Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War by Pierpaolo Barbieri (review)

In recent years historians have revived the concept of empire to analyze the Third Reich. While social scientists had first used this concept in the 1970s to understand Adolf Hitler’s foreign and economic policy before 1939, since 2000 Mark Mazower and others have shifted focus to World War II, using imperialism to frame Hitler’s violent conquest of Europe and to compare Germany’s occupational regimes to European imperial projects in Africa and Asia. By focusing on occupation and war these new studies usefully portray Nazi Germany as a project of formal imperialism — gaining political control over territory through conquest — but in doing so they bypass the rich, if thorny, analytical category of informal empire. It is this concept that Pierpaolo Barbieri applies to Nazi Germany’s relationship with Spain’s Nationalist Regime during the 1930s, and in doing so he hearkens back to earlier studies, though with an updated, transnational approach supported by archival research in six languages.

Barbieri successfully portrays Nazi intervention into Spain’s Civil War (1936–1939) on the side of General Francisco Franco as a project of informal imperialism driven by economic considerations. Although Hitler made the initial decision to support Franco based on geopolitical, military, and ideological factors — a decision Barbieri calls “Wagnerian” for its impetuosity (70) — Barbieri shows how the mid-level functionaries who actually carried out Germany’s intervention saw Spain less as an ideological battleground and more as a source of raw materials for the Third Reich’s overheating economy. Here the grand architect was Hjalmar Schacht, German Economics Minister and Central Banker, who used neo-mercantilism to manage Germany’s trade deficits and free Germany from an Anglo-American global order. Schacht saw Spain as an important pillar in this strategy, for it could provide Germany with crucial minerals at little cost in foreign currency. Schacht’s instrument was a pair of trade monopolies — hisma (Compañía Hispano-Marroquí de Transportes) and rowak (Rohstoffe-und-Waren-Einkaufsgesellschaft) — that controlled the flow of goods between Nationalist Spain and the Third Reich. Though Spain’s Nationalists came to despise these institutions for the profits they extracted, hisma-rowak remained a pillar of German intervention throughout the civil war, and in the process pushed Spain deeper into foreign debt. The Nazis hoped to transform this mounting debt into direct ownership of Spanish assets, and thereby overcome Germany’s lack of direct investment in Spain. This aspiration was a novel imperial tool, yet it never reached full development: after 1939 Germany’s negotiating position weakened and Franco consequently resisted the expansion of these trade monopolies as well as German efforts to exploit their creditor position.

The strengths of this book are many. To explain why the Spanish Nationalists gained assistance from Germany and Italy while the Republicans failed to get comparable commitments from Britain and France, Barbieri elegantly welds together three narratives: the emergence of German domestic economic tensions after 1934; the evolution of Spain’s political crises; and the foreign policy-making process in London and Paris. Barbieri also paints an excellent intellectual portrait of Schacht, tracing Schacht’s interest in neomercantilism to his dissertation on English trade policy, and early speeches to Germany’s Colonial Society in which he laid out plans for state-sponsored private monopolies that should be the commercial basis for any future German colonial venture. Barbieri, moreover, clearly delineates competing imperial imaginaries in Germany during the 1930s. Labeling Schacht’s strategy a neo-Weltpolitik, Barbieri contrasts this with Lebensraum, or territorial conquest and settlement espoused by Hitler, Hermann Göring, and others. In making this distinction, Barbieri follows a well-trodden path, though he adds a new twist by arguing neo-Weltpolitik was a viable alternative to Lebensraum that enjoyed support from key players in the Third Reich before 1937. He furthermore shows how such informal economic pressure could be “far cheaper and easier to manage” than the formal control Hitler...