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The Wages of Economic Destruction: How Hitler's Gamble Reshaped Europe
In the shadow of World War I's devastation, a radical vision for German restoration emerged that would ultimately plunge the world into unprecedented darkness. Adam Tooze's masterwork "The Wages of Destruction" has revolutionized our understanding of Nazi Germany, shattering conventional assumptions about Hitler's economic policies and strategic decisions. This isn't merely another Third Reich history-it's a fundamental reframing that The Guardian calls "thought-provoking and important" while The Wall Street Journal praises Tooze's "masterly command" of economic and military matters. The book has achieved that rare scholarly distinction of changing how experts view a seemingly well-understood historical period, revealing Hitler's worldview as frighteningly logical given his racist ideology and understanding of global industrial power. Even more remarkable, Tooze accomplished this feat while making complex economic concepts accessible to general readers, earning him comparisons to top-tier public intellectuals who transform dry material into compelling narrative.
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Hitler's Economic Worldview: America as Existential Threat
At the heart of Nazi Germany's fateful trajectory was Hitler's acute awareness of America's emerging economic dominance. While conventional histories often portray Hitler as backward-looking or irrational, Tooze reveals a leader obsessed with modernity and industrial capacity-particularly America's overwhelming productive advantage. Hitler understood that the United States represented not just another rival power but an existential threat to Germany's future as an independent nation.
This American preoccupation shaped Hitler's worldview long before he took power. In his unpublished "Second Book" (1928), Hitler explicitly acknowledged America's industrial superiority, noting how Europeans increasingly measured their standard of living against American conditions. Where his contemporaries saw this as cause for international cooperation, Hitler drew radically different conclusions. "The final decision in the struggle for the world market," he declared, "will lie with force."
Hitler's fixation on American productive capacity wasn't paranoia but clear-eyed assessment. By 1943, American output would be nearly four times that of the Third Reich. The productivity gap was equally stark-American workers produced twice as much per capita as their German counterparts in most manufacturing sectors, with the advantage widening to 4:1 or 5:1 in automobiles and consumer electronics. This wasn't merely economic competition but, in Hitler's racialized worldview, an existential struggle that Germany was losing.
Unlike mainstream German politicians who sought integration with the world economy, Hitler rejected what he saw as subordination to "Jewish" international finance. When Gustav Stresemann, Germany's pragmatic Foreign Minister, pursued economic cooperation with America and France, Hitler countered with a vision of aggressive expansion. Where Stresemann saw America as a stabilizing force offering Germany a path to peaceful prosperity, Hitler viewed it as raising the stakes in racial survival, warning that all European countries faced reduction to the status of "Switzerland and Holland."
Most crucially, Hitler interpreted America's power through an antisemitic lens. He viewed the United States not merely as an economic competitor but as the headquarters of a "world Jewish conspiracy" manifested through "Wall Street Jewry" and America's "Jewish media." This fantastical interpretation drove Hitler's risk-taking. Germany couldn't become an affluent American satellite because this would mean enslavement to Jewish conspiracy and racial death. Given the "pervasive influence of Jews," peaceful partnership with Western powers was impossible. War was inevitable-the question was when, not if.
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The Great Depression: Catalyst for Catastrophe
The Great Depression shattered the fragile stability of Weimar Germany and created the conditions for Hitler's rise to power. By 1928, despite Hitler's presence, the Weimar Republic had a functioning parliamentary system committed to peaceful treaty revision under American auspices. Gustav Stresemann's "Atlanticist strategy" sought security through financial connections with America and industrial integration with France. The May 1928 election decisively rejected Hitler, whose party gained only 2.5% of the vote.
This stability unraveled when Stresemann's strategy was undermined by American actions. The 1929 Young Plan negotiations deeply disappointed Germans when reparations were reduced less than hoped. American lending to Germany declined as interest rates rose and the Smoot-Hawley tariff made it harder for Europeans to earn dollars needed to service Wall Street obligations. When Stresemann died in October 1929, his successor Heinrich Bruning faced impossible choices.
Under gold standard rules, with Young Plan demands and nervous international capital markets, deflation became Bruning's only option. The political costs proved enormous. Between April-July 1930, Germany's parliamentary system fractured over Bruning's deflation package, forcing him to invoke emergency powers. The resulting economic crash-landing doubled unemployment, fueling Hitler's stunning electoral breakthrough in September 1930 when the Nazis jumped from 2.5% to 18.3% of the vote.
The financial crisis continued spreading across Europe. By September 1931, Britain abandoned the gold standard, allowing sterling to float freely. Countries remaining on gold at old parities, like Germany, had to adopt draconian trade and currency restrictions. German exporters faced enormous obstacles as competitors gained advantage through devaluation.
By winter 1931-32, all major banks were under state control. Spectacular failures occurred in insurance and engineering, with crisis at Vereinigte Stahlwerke (Europe's leading steel conglomerate) averted only through Reich acquisition of shares. As Finance Minister Hermann Dietrich explained, the government hadn't intended to "nationalize half the Ruhr" but feared foreign interests buying the shares or a collapse that would destroy Germany's banking system.
By early 1932, the "deflation consensus" that had sustained Bruning's government collapsed. Bankruptcies began consuming German businesses as deflation created a devastating imbalance: while incomes and revenues fell, debts remained fixed at pre-Depression levels. Hjalmar Schacht, who had previously supported the Atlanticist approach, abandoned restraint and aligned himself with the Nazi movement.
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Nazi Economic Revolution: Myth and Reality
A deeply entrenched historical misconception suggests the critical change between Weimar and Nazi economic policy was Hitler's urgent implementation of national recovery and work creation programs. This contrast-Bruning's deflation fetish versus Nazi job creation-gained significance through the lens of the Keynesian revolution, serving as a stark illustration of free market failures.
However, work creation only emerged as a serious right-wing discussion topic in late 1931. The Nazi party didn't adopt it as a key program until spring 1932, and it remained central for just eighteen months before being formally deprioritized in December 1933. Despite Goebbels' propaganda claims, civilian work creation wasn't a core agenda item for the nationalist coalition seizing power in January 1933.
What truly united the nationalist right and enabled Hitler's government were three priorities: rearmament, repudiating Germany's foreign debts, and saving German agriculture. These issues had dominated right-wing agendas since the 1920s and took priority after 1933, even at work creation's expense.
Secret German rearmament preparations had continued throughout the 1920s but never reached threatening proportions under Stresemann. The Rhineland evacuation in summer 1930 enabled more concrete planning. By December 1931, the Reichswehr had finalized its second Rearmament Plan, calling for 480 million Reichsmarks over five years to equip a defensive force of twenty-one divisions with minimal artillery, tanks and aircraft.
The defining economic agenda of German nationalism since the 1924 Dawes Plan wasn't work creation but repudiating international obligations-first reparations, then international credits taken to pay them. By autumn 1932, everything had changed. At July's Lausanne conference, Britain and France agreed to effectively end German reparations, tying this to cancellation of their American war debts. America could no longer dictate European affairs, dramatically altering German strategy.
In January 1933, Germany still owed 19 billion Reichsmarks to foreign creditors (8.3 billion to Americans alone), requiring annual transfers of nearly 1 billion Reichsmarks. With reparations gone and France and Britain at odds with America over war debts, Germany's incentive to cooperate with Washington vanished.
If any economic interests were responsible for the Weimar Republic's collapse and Hitler's installation in 1933, it was Germany's embattled farmers, not big business. Agriculture had been lost to liberalism since the 1870s when Bismarck won over agrarians with grain tariffs. As worldwide commodity prices collapsed, the farm lobby became radicalized, demanding not just protection and debt relief, but a fundamental reorientation in German trade policy.
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Rearmament and Economic Control
Within days of taking power, Hitler made his true priorities clear. Speaking to military leadership, he emphasized that domestic policy existed to consolidate the foundations for rearmament. The destruction of Marxism, economic reconstruction, and rescuing the peasantry were merely means to this end. On February 9, he declared that "the future of Germany depends exclusively and only on the reconstruction of the Wehrmacht. All other tasks must cede precedence."
Hitler quickly cleared away obstacles to expansionary government spending. Hans Luther was replaced at the Reichsbank by Nazi-affiliated Hjalmar Schacht, and Fritz Reinhardt, a party spokesman on work creation, was appointed Secretary of State at the Finance Ministry. Hitler and Schacht made defending the Reichsmark's gold value a symbol of regime reliability.
On June 1, 1933, the Nazi party delivered on its promise with the billion-Reichsmark "Reinhardt programme" for work creation, focusing on settlements, road works and housing. This "productive credit creation" was financed not by taxes or conventional borrowing but through a system where contractors received interest-bearing IOUs guaranteed by state-affiliated banks and ultimately backed by the Reichsbank.
By mid-1933, Germany's trade balance shifted into deficit as the Reichsbank's foreign exchange reserves plummeted from 800 million Reichsmarks in January to just 400 million by summer-barely enough for one month of minimal imports. Hitler's regime faced a critical choice: either devalue the Reichsmark to boost exports, or choose between sustaining minimal imports for economic recovery or satisfying foreign creditors.
Unlike Bruning's government, which had prioritized debt payments over imports in 1930, Hitler's approach was clear. At the end of May 1933, Schacht convened a conference of Germany's creditors in Berlin to negotiate a partial moratorium. When creditors refused concessions, the cabinet approved a unilateral moratorium on Germany's long-term foreign debts beginning June 30th. Germany would resume foreign currency payments only once its trade position showed a healthy surplus-effectively forcing creditor countries to purchase German goods if they wanted repayment.
At the same meeting where the debt moratorium was approved (June 8, 1933), Hitler's government took decisive steps toward rearmament. Schacht approved a staggering 35 billion Reichsmark military spending program spread over eight years-representing 5-10% of German GDP annually, dwarfing Weimar's military spending. To finance this massive rearmament without conventional borrowing, Schacht created an off-budget system centered around Mefo GmbH, a shell company capitalized by major industrial firms.
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The New Economic Order: Business Under Nazism
Hitler's first years saw unprecedented peacetime controls imposed on German business, largely stemming from balance of payments difficulties originating in the 1931 financial crisis. Following the collapse of the gold standard, Germany's default on long-term debt, and the implementation of the New Plan, these regulations became more systematic.
To manage this control system, Schacht established a framework of compulsory business organizations between autumn 1934 and spring 1935. Existing voluntary associations were consolidated into a hierarchy of Reich Groups (for industry, banking, insurance), Business Groups (for mining, steel, engineering), and Branch Groups (for specific sectors). Every German firm had to enroll, with each subdivision headed by its own Fuhrer nominated by existing associations, vetted by the Reich Group, and appointed by Schacht.
These Business Groups served as conduits between individual firms and the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs, transmitting decrees downward and complaints upward. They collected compulsory reports from members, creating unprecedented industrial statistics, and after 1936 were authorized to implement standardized bookkeeping systems. Their most crucial functions involved operating the New Plan-staffing import supervisory agencies and administering the export subsidy levy.
The control apparatus virtually eliminated foreign competition from German markets, as nothing was imported that could be produced domestically. This, combined with rising domestic demand, allowed German producers to end deflation and increase prices significantly. To prevent inflation, the RWM enacted price control measures, culminating in November 1934 with Carl Goerdeler's reappointment as Reich commissioner for price control, creating a comprehensive system of state-supervised price-setting.
This economic environment-rising demand, no foreign competition, increasing prices, and static wages-created substantial profits for German businesses. By 1934, executive bonuses were so spectacular they embarrassed Hitler's government, prompting regulations limiting dividend distributions to 6% of capital.
The relationship between IG Farben and the Nazi regime exemplifies the complex intertwining of profit, politics, and technology in the Third Reich. As one of the world's largest private companies with over 200,000 employees and assets exceeding 1.6 billion Reichsmarks, IG Farben's collaboration with Hitler became emblematic of German industry's entanglement with Nazism.
The crucial turning point came with IG's development of synthetic chemicals, beginning with the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production that proved vital during World War I. By 1926, IG had constructed the world's first coal hydrogenation facility at Leuna, transforming coal into petrol based on predictions of future oil scarcity. This 330 million Reichsmark investment became economically untenable when massive oil discoveries in the late 1920s and early 1930s glutted world markets. Rather than abandoning the project, Bosch sought political protection, leading IG to approach the Nazi party in autumn 1932 to brief Hitler on synthetic fuel's national importance.
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Volksgemeinschaft on a Budget: The Contradictions of Nazi Prosperity
While Hitler was ultimately motivated by apocalyptic visions of national destruction, he also harbored conventional aspirations for national progress and affluence. When asked by a journalist to describe his ultimate political objectives, Hitler stated simply: "I have the ambition to make the German people rich and Germany beautiful. I want to see the living standard of the individual raised."
The fundamental problem was the enormous gap between these high-flown aspirations and German economic reality. By contemporary standards, Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was not an affluent society, a problem rooted in deep-seated international economic inequality rather than merely the Great Depression.
In 1938, the prestigious Hamburg journal Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv published an article by Colin Clark, a young Australian statistician who made the first systematic effort to compare national incomes using purchasing power parities rather than simple exchange rates. Clark's pioneering work established that Germany's per capita income was only half that of the United States and at least a third lower than Britain's. In modern terms, German per capita national income in 1935 would be roughly $4,500 (compared to today's $20,000), ranking alongside current South Africa, Iran and Tunisia.
The gulf between Germany and America was unsurprising. By the 1920s, twentieth-century mass consumption items-cars, refrigerators, radios-were already norms in the United States while remaining luxuries for Europe's upper middle class. As Hitler noted in his "Second Book," this differential stemmed from America's abundant natural resources and vast consumer markets, which encouraged dramatic manufacturing advances enabling ordinary Americans to achieve material standards Europeans could only dream of.
For ordinary Germans, wages were counted in Pfennigs rather than Reichsmarks. Only the most skilled workers earned more than one Reichsmark per hour, while the lowest-paid male workers in sawmills and textiles earned 59 Pfennigs hourly. In 1936, with full employment, 62 percent of German taxpayers reported annual incomes below 1,500 Reichsmarks (about 30 Reichsmarks weekly), while only 17 percent earned more than 2,400 Reichsmarks annually.
A blue-collar household with both adults working might achieve a combined income of 2,700 Reichsmarks annually, while white-collar households could reach 4,000 Reichsmarks by combining an average male salary with a second income. These modest figures become stark when compared with prices: a kilogram of brown bread cost 31 Pfennigs (half an hour's work for low-paid workers), butter was extraordinarily expensive at 3.10 Reichsmarks per kilo, and a liter of milk cost 23 Pfennigs.
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Lebensraum: The Economics of Conquest
The most striking economic difference between Germany and Anglo-American powers was their command over raw materials and land. Land hunger had driven European expansion since the 17th century, transforming global power structures through conquest, settlement, and exploitation. By the late 19th century, this had revolutionized the global food system, affecting Europe's peasant populations dramatically.
Hitler's preoccupation with Lebensraum wasn't atavistic but addressed contemporary European concerns about territory and resources. While expansion had largely halted by 1914, Russia continued developing lands east of the Urals-precisely where Hitler looked to direct German expansion. The question of how European societies should respond to the new global food economy remained fundamental into the twentieth century.
Nazi agrarianism wasn't merely ideological fantasy but addressed massive social reality. In 1933, agriculture employed 9.34 million Germans (29% of the workforce), with 32.7% living in rural communities under 2,000 inhabitants. Including small market towns, 56.8% of Germans lived in predominantly rural settings.
Statistics can't convey the sheer backwardness of German rural life. School photographs routinely showed barefoot children whose parents couldn't afford shoes. Fieldwork images depicted elderly people using primitive ploughs pulled by worn-out cattle. Harvesting remained entirely manual labor. Even those who had migrated to cities carried recent rural memories-Hitler himself began Mein Kampf describing his father's journey from poor cottager to civil servant and back to farming.
National Socialism's radicalism lay in refusing to accept that basic questions of modernization, land distribution, and resources were settled. While the victors of World War I-France with its favorable population-to-land ratio and empire, Britain and America controlling agricultural heartlands across continents-were content with the status quo, Hitler rejected Germany's assigned place as a medium-sized workshop economy dependent on imported food.
This dependence on imports represented what Hitler called a recipe for "race death"-urban overcrowding would reduce birth rates, the best Germans would emigrate, and resource scarcity would prevent matching American affluence. Should Germany emerge as a trade competitor, Hitler believed it would face hostility from Britain and "Jewish propagandists of global liberalism" who would unleash another war while crippling Germany through blockade.
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The Path to War: Hitler's Strategic Gamble
By 1936, liberalism's enemies were clearly ascendant in Germany. The damage to the parliamentary system appeared irreparable, making an authoritarian nationalist regime likely. Yet Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on January 30, 1933 was far from inevitable. The Nazis had peaked electorally in July 1932 with 37.2% of the vote, but Hitler refused any position less than Chancellor. By November 1932, Nazi support had declined to 33%, momentum was exhausted, and internal divisions resurfaced.
Economic indicators were also improving. The first hints of recovery appeared in America in June 1932. After reparations were lifted at Lausanne, German bonds strengthened, helping banks rebuild cash reserves. Construction showed signs of revival, and though winter unemployment approached 6 million, experts were encouraged that it didn't exceed the previous year's level. By December 1932, economic commentators including the influential Berlin institute for business cycle research declared the contraction over.
Hitler's rise resulted from a tragic miscalculation by ultra-nationalist conservatives. Ex-Chancellor Papen conspired with the agrarian lobby and aggressive military elements to pressure Hindenburg into dismissing Schleicher and forming a government with Hitler as Chancellor, Hugenberg controlling Agriculture and Economic Affairs, General Blomberg at Defense, and Papen as Vice-Chancellor. Powerful forces in German society could have redirected Hitler's path, but failed to do so.
The Nazi regime's economic policy choices weren't inevitable responses to crisis. While unemployment dominated public discourse, the most crucial decisions in 1933-34 concerned foreign debts, currency and rearmament-core nationalist issues with no pretense of political innocence. Even without Hitler, Germany likely would have disrupted international stabilization efforts, but the global environment in 1933 was far less conducive to multilateralism than a decade earlier.
By summer 1936, German business sentiment had shifted from focusing exclusively on domestic markets toward international trade. The Berlin Institute for Business Cycle Research identified access to raw materials as Germany's principal economic problem, which depended on increasing exports. With many major economies in recovery, opportunities for world trade expansion were evident.
But Hitler systematically refused any rapprochement with Western powers. While conventional minds saw opportunity to reconnect with the world economy, Hitler interpreted Popular Front governments in France and Spain as signs of Communist upsurge. Anti-Semitic rhetoric about "Jewish world conspiracy" returned to Nazi discourse. From summer 1936, Hitler privately insisted on preparing Germany for war, evading Western efforts to trade economic concessions for moderation in rearmament.
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From Victory to Catastrophe: The Economics of World War II
The German armaments effort in 1939-40 represented the most sustained and dramatic increase of the entire war, exceeding even Albert Speer's later achievements. This surge was only possible through ruthless resource mobilization that disregarded both civilian needs and long-term economic sustainability. In military and economic terms, Nazi Germany was truly "going for broke."
Despite the Wehrmacht's extraordinary victories, the territory under German control by autumn 1940 was not the self-sufficient Lebensraum Hitler had envisioned. Rather than providing a platform for a long war of attrition against Britain and America, Western Europe's conquest actually deepened Germany's economic dependency on the Soviet Union.
Hitler had already concluded that defeating the Soviet Union in 1941 was key to ultimate victory. At the Berghof on July 31, 1940, he told military leaders that eliminating Russia would rob Britain of its "dagger on the mainland" while unleashing Japan in the Far East. After conquering Lebensraum in the East, Germany would be ready for a "war against continents."
The Wehrmacht's victories temporarily masked Germany's deteriorating strategic position. As Operation Taifun bogged down near Moscow, Germany's war economy began unraveling with critical fuel shortages and impending economic collapse. By mid-1941, coal stocks were virtually depleted with a deficit of roughly 40 million tons. The steel industry faced coal consumption cuts of 15-25%, forcing drastic reductions in Wehrmacht steel allocations.
Hitler refused to acknowledge these material constraints, decreeing that the Wehrmacht should ignore rationing altogether. With Army Group Centre's desperate push toward Moscow, all strategic coherence in Germany's armaments effort was abandoned. As the exhausted Panzer divisions reached within sight of Moscow, they lacked the strength to force a decision. Without winter preparations, Army Group Centre was completely exposed when temperatures plunged to -25F, causing tens of thousands of frostbite casualties.
The Wehrmacht didn't merely "fail" to take Moscow-it suffered a shattering battlefield defeat. Stalin's overreach in ordering a full offensive along the entire 1,500-kilometer front line on January 7, 1942 proved a tragic mistake. Though the Red Army inflicted severe losses, Stalin's failure to concentrate forces against Army Group Centre's weakest point allowed the Germans to stabilize their position 100-150 kilometers from Moscow by March 1942.
Hitler's 1941 gamble had catastrophically failed. He had hoped to defeat the Soviet Union before America entered the conflict, placing Britain in an impossible position. Instead, the Wehrmacht's initial successes drove Roosevelt and Churchill closer together. The Atlantic Charter of August 1941 cemented America as the centerpiece of the anti-Nazi coalition, with joint Anglo-American planning already underway for a $150 billion victory program.
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The Final Reckoning: Defeat and Devastation
The jarring contrasts of late 1941 revealed what Tooze calls "the shocking contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous." Germany's imperial ambitions weren't atavistic but anachronistic-not a regression to barbarism but a belated, perverse extension of European colonial conquest that failed to recognize its own obsolescence. The crude manifestations of German imperialism-tiny tanks dwarfed by Soviet models, horse-drawn supply wagons, and primitive execution methods-appeared grotesquely primitive compared to the cutting-edge physics developing in New Mexico's deserts.
What Germany encountered in the Soviet Union wasn't "Slavic primitivism" but history's first successful developmental dictatorship. The Wehrmacht's disastrous advance revealed not Russian backwardness but Germany's own partial modernization. By the 1940s, the nineteenth-century power balance centered on Western Europe had fundamentally shifted. America's emergence as an economic superpower and the Soviet Union's explosive development had transformed global power dynamics-a shift Hitler recognized but couldn't effectively counter.
The famous final acceleration of German production in 1944 occurred amid apocalyptic violence consuming millions of lives across Europe. The murderous SS police state was imported directly into the war economy through the Mittelbau complex and Jaegerstab practices. Tens of thousands of obsolete fighters were produced in early 1944 by mobilizing all available labor and materials under limitless repression. In summer 1944, Speer and the Jaegerstab maintained a direct hotline to the Auschwitz ramp where Hungarian Jews were being processed for the gas chambers.
Hitler had prophesied that failure would bring unprecedented national catastrophe. From 1942 onward, he and collaborators like Speer steered directly toward this outcome. The damage remains almost unbearable to contemplate-to Europe's population, physical infrastructure, and the very idea of European civilization. The scale of destruction and misery in 1945 Germany defies description. Beyond the millionfold murders Germany committed across Europe, more than one-third of German boys born between 1915-1924 were dead or missing, rising to 40% for those born 1920-1925.
The immediate post-war period seemed to confirm Hitler's apocalyptic vision-Germany had ceased to exist as a political entity, military force, or economic unit. Yet ironically, it was Stresemann's logic, not Hitler's, that ultimately prevailed. Just as Stresemann had predicted in 1919 that Germany would again be needed as a bulwark against Bolshevism, by 1947-with Soviet forces in Vienna and Berlin-the same realization dawned on Western powers.
Parliamentary democracy, American alliance, and European economic integration-all Stresemann's aspirations-returned to prominence. But post-1945 German democracy existed within a truncated form of statehood unlike anything imagined in the 1920s. The Cold War divided Germany, with massive foreign occupation forces on both sides and the threat of nuclear annihilation overhead. The most explosive issues of Weimar politics-territorial integrity and military parity-vanished from the agenda. Economic growth became the Federal Republic's primary focus, while European integration devolved into haggling over quotas and rebates. The Third Reich hadn't extinguished Germany, but it had drawn the curtain on the classic era of European politics, leaving open the question of what politics in Europe might mean beyond the squabbles of discontented affluence.
