The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy Book Review

I recently finished "The Wages of Destruction" by Adam Tooze, and being a history fan, I thought it was a great book.

Unlike many books that examine Nazi Germany, this one examines it from a primarily economic lens, and while it does not discount the political and social aspects of the Nazi regime, it argues that while they were key elements, they all had a cooperative effect with economic motives and vice versa.

One of the main points it argues is that economics was key to setting the stage for Hitler's rise to power, the impetus of his platform while in power, and had a sizable degree of influence on his fall from it, and the Third Reich was also far more in pawn to its economic limitations than most give it credit.

The author spends a fair majority of the time going into profound detail at every stage of the interwar and WWII period covering all the economic factors that underpinned the German economic backdrop and how that influenced Nazi policies, which, as the author displays with lots of charts, graphs, and cited figures, was a very considerable underpinning.

Adam Tooze does tend to paint a fairly cynical and pessimistic picture of the Nazi regime economically, and one would be understandably incredulous on first reading. I was at first, but the evidence cited suggests that the Nazi regime danced on the knife edge of economic disaster not only because of it's racial politics and militaristic focus leaving it's national earnings far less than expected; it is also argued that it also had as much to do with the limitations of the German economic base both before and after Hitler's rise. In other words, Hitler's regime did far better than anticipated in many ways, yet was still crippled economically because of many factors of economic import that did not change since the end of World War I.

Tooze also goes into considerable detail about the various figures who had a sizable impact on the financial background of the Nazi regime, and how their influence led to key shifts in not only economic policy; their influence had critical influence on the main causes of both the Nazi ascent and it's decline.

Overall, it's not an easy book to get into if you do not follow the subjects of European history and economics, but if you do, it provides an indepth look at an underexplored aspect of the Nazis many other historians tend to give less attention than I personally believe deserves more of.