Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1
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Comp. by: SSENDHAMIZHSELVAN Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1 Title Name: GEYERandTOOZE Date:2/2/15 Time:14:35:35 Page Number: 48 terms the contribution of the occupied territories was very large. As in the case of Lend-Lease, the sheer scale and multi-facetedness of wartime economic integration de fied regular national accounting. There is a bitter historic irony in the fact that our modern techniques of national income accounting reached a new pitch of re finement, at the moment that slave labour returned to some of the most advanced economies of the world. But, according to the latest calculations, France alone may have contributed one-sixth of the Reich ’s war
expenditure between 1940 and 1944. In 1943 as the German military effort surged to 60 per cent of domestic income, a quarter of the Reich ’s military budget was covered by the occupied territories, by means of a current account de ficit amounting to 16 per cent of German GDP. However, even at the height of the Nazi exploitation of Europe, the majority of the Third Reich ’s war effort was covered out of Germany ’s own resources. A large part came in through taxes, the revenues of which doubled between 1938 and 1943, as wartime earnings and pro fits surged. On top of that, out of the Reich’s expenditure in 1943
of 153 billion Reichsmarks, 87 billion were funded through borrowing, equivalent to almost all the Reich ’s spending on the Wehrmacht. The vast majority of this debt was placed directly with Germany ’s financial institutions. These then took in deposits from savers which were recycled to the state. Much has been made of the fact that this system of ‘silent financing’ did not involve the popular war bond drives familiar from the First World War. It has been alleged that Hitler ’s regime shrank from a financial referendum. But, in fact, all of the combatants relied in varying degrees on such indirect fund-raising mechanisms. In Britain the large wartime surpluses of the health and unemployment insurance funds were credited to the account of the National Debt Commissioner. In the USA, the banking system, savings banks and insurance funds provided more than enough funds to cover the cost of Lend- Lease. Though its mechanism of financing may have done without fanfare, Hitler ’s regime made no secret of the crucial role that savings played in the mobilization of the war economy. At every turn, the Volksgenossen were loudly called upon to save for victory. Thanks to rationing and the effective suppression of the black market their options were, in any case, limited. Rather than thinking of institutional funding as a flight from ‘democratic’ bond financing, it seems more appropriate to think of ‘silent financing’ as an organiza- tional expression of the new macroeconomic approach to public finance that Keynes and others had been calling for since 1939. So long as the circuit of wages, savings, borrowing and government expenditure was maintained, the flow of funds provided the indispensable frame for Germany’s hybrid war economy half way between a terroristic Stalinist dictatorship and a pro fit-driven a d a m t o o z e a n d j a m e s r . m a r t i n 48
Comp. by: SSENDHAMIZHSELVAN Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1 Title Name: GEYERandTOOZE Date:2/2/15 Time:14:35:35 Page Number: 49 market economy. It was after the summer of 1944, when the prospect of imminent defeat became too obvious to ignore, that in Germany too the financial foundation of the war economy began to disintegrate. As the money supply bloated and price incentives lost their meaning, outright coercion became increasingly essential to maintain production. Across Europe, Hitler ’s war bequeathed a monetary and financial disaster. In the chaotic two-year period following Mussolini ’s overthrow, Italy’s price level soared by a factor of fifteen. As France was consumed by something akin to civil war, in 1944 its price level doubled. Plans to cement liberation with an austere anti-in flationary policy were abandoned in favour of monetizing gov- ernment spending. This had the effect between 1944 and 1950 of reducing France
’s public debt as a share of GDP from 181 to 51 per cent. To undo the financial effects of German occupation as quickly as possible Belgium, Den- mark and Norway, as well as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, carried out wholesale currency reforms, backed up by draconian taxes on wartime pro fiteers. Austria introduced a new national currency in November 1945. Meanwhile, in post-war Germany, the Reichsmark remained in circulation and Hitler ’s price stop decree of 1936 continued to be effectively enforced. This worked remarkably well in holding back a vast monetary overhang, which by 1947 was estimated at ten times the volume of money in circulation in 1936. Perhaps half of this surplus purchasing power spilled over into a restricted, but spectacularly expensive black market, where items such as butter, sugar and stockings went for 100 times of ficial prices. Transactions between German civilians and the soldiers of the occupying forces were commonly denominated in cigarettes. Meanwhile, the bulk of economic life was reduced to a rudimen- tary level of rationing and barter. The Nazi occupation of Europe had at least maintained a division of labour from which many farmers and businessmen in occupied Europe had bene fited handsomely. The question that inescapably posed itself with the end of the war was how Germany and Europe could be reconstructed and reinserted into a wider international economic order. A new order? In August 1941 in the Atlantic Charter, Churchill and Roosevelt had commit- ted themselves to a return to a system of multilateral trade combined with guarantees for social security and labour protections at the national level. 29 29
’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 42 –5. The economics of the war with Nazi Germany 49 Yüklə 302,82 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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