The Wages of Destruction: the Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy Pdf

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See what's new with book lending at the Internet Archive. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! There was no aspect of Nazi power untouched by economics - it was Hitler's obsession and the reason the Nazis came to power in the first place. The Second World War was fought, in Hitler's view, to create a European Empire strong enough to take on the United States - a last chance for Europe to dig itself in before being swept away by the USA's ever greater power. It took years of fighting and the deaths of millions of people to destroy the Third Reich, but effectively World War II in Europe was fought in pursuit of a fantasy: The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy years in which Western Europe could settle the world's fate were, bylong past. This is a major book by a major author and will provoke an enormous amount of controversy and debate. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze

Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing. For the economic historian, the great pitched battles of the second world war, from Stalingrad to Midway, are not primarily exercises in strategy, brutality or heroism but the titanic amassing of capital and human beings and their concentration on a The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy of space and The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Economic historiography has thrown rays of haggard light into some of the blackest corners of the Third Reich, even where, as in the case of the memoirs of Hitler's last minister of armaments, Albert Speer, much was concealed or The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. In his long new book, the Cambridge historian Adam Tooze presents the Third Reich as an engine doomed to smash itself to smithereens not, as for Speer, from bureaucratic turf wars and Hitler's chaotic office habits, but from its own birth defects. To sum up: Hitler's Germany was always too hampered by shortages of raw materials, notably crude oil and rubber but also iron ore and coal, animal feed and fertiliser, foreign currency and even labour, to attempt an independent industrial and commercial existence in peace, let alone a campaign of European conquest. For all the ingenuity of cynical opportunists such as Hjalmar Schacht, at the Reichsbank untiland Speer, at Armaments afterGermany passed through a succession of hair-raising financial and resource crises that hampered its armies and helped to bring on the final collapse. As if from a commanding height, Tooze points out for the reader fields and factories and autobahns, the delusive investment in radios and passenger cars, the financial and credit market subterfuges of the s, and the scramble for military aircraft and battle tanks and ammunition. He shows how German The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy was won over to armaments by the high return on capital that Hitler permitted. As the war turns against Hitler, the air becomes dark and bitter cold, and we pass into Speer's subterranean armaments factories and on to the selection ramp at Auschwitz. For this reader, it took a day or two for a certain depression of spirit to lift. One wonders how its author fared. The originality of the book, and what labels it as a performance of the 21st century, is the overwhelming role Tooze accords the United States as a figment of Hitler's fears and imagination. He ignores Hitler's prison testament, Mein Kampfwith its anti- capitalist and anti-Jewish ranting, in favour of the so-called Zweites Buch Second Bookwritten four years later but not published until the s. Faced with this longing for American amenities, but without the vast scale of the American land mass or market to supply them, European states must be reduced to the status of a "Switzerland or Holland". A cooperative union of the European states, such as was promoted after the war, did not accord with Hitler's racist obsessions. Instead, he found another justification for the conquest of the east - known as Lebensraum - in the scale of the American internal market. Following on from this, and far more controversially, Tooze argues that given the disposition of industrial power in the world and his racist ideology, Hitler was correct to act as he did. Aware that it was only a matter of time before the American giant stirred, Hitler was wise to act with such precipitate haste, to launch the arms race, to annex Austria and the Sudetenland, to exploit a sudden diplomatic opportunity to invade Poland, to smash westwards ineven to invade the Soviet Union the following year. This sort of provocative self-confidence may just be the economist's way of mastering ghastly material and keeping it out of his dreams. On the credit side, Tooze's search for a reasonable explanation to German conduct in addition to racism allows him to bring the Reichskristallnacht, the Holocaust and the other German brutalities in the east into the realm of Nazi political economy. Without in any way belittling the persecution of the Jews, Tooze reminds us that the Holocaust was an aspect of a campaign of mass murder which involved the forced starvation of Soviet prisoners and cities to feed the German population. For Tooze, there was after a "compromise", or rather a succession of them, between exterminating people and setting them to make ammunition or aircraft. He reminds us that many of the Jews of Budapest, the last great Jewish community to be liquidated by the Nazis, went into aircraft factories. Camp workers swung from the rafters to terrorise their fellow-inmates on the V2 rocket production lines in the Mittelbau. For this reason, and for countless others, Tooze cannot stand Speer and seems genuinely baffled that the man saved his neck at Nuremberg. On the debit side, a sequence of rational actions will often end in complete delusion, as the German poet Christian Morgenstern told his Wilhelmine readers. It is all very well for Tooze to say that Hitler was wise in to concentrate his forces towards the Caucasus, so as to secure oil supplies to fuel new aircraft to fight the British and Americans, but somewhere a sort of geographical common sense has fallen away. Tooze's emphasis on American industrial power, illuminating as it is, has the effect of downplaying the Soviet Union, and reducing the fight with Britain to a sideshow. Britain, which sacrificed its empire to defeat Germany in the war, is for Tooze merely a forward marshalling yard for the factories of Detroit and the American midwest. British victories are foregone conclusions. The Battle of Britain was, "in retrospect, an extremely one-sided affair". The outcome of Alamein "was never in doubt". One wonders if Tooze has ever spoken to his parents about the war or to the men who fought those hard fights. They did not think the outcomes pre-determined. Hitler's gold. Buy The Wages of Destruction at the Guardian bookshop. James Buchan. Topics Books History books Reuse this content. THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION | Kirkus Reviews

An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. The Wages of Destruction is a chilling work of originality and tremendous scholarship that is already setting off debate in Germany and will fundamentally change the way in which history views the Second World War. A tour de force. 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. Hovering over his chronicle are two extraordinary questions: how Germany managed to last as long as it did before the collapse of and why, under Hitler, it thought it could achieve supremacy at all. Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism. When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. Join Our Authors for Virtual The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Feb 26, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Available from:. Paperback —. About The Wages of Destruction An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Also by Adam Tooze. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. The Longest Night. Gavin Mortimer. To Hell and Back. The United States of Absurdity. Gareth Reynolds and Dave Anthony. Black Diamonds. Catherine Bailey. The Beauty and the Sorrow. Peter Graves and Peter Englund. The Anatomy of Fascism. Robert O. Empires of the Sky. Alexander Rose. Home Fires. Julie Summers. Patrick J. The Civil War. The Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis. Paul Johnson. History of the World Map by Map. World War I. Michael Davie. World War II. The Secret Lives of Codebreakers. Sinclair McKay. Dangerous Games. Margaret MacMillan. Give Me a Fast Ship. Days of Rage. Bryan Burrough. Plain, Honest Men. Richard Beeman. Titanic, First Accounts. Ardennes Antony Beevor. The Zimmermann Telegram. Barbara W. The First World War. Intrepid Aviators. Gregory G. The Time of Our Lives. Related Articles. Looking for More Great Reads? Download Hi Res. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy The eBooks you want at the lowest prices. Read it Forward Read it first. Pass it on! Stay in Touch Sign up. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later. Become a Member Start earning points for buying books!