The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy By Adam Tooze

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Author: Adam Tooze

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

At this time of writing, The Audiobook The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy has garnered 8 customer reviews with rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Not a bad score at all as if you round it off, it’s actually a perfect TEN already. From the looks of that rating, we can say the Audiobook is Good TO READ!

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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.

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Best Edition The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy with Free PDF EDITION Download Now!

PDF The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy with Free PDF EDITION Download Now!

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PDF The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy with Free PDF EDITION Download Now!

PDF The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy with Free PDF EDITION!

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