Help on essay? German Inflation during ww2

Im looking for someone to proofread my essay on this subject which i know nothing about :frowning:

During World War II, the German economy experienced high levels of inflation. Eventually, the government made laws to stop the rising inflation rate. Governments placed limitations on the production and importation of some goods, for example, appliances and cars, so as to focus the country’s resources on the importation and production of arms and weaponry.
The government took action by rationalizing supplies and reducing the number of goods available to consumers, thereby decreasing spending and the money supply in the economy. Governments passed price ceiling laws in which people were limited in terms of how much they could buy each month of essential supplies like meat and sugar. Suppliers lessened their production levels at this stipulated price resulting in shortages of goods and services on the market. People were issued ration coupons each month to buy these essential supplies. The government even had a national speed limit of 35 miles per hour to conserve gasoline. This was successful in causing less access to goods and as such lessening the chances of an increased money supply in the economy by way of local consumption.

Another step taken by the government was to create the National War Labor Board, in an attempt to forestall labor-management conflict during World War II. Roosevelt wanted to prevent potential labor union strikes, which would slow industrial production and impede the war effort. During WWII, the NWLB mediated disputes between management and laborers to prevent strikes so products would be produced and to prevent workers from demanding big pay raises that would fuel inflation.

At the end of World War II, much of Germany was in ruins. Large parts of its infrastructure was attacked or bombed by the Allied Forces. The city of Dresden was completely destroyed. The population of Cologne had dropped from 750,000 to 32,000. The housing stock was reduced by 20%. Food production was half the level it was before the start of the war; industrial output was down by a third. Many of its men between the ages of 18 and 35, the demographic which could do the heavy lifting to literally rebuild the country, had been either killed or crippled.

When the war ended the command economy was dismantled. By the end of 1946, direct government allocation of resources by edict, price controls, and rationing schemes was essentially eliminated. Tax rates were cut as well, although they remained high by contemporary standards. By any measure, the economy became less subject to government direction. Despite the pessimism of professional economists, resources that previously would have been directed to the production of war goods quickly found their way to other uses. The business community did not share the economists’ despair. A poll of business executives in 1944 and 1945 revealed that only 8.5 percent of them thought the prospects for their company had worsened in the postwar period. A contemporary chronicler noted that in 1945-1946 businesses “had a large and growing volume of unfilled orders for peacetime products”

Between mid-1945 and mid-1947, over 20 million people were released from the armed forces. This was described by President Truman as the “swiftest and most gigantic change-over that any nation has made from war to peace.” During that time, the unemployment rate rose from 1.9 percent to just 3.9 percent. As economist Robert Higgs points out, “It was no miracle to herd 12 million men into the armed forces and attract millions of men and women to work in munitions plants during the war. The real miracle was to reallocate a third of the total labor force to serving private consumers and investors in just two years.”

By 1948 the German people had lived under price controls for twelve years and rationing for nine years. Adolf Hitler had imposed price controls on the German people in 1936 so that his government could buy war materials at artificially low prices. Later, in 1939, one of Hitler’s top Nazi deputies, Hermann Goering, imposed rationing. During the war, the Nazis made flagrant violations of the price controls subject to the death penalty. In November 1945 the Allied Control Authority, formed by the governments of the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, agreed to keep Hitler’s and Goering’s price controls and rationing in place.