On the export side, the simplest solution was to devalue the Reichsmark. This was debated in the Weimar era and, behind closed doors (as a politically sensitive topic), in 1934 and 1936, but ruled out for aforementioned reasons (debt, fear of inflation and prestige). This forced Germany to come up with creative methods to lower the price of German exports.
The first was, starting in 1933, a complicated system of bond buy-backs (I, for one, didn’t understand it; it’s described in page 77) which essentially subsidized exporters at the expense of Germany’s foreign creditors.
As this wasn’t enough, in 1935 exports were subsidized by a new tax levied on industry as a whole. A progressive tax rate of 2 to 4 percent on turnover raised tens of millions of Reichsmarks every month. The largest payers of this tax were in the booming armaments industry, which ultimately propped up the export sector and the balance of trade. The tax was unpopular with businessmen, particularly since it left some industries in the red, but it was effective at least in the short term.
On the long term it began to draw hostility from trade partners as it was essentially state-subsidized dumping, a point made in a memorandum written by Carl Goerdeler in 1936.
The objective of a positive balance of trade was contradicted by another policy, the encouragement of Jewish emigration. As emigrants left with their property and had to be provided with foreign currency by the Reichsbank, they constrained Germany’s limited supply of foreign currency. The Haavara Agreement was one workaround to this: as Jews leaving for Palestine paid German goods, they compensated their departure with an increase in exports.
Kristallnacht was a setback, as replacements for vandalized goods had to be imported at a steep price. Goering was incensed, not about the events themselves but of their financial effect.
The whole system of import rationing and export subsidies, imperfect as it was, is called remarkable by Tooze. It allowed Germany to survive and trade with foreign exchange reserves much smaller than those of most countries today. Though even before the war it was already strained by neverending rearmament and measures such as tight controls of foreign currency and one-time acquisitions had to be taken, it was still the same framework of German trade well into the war.