Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2007)
Author: Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He earned his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1996. He is the author of four books, and Wages of Destruction won the Wolfson and Longman History Today Prize.
Overview: This is an historical account of Germany under Hitler from an economic perspective. In examining the economic conditions and policies of the times and their consequences Tooze offers a fascinating picture of Hitler’s actions and reasoning, making for a valuable contribution to the better understanding of what led to World War II and the Holocaust, and how Germany conducted the war.
Central Thesis: The German economy was simply not strong enough to create the military force necessary to overwhelm all of its European neighbors, including both Britain and the Soviet Union, let alone the United States.
Historiography: The book makes the case for the economic impact of the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign, challenges the idea of an economic miracle under Albert Speer and rejects the idea that the German economy could have mobilized significantly more women for the war economy.
Scope of Book: Hitler, he argues, was convinced American and Soviet potential lay in the size of their respective economies: physical resources, labor forces and consumer markets Germany could never hope to equal. Hence the need for an expansionary war of conquest – one Hitler’s racial ideology and fervent anti-Bolshevism oriented toward eastern Europe. Hitler’s primary “strategic” aim was lebensraum yet was unable to connect that to economic and military policy. Lebensraum would give Hitler enough resources to match the American’s in North America.
- Focus is on Hitler’s impact on Germany’s economy, beginning in the early 1930s. Those were troubled times for both the local and the global economies, with Germany heavily burdened by reparations (until 1932) and foreign debt. Recovery after the Weimar years was slow, with vast unemployment. Hitler had his own specific ideas about how to fix things. “Rearmament was the overriding and determining force impelling economic policy from the earliest stage.” (659)
- Tooze observes that the Nazi armaments program—made possible by defaulting on US loans and reparation payments—was the largest transfer of resources ever made in a peacetime capitalist economy; even so, Germany lacked the resources to sustain an army that could defeat all the enemies it courted.
- Strong government intervention was necessary before and during the war. By 1938 “Germany was suffering from an acute shortage of labour”—but even here the state ruled with a firm hand, not allowing a free movement of labor and imposing a ‘wage stop’. As usual, the market was hard to stop people found ways around this. Wartime success did not yield immediate benefits: victory in France added to Germany’s industrial base—but also increased Germany’s fuel-needs as France had little capacity.
- Three elements pushed Hitler toward war. 1) His efforts to prepare for war with the Western powers had failed and he needed to attack quickly before his enemies improved. 2) Diplomatic conditions meant that Hitler had nothing to gain from waiting. 3) Hitler’s ideology of defeating the international Jewry became a fixation he could not ignore. (663–664) The war against Churchill and Roosevelt were just as racially ideological as the war in the east for Lebensraum as Hitler saw those leaders as agents of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
- Germany realized that it could not keep up in an arms race, which thus provided incentive to start and win war as soon as possible. This race towards war and a strategy predicated on quick decisive victory were destined to fail at the hands of the reality of war.
- Having failed to defeat Britain in 1940, the economic logic of the war drove the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 to obtain the natural resources necessary to challenge the economic superpowers of the United States and the British Empire. Operation Barbarossa sealed the fate of the third Reich because it was resource constraints that made victory against the Soviet Union impossible, especially when the Soviet Union received supplies from Britain and the US to supplement the resources remaining under Soviet control.
- Characterizes Hitler’s plans for war in the east, west, and Eastern European civilians as “a global Blitzkrieg, this grand strategy of racial war, turned out, however, to be a strategy not of victory but of defeat.” (668)
- The United States plays a central role throughout the book as Tooze argues that Hitler was always looking to America as its chief rival. There is significant emphasis on American industrial might as well and Britain becomes a forward marshalling yard for American products. Tooze argues that “By any reasonable estimation, Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States sealed the fate of Germany.” (668)