Wages of Destruction

Wages of Destruction is an incredibly dense and long book about the German economy from 1919-1945. The book attempts to provide a strategic, ideological, and economic synthesis as an answer to many big questions about Nazi Germany.

• What were Hitler’s geopolitical ambitions?
• Did Hitler help Germany exit the Great Depression?
• Why did Hitler go to war in 1939 with Western Europe?
• Why was Germany so successful in 1940-1941?
• How was Germany able to surivive another 3.5 years after the failure of December 1941?
• Why dedicate valuable resources to genocide?
• How effective was Anglo-American bombing of German industry and cities?

The answers for these questions deviates from the previous historical orthodoxy. Hitler’s desire to create a Germany capable of competing with the United States (and UK to a lesser extent), improvisation in the face of material and labor constraints, and racial hierarchy drive much of Wages of Destruction. This desire to compete with the North Atlantic leads Hitler to the conclusion that he must conquer and genocide Eastern Europe to gain sufficient land and labor. Along with careful management of the national economy, the Nazi state applies these tools before and during World War II to start and perpetuate the worst conflict in human history.

I am uncertain as to whether Tooze is right. Tooze’s rationalization of much of Germany’s genocidal drive and action as a reaction to the American century was certainly shocking to me. What is more certain is that the book is a hard read even for those familiar with the course of the Second World War. There are many names of people, companies, and government agencies which, unless you too are an economic historian of 20th century Europe, will be new. Having never taken a macroeconomics course in high school or college, I had to look up terms like rationalization or balance of payments. The trouble was definitely worth it to learn about the greatest war in human history from a new perspective.