from the pen of leading Jewish confidants of the President. It is intended to give him the possibility of pursuing without limitation his policy of influencing the war through all means “short of war”. With the passage of the law the Jewish world-view will therefore have firmly asserted itself in the United States.’ It then went on to itemize the huge deliveries that could now be expected by ‘England, China and other vassals’.46

As we have seen, American industrial assistance for France and Britain had been very much on Hitler’s mind in the first months of the war. In March 1940 Fritz Todt had highlighted Hitler’s concern about ‘USA-POTENTIAL’. And this was reiterated fifteen months later by General Thomas in a retrospective review: ‘A victorious end to the war was to be achieved at all costs in 1940, above all to negate American assistance for the Western powers, the acceleration of which . . . was already then part of our calculations.’47 Britain’s continuing resistance raised the stakes. On 21 July, in the wake of America’s rearmament decisions, Hitler instructed the Wehrmacht high command ‘to consider seriously the Russian and American question’.48 In public speeches Hitler rubbished America, but in the light of popular fears about American industrial might this is hardly surprising. The euphoria surrounding victory over France was in large part due to the fact that this appeared to make impossible an American intervention in the war.49 Local offices of the Gestapo were unanimous in reporting a popular preoccupation with all things American: aid for Britain, the prospects for Roosevelt’s re-election and the likely entry of America into the war.50 To manage this anxiety Goebbels adopted a cautious strategy of news management.51 A complete news blackout was imposed in relation to the destroyer deal, which behind closed doors in Berlin was regarded as a decisive break in American neutrality.52 Nor were there to be any news reports of America’s rearmament effort. The public needed reassurance, as did foreign diplomats who visited Berlin in the autumn of 1940.53 Hitler did not deny that America was now underwriting the British war effort. But he believed that Germany had some time. Following Roosevelt’s re-election he remarked to the Hungarian premier that American shipments to

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