ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the war Hitler told his adulatory audience at the Sports Palace in Berlin: ‘We National Socialists have our origins in war, our philosophy results from the experience of war and it will prove itself, if necessary, in war.’ Nazism was to find its true expression in war, and hoped to discover an answer to its economic and social difficulties by territorial expansion. Party ideologues refused to draw a distinction between a war economy and peacetime economy, and used the term ‘military economy’ (Wehrwirtschaft), a term which was popular in military circles in the 1920s, to describe the fundamental principles of economic organisation both in peace and wartime. It is partly for this reason that the pre-war economy was described as a ‘war economy in peacetime’, and yet until 1941 the war economy was limited to the extent that it was possible to speak of a ‘peacetime war economy’.
