Revenge of the Powerless
Richard Evans recently wrote in the New York Review about Adam Tooze’s book, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Tooze had tracked German manufacturing through the war years and found that, despite Allied bombing, production of armaments continued to increase in 1943 and 1944, owing largely to forced labor.
The workers were brutally exploited in slave labor camps in Germany and Poland, underfed and living in appalling conditions, relentlessly driven to turn out munitions including the V-2 rockets falling on London.
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Even if you didn’t like the articles, NYR would be worth reading for its letters.
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The next issue brought a letter from scientist John Diebold, who liked the review, had decided to get the book, and also had something to add.
In 1978, he along with colleagues in Norway needed to trigger a series of explosions in order to make seismic measurements. They used World War II surplus Nazi explosives that had been stored in man-made caverns along Norwegian fjords.
“It was my personal observation,” he writes, “that while the munitions dated 1939-1940 were reliable, those with dates from 1943 and later were typically weak or noneffective.”
Either the Nazis were running short of critical materials, or the concentration camp inmates were sabotaging the armaments – or both.
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Reviewer Evans was grateful for the new information, and he responded with a confirming story of his own.
In 1943, a German bomb fell through the roof of his wife’s grandmother’s house in the East End of London and lodged, unexploded, in her bedroom wardrobe.
When the bomb disposal unit opened it up, they found a note inside:
“Don’t worry, English. We’re with you. Polish workers.”
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Yet another book to read and so little time to get to it. But after scanning Evan’s comments it seems to me that any serious student of Nazi Germany’s Thousand Year Riech must study Tooze’s observations. Speer, Schoenbaum, Joachim Fest and others have discussed economic aspects of the Nazi years, including transition from a peacetime to a total war economy as late as 1942, and the impact of foreign labor on production increases beginning in 1943. But Tooze, apparently, has done so with much more intensity of purpose.
Frequent visitors to the The House of the Horse, it seems, are exposed to a most interesting variety of subject matter. I think I’ll ride in more often.
Comment by JDP — February 11, 2008 @ 9:32 am
Such learned visitors are most especially welcome. As for variety of content, since we’re liberals, we write about what we please. When it’s politics or the supreme court, you may want to take exception, and exceptions are welcome, too.
Comment by Al — February 11, 2008 @ 5:16 pm
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Trackback by 'ILLEGAL — April 14, 2008 @ 5:59 am