I’ve been interested in WWII for a while now, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned just how unstable the Nazi economy was. From my understanding, Hitler’s supposed “economic miracle” was basically just smoke and mirrors – he was starting all these ambitious national projects, but he was doing it by basically just borrowing a ton of money that he never would have been able to pay back. I’ve even heard the argument that if WWII never broke out, Germany probably would have gone bankrupt by the end of the 1940s and the illusion of Hitler as a great social builder would have been shattered (in fact, it might have been the shift to a wartime economy that bought them a few more years).
Can someone explain this to me? Am I understanding it correctly? Was he really just burying the country in debt for n the hopes he could repay it through taxes? And if this is true, then if Hitler had never shifted to a wartime economy, exactly WHEN, WHY, and HOW would Germany inevitably go bankrupt (e.g. when would all that debt finally catch up to Hitler and what would the economic crash look like in Germany)?
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The subreddit has a Nazi Economics FAQ
/u/kieslowskifan and /u/commiespaceinvader and /u/Caherdaniel et al.
Many, many fat books have been written to explain the Nazi economy.
As explained, many fat books have been written to explain the economy of Nazi Germany. If I was to recommend just one, it would be Adam Tooze’s ‘The Wages of Destruction – The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy’.
It’s quite fat, over 650 pages, but you won’t need a degree in economics to understand it.