June 1940: Hitler launches tanks and troops across Europe yet Germany is impoverished, has few raw materials, and no oil or currency. How did the Nazis manage to set off the cataclysm of WWII with little money and a weak economy?
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00:00Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France.
00:17On September 1st, 1939, Hitler started launching his troops across Europe.
00:31Inside their tons of armored steel was an instruction manual for the crew of the panzers.
00:40This small illustrated guide stated on the last page,
00:45For every shell that you fire, your father has paid 100 Reichsmarks in taxes.
00:51Your mother has worked a week in the factory.
00:54And the trains have traveled 10,000 kilometers.
00:57The tank's total cost was 800,000 Reichsmarks and 300,000 hours of work.
01:0230,000 people will have given a week's salary.
01:056,000 people will have worked a whole week so that you could have an armored combat vehicle.
01:11Everyone has been working for you, the tank crew.
01:13Think about what you have in your hands.
01:25At the heart of this German war machine, a symbol of a powerful, organized, and invincible
01:29nation, the Nazi regime was obsessed with money, working hours, and taxes.
01:40The resounding victories of the Blitzkrieg were the result of an unprecedented mobilization
01:44of German industry.
01:46They were also won by a financially beleaguered regime.
01:54The true colors of the Nazis' economic miracle, which had won over the whole nation and the
01:59majority of German industrialists since 1933, were now plain to see.
02:06Germany was short of everything, food, raw materials, money, and military equipment.
02:12In the defeated and occupied countries, there was organized pillage.
02:25The eagerness with which Germany drew on the resources of occupied territories is testimony
02:30to the degree to which domestic consumption had already been squeezed before the war and
02:35continued to be squeezed after the war broke out.
02:40It's true that foodstuffs were rationed in National Socialist Germany.
02:44Meat, butter, or any other items could only be bought in limited quantities, but these
02:50rations were nevertheless largely sufficient even for hard laborers.
03:13During the war, Germans never went hungry, mainly because huge quantities of foodstuffs
03:17were brought into the Reich from occupied territories.
03:24So materially speaking, it was clear that the German population were living at the expense
03:29of the occupied.
03:40Theft and pillage consolidated the political stability of the regime.
03:45Communism fed its people.
03:47It was food that enabled Hitler to maintain the support of the Germans.
03:52In fact, during the war, wages were at a very acceptable level.
04:00Nevertheless, all sorts of products were impossible to get hold of, even for money.
04:05Many consumer goods were just not being produced.
04:12As a result, Germans could do nothing else with their money, apart from put it in the
04:16bank, where they theoretically accumulated large sums, but in the end, they could seldom
04:22buy anything with this money.
04:56One way of thinking of the cycle of finance in the Nazi war economy is that war workers
05:17are paid for production in armaments factories, soldiers are paid, their widows are paid.
05:23There is a very considerable flow of money from the state, new printed purchasing power,
05:28to the German economy.
05:29Now, if all of that money was spent on the limited supply of goods that were available
05:35during the war, when up to 40% of GDP is being transferred to the war effort, it would have
05:39produced inflation.
05:41So the crucial thing to do is to stabilize, to freeze that purchasing power.
05:47They are issuing currency to pay war workers, but if you prevent people from spending their
05:53purchasing power, you don't get the price effect.
05:55But to do that, you have to maintain their confidence in the system.
06:07While the Germans were saving money, money printing was at full capacity.
06:12It helped reimburse the MIFO bills, it paid wages, and it paid the industrialists' bills.
06:20And so then you have a closed loop in which money generated in the first round generates
06:25wages, generates savings, and generates a flow of money back to the state.
06:30The crucial advantage of that is that it operates without propagandistic brouhaha.
06:35It operates continuously, and if it works, it generates price stability.
06:41It generates zero inflation.
06:45And if you have price stability, then people will also be willing to continue with this
06:48flow.
06:56The Nazi economy was voracious.
06:58The German savings, the plundering and spoliations in the occupied territories were not enough
07:03to support the war effort.
07:10The regime was in need of new places to conquer, new areas from which it could obtain the necessary,
07:15necessary resources.
07:18Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union.
07:21On June 22, 1941, Goebbels announced the start of Operation Barbarossa.
07:35Germany broke the non-aggression pact, and German troops entered the Soviet Union.
07:53The initial military successes against the Red Army were emphatic.
07:59I think for Hitler, the key thing was he always wanted to have an empire that matched the
08:03British Empire, for example.
08:05Maybe you could do it.
08:06You could defeat the Red Army quickly, and then you would have this large area, which
08:10could then be populated by Germans, and where you could draw raw materials and food and
08:15so on.
08:23In the spring of 1941, the Third Reich was waging three wars, one against the Soviets,
08:29one against the United Kingdom, supported by the U.S., and a racial war.
08:37Nazi genocidal violence was unleashed on the Jewish populations of the invaded territories
08:41to the east, in Poland and Ukraine.
08:50People were shot in mass executions, and the building of extermination camps began.
08:57In February 1941, the chemical giant IG Farben agreed to hand over an industrial zone to
09:03the SS, an area of 24 square kilometers to the east of Auschwitz, which had only been
09:08a prisoner of war camp at the time.
09:12Genocidal obsession began to converge with economic necessity.
09:19Between June and December 1941, the Third Reich was in its heyday.
09:24There was a point at which Hitler really thought that this imagined empire of his would actually
09:38become a reality.
09:41And so he asked Himmler and a group of SS academics around him to plan a vast new German
09:51empire.
09:52Himmler draws up a plan, General Plan Ost, General Plan East, and the object is to find
10:00a way of changing the geography of this area completely.
10:03You're going to drive all the Slavs out, or a great many Slavs out.
10:07Those who remain are going to be a kind of forced labor force, like a colony, really.
10:12And you're going to get German businesses to go in and start using Soviet raw material
10:16resources.
10:18So into this space of colonial settlement and struggle, the Nazis very specifically
10:26imagined moving millions of German settlers from the overpopulated regions of southern
10:31Germany, where you have tiny little farms eking out a miserable living in the Rhineland,
10:37for instance, but also resettling German ethnic groups that were scattered around Eastern
10:43Europe and finding new farms for them there.
11:09By laying claim to this living space for settlement, it meant that the millions of
11:15people who were already living there would lose the right to live there, as well as lose
11:24their possessions.
11:28The concept of Lebensraum, at the heart of Nazi ideology, was unavoidably linked with
11:33theft.
11:34Two things went hand in hand.
11:40In the propaganda films, German settlers were shown arriving in the occupied territories
11:44and settling into their new homeland.
12:06We have now worked together for half a year.
12:27You farmers, stay on your farms, which you have created out of Polish mismanagement.
12:36The last great European colonial project, the Master Plan for the East, was only implemented
12:41in Poland.
12:44A more urgent issue for the Reich was to feed its population and its army.
13:01Over three million troops, 600,000 horses, all of these have to be fed.
13:05And so the extraordinary implication that dawns on the German planners in the spring
13:10of 1941, with more and more clarity, is that the urban population of the Soviet Union will
13:16have to be starved to death so that the German armies can be fed from the territory of the
13:21Soviet Union.
13:43At the heart of Generalplan, or his so-called Hunger Plan, the idea that the area that Germany
13:49has conquered is full of so-called useless eaters.
13:53They don't contribute anything, they eat food.
13:56And you don't need them.
13:57And so already in 1941, you're beginning to impose on the Soviet population almost a level
14:05of starvation.
14:06Supplies, for example, for the city of Kiev are deliberately withheld, food is instead
14:12used by the armed forces or sent back to Germany.
14:15At the heart of the Hunger Plan is the idea that 30 million people will probably perish
14:20of starvation, perhaps even more.
14:22So it's shocking because this is 12 months before the famous Wannsee Conference.
14:28This is 12 months before even euphemistic talk of the total annihilation of the Jewish
14:33population begins in planning documents.
14:36And this is being talked about openly across the entire German military.
14:42We're talking about 20 to 30 million people who are going to be starved to death in the
14:46cities of the Soviet Union.
14:47The two things are nested together because the Jewish population predominantly lives
14:51in the cities, it doesn't farm.
14:53And so when you occupy a Soviet town, you have the problem of how you feed the Jewish
14:57population and they are the first people who will be cut out of any supply.
15:04And I have seen in the planning bureaucracy of the rice agency that deals with grain a
15:09spreadsheet in which they spell out the allocation of grain to the different populations within
15:16Germany itself from the highest ration allocations to mine workers all the way down to the inmates
15:23of concentration camps based on this calculus of preferential feeding.
15:33This does not at any moment mean that the ultimate reason for the destruction of the
15:39Jewish population of Poland is economic.
15:42That's not the point.
15:43The point is that if you have the plan to kill the Jewish population of Poland and you
15:48have a food shortage and you've got to decide who's going to starve, you move from deciding
15:53that you're going to starve the urban population of the Soviet Union to an accelerated, deliberately
15:57accelerated, this is the other telltale sign, we can see how the Nazi planners accelerate
16:02the Polish Holocaust in 1942.
16:04Why are they doing that?
16:05Why are they increasing the pace?
16:07Because they know that the harvest is critical and the rations in Germany are being cut and
16:11they need to reallocate.
16:31It was Herbert Backe who was chiefly responsible for the hunger plan.
16:35The minister of agriculture was a technocrat and a radical Nazi.
16:44Led by people such as Backe, the modern economic methods were put to use to serve the regime's
16:49genocidal obsessions.
16:57Human beings were objectivized and turned into commodities.
17:00They would be added to the Nazi economy's equations.
17:08Racial accounting was created where people were calculated, measured, added up, planned
17:13for, rationed, starved.
17:15It was all written down.
17:17It became a war weapon, as did the slide rule.
17:34The Red Army was starting to fight back by the autumn of 1941.
17:39And after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the U.S. entered the war.
17:43Germany was therefore forced to fight a much longer war.
17:56Equipment that had been destroyed had to be replaced and new tanks built with supplies
18:00of munitions.
18:01The army's needs were never-ending.
18:04Industrialists fought over raw materials, which were in short supply.
18:11Decisions of orders were left unclaimed.
18:13The military, engineers, planners, and civil servants were all confused as to which way
18:18to turn.
18:19The German economy was unable to keep up.
18:24German industry, because of military intervention, has become extremely inefficient.
18:30Productivity falls between 1939 and 1941, largely, really, because of military intervention.
18:38The military want the best, the highest quality, they want this, then they want that.
18:42You stop producing this, you start producing that.
18:45They literally, in December 1941, decide that rather than continuing to muddle through,
18:50it would be better simply to shut all the factories in Germany and reboot in 1942.
18:56They literally power down.
18:58They say, we can't make any of our planned allocations work, we'll declare a holiday
19:02in 1941, right at the very end.
19:05And then restart again in 1942 on a new basis, rethinking the whole priority set, bringing
19:09in foreign labor, morphing the Hunger Plan, and again the Lagerplan Ost, rejigging those
19:15around the new drive in 1942.
19:21For one week, in the middle of a world war, the arms industry shut down.
19:36Plan after plan of extravagant aims, constant ideological incitements, improvisation and
19:43and spoliation had turned the German war economy into total chaos.
19:57By the time that you're fighting not just the British Empire and the Soviet Union, but
20:01the United States as well, it's obvious to anyone that Germany is massively inferior
20:07in terms of its economic resources.
20:09So you need some answer, you need some plausible answer.
20:13And the answer comes in the form of rationalization.
20:16We will make more with the same amount.
20:18In December 1941, Hitler passes a so-called rationalization decree, in which he says everything
20:27has to be simplified.
20:28You must stop demanding the best weapons.
20:31We need to move towards mass production like the Americans and the Russians.
20:40The Nazis believed in the miracle of technology and the strength of their ideas.
20:45Short of money and trade, and permeated with racial ideology, the engineers and laborers
20:50were forced to ignore reality and the laws of economics.
20:56This kickstart, both ideological and technological, was initiated by Albert Speer in February
21:011942.
21:05He was a rapid replacement for Fritz Todt, who had died in a plane crash.
21:13Hitler says to Speer, look, you succeed Todt, and you will have my complete backing.
21:19Anything you want to do in the war economy, you will have my complete authority.
21:29Now Speer doesn't really know how to run a war economy.
21:33So he takes all the plans that Todt had developed, and he begins to put them into practice.
21:39That means reorganizing German industry in a series of so-called main committees and
21:44rings, so that the industrialists are involved in planning mass production and how to achieve
21:51it, rather than the military.
21:54He introduces a central planning agency, which again is basically a civilian agency, in order
22:04to be able to redirect raw materials, everything from coal to iron and steel to aluminum, to
22:10where it is needed.
22:15Immediately, a focus is put on mass production.
22:21You cut back the number of models that are being produced.
22:25Through time and motion studies, you find ways of improving labor productivity.
22:30You prevent wastage.
22:39All of this means that by 1944, Germany is producing roughly three times as many weapons,
22:45but it's only using, say, 20 or 30 percent more materials and labor.
22:50There's been an extraordinary revolution in the productivity of the German war economy
22:56between 1942 and 1944.
23:09From 1942, prices were fixed by the authorities.
23:12The market had vanished.
23:24High-ranking Nazis reached out directly to engineers such as Ferdinand Porsche, famous
23:28designer of car engines, and put him in charge of the construction of new assault tanks.
23:42General Erhard Milch, in charge of rationalization in the aviation sector, forced the major companies
23:47Junkers, Messerschmitt, and Heinkel to design simpler and easier-to-produce planes.
24:01Between the beginning of 1942 and 1943, Milch succeeded in doubling the monthly production
24:06of planes without increasing the use of aluminum, his secret rationalizing and exploiting thousands
24:13of forced laborers.
24:17At the end of May 1943, the production of arms had increased by 120 percent compared
24:22with February 1942.
24:30So the huge surge in armaments production that we see after 1942, which Albert Speer
24:35will claim as his armaments miracle, is in fact anything but.
24:39I mean, it's basically relying on investments that were made early on in the war in long-term
24:44productive capacity in armaments factories, and on the other hand, the massive mobilization
24:49of forced labor.
24:52And with the expansion of the war economy and the recruitment of very large numbers
24:55of people into the armed forces, and in the end some 17 million people are drafted into
25:00the German armed forces, where are you going to get the labor?
25:04Who's going to run the farms?
25:06Who's going to work in the armaments factories?
25:09So forced labor is the only answer, and between 1940 and 1945, around about 13 million people
25:19from outside Germany are brought back to the Reich to perform some kind of forced labor.
25:29In France, Belgium, and Denmark, recruitment campaigns operated initially on a voluntary
25:34basis, but then made obligatory by the forced labor service.
25:43Fritz Sauckel, General Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment, was in charge of a severe
25:47recruitment program across Europe.
25:51Civilians of both sexes, prisoners of war, Poles and then Russians, were all encouraged
25:55to work for the Reich, voluntarily or forcibly.
26:06The Slav populations were the most badly treated.
26:16There was a civil administration in the occupied territories, particularly in Ukraine, with
26:21regional commissioners, who sent recruitment gangs into the small towns and villages.
26:27These recruitment teams enforced and compelled sometimes entire age groups to be sent to
26:32Germany to work.
26:34It was vital to enable the war economy to function, but it also explains the radicalization
26:39of the occupation of these territories.
26:42It was based on the idea that the Slavs were in any case inferior to the Germans, and that
26:47they were obliged to work for the Reich.
26:54Prisoners of war, civilian conscript, men and women drafted from the Ukraine, volunteers
27:00from Italy, volunteers from the Benelux countries, and volunteers from France, sucked into the
27:07German industrial apparatus, such that by 1944-45, the ethnic, cultural, national complexion
27:15of a major German industrial city is much as it is today.
27:19In other words, at that point, Germany's labor force is in fact more cosmopolitan than it
27:24is today.
27:32While Sauckel was working day and night to select and transport the slave labor, Heinrich
27:36Himmler and the SS were murdering millions of Jews, thus depriving the Reich's factories
27:41of a precious workforce.
27:46In the second half of 1942, 2.4 million workers, laborers, and craftspeople were killed in
27:53the extermination camps, simply because they were Jews.
28:01The destruction of six million people, many of whom were highly productive workers, is
28:06an extraordinary waste of human potential, there's no way around that, and it would be
28:13absurd and obscene to deny that.
28:15But the question, of course, is what kind of logic, what kind of rationality does the
28:22regime impose on this project?
28:24And we're talking at that moment about the Holocaust in its purest form, if one can speak
28:29in those terms.
28:30This is not the Holocaust par val, this is not the executions in the killing fields of
28:33Eastern Europe.
28:34This is Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, and then Auschwitz.
28:38These are the industrialized killing centers of the Holocaust.
28:43And they are being fed with people at an accelerated pace in 1942-43, with a view to clearing out
28:50the Polish food balance, such that Poland moves from being an area that takes food from
28:55Germany, which is what it had been in the early stages of the occupation, to being an
28:59area that can deliver food.
29:02And the reason why that problem is so urgent is that there are reports coming in from the
29:06Reich of valuable Ukrainian workers falling down, effectively dead, at their workstations
29:12across the factories of Germany, because Germany cannot deliver the food that's necessary.
29:18So you see a direct linkage there between the imperatives of the armament economy, the
29:23imperatives of forced labor, and the imperatives of food.
29:30The needs of the economy and the genocidal obsessions revolved around the issue of food.
29:37Killing the Jews enabled the slave workers, who were exhausted in the Reich's factories,
29:41to be fed.
29:43Death became the engine which drove the Nazi economy.
29:51Industrialists saw starving and mistreated forced laborers arriving in their factories.
29:59The management of the Mitteldeutsche Motoren Werke, the MIMO, a company which built airplane
30:04engines for Junker and Messerschmitt, expressed their worries in a sober report to the Reich's
30:09aviation ministry.
30:18If, in the case of earth-moving work, we employ 2,000 Russians, and due to insufficient supplies,
30:24we lose several hundred of them each quarter, it's easy to replace the missing workers by
30:28new ones.
30:29However, in the process of building an arms factory, it is simply impossible to replace
30:34a man who works on special machinery quickly enough.
30:47Forced labor was a solution as brutal as it was beneficial to the war economy.
30:53In factories, it was impossible to spot the boundary between racial ideology and cynical
30:58managerial organization.
31:05The death of workers was just part of the Nazi industrial equation.
31:15The efforts to rationalize, however, could not save the Reich.
31:23On February 2, 1943, the Red Army inflicted a resounding defeat on the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad.
31:31And Allied bombing brought the battleground to German factories and towns.
31:41If you look inside the apparatus of the Speer ministry, in the spring of 1943, as the Allied
31:47bombers, above all the RAF, begin sustained bombing of the Ruhr in the northwest of Germany,
31:52which is the heavy industrial heartland of Germany, there can be no doubt that it in
31:56fact sabotaged all of their efforts to increase armaments production in 1943.
32:02They're completely explicit about it, and you can see in the statistics of the armaments
32:06ministry, there is no sugarcoating this, that armaments production flatlines.
32:11It doesn't collapse, but it stops going up, which is, of course, the promise of the Speer
32:15ministry that it will go on up endlessly.
32:28Hitler's dictatorship was characterized by continuous upheaval.
32:32Faced with military defeats, with the disorganization and slowdown of its economic machine, the
32:37regime could only respond by upping the stakes.
32:40In 1943, total war was decreed.
33:10In the factories, as well as on the battlefields, war just had to go on.
33:21Behind the superlatives and provocative language of total war, an unwavering alliance was forged
33:26between Speer and Himmler.
33:30The extreme violence of the SS became a tool of management and organization.
33:40Speer will get on in the meantime with fighting for the Endsieg and for the promise of final
33:45victory, come what may, against whatever the odds.
33:48And what he needs for that is the promise of technology, this voluntarist vision of
33:52rationalization, and he needs the means of coercion.
33:55He needs to be able to threaten everyone in Germany.
34:00And that actually centers on the demand to discipline German factories and German workers
34:05and German businesses into surrendering to the demands of the total war effort.
34:10And that's where Heinrich Himmler comes in, because Heinrich Himmler provides you with
34:14the muscle and the informant network and the spies to go into every factory in Germany.
34:21Milch told the aeronautical engineers and factory managers, strike down whoever gets
34:27in your way, we will back you up.
34:35He traveled up and down the country in a train which served as a peripatetic court, in which
34:40factory managers were put on trial for not meeting their objectives.
34:45German bosses learned to use violence to keep productivity going.
34:52By 4243, memos are circulating about the best practice of using foreign labor, which
34:57include the new idea of performance feeding.
35:01So one way it turns out you can get the best out of your workforce, if you've got 4,500
35:07calories to allocate, you can allocate 1,500 to three workers, each one of them will be
35:14basically malnourished and incapable of sustaining hard physical labor.
35:19Or you can run a competition between the foreign workers, and as one of them declines
35:23relative to the other two, strip his or her rations away and reallocate it to the high
35:27performing workers, and by the time you're feeding one of them 3,000 calories and the
35:31other down to 750 each, you've got at least one high productive worker.
35:36There's a knowledge process that goes on here.
35:38The German employers and managers learn about human nutrition.
35:42They learn about base metabolism.
35:44They begin to understand that it's important not just to feed them great big cauldrons
35:50of soup consisting largely of sugar beet and potato.
35:53You actually have to find some scraps of meat to provide them with protein, otherwise productivity
35:58declines over time.
35:59You have a highly cynical process of learning that goes on in optimization that is documented
36:04throughout the managerial apparatus of industrial Germany.
36:44The ideological ranting of total war and the radical accounting and management systems
36:51of Speer were unable to fully hide the reality of the economic figures.
36:57However hard propaganda heralded the new Tiger tanks, which were heavier and more powerful
37:01than the American Lee tanks, the statistical reality of industrial production was incontrovertible.
37:12In 1943, 18,300 assault tanks left German factories against a total of 54,000 produced
37:19by the Allies.
37:21The U.S., the Soviet Union, and the U.K. produced four times more planes than the Nazi regime.
37:27The game was up for Germany.
37:42By 1943-44, when it was already clear that Germany was unlikely to win the war, many
37:52industrialists kept going, but they also began to make plans for what would happen afterwards.
37:58They wanted to find some way in which they might be able to integrate themselves again
38:01into the world market.
38:03So in some cases they began to hide away machinery.
38:07They would hide it in bunkers and things like this so that the military couldn't see
38:12it.
38:13We see companies shifting their IP, their intellectual property, to branches they might
38:19have in Stockholm or a branch they might have in Zurich.
38:23You just do a little, very below-the-surface kind of accounting transfer where we say,
38:29we know we're not going to be able to save our factory, but what we'll do is we'll transfer
38:33the engineering blueprints to the office in Stockholm.
38:37So you see those kind of moves beginning to take place where companies are not explicitly
38:43opting out of the war effort, but preparing the basis for some kind of recovery after
38:48the end of the war.
38:56After the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, Nazi Germany, despite a last effort, started
39:02to implode.
39:10Nazism sought salvation once again in technology.
39:14Speer, a consummate organizer, coordinated the production of miracle weapons.
39:21Electric and diesel-powered submarines, which were faster and quieter.
39:26The V-1 ballistic missiles and V-2 rockets.
39:30Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighters and human torpedoes.
39:34All these miracle weapons were meant to bring about victory.
39:43The combination of the ideology of the fighting German spirit with the technical know-how
39:47of engineers was implausible.
39:49The miracle arms were too expensive, unreliable, and failed to change the course of the war.
39:58A war that was never ending because the collusion between Speer, Himmler, and the major industrialists
40:05ensured that the regime held on resolutely until the final defeat.
40:12And then in 1944, as the regime really hits the buffers and is facing the end, there is
40:18the widespread dispersal of concentration camp inmates and even Jewish concentration
40:23camp inmates to high-status armaments production, the most notorious and the most famous of
40:29which are the underground factories for the V-1 and the V-2 rockets.
40:42If you ask about the logic of this system, I think it has two basic drivers.
40:48One, from the point of view of the SS, is the ultimate annihilation of this population.
40:54And then the other is the maintenance of production in the Third Reich under increasingly impossible
40:59conditions until the very end.
41:01And so it's out of that that emerge these extraordinarily inefficient, irrational production
41:09lines buried deep into the mountains of Thuringia, where you're producing weapons which can have
41:15no more than a symbolic effect on the outcome of the war with humans who can barely stand.
41:30There is a real imbrication at that point between the final stages of the final solution
41:37and the final last-ditch efforts to maintain armaments production.
41:40In the summer of 1944, there is a hotline, a telephone line, between the ramp at Auschwitz
41:46and the command centers of Albert Speer's ministry, in which they daily discuss the
41:51level of deliveries of human material that Auschwitz is receiving from Hungary and how
41:56many of those have been judged on the ramp fit for immediate deployment to high-priority
42:02armaments factories.
42:03And they're going overwhelmingly to Luftwaffe production and to Vergeltungswaffen, to V-1
42:08and V-2 production.
42:15The contract with the SS for concentration camp labor, and especially Jewish concentration
42:20camp labor, isn't a contract for individual workers, it's a contract for a flow of labor.
42:25And so if somebody is used up and no longer usable, you just simply expect the SS to replace
42:30them with another body.
42:38Right up until the end, the Nazis were obsessive in their pursuit of their number one priority,
42:43the mass killing of European Jews.
42:49This objective was taken up by the factories of the Reich, turning them into instruments
42:53of death by work.
42:56Under Speer's leadership, death was just another variable which production had to deal with.
43:05And then fundamental questions begin to arise about, do we conceive of a future for the
43:10German population beyond the end of the war?
43:12The truly crucial decision is taken, however, to allocate all of the available chemical
43:18raw materials to the production of ammunition, which has a disastrous impact for Germany
43:23because it means that none is left for fertilizer production.
43:27And so Germany faces, from the summer of 1945, a year of agriculture with no fertilizer.
43:34So they're planning the collapse of food supply beyond the summer of 1945.
43:41This is an explicit decision taken by the Speer ministry, weighing up, as it were, the
43:46costs and benefits of continuing the war or providing the basis for the continued production
43:51of food.
43:56The ultimate victims of Nazism were the Germans themselves.
44:03In December 1944, Goebbels exhorted workers of the necessity of continuing production
44:08in a factory without electricity.
44:15For over 12 years, the scramble to go to war had been built on credit, a huge amount of
44:20credit at first hidden by the MIFO bills, offset by spoliation and confiscation, fueled
44:26by the recourse to unlimited money printing, producing cash that just stagnated in savings
44:31accounts.
44:37In this headlong rush, the regime had enlisted business leaders, engineers, managers and
44:42accountants.
44:47On May 8, 1945, Germany capitulated.
45:04National socialism had invented nothing new.
45:07Anti-Semitism, eugenics, racism, colonialism and forced labor were all ideas that had existed
45:13in European culture for centuries and were just recycled by the Nazis and radicalized.
45:19Nevertheless, Hitler's regime was capable of inventing an economy, a system of production
45:24and finance built around plundering, theft and death.
45:38In Allied-occupied Germany, hundreds of billions of Reichsmarks printed by the Nazi regime
45:43during the war were released from savings accounts and flooded the partly freed economy.
45:53Inflation soared.
46:02The Germans understood that it was better to spend a fortune on food on the black market
46:06than to hang on to cash that would have no value the following day.
46:18And some things had a real currency to them.
46:21Cigarettes, for example, you know, people were desperate for cigarettes, real cigarettes
46:24because they'd had fake tobacco for a lot of time.
46:27Real cigarettes and, you know, this could be used as a bargaining tool, you know, you
46:31would change 20 cigarettes if you had them for a loaf of bread.
46:42The real German currency in 1945 was cigarettes.
46:49It's a truth that's, I think, quite difficult to swallow, but there's no doubt at all that
46:57in terms of brute capital accumulation, the Nazi regime increased the productive capacity
47:07of the German economy or the territories that were German in 1938 and then become Polish,
47:14for instance, after 1945.
47:16If you look at the estimates of installed capital, machine tools, industrial plant that
47:24we have for 1938, then still in 1948, so 10 years later, after reparations, after dismantling,
47:31after bombing, the total quantity of capital available is larger than it was at the beginning
47:38of the war.
47:40Large parts of the gigantic chemical industrial zone, which the Germans and the Nazis built
47:46in Silesia because it was out of the range of Allied bombers early in the war, ends up
47:51as the core, the kernel of the heavy industrial complex of the new Polish state after 1945.
47:58Auschwitz is part of that complex.
48:00The Auschwitz rubber plant continues to function all the way down to the present day.
48:04It's one of the largest synthetic rubber plants in Europe.
48:14Industrial capitalism had adapted itself to Nazism.
48:17And it managed to integrate the genocidal obsessions of the regime into its means of
48:22production.
48:23It had survived bombing and, like a phoenix from the ashes, rose again to carry on doing
48:27what it knew best, productivity come what may.