After World War I, Germany faces poverty, industrial output at historic lows, and a currency in freefall. This History Hit episode traces how the Nazi party, inheriting an economy with almost no oil, few raw materials, and empty coffers, financed a total-war machine anyway. It follows the mechanisms Hjalmar Schacht and the Reich Economics Ministry used, hidden rearmament budgets, barter deals with foreign suppliers, and the Mefo bills scheme that let Germany borrow against its own future to pay arms manufacturers without officially printing money it didn't have. Archival photographs and footage of factories, party rallies, and early Wehrmacht maneuvers illustrate the shift from Weimar stagnation to wartime production, while narration lays out how deficit spending and forced labor policy fed the buildup that let Hitler send tanks into France, Belgium, and Holland by June 1940. The film treats the economics as the real engine of the story, showing a bankrupt state gambling its entire industrial capacity on a war it could not otherwise afford.