Tobias Straumann, Out of Hitler’s Shadow: Debt, Guilt and the German Economic Miracle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.

Reviewed by Jeremy Black

War and its consequences range widely, helping ensure that a variety of books are of interest to the historian of war. Two instances of this lately published by the ever-excellent Oxford University Press are Straumann’s study of consequences and Goebbels and ‘Total War‘. The Sports Palace Speech of 1943 (by Peter Longerich, Lesley Sharpe, and Jeremy Noakes, 2025), which offers an annotated version of the speech and Before and After sections. Goebbels’ positioning of himself and ‘Total War’ as linked goals and means is handled very ably, and the book serves as a skilful discussion of the public consideration of strategic choices, at least in rhetorical terms. Goebbels is seen as lacking in an understanding of administrative process and as pursuing a lazy emphasis on will.

The consequences of rhetoric also play a major role in Straumann’s book, which is also commendably short, although somewhat weakened by its very strong commitment to a particular outcome. The benign consequences of the London Debt Agreement on 1953 in terms of the stabilisation of West Germany are emphasised throughout. As Straumann, however, points out, the debt-to-GNP ratio of other states, notably Britain, was far harsher. The blackmail consequences of Hitler’s use of the Versailles settlement are readily apparent, as is the dominant role in part as a result of the West German economy within the developing Western European system. That war’s results are often very different to what might be suggested by the campaigning is one conclusion, but the perspective looks very different from the East German/Soviet perspective.

Instead, the 1953 agreement was a key aspect of the creation of the postwar Western alliance system, one that depended in part on the Bundeswehr, the campaigning space of West Germany and the West German economy.