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The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy Paperback – February 26, 2008
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An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision--ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology--was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. The Wages of Destruction is a chilling work of originality and tremendous scholarship that set off debate in Germany and will fundamentally change the way in which history views the Second World War.
- Print length799 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateFebruary 26, 2008
- Grade level12 and up
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions8.4 x 5.5 x 1.8 inches
- ISBN-100143113208
- ISBN-13978-0143113201
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Editorial Reviews
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-Niall Ferguson
"Tooze has produced the most striking history of German strategy in the Second World War that we possess. This is an extraordinary achievement, and it places Adam Tooze in a very select company of historians indeed ... Tooze has given us a masterpiece which will be read, and admired; and it will stimulate others for a long time to come."
-Nicholas Stargardt, History Today
"It is among Adam Tooze's many virtues, in "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy," that he can write about such matters with authority, explaining the technicalities of bombers and battleships. Hovering over his chronicle are two extraordinary questions: how Germany managed to last as long as it did before the collapse of 1945 and why, under Hitler, it thought it could achieve supremacy at all."
-Norman Stone, The Wall Street Journal
"Virtually every page of his book contains something new and thought-provoking, making the whole an impressive achievement, in which original research has been combined with critical scrutiny of a vast literature that seems ripe for such a re-examination."
-Michael Burleigh, The Sunday Times (London)
"A magnificent demonstration of the explanatory power of economic history."
-The Times (London)
"Masterful . . . Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism."
-Financial Times
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (February 26, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 799 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143113208
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143113201
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Grade level : 12 and up
- Item Weight : 1.65 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #207,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #423 in German History (Books)
- #432 in Economic History (Books)
- #2,003 in World War II History (Books)
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Tooze starts by describing the quandary which faced Germany in the late 1920's. Germany was not self sufficient in food or raw materials and thus needed to be able to export in order to finance essential imports. Germany also needed to be able to sell its exports in order to obtain hard currency to pay the reparation demands from the World War I victors. Despite these difficulties, the German finance ministry was managing to navigate Germany through a slow and painful recovery from WWI. Then disaster struck with the Great Depression. First there was an inevitable shrinking in export markets and then, much more seriously, there were conscious protectionist decisions in America, Britain, and France to block German exports in order to protect home employment.
Before reading The Wages of Destruction, I had loosely understood how the Great Depression had been a key factor in Hitler's rise to power, especially due to widespread unemployment. But Tooze clarifies that Germany was facing a much deeper strategic dilemma than a simple economic depression. Germany was dependent on the goodwill of other powers for its export markets and for its essential food and material imports, but those powers were demonstrating that in a crisis they would look entirely to their own interests and would quite cheerfully close their markets and let Germany suffer. Given this behavior, the long-term economic and political future for Germany looked extremely grim. Hitler offered a radical solution to this problem: Germany needed to expand to the East and become self sufficient in resources in the same way as the British Empire or America. Given the depth of Germany's problem, it becomes easier to understand why many thinking Germans either enthusiastically or reluctantly accepted Hitler's solution.
In succeeding chapters, Tooze describes how Hitler rapidly switched the Germany economy to focus on rearmament. He argues that while the Nazi propaganda machine emphasized efforts to increase employment and visionary projects such as the autobahn system, this was really mere window dressing and the regime was massively focused on military preparations for war. More interestingly, he also highlights how the continual shortages of hard currency (and thus of key materials) continually constrained and shaped rearmament. By 1938 lack of currency and other economic constraints were limiting further military expansion. Hitler was thus faced with a situation where Germany could see its own military abilities peaking and simultaneously see other powers starting to accelerate their own rearmament, weakening Germany's relative advantage. Hitler being Hitler, this drove an impatience for war, while Germany had its best relative position. As the war progresses, Tooze revisits this theme from several angles. Hitler was continually faced with situations where enemy military production would quickly eclipse Germany's and he reacted by trying to knock particular opponents out of the war quickly.
Tooze's major focus is on the operations and outputs of the German wartime economy. Overall, he shows us an economy that was reasonably well run and efficient but where production was dominated by shortages of key resources, especially steel and skilled manpower. By making high-level decisions about reallocations of these resources the Reich leadership could cause major leaps (or declines) in production in target sectors such as aircraft or tanks or munitions. Typically these resource shifts would take about six months to work through the system. The lucky Nazi bureaucrat who happened to be in charge of a target sector at the end of the six months would then happily boast of his productivity miracle as his sector suddenly produced startling jumps in output.
Tooze does not shy away from describing and condemning the many darker aspects of the Third Reich's war economy. A major aim of the expansion to the East was to improve Germany's food supplies. But that land was already inhabited and that food was already being consumed. So the Nazi solution was the "Hunger Plan" which quite casually assumed that food would be diverted from Poland and the Western USSR to Germany and that many millions would be deliberately starved. Tooze argues that this appalling plan was widely circulated, understood and accepted among the German political and military leadership in 1941. Thankfully, it proved difficult to execute and while there was widespread suffering, the East avoided the systematic mass starvation called for in the plan. However, in subsequent years the same desire to remove what were seen as "useless mouths" and free up food supplies was one of the many input factors towards the holocaust. In parallel, Germany manpower shortages led to large drafts of forced labor from occupied countries to German factories. Tooze illustrates both the appalling conditions of the laborers and the folly of a regime that for ideological reasons oppressed and starved the very labor it was trying to exploit.
Overall, I found this book a very enlightening read. Tooze's thorough analysis of the details of exports, imports, and production constraints provides a convincing base for his explanation of how the constraints and limits of the German economy drove high level German economic and military planning.
Other reviews have given the outline of this volume, but I wish to add several points that the author points out that may be especially germane to a decision on purchasing and reading this book.
First, the author shows how Germany's drive to expand and Hitler's policies with respect to expansion in the East were the logicial continuation of German expansion from the 19th and early 20th centuries. In some respect it actually goes back to the 13th century, but that is another story. Nonetheless, this expansion was similar to and could be understood by the other imperial powers; Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Italy. By the time Hitler assumed power, Germany possessed no colonies (while all the other listed powers did) and many citizens, Nazi or otherwise, saw this expansion as their country's right and even obligation to spread German culture. That the lower-cultured (in German eyes) Slavs might object, was seen as a problem to be surmounted for their own good.
Hitler then took this position to an extreme where the lower cultured populations were to be eliminated or assimilated. Star Trek fans will understand this as the Borgs' policy. The Germans needed the East's raw foodstuffs, oil, and other natural resources in order to become a great power. The only way to gain them was to destroy the political entities under whose control they were at the time. Ergo, the invasion and destruction of the Soviet Union was a given to have to happen sooner of later. In this respect, Hitler was not so much crazy as merely taking German policy and aspirations to their logical extreme.
In many respects, Germany was not prepared for war with the major powers at any time during Hitler's fuehership. The economy was never actually put on a full wartime footing and competing organizations were granted priorities back and forth based on their success or failure in turf wars.
Germany never achieved mass production of anything -- as soon as a level of production was achieved that seemed to satisfy an organization, its priority was withdrawn and some other project was pushed. Even with successful products such as certain tanks and aircraft, the Germans never stopped tinkering to make them better at the cost of being able to mass-produce them and supply standard spare parts. The result was that much of the German Wehrmacht's equipment was superior to the Allies', but they never possessed them in sufficient quantity to achieve their aims.
The author discusses the efforts by Speer to increase Germany's industrial output and concludes his efforts were only partially successful in spite of seemingly having a great impact. This entire presentation was highly interesting and worth the price of the book by itself.
In conclusion, this is an important work that concludes that Germany was never able to compete effectively with the Allies in war production, even with the captured territories and the use of slave labor. The difficulties it faced and the internal competition that ensured that the resources it had would not be effectively employed contributed in no small measure to its eventual defeat in spite of its efforts on the battlefield.
I recommend the purchase and reading of this work.
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Needless to say, the book is interesting precisely because coal, steel and (to a lesser extent, presumably for lack of data) wheat, oils and fat are the currency in which author Adam Tooze deals in Nazi Germany’s motivation, timing and the conduct of WWII, including its worst crimes.
In broad terms, and yes, I’m oversimplifying (read the full 675 pages to get the actual detail –you will not regret it) the author’s reading of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and “second book” forms the basis on which he gets into the dictator’s head to arrive at the following a priori judgements:
• The world’s mightiest empire, the British Empire, was about to be usurped by the United States of America, chiefly thanks to the immense success of American capitalists such as Henry Ford in developing the methods of mass production. This opened an opportunity for Germany to side with the US in the struggle for primacy and become the biggest European power. (Significantly, the author points out that this was not an enormous deviation from his Weimar Republic predecessors’ world view.)
• In the early 20th century, Germany was a less-developed economy than France or Britain from a manufacturing perspective and could not hope to catch up without a concerted, state-driven effort, which would have to start with the end of WWI reparations and the reclaiming of the Ruhr. (Again, this was hardly a radical view for a German statesman to hold at the time.)
• Germany, given its early 20th century borders, was doomed to lack of self-sufficiency in agriculture. For a number of reasons (all detailed in the book), redistribution of land would simply not suffice. (True enough, but also true of many other industrial powers)
• To achieve self-sufficiency, (and here’s where it all starts to go horribly wrong) it was necessary for Germany to expand eastward. Along the lines of the American ideology of the frontier a militarized Germany would have to re-claim the fertile plains of Poland and the Ukraine. This would entail driving out the current, lesser human inhabitants of these lands, along the lines (p. 469) of what had happened to the American “Indians.”
• The two arch-enemies of Germany in its efforts to achieve its destiny would be 1. the “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” and 2. a chiefly “British / free markets / Jewish conspiracy” orchestrated by the likes of (American and 100% secular!) Louis Brandeis that for example favored free trade and whose appointed puppet in the world of politics was (p. 665) none other than Franklin Roosevelt.
The reign of the National Socialists (including industrial policy, economic policy, monetary policy, decisions regarding both when to start war and how to wage war, all the way through to the fate of the conquered peoples) is recounted through the prism of these basic judgements and always with an emphasis on Germany’s ability to produce coal and steel.
The book has three parts: before the war the protagonist is Goering and the story is told of how he and Schacht combined their efforts to bring about rearmament, which would have rendered Germany ready to fight by sometime in 1943-44, had Hitler been patient enough to wait.
Goering and his minions (as the book progresses it’s increasingly faithful party members like Autobahn-layer Todt who replace technocrats) are “credited” with both “laying down the law” with the industrialists, using coercion and threats and making them complicit in the crimes against humanity the regime had in store right from the beginning, but also allowing them to make solid returns on the necessary heavy investment by guaranteeing both volumes and profitability levels.
Schacht, on the other hand, is credited with succeeding in preventing the economy from running hot, in an environment where unemployment went from “worst ever” to literally zero. To do this, uniquely among developed nations, he never officially abandoned the gold standard, thereby creating a chronic lack of gold / currency, against which he had to suppress imports via a system like the one China runs today, whereby all transactions with foreign entities, and imports in particular, first had to be approved by the Reichsbank; a truly monumental endeavor.
A much darker corollary of this suppression, and the author goes into quite some detail on the topic, was that many Jews delayed their emigration until they could find a way past these controls in order to export their liquid wealth, to say nothing of the fact that it encouraged pogroms that were intended to persuade them to leave without having done so.
(N.B. the author has as good as expunged gold from the account, with zero loss to the story)
Adam Tooze takes the time to explain that the economic renaissance Germany went through in this period was entirely down to the rearmament effort. The sundry highways and vanity projects like the people’s radio and the people’s car were 99% propaganda and barely register in the numbers. Indeed, even investment in railways, the ultimate infrastructure of the period, suffered. This was actually a rare way in which the Nazis left Germany in 1939 less prepared for war than they found it. Also, rearmament took priority over consumption, which was suppressed in a large number of overt and covert ways.
From Goering’s preparations the author moves on to the decisions regarding the war itself. He does not get mentioned near as much as his lieutenants in the book, but the main character of the book at this stage is Hitler himself.
To cut a long story short, the decision to attack France came down to numbers: every day that went by, and despite the best efforts of the Germans, the finite capacity of the German war economy in conjunction with the squeeze from the balance of payments situation meant that the allies were producing steel at a rate that eclipsed that of the axis powers. In other words, every day that went by the French would be better able to defend themselves. So the best time to attack was the earliest possible! The trigger came when the Ribbentrop – Molotov agreement allowed Hitler to relax about the “Jewish-Russian conspiracy.” That was his chance and he grasped it with both hands.
The story Tooze tells next is fascinating: for all the talk about technological advances, the German army mainly moved on foot. WWII was the last war fought in Napoleonic style, not the first war of the modern era. And the swift conquest of France was down to the utter genius of von Manstein, who moved his army through the Ardennes and caught the British and the French napping. The myth of German “Blitzkrieg” was invented after the fact and was convenient to both the allies (who could claim to have lost to a new, mechanized, foe, rather than having been beaten on strategy) and to the Germans, who could suddenly believe they were conducting a winnable war.
The conquest of France / Holland / Belgium / Luxembourg also changed the balance very significantly in the race for armaments, of course. Germany could suddenly dream that it was no longer waging a war at a material disadvantage. The fascinating story is told about how Germany did not violate the market system in availing itself of these resources. Quoting from p. 388, “Exporters in each country were paid, not by their customers in Germany, but by their own central banks, in their own currency. The foreign central bank then chalked up the deficit to Germany’s clearing account in Berlin. The Germans received their goods, the foreign suppliers received prompt payment, but the account never settled. At the end of 1944, the Reichsbank recorded almost 30 billion Reichsmarks owing to members of the clearing system.” (nothing like a bit of history to drive one’s understanding of what Hans Werner Sinn is talking about when he complains about Target 2)
But the balance was not changed enough and Germany did not have the naval ability to conquer Britain, so in 1941 the exact same logic that had dictated the invasion of France dictated the invasion of Russia, this time on a very deliberate Blitzkrieg basis. In the conclusion to the book the author claims that Hitler's twisted ideology must also have played a part in this decision. In my view it’s the one bit of the book that’s probably a bit contentious. Yes, Hitler was ideologically driven to clear Germany’s Lebensraum of “lesser peoples,” but I find it hard to believe that even a madman of his caliber was fearful enough of what “world Jewry” might have had in store for him to precipitate an attack on Russia with inadequate resources that depended entirely on the hope of delivering a knock-out punch. In all probability, he’d started drinking some of his own “Blitzkrieg” cool-aid. Tooze himself backs up the idea that Hitler consciously shifted to Blitzkrieg (p. 667), if only because that was the only workable plan that would allow him to wage war on two fronts.
Militarily, the rest is history, as they say, and it’s recounted here well (with coverage for North African campaign to boot). Special emphasis is given to the extermination of the Jews in the Ukraine and Belarus. It appears that some 11.3 million were specifically targeted for extermination! The author chooses not to comment on whether the operation in which they perished (called Taifun) was a military blunder, given that it diverted the German war effort away from the prime objective of taking Moscow and dealing Stalin a blow he would not recover from, or a sine qua non, given Hitler’s intentions to exterminate the Jews.
But this is not a military history per se, so it shifts to Albert Speer and Fritz Sauckel and the way they conducted the losing war against the Soviets. In particular, and in keeping with the book’s unwavering theme, it is the story of how they went about producing the steel and armaments necessary to conduct that losing war.
This is, by some margin, the part of the book where I learned the most and by an even bigger margin, the most important work of historical research to be found in this tome.
The story is told of the millions of Slavs, chiefly, who were uprooted from their lands and sent to work in keeping the German war machine running. Their working conditions, the means by which they were rewarded and how they were actively worked to death.
What you get here, more than in any sci-fi movie or, indeed, 21st century computer game, is a picture of what Europe would have looked like after a Nazi conquest: a world where the able bodied of the slave race man the engine room of the master race. Tooze goes out of his way to mention that it is under this light that we should look at Schindler, even. (p. 524)
The author goes beyond penning an indictment of Speer, here: he takes you through the factories and camps and back to the times when wars were not yet fought for territory, but to bring back slaves.
It is ironic that this should be the most poignant element of a war allegedly fought for Lebensraum.
And it is doubly ironic that, in the author’s view, at least, this “third front” could be precisely where Hitler lost his war: had he spared the lives of the millions of slaughtered Jews and millions of starved Red Army prisoners and turned them to slave labor some two years earlier, his millennial plans could well have become our nightmare.
Agree or disagree, this was a monumental read.
The reviewer has a Bachelor of Theology majoring in Moral Theology and Ecclesial and Economic History.
Mr Tooze's account of the war echoes Mr Churchills detailed account of the war.
Every ration of bolts and butter were scrutinised by the British PM, according to his memoirs.
Mr Tooze provides evidence that the Nazis were economic cretins a bit like the wolves of Wall Street.
Mr Tooze writes politely and evidenced based.
The tome is detailed regarding the individual choices in retrospect which were both immoral and economically dumb.
The book is best read as a clash between folk who use clubs and batons and those who read books.
The field of historic forensic accounting is new.
Mr Tooze has made a massive contribution.
War is not justified unless on moral reasons.
The fight against Nazi ideas immoral as they remain are best left to rational discussion.
Mr Tooze asserts the primacy of fact, ideas and the best of human nature.
Mick