Trading with the enemy? The flow of scrap between Britain and Germany from pre-war rearmament to post-war reconstruction

Abstract

Ferrous scrap is a vital ingredient in the manufacture of steel, and it constitutes a strategic material of the greatest significance in modern warfare. During the late 1930s, Britain exported considerable quantities of scrap metal to Nazi Germany, a trade which subsequently proved embarrassing and which officialdom sought to obscure. Following the Second World War, Britain obtained large amounts of iron and steel from Western Germany, much of which it took—often surreptitiously—as war booty. Historians have paid relatively scant attention to this flow of scrap, yet it had important economic, strategic, and diplomatic consequences. Two reasons for this lack of attention are the overwhelming influence that the US and the USSR played in shaping the fate of postwar Germany, and a tendency of British policymakers and historians to support an overly simplified narrative that contrasted Western beneficence toward their former enemy with Soviet rapaciousness.