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The Wages of Destruction

The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

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The Wages of Destruction

By: Adam Tooze
Narrated by: Adam Tooze, Simon Vance
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About this listen

"Masterful.... [A] painstakingly researched, astonishingly erudite study.... Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism." (Financial Times)

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.

This audiobook contains a downloadable PDF of tables and figures from the book.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Adam Tooze (P)2021 Penguin Audio Economic Conditions Economic History Economics Europe Germany Imperialism Holocaust War Hungary

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Critic reviews

"One of the most important and original books to be published about the Third Reich in the past twenty years. A tour de force." (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)

All stars
Most relevant  
And the coercive powers of the modern states in its ability to direct investment (not very efficiently). There’s still so much more to know on a micro level, but an excellent macro assessment, deftly weaving in political, military, and geopolitical context to the economic/financial central narrative.

Essential in gaining an understanding of Nazism

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Probably the best book on the second world war I've ever encountered. contains some challenging material - especially for those on the right of UK/US politics who might find some of the stuff about the inspiration for Hitler's project difficult - but a must listen if you're into the history of the period.

Absolute Banger

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Worth listening to purely for it's sharp evisceration of Albert Speer, the Nazi who dodged the noose at Nuremberg, this book is a detailed and deeply insightful examination of the economic madness that was Germany's path to war and eventual defeat in May 1945.

Exhaustively detailed, the writing doesn't get bogged down in the dry statistics and brings to life the dreadful arithmetic of the Nazi economy and war machine,

A great complimentary work to "How the War was Won" by Philips Payson O'Brien.

Tooze's tour de force: a terrible subject, brilliantly explored

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Exceptional analysis and one to return to for a second go I think. Well read too.

Superb

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I admit to being baffled by one of the other reviewers who said they didn’t think this was an economic history. Perhaps they thought Hitler and Schacht and the others had some magical equation and that the book would lay out how that unfolded in 1930’s Germany. In reality economics, as someone once said, is concentrated politics. Hitler and his government had political goals, and sought to subordinate the economy to those goals. This book lays out how they did it, why key actors such as the capitalist magnates of German industry and finance went along with it, and how the priorities evolved in light of the internal logic of the Nazi economic system, in light of external events and in light of the peculiar impetus imparted by the racial hierarchy of Nazi social policy.

I describe the book as subtly terrifying. In a way I have simply never seen, it fully humanises and rationalises Nazi goals, using direct quotations from the people leading the state and economy and from primary sources. From the drive to establish a counterweight to America, to the realities of how to feed and extract labour from a continent occupied by Germany and blockaded by the largest navies in the world, Tooze’s ability to establish the political motivation of the Nazis fully makes intelligible key decisions, such as the death camps and the barbaric treatment of the Slavs. Intelligible, not an expression of evil, banal or otherwise, but the fullest expression of homo oeconomicus, and all the more absolutely horrifying for it.

Tooze also smashes myth after myth, about the economic “miracle” which Nazism was touted as, or the myth we Brits tell ourselves about how we stood alone against the full might of fascist tyranny. The economic and military imbalance between the empire, still the most powerful military on earth with huge reservoirs of food, factories and manpower, and Germany was staggering. Tooze brings this out beautifully, still more with the economic imbalance between backward, horse-powered Europe and the increasingly motorIsed USA. It also curbs some of the wilder things one commonly sees about the USSR, which, as Tooze outlines, was very nearly at the limits of its endurance, given the truly calamitous casualties caused by Stalin’s mishandling of the war from the beginning. For these and many other reasons it is the finest book on political economy I have read. I even went out and bought the paperback afterwards for ease of flicking to some key parts.

Subtly terrifying and absolutely superb

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Interesting to hear about the details that went into different aspects of making German's WW2 economy work, and what some of the driving forces were and how they affected overall diplomatic policy.

Interesting lens to view German's WW2 through

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The first half of this book is the strongest, covering the period at peace, detailing how they borrowed money from every possible source to fund their rearmament. It does a good job of putting the figures in context, helping the listener understand the overall size of the economy, as well as the portion going to the military and that which had been going to servicing debt and Versailles repayments. My only criticism is that after the war starts the book becomes more like a series of anecdotes of Nazi atrocities, rather than a detailed explanation of how much each method of plunder contributed to the war effort. I suspect that accurate figures for this period were simply harder to come by

Engrossing account of the buildup to war

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This is a very good book focusing on an aspect of the war that doesn't get enough attention normally, although there are some flaws in the author's understanding of political systems, but that doesn't really affect the overall conclusions reached. The beginning of the book is somewhat heavy as it focuses quite a bit on monetary policy which is a somewhat dry topic, although certainly very important for the history of the war. The rest is easier to understand and follow, focusing and different aspects of the war economy, like for example what was done to increase production in certain sectors (i.e aircraft, ammunitions etc.) and also some historical narration around that generally, like what was going on in the war at that time to place it in the general context of WW2.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in WW2, even if you are not really interested in economy or do not understand much of it, you can certainly get out a lot of this book, especially after the beginning.

Crucial for understanding WW2

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A major study of the German economy which answers many questions about the apparent irrationality of Hitler’s war strategy. Not easy listening but very worthwhile.

I had understood that the Nazis engaged in a work creation program akin to Keynesian policy but this book shows that the Nazis focussed almost exclusively on rearmament (which incidentally had work creation benefits.

The most chilling aspect is the link between the Holocaust and food scarcity from 1941 onwards. The victory in France (thanks to a late change in strategy) and the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact were stunning but Hitler still calculated that he had to invade the Soviet Union to take its resources if he was to defeat the “world Jewish conspiracy” led by Roosevelt and Churchill.

Important insights into the Nazi regime from an economic perspective

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I have been reading histories of WWII for over 50 years. I have become a little jaded; wondering how often one can come across something that truly adds something fresh given the mountain of books already written on every facet of that terrible conflict. Then this comes along.
I came to it via "Crashed"; Tooze's superb analysis of the 2008 financial meltdown. This, however, is better. Why? Because Tooze explains the dynamics of Hitler's war in a way that is not just new, it is unique.
He lays bare the economic drivers to the Nazi approach to WWII in a way that is clear, authoritative and totally credible. It really has changed my views on the war. It gives the first rational and credible explanation I have read for why on earth Hitler declared war on the USA. It offers a new context to the primacy (or otherwise) of Drang Nach Osten; the drive to the East. It adds powerful context as to just how reckless a gambler Hitler was given the threadbare economic underpinnings of his regime. It makes an important contribution on the importance of slave labour to the economics of the Nazi war machine and does a great job of bringing more rigour to the true role played by Albert Speer as opposed to his own reworking of history.
This is a truly brilliant, important book.

Genuinely brilliant

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