In this book Alfred Mierzejewski describes how the German economy collapsed under Allied bombing in the last year of World War II. He presents a broad-based, original study of German wartime industry and transportation, and of Allied air force planning and intelligence, including the first complete analysis in English of the German National Railway.

The German industrial economy was extraordinarily dependent on the timely, adequate distribution of coal by railroad and inland waterway. The German National Railway in particular was the pivot of the finely balanced armaments production...

The largest enterprise in the capitalist world between 1920 and 1932, the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway) was at the center of events in a period of great turmoil in Germany. In the first detailed history of this important organization, Alfred Mierzejewski presents a sophisticated analysis of the Reichsbahn's operations, finances, and political and social roles. In addition, he uses the story of the Reichsbahn to gain new perspectives on modern German economic and political history.

Mierzejewski describes and analyzes the beginnings of the national railway in Germany...

The largest enterprise in the capitalist world between 1920 and 1945, the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway) was at the center of events in a period of great turmoil in Germany. In this, the second volume of his comprehensive history of the Reichsbahn, Alfred Mierzejewski offers the first complete account of the national railway under Hitler's regime.

Mierzejewski uses sources that include Nazi Party membership records and Reichsbahn internal memoranda to explore the railway's operations, finances, and political and social roles from 1933 to 1945. He examines the...

In the first English-language biography of one of the most important figures in postwar German history, Alfred C. Mierzejewski examines the life and service of Ludwig Erhard (1897-1977), West Germany's first minister of economics and second chancellor. Erhard liberalized the German economy in 1948 and is generally considered the father of West Germany's "economic miracle--the period of extraordinary growth in jobs and improvement in the standard of living in the 1950s that helped stabilize Germany's first successful democracy.

While recent scholarship has dismissed Erhard's...

A History of the German Public Pension System: Continuity amid Change provides the first comprehensive institutional history of the German public pension system from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the major reform period in the early twenty-first century. Relying on a wide range sources, including many used for the first time, this study provides a balanced account of how the pension system has coped with major challenges, such as Germany s defeat in two world wars, inflation, the Great Depression, the demographic transition, political risk, reunification, and changing gender...