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The Wages of Destruction
- The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
- Narrated by: Adam Tooze, Simon Vance
- Length: 30 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's Summary
"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.
What the critics say
"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)
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- Chillyfinger
- 2022-11-30
A re-telling of World War II
Modern war is machine against machine. This means steel, energy, and money. Economics.
In conventional accounts, the actions of humans are emphasized. This book reminds us that the central role of humans is to squander resources in service of fantasy.
There are many lessons for the present. To cite just one, the German economy was a basket case in 1929, but efforts to "fix" things by a decree made things worse and worse. Money is real. Debt is real. The steel you use for tanks can't be used to fix the rail lines. You can't transport food. Hungry people make terrible factory workers. The more you tinker, the more you arrange "priorities," and the worse it gets. Paradoxically, Hilter's success in conquering Europe just made things worse. More mouths to feed. More people to enslave. But slaves need food. And so it goes.
This lesson was learned in Soviet times when efforts to micro-manage the economy led to a similar catastrophe. Markets are real. Money is real. The economy of even a small country is far too complex for the human mind to comprehend, let alone "manage." In fact, Hayak came away from World War II with precisely this conclusion, which underpins much of modern "conservative" thought.
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- Mat
- 2023-04-23
Fascinating new angle on the war
This book talks about the “bottom line” that drove Nazi strategy and decisions throughout the third reich. Resources and resource acquisition. Ina globalizing economy, if you didn’t have an empire to draw on, you needed to create one……
Loved it. Not since The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich has such a comprehensive fresh take been published.
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