Abstract
Reviewed by: Aleksandr Bogdashkin, VUNTs VVS ‘VVA’, Voronezh, Russia
In this volume, the Dutch historian Hein Klemann and his Russian colleague Sergei Kudryashov look at the economies of the European countries occupied by Nazi Germany immediately before and during the Second World War. They have made a significant contribution to the international historiography on this question. This book is the result of a large-scale project involving many scholars from various European countries. Klemann and Kudryashov have taken on the far from easy task of summing up the conclusions of several important conferences and bringing together the materials produced by a group of specialists on the economic history of individual countries between 1939 and 1945.
The result of all this painstaking work is a very interesting study on the economic situation in all the occupied countries: the Czech lands and Poland, the Scandinavian states, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Balkans and the USSR. The book looks at such important questions as the mechanisms by which the Nazi regime exploited the resources of the territories it occupied, the problem of using the labour of foreign citizens, the workings of the financial system, trade and production. Quite a lot of attention is devoted to the black market. The economic consequences of Nazi occupation for post-war Europe are looked at in detail. A large quantity of previously untapped archival sources are cited, as are a wide range of published works. All this attests to the high scholarly standard and indisputable originality of this volume.
One of the key points demonstrated by the authors is that during the Second World War the belligerent countries came up against the necessity not only for military mobilization but for the total concentration of all economic and technological resources for the needs of the war. They are at pains to show that the productive potential of the opposing sides was of decisive importance for the outcome of the war. Although this is beyond dispute, I cannot concur with the view presented in the book that the declaration of war on Nazi Germany by the USA made the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition a foregone conclusion. The authors are inclined to think that after December 1941 the combined economic might of the USSR, Britain and the USA predominated over that of the Axis states, and this made the defeat of Germany and its allies inevitable. This view is qualified in various places in the book. On page 96 the authors note that the Allied victory was gained as a result of the enormous number of mistakes and the lack of coordination on the part of the Axis powers. Moreover, on page 174 they write of how the Red Army’s counteroffensive near Moscow in December 1941 was more important that the USA’s entry into the war in obliging the leaders of the Third Reich to rethink not only their military strategy but the whole way they organized their war economy and the exploitation of occupied Europe. It seems to me that even after December 1941 Nazi Germany remained very powerful and that the victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad should not be seen as the victory of the USSR’s economic might. Right up to the battles at the Kursk Bulge, the outcome of the Second World War was far from certain. It was for this reason that the leaders of Britain and the USA held off from opening the ‘second front’ in Europe.
One of this book’s real merits is its contribution to the debate about the relative importance of dogmatism and rationalism in the decisions taken by the Nazi German leadership regarding economic policy in the occupied territories. The authors show convincingly that the need to use the resources of the occupied countries effectively obliged the Nazis to reconsider many of their ideological stances. Their conclusion that ‘where industry of value existed, it was exploited; where industry was of no value to the Nazi strategy, it had to disappear, as its raw materials and labour were needed elsewhere’ (76), is well founded. They are also correct in pointing out that the occupation policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, whatever may have been written in Mein Kampf, was significantly different from the policy carried out in other countries of Eastern Europe. This is closely tied up with another important finding of their study – that the economic consequences of Nazi occupation were not the same for all European countries. In several Western European countries, and in Bohemia and Moravia, Nazi military orders provided a stimulus for the development of local production. That said, the authors take issue with the German historian Götz Aly, stating that little more than one third (35%) of Nazi Germany’s military expenditure went to the occupied countries.
For all the indisputable positive aspects of this study, it contains some questionable statements, such as the assertion – repeated twice – that Nazi Germany’s annexations of countries in Western Europe were for purely strategic rather than economic reasons. The authors’ observation that the German leaders had no plan for using the resources of the countries they had taken over seems insufficient to sustain such a conclusion. I would suggest that the Nazi leadership could not have failed to consider the idea of exploiting the economies of all the countries they had conquered.
I should also remark that the authors’ criticisms of the views of Alan Milward and the historians of his generation seem too categorical and condescending. Although many of their ideas and conclusions are debatable, these historians made no small contribution to the development of the historiography of Second World War economic history.
That said, although there are some debatable statements in this volume, overall its authors have produced a serious study which paints a vivid and complex picture of the economic history of occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945. It will be of interest to everyone concerned with studying the history of the Second World War.