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tatters, but the nationalist alternative seemed to be working. By 1935, world
trade had not yet returned to 1929 levels, but recovery was well under way
notably in those states that had abandoned the gold standard. Devaluing
states gained export competitiveness and diverted domestic demand away
from more expensive imports. Most importantly, liberation from the gold
standard
’s disciplinary rules allowed them to employ a suite of new expan-
sionary monetary and
fiscal techniques.
3
By contrast, the few countries that
clung to the gold standard after 1933
– the so-called ‘gold bloc’ consisting of
Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and France
–
continued to suffer from weakening balance of payments, anaemic industrial
production, high unemployment and worsening
fiscal deficits. France, the
richest member of the
‘gold bloc’ led the way, doggedly maintaining a
de
flationary stance, even as the country sank deeper into recession and
political turmoil.
4
France
’s financial impasse was not separable from its increasingly alarming
security situation. In East Asia the confrontation of Russian and Japanese
interests in Manchurian and northern China had raised tensions since the late
1920
s, culminating in the occupation of Manchuria in 1931. In October
1935
Mussolini launched his attack on Abyssinia. France and Britain might
have been able to isolate East Asia and the Mediterranean as regional threats,
but for the simultaneous upheaval in Germany. It was Hitler
’s increasingly
overt challenge to the security order in Western and Eastern Europe that
forced Britain and France to respond, creating a truly continental crisis.
In its early months Hitler
’s government had conformed assiduously to the
ideology of peace that was such a marked feature of international relations in
the 1920s. Civilian work-creation and national rehabilitation were to the fore.
The Third Reich would not openly announce its remilitarization until March
1935
. But behind the scenes plans for a massive military buildup had been in
place since the earliest days of the regime. In June 1933, Schacht, Goering and
Blomberg had agreed on an eight-year plan of rearmament to be
financed by
the Metallforschungsgesellschaft, an off-the-books front company underwrit-
ten by the Reichsbank. Already by 1935, however, military spending was
running far ahead of target and in 1936 it would reach 11 per cent of total
national income. This
figure was historically unprecedented in a peacetime
3
Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression,
1919–1939
(Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 367.
4
See Kenneth Mouré, Managing the Franc Poincaré: Economic Understanding and Political
Constraint in French Monetary Policy,
1928–1936 (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
a d a m t o o z e a n d j a m e s r . m a r t i n
30
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capitalist state.
5
On the eve of the First World War in 1914, by contrast, the
military spending of all the major European powers had hovered between
3
and 4 per cent of GDP.
6
Nor was Nazi Germany alone. The Soviet Red
Army was undergoing dramatic modernization. Italy
’s attack on Abyssinia
pushed its military burden over 12 per cent. When Japan attacked China in
1937
and it began a phase of semi-mobilization for war, military spending
would surge to over 20 per cent of GDP.
How was such a drastic reallocation of resources possible? In Stalin
’s
Soviet Union the answer was consistent and radical. The entire economy
was restructured around collectivized agriculture and a rapidly expanding,
state-controlled industrial complex. Civilian consumption was squeezed to
the point of provoking a dreadful famine in the countryside. Meanwhile, the
share of armaments in industrial production rose from 2.6 per cent in 1930, to
5
.7 in 1932, 10 per cent in 1937 and 20 per cent by 1940. Though there was a lull
in 1937 as the Communist Party was convulsed by the purges, after 1938 35
–40
per cent of all steel produced in the Soviet Union was directed to the
armaments sector. Production of aircraft and artillery surged. The regime
advertised itself as bringing tractors to the countryside. But no less remark-
able was its achievement in creating a world-beating capacity for the design
and production of armoured vehicles, that already in 1936, whilst the Soviet
Union was at peace, was turning out 5,000 tanks per year. From its inception
in the
‘war scare’ of 1926, Stalin’s regime lived under the shadow of war.
Though bent on remilitarization and international confrontation, Nazi
Germany was not a socially revolutionary regime. Seizures and state owner-
ship were limited on an ad hoc basis to particular troublesome or strategic
industries, notably aircraft (Junkers) and steel (Reichswerke Hermann Goer-
ing). The key was to use state expenditure to mobilize and redirect the huge
capacity left idle by the Great Depression. Already in December 1933 all new
allocations of money for the work-creation schemes of the Reich were
frozen. Thereafter, the civilian economy was consistently put in second
place. Apart from the allocation of spending, the other main means of
redirecting the German economy were the currency controls put in place
during the crisis of 1931. These gave the Reichsbank full control over all
imports. In 1934 they were consolidated by Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler
’s central
5
Adam Tooze,
‘The Economic History of the Nazi Regime’, in Jane Caplan, ed., Nazi
Germany
(Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 180
–1.
6
Richard Overy and Andrew Wheatcroft, The Road to War: The Origins of World War II
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 58.
The economics of the war with Nazi Germany
31