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Adam Tooze

The wages of destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi economy Hardcover – January 1, 2006

by Adam TOOZE (Author)

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Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Very Good, A very good, clean and sound copy in red cloth boards with a very good dust jacket with a clear protective wrapper. The wages of destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi economy. xxvii, 799 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. ; 25 cm.. Includes bibliographical references (p. 689-773) and index.. .

Print length

799 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Allen Lane
Publication date

January 1, 2006
Dimensions

6.38 x 2.13 x 9.37 inches
ISBN-10

0713995661
ISBN-13

978-0713995664
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen Lane (January 1, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 799 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0713995661
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0713995664
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.95 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.38 x 2.13 x 9.37 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,897,718 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12,837 in Economic History (Books)
- #49,910 in World War II History (Books)

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R. A Forczyk

Great Explanation of Economic Reasons for German Defeat

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2015

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By now, nearly a decade after it first appeared, Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (2006), is considered a classic by many and one cannot address the subject of the Third Reich’s wartime economy without reference to his book. This book is an economist’s interpretation of why the Third Reich failed to achieve its objectives and offers many unique perspectives. Overall, The Wages of Destruction is a landmark work and a very good piece of historical work. However as a military historian, the book appears to only scratch the surface in places and lacks the detail to fully explain Germany’s wartime economy. Essentially, the book is more focused on economic indicators and input variables (e.g. labor, raw materials) than either R&D or output. Furthermore, I found the author to be unduly pessimistic; reading the book, I had the impression that Germany’s economy was extremely weak and near collapse even in the 1930s. Based upon the Third Reich’s wartime output, this seems counter-intuitive. The amount of blood, sweat and high explosive that the Allies had to expend to cripple German industry was prodigious, so I appreciate Prof. Tooze’s analysis, but the numbers seem to fall short of explaining the results. That being said, Prof. Tooze’s book does explain a great deal and should be regarded as the starting point for more in-depth research in how to cripple the economy of aggressive dictators (I think that may come in handy).

The Wages of Destruction is divided into 20 chapters and has 22 supporting tables and 22 additional figures. The first section covers the German economic recovery after Hitler came to power; Hitler wanted to spend 5—10 percent of Germany’s GDP on rearmament, but the economy was wobbly. Tooze makes interesting points in these opening chapters about how Hitler, Goring and friends coerced German businesses to adapt to their rearmament priorities, including forcing the coal industry to capitalize synthetic fuel production in 1934 and the nationalization of aviation companies like Junkers. Indeed, the ramp-up of aircraft production in Germany from 1934 to 1939 was phenomenal, but also expensive and wasteful. The author’s discussion of the Volkswagen program as a disastrous flop – but which was touted by Hitler as a great success – was also very illuminating about how the Third Reich ran industrial programs.

The book’s second part covers the period 1936-1940. Tooze focuses on three levers that inhibited German rearmament in the lead-up to war: the scarcity of foreign currency (which made it difficult to purchase raw materials overseas), the shortage of critical raw materials such as copper and rubber, and the persistent shortage of skilled labor. These are all good points, but Tooze does not always provide the supporting data to fully evaluate these issues. For example, he mentions copper several times as a key material, but fails to provide data on imports or sources. Thus, I could not figure out how badly Germany was short of copper or how this reduced armaments production. A number of the tables that are provided are not well explained and lack x- and y-labels, which makes it hard to understand a graph with ambiguous number values. Another interesting point that Tooze makes is the Nazi failure to invest in railroad development, which led to persistent transport issues during the war as demand greatly exceeded supply. However, Tooze also has a tendency to offer opinions as fact, such as his claim that, “the task [to dominate the British Isles] was simply beyond Germany’s industrial resources.” While the Luftwaffe clearly made operational and tactical mistakes in the Battle of Britain, the idea that Germany industry could not compete with Britain manno I manno is a bit absurd. Britain was on the winning team because it had the US and USSR as allies, not because of its innate industrial superiority over the Reich. Had Hitler delayed Barbarossa a year and focused on defeating England, the British would have been in real trouble in mid-1941. Another opinion is that Allied Lend Lease “did not begin to affect the balance on the Eastern Front until 1943,” which is highly contentious and offered without supporting evidence.

The third and final section covers 1941-1945. This section is the best in the book and has interesting details about how all the weaknesses in Germany’s economy undermined industrial performance. There is some discussion of specific programs, such as tanks and U-Boats, but the evidence presented is less than conclusive. For example, Tooze does not examine German assembly line practices, which were not very efficient, or the tendency to “over-design” weapons until they were too complex to mass produce. One chapter is focused on Albert Speer and the alleged “miracle” of production in 1943-44, which Tooze dismisses as mostly propaganda. Overall, Tooze’s thesis is that Germany’s economy was not ready to wage a global war and was badly mis-managed, which e does a fairly good job of supporting, even though specifics are sometimes insufficient. The fact that Germany was badly out-produced even by the Soviet Union appears ipso facto to support Tooze’s conclusions. However what Tooze fails to do is to show why – if the Third Reich’s economy was such a mess – that it took its enemies so long to defeat it. Somewhere in here, there is an economist’s over-estimation of the economic levers and an under-estimation of the human factors, which the Third Reich actually did an exceedingly good job of organizing.

152 people found this helpful

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Edmund Pickett

The economic basis of Nazism, which explains everything else

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2019

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I've read perhaps a hundred books on World War II in Europe and this one shines amazing and surprising light on all the others. No other author has asked the hard questions about how exactly Hitler thought he could pay for all his wars. Was National Socialism really socialist? Not even close. It was more like crony capitalism plus Soviet style central planning with a hundred different committees setting quotas and allocating resources. Food, steel, fertilizer, lumber--there was never enough of anything and resources had to be continually shifted here and there, with massive inefficiencies and shortages. The German people suffered planned hunger and the people in the occupied countries suffered planned starvation, while the Army, Navy and Air Force fought over steel allocations. Albert Speer took credit for fake production miracles and Hitler believed the propaganda, while the soldiers lacked food and ammunition. All previous writers have been obsessed with tactics, strategy and leaders. Adam Tooze shows that if you want the truth about the Third Reich, you need to follow the money.

22 people found this helpful

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Martin Wegner

Changed my view of WWII

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2016

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I am a reader of history, in particular 20th century history. I have read extensively on WWII over the past 40 years and thought I had established a solid understanding of the factors that led to the start of the war. This book changed everything. I had never encountered such a clear and convincing examination of the economic factors that were at work inside of Germany. Hitler wanted a European war, that is clear from Mein Kampf. But once he took control of the chancellorship in 1933 and set about his armaments program he all but sealed his own fate: he was in a race to either start the war or see Germany go bankrupt. Tooze does an excellent job of showing how the German economy, directly impacted by the Nazi regime, could not sustain the military build up forever. There would come a day in which inflation would bring the whole thing tumbling down. That is an amazing angle to understanding the dynamics of the interwar years. There are more insights that I gleaned but I won't list them here. Suffice to say I just loved this book.

51 people found this helpful

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Mark McCandless

How economic forces and choices drove Germany to war.

Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2018

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This book answers a number of questions rather convincingly-- why did Hitler go to war when he did and why invade Russia when he did. It shows that that going to war was not an accident, but a plan, and not one that could be easily changed as late as 1939, In the early 30's, the interplay of reparations and foreign tariff policies created a delimma for Germany that made survival of the Weimer Republic difficult. Altogether, a book that taught me more on the causes and course of WWII, a subject I've read about all my life, than almost any other in the past decade. Long, but worth it.

27 people found this helpful

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Bracton

Masterful analysis and writing

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2015

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I came to this book after reading "The Deluge," Tooze's analysis of the inter-war years; "The Wages of Destruction" is as good as "The Deluge." ("The Deluge" is a prequel to "The Wages of Destruction," but reading "The Deluge" isn't necessary before reading "The Wages of Destruction.") The April 2007 reviews by Tom Munro and Philip Sim and the May 2015 review by David Hart are spot on, and I have nothing to add in that regard. Some observations, however, about reading the book: first, many of Tooze's conclusions run counter to the standard narrative of the war; to fully appreciate Tooze's analysis, you need to know quite a bit about the war in general. Second, the book dragged a bit for me as Tooze discussed the late 1930s; keep reading, however, and your patience will be rewarded when Tooze delves into the war years. Third, the book seems to be huge, but in the Kindle edition at least, the text is only 2/3 of the entire book, the tables and endnotes taking up the final third. Fourth, the text is mercifully free of jargon. If you have any interest in European history from 1919 to 1945, you need to read this book.

44 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Athan

A tour de force

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 3, 2019

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If you do a word search on this book, I bet you the two first entries will be “coal” and “steel.” What we have here, basically, is a history of German coal and steel production from 1933 to 1945: what motivated it, what it actually was used toward, and who made it possible.

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.

50 people found this helpful

Germinal

Nazism and capitalism

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 8, 2018

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I recently completed Adam Tooze's 'Wages of Destruction' after a hiatus of several years between parts one and two.

It struck me as quite an uneven book in parts, partly because it can be read at a number of levels. On the most basic of levels it states the obvious - that there was no way that Germany could win a protracted war and was doomed after the Wehrmacht stalled at the gates of Moscow given the industrial might of Britain, Britain's empire, the USSR and the USA ranged against Germany.

But there's a deeper level of understanding to be gleaned if the reader keeps in mind Tooze's Preface where he says:

"The originality of National Socialism was that rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilise the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its own imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States.... The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalised as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today. (xxiv-xxv)"

Then there's another level if you contemplate the development of capitalism and an industrial economy in Germany and how the Third Reich was completing Germany's bourgeois revolution - if one thinks of that in a consequentialist sense.

Some of the writing is superb - Chapter 16 'Labour, Food and Genocide', for example, is a master class in dialectical history writing.

16 people found this helpful

Mark Brown

Paying for a War Machine

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2019

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Economics, by definition, is the study of scarcity. How the Nazis paid for their program of works in the 1930s/40s is probably a question that seldom bothers us. Our vision is of an Aryan uber-economic machine, over-coming all obstacles, like some fiscal-Blitzkrieg. This could not be more wrong. The Nazis could not suspend the laws of economics in the way they could not suspend the laws of physics. The tale revealed in this book seems so banal and so “modern” - even if the economics of the 1930’s seem so far away for anyone living in a modern liberal western democracy. This was a world of endless trade wars and the Gold Standard. Europe was in a race to compete with the burgeoning economic hegemony of the United States. Regardless of how much Hitler wanted to re-arm Germany his wildest fantasies were held back by quite mundane matters. Germany never had the foreign currency reserves to pay for the war materials it needed for full rearmament. It lacked the currency due to export restrictions.

Starting the war itself was a gamble inspired by the growing arms race with France, Britain and America. Combined, the Allies were out-spending Germany yet they could better afford it as it represented a much smaller percentage of their overall earnings. The Germans were operating at the maximum armaments productive capacity through the 1930s and achieved brief superiority over Allies in only some areas, ie the Luftwaffe. The gamble in 1939 was based upon the perception of a very brief window of opportunity for a quick victory before the Allies started out-gunning Germany. That window closed quickly.... Regardless of popular myth, the Nazis were never short ingenuity. Yet even with millions of slave labourers (to propel Speers alleged “armaments miracle”) they could not build what they wanted for lack of steel and oil. Spikes in output in one industry came at the expense of another from where the raw materials were diverted. The German Navy & domestic consumption suffered. In the end the numbers never stacked up. They simply could not get access to the quantity of resources that the combined American, British & Soviet economies had. Even if money was no object this mattered little.

The author casts himself as a revisionist historian yet his revelations are far from shocking (IF you understand them - since they are somewhat esoteric). Still, he does reveal many interesting facts as he goes back to look at real statistics rather that self-serving post-war memoirs. For example the popular myth about the lack of women in industry: Germany always had a higher percentage of women in the workplace than the Allies. He also reveals the crushing economic logic behind the “Hunger Plan” that was to wipe out millions of lives without needing a single person to step inside a gas chamber. Nazi Germany was never run for the benefits if its people. It was quickly converted to a war economy until its inevitable destruction. This re-interpretation, through the eyes of an economist, is quite revealing. Lessons for today?

2 people found this helpful

globe econ

Excellent in one of the most fundamental topics

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 24, 2020

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WW2 and pre WW2 have been the object of many books that focus on the narrative of what happened and wrong causality. Instead, this book is amazing. Focus on economics and finance a marginal area for many ideological historians but the fundamental that explains clearly how it was possible WW2. It is a fantastic book full of relevant data and evidence and properly written. It is not a novel. However, it clearly explains that the evidence shows without any doubt that the National Socialist Party was a socialist party without any doubt. In spite of many ideological and Marxist historians that fail to see what is obvious. Strongly recommended I rarely give 5 stars

One person found this helpful

Providential Eye

Essenital reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 18, 2018

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Essential reading for anyone wishing for a better understanding of Nazi Germany and WW2. Well written and not too technical for the non-economist reader. Covers the period from 1918-1945. Good on the often neglected pre-Nazi economic situation Corrects many misapprehensions of the period with more recent research and much better statistics. Is particularly enlightening on the true role of the role of the supposedly apolitical technocratic minister of armaments, Albert Speer, who emerges as much more sinister and much less effective than the common myths purport.

4 people found this helpful