Tooze-Wages of Destruction-Making&Breaking of Nazi Economy (2006)

[redgonzo]

This is Adam Tooze's monumental book The Wages of Destruction - The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) which presents a radical different economic history of the Third Reich and provides the clearest picture to date of the Nazi war machine and its ultimate undoing. The idea that Nazi Germany was an unstoppable juggernaut, backed up by a highly industrialized economy, has been central to all accounts of the Second World War. But what if this was not the case? What if the tragedy of twentieth-century Europe had its roots in Germany's weakness, rather than in its strength? Adam Tooze has written the first radically new account of the Second World War in a generation. He does this by placing economics alongside race and politics at the heart of the story. An intuitive understanding of global economic realities was fundamental to Hitler's worldview as he understood that Germany's relative poverty in 1933 was the result not just of the Great Depression but also of its limited territory and natural resources. He predicted the dawning of a new, globalized world in which Europe would be crushed by America's overwhelming power. There was one last chance: a European superstate under German rule. But the global balance of economic and military power was from the outset heavily stacked against Hitler, and it was to forestall this danger from the West that he launched his under-resourced armies on their unprecedented and ultimately futile rampage across Europe. In Hitler’s view, the Second World War was fought to create a European empire strong enough to take on the United States but as this amazing book makes absolutely clear, Hitler’s armies were never powerful enough to beat either Britain or the Soviet Union - and Hitler never had a serious plan as to how he might defeat the United States. Lately, social and ideological analyses of Hitler's strategic choices have prevailed; in part because of the volume and complexity of available data, even the most economically savvy historians of World War II have generally provided only fragmentary glimpses of the myriad ways in which economics influenced German rearmament and aggression. As Tooze argues, however, the choices made by the Nazi war machine were as economically driven as they were Hitler driven as he also addresses the relationship between economics and ideology at Auschwitz. The net result, emerging from more than 800 pages of genuinely readable macroeconomic analysis, is an original and comprehensive thesis that couches the strategic choices of the Third Reich firmly within an increasingly American twentieth century. An unputdownable epic history with eye-opening and groundbreaking results, Wages of Destruction is a gripping and chilling account of astonishing events, which will redefine our view of Nazi Germany and the Second World War as Tooze combines a sophisticated understanding of the economic issues at stake with a remarkable depth and breadth of historical knowledge. 805 pages, many pictures. A must read for everyone.

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