This book falls squarely in the tradition of the ministerial histories that during the last fifteen years have laid bare the involvement of various sections of the German bureaucracy in Nazi criminality. Here, the focus is on the intertwined National Statistical Office (Reich Statistisches Amt or RStA) and the Institute for the Study of Business Cycles (Institut für Konjunkturforschung or IfK), whose name was changed in mid-1941 to the title it retains today, the German Institute for Economic Research (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung or DIW). The elements of the story are mostly familiar to any reader of these ministerial histories: considerable continuity of personnel from Weimar through the Nazi era and into the postwar world; ready and rapid self-coordination (Selbstgleichschaltung) with the Nazi regime and its objectives, including preparing for war and persecuting the Jews; tenacious application of organizational skills and pursuit of duty in service to the regime right up until the end of World War II; and sometimes surprising aftereffects on postwar Germany. Rainer Fremdling provides, in other words, another demonstration of the point that I and my colleagues on the commission to study the German Foreign Office made a decade ago: government officials and institutions in the Third Reich became agents of the Third Reich, whose actions cannot be separated from its deeds, contrary to what many of the actors pretended after the war.

Because the plot line of the book follows a well-worn pattern, the author's perceived need “to demonstrate the cold and cynical considerations” (69) of the StRA in carrying out a directive to calculate the total wealth of German Jews in 1936 comes across as slightly naive, as does his apparent sense that showing the “interwovenness” (76) and “interconnection” (109–113) of a research institution (the IfK) and Nazi ideology will come as a surprise to his readers. A different sort of lack of awareness of the existing literature emerges in his heated insistence that most of German business had been “bought” by high profits into becoming willing and enthusiastic participants in the Nazi rearmament drive (115–116). There is some truth to this, but the liquidity crisis that nearly overwhelmed many producers aroused considerable misgivings in 1937–1938 (see Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era [2001] and From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich [2004]). These experiences reinforced the widespread resentment among corporate leaders provoked by the NSDAP's relentless attacks on the bourgeoisie (see especially Cornelia Rauh, “Wirtschaftsbürger im ‘Doppelstaat’,” in Unternehmen im Nationalsozialismus, eds., Norbert Frei and Tim Schanetzky [2010], 100–15).

Potentially the most consequential arguments of Fremdling's book concern the relationship between statistics gathering and economic planning in Nazi Germany. The author traces the steady rise of both from 1933 to 1945, necessitated by the clash between the regime's military ambitions and the country's resource poverty. Optimizing the allocation of scarce raw materials (and, later, of labor, investments, and production processes) presupposed mapping their distribution, which led to the StRA's annual industrial census becoming ever more comprehensive in the early years of Nazi rule, until the survey of 1936 could and did become the template for IfK officials, working with the Economics Ministry and Four-Year Plan administrators, to match the real existing Nazi economy to the Reich's military needs thereafter. Fremdling believes that Ernst Wagemann, who headed both the StRA and the IfK from mid-1933 until the end of the war, foresaw and embraced the fact that a German economy oriented around war would become increasingly state-directed and centralized. The inexorable trend toward a “planned economy” (25) culminated in the rise of Hans Kehrl and his Central Planning Office, first within the Four-Year Plan organization and then in Albert Speer's Armament Ministry. A meticulous examination of the relevant surviving records leads Fremdling to the rather daring remark that Kehrl and his associates “did not shy away from the application of economic planning concepts of the Soviet type” (132). But the planning statistics gathered under a hail of aerial bombardment were never comprehensive enough to permit translating such “concepts” into reality.

The reference to the Soviets provides a transition to the afterlife of the industrial survey of 1936, namely its importance to the economic planners of the fledgling German Democratic Republic. They and their Nazi predecessors had in common operating “in a centrally directed market of scarcity” (“in einer zentral gelenkten Mangelwirtschaft,” 21), so after efforts to conduct new industrial surveys of the Soviet Occupation Zone foundered on the resistance of the constituent German states (Länder), GDR planners naturally fell back on the Nazi survey of 1936, published in 1939, as the most up-to-date and comprehensive statistical reference available to them. This is not only an ironic point, but also an interesting one. Unfortunately, the author does not follow up on it to show whether and how it led the first cohort of East German communist planners astray.