1) Schacht was wrong if he said to Goering that the official policy would deprive the population of butter for their bread , because the population did not use butter for its bread : butter was in Germany before WWII a luxury, as it was in Belgium, Britain and most other countries .But Schacht,who belonged to the wealthy classes, did not know how the average German was living .Hanny wrote: ↑20 Jan 2019 12:09Context is never irrelevant, you refered to meat consumption, German meat consumption during the war was kept up by taking it from occuppied nations, and consuming it at home. For the military, half of their meat ration came from direct confiscation of the nation they were in and consumed there to ease the logistiocal burden of supply.
Which is why context is required, in 1936 50% of Germans lived below the official poverty line.
Low countries economy once occuppied was subordinated to that of the Reich, the food they would have eaten was consumed by Germans instead.
Except it was not.
It imported food as it was food deficit nation. What had changed was that their was increased income to purchase it.There was refigeration in most homes ( state gave everyone a home, and you payed back the cost depending on how many children you had, and if your wife gave up working, by 4 children the house became a gift of the state) to store it for longer, hence Tooze moves state expenditure on refrigeration/canning to the military sector as the Reich invested massively in stockpiling frozen/tinned foodstuffs, to replace imports lost in case of blockade, and setting up civilian infrastructure to consume less food due to decreased wastage.
German Life expetency fell between 32 and 37.
Kershaw "A summary of price and wage levels prepared for Hitler on 4 September 1935 showed almost half of the German work-force earning gross wages of 18 ReichMarks or less per week. This was substantially below the poverty line...Wages, then, remained at the 1932 level--substantially lower than the last pre-Depression year of 1928 in the much-maligned Weimar Republic. Food prices, on the other hand, had risen officially by 8 per cent since 1933. Overall living costs were higher by 5.4 per cent. Official rates did not, however, tell the whole tale. Increases of 33, 50, and even 150 per cent had been reported for some foodstuffs. By late summer, the terms `food crisis' and `provisions crisis' were in common use."
Annual food consumption in 1937 had fallen for wheat bread, meat, bacon, milk, eggs, fish vegetables, sugar, tropical fruit and beer compared to the 1927 figures. The only increase was in rye bread, cheese and potatoes.
Kilo of bacon cost 2.5rm
kilo of butter 3 rm.
1933 State had 937 million in gold reserves, in 1937 72 million.
I totaly get that your views are shaped by your ideology. What Klien said was based on Wagenführ statistics and he argued that 1939 9% on military expenditure ment AH was prepared for short wars, not long nutritional ones, Tooze used 17% for the same period and argued AH was prepared for long attrition wars.
Now if you had given klien Toozes numbers you would get a different explanation of what they meant from him. Each is counting things radically different from each other.
Wagenfuhr/Tooze in comparison of Military share of industrial production.
1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944
9 16 15 22 31 40
Tooze
17 24 30 34 38 43
2 ) About the military share of industrial production : Tooze is right and Wagenführ is wrong
3) That the living condition of the average German was worse than during the depression is false and ridiculous : if it was true, the nazi regime would collaps .
4) The slogan : guns instead of butter is
meaningless ,because less guns would not mean more butter,and more guns does not mean less butter .
wrong, because there were more guns and more butter : the amount of fat that was produced domestically was 53% of the demand of the industry and population in 1933/1934,while it was 57 % in 1938/1939 .
There is no proof for a correlation of the production of guns with the production of butter .The production/import of butter would only increase/decrease if the demand was higher /lower .
The slogan was only an attempt to convince the population/ industry to consume less fat,and, as we don't know how much was consumed by the population compared to the industry and as we don't know how much the industry could decrease its consumption,the obvious conclusion is that the slogan was only an empty slogan, as most slogans are and we don't know if the slogan was successful or not .Was the consumption of fat decreasing ?
