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

The author of the book has a rather deterministic view of the possible outcome of the second world war. While I may disagree with him, I think that he presents his view with sound arguments, but he is not very intellectually honest (or maybe he doesn't know many statistical material concerning the second world war). My criticisms here concern mostly his coverage of the military aspects of the war, with of course, tend to be inferior to his coverage of economic aspects of the war, with are his specialty.He wants to defend his view that the outcome of the second world war was given as victory to the allies and that Germany didn't stand a chance of surviving a war against them, however he defends that view using distorted statistics. For example, at the Battle of France, Tooze claims that the Allies had 4,500 combat aircraft while Germany had 3,600. But according to E.R Hooton 2007, p. 47-48, the Allies actually had only 2,930 aircraft ready to be deployed while the Germans had 5,640 aircraft ready to be deployed. Which helps to explain why the Germans managed to have airsuperiority at the battle of France. Other examples abound in the book. For the battle of Kursk, Tooze uses a statistic of 2,450 German tanks and SP guns vs 5,130 soviet tanks and SP guns. In fact there are several different estimates for the number of tanks present at the battle, according to Bergström 2007, we have 3,000 German tanks and SP guns versus 3,600 Soviet tanks and SP guns. In several parts of the book he apparently selected his statistics to reflect his views that Germany was fighting against completely overwhelming odds in terms of materiel and men. I have written only two examples here, but with time I can find dozens.He also says, implicitly, that in the 1944-45 period was the period were German casualties were much greater than preceding periods. He then cites that 1.8 million Germans soldiers died in 1944 and 1.4 million Germans soldiers died in 1945. These statistics are taken from Rudiger Overmans' survey on German military deaths in WW2, this survey has the highest number of German military deaths of the many sources I know. Overmans calculates the number of total military deaths by summing up KIA (2.3 million) + MIA (2 million) + died of wounds (0.5 million) + died in captivity (0.5 million) = 5.3 million. Overmans concluded that 1.75 million died in 1944 and 1.29 million in 1945. Then Tooze rounds up these statistics to 1.8 million and 1.4 million. So in fact, he takes the highest statistic of German military death available and even increases it! But speaking of Overmans's survey it is quite ridiculous to sum up MIA and the number that died in captivity, since the soldiers missing were captured and then died in captivity (in other words: double counting), unless you include the number of soldiers that died after the war, with is not relevant to his purpose of arguing that combat was more intense to the Wehrmacht in 1944-45 than preceding years.So how the picture looks like if we view only the number of KIA per year?According to van Creveld 1982, these are the total number of German KIA by fiscal year:1939-1940 (12 months): 73,8291940-1941 (12 months): 138,3011941-1942 (12 months): 445,0361942-1943 (12 months): 418,2761943-1944 (12 months): 534,1121944-dec.1944 (4 months): 167,335, yearly rate: 502,005The fact is that German combat KIAs were roughly constant from 1941 to 1945, and Soviet combat casualties too: in 1941 the USSR lost 4.3 million men in 6.5 months (KIA+MIA+WIA) about 660,000 per month, in 1945, the USSR lost 2.8 million in 4 months, 700,000 per month. Since around 90% of German KIA was in the Eastern front there is not evidence that the war was more intense in 1944 than in 1941. While since German soldiers were better trained in 1941 than in 1944, I can even argue that the wehrmacht suffered more in 1941 in terms of loss of combat power and fighting edge than in 1944, since the soldiers lost in 1941 were the cream of the army while in 1944 most losses were composed of not-as-good recruits.To book exaggerates the contributions of the Western allies to the war, in fact, the casualties that Germany suffered against the western powers were almost insignificant compared to the losses against the Soviet Union. Even in 1945, second to Glantz, Germany had 67% of her casualties in the eastern front, which makes sense since in January 1945 (with marks the peak of the allies relative participation in ground warfare), of the 338 divisions equivalents of the wehrmacht, 228 were in the eastern front while only 73 in the western front. In the 3 years from june 1941 to june 1944, about 95% of Germany's casualties were in the eastern front. According to Glantz the western allies probably only contributed to shortening the war in 12 to 18 months. The most important strategic contribution of the Western Allies was the crippling of the Luftwaffe between 1943 and 1945, which permitted an increase of the speed of advance of the Russians in the eastern front, since resources were shifted from production of bombers to counter the Red Army to the production of fighters to counter Bomber Command and the US's 8th airforce.Tooze critizes Albert Speer, the minister of armmaments during the last 3 years of the war, and the view that Germany`s production of munitions was badly run during the first years of the war. But, during his term (1942-1945) per capita productivity in munitions production more than doubled. No other country reached such high levels of increases in productivity of the munitions related industries. We have two possible reasons: Germany`s munitions production was blady run in the first years of the war, or, at the last years Germany`s production of munitions was incredibly well run. He cannot dismiss the increase in productivity from 1941 and 1944, calling it an statistical illusion.Also, by comparing relative strengths in the fronts, the allies only had about 90 to 100 divisions in the western front in 1944-45, while Germany had over 300, of with about 200 to 250 were fighting the 400-500 Russian divisions deployed in the eastern front. In terms of personnel the US had 1.4 million frontline soldiers in Europe by december 1944, while Germany had 5 million soldiers deployed in June 1944, the British complemented the Americans with 800,000 soldiers. So the western allies had 2.2 million men versus around 5 million German soldiers in all of Europe. So, I can argue that without the USSR the allies wound never stand a chance of winning the war with the resources that they historically deployed in the European theater. Since most of the economic power of the allies was in the British-American coalition, this fact represents an asymmetry with Tooze's arguments that economic strength determined the outcome of WW2. In fact, economic strength is very important, but it doest solely determines the winner of an armed conflict. In Vietnam, the US had hundreds of times the resources of North Vietnam, but didn`t manage to protect South Vietnam.Anyway, Tooze main argument is that by attacking the USSR, Hitler embarked on a journey to his own destruction. He is entirely correct in that regard. And he is correct to point out that using information available in 1941, that the USSR was weaker than history proved it to be. Also, it is correct to state that the lack of raw materials was a factor in Germany's defeat, but it wasn't a major factor since munitions weren't the biggest problem in the German war effort, manpower was the biggest: They didn't have enough soldiers to fill the 3 thousand kilometers of the eastern front, nor the soldiers needed to drive out the allies from Normandy. And the population of Germany would not increase with the conquest of the Soviet Union.Also, Tooze doesn't discuss the fact that German munitions production followed a rather different path than Soviet and American production. Germany produced munitions after they were needed, tank production increased in 1943 because of increased demand in 1942. Fighter production increased in 1944 in response to increased demand in 1943. These were severe strategic errors. In fact, it appears that Tooze argues that Germany was doomed from the start and the victories of the Wehrmacht between 1939 and 1941 were lucky shots. Well, in 1939 to 1941 the Wehrmacht faced opponents with numerical parity, according to wikipedia, in the Battle of France, there were 3.3 million allied soldiers vs 3.31 million German soldiers, while in Barbarossa, accoring to Nigel Askey, there were 3.316 million German soldiers vs 3.31 million soviet soldiers. At the start of operation Blau, according to Glantz, there were 2 million German soldiers vs 1.8 million Soviet soldiers. All these 3 cases ended with the same result: annihilation of the forces opposing Germany. History showed that when you face Germany with numerical parity you lose. To stop the Wehrmacht, the Red Army lost 29 million soldiers in 4 years, gradually eroding the best soldiers of the German army, transforming the wehrmacht into a shadow of its former self, which was not as "invincible" as the "classic" wehrmacht of the 1939-1942 period.So the allies took note: since they could not achieve qualitative parity they needed numerical superiority. By June 1944 there were 2.4 million German front line soldiers facing 6.7 million Soviet front line soldiers (in terms of total personnel it was 3.9 million Germans vs 10.5 million Soviet), source: Glantz 1995, while in the western front the allies massed 5.4 million personnel (2.2 million front line soldiers), opposing 1.5 million German personnel (~1 million front line soldiers). Note that the western allies needed a larger proportion of the personnel in logistics and other non combat functions than the USSR and Germany, for quite obvious logistical reasons (the Atlantic sea + English channel). The outcome of the following months was a natural conclusion of overwhelming manpower odds. But also, in the crucial battles of Normandy and Bagration, allied success was in a significant regard a consequence of deception, where the Wehrmacht failed to understand were the main trusts would come, so they only allocated reinforcements in both cases after the odds became extremely bad and the battle was already lost.So, concluding, Wages of Destruction is a good book, but way overrated as it tries to explain more than can be explained with only the economic aspects of the war. Also his theory of a poor and peripheral Germany compared to the US doesn't stand a closer inspection: from 1901 to 1932 Germany produced 32 Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine, the US produced only 6, the USSR (and the Russian Empire), only 2. These countries were the actual periphery in the pre-WW2 world. For example, the economic superiority of the US didn't translate in massive military superiority in the European theater because of the geographical factors at work (the Atlantic ocean) preventing the deployment of hundreds of American divisions in the European theater, in fact, they deployed only 1.4 million soldiers in the European Theater opposing less than 1 million German soldiers (out of the 5 million front line personnel, mostly concentrated against the USSR). And while the Eastern Front was the decisive front, there Germany in fact had significant economic superiority (producing 4 times more steel, 5 times more aluminium and 5 times more coal than the USSR in 1943) and failed to convert this economic superiority in military superiority over the USSR, particularly in the decisive years of 1942 and 1943. Concluding, basic economic strength played an important role in the war but they were not the main determinant in the outcome. If it were, Germany would have crushed the USSR before the Western Allies could help, so any continental invasion would be destroyed by the hundreds of German divisions freed-ed from the Eastern front. In other words, economics doesn't explain why Germany lost from their strategic position in 1941. The will of the Soviet people is a definite factor to take into account.

The title is a little misleading: while Tooze occasionally mentions in passing how companies or individuals benefited from fueling the Third Reich's war effort, his real topics are far broader and more interesting: showing how economic factors drove Hitler's war goals and timing and how the continual feedback between industrial needs and war goals drove war strategy.Tooze starts by describing the quandary which faced Germany in the late 1920's. Germany was not self sufficient in food or raw materials and thus needed to be able to export in order to finance essential imports. Germany also needed to be able to sell its exports in order to obtain hard currency to pay the reparation demands from the World War I victors. Despite these difficulties, the German finance ministry was managing to navigate Germany through a slow and painful recovery from WWI. Then disaster struck with the Great Depression. First there was an inevitable shrinking in export markets and then, much more seriously, there were conscious protectionist decisions in America, Britain, and France to block German exports in order to protect home employment.Before reading The Wages of Destruction, I had loosely understood how the Great Depression had been a key factor in Hitler's rise to power, especially due to widespread unemployment. But Tooze clarifies that Germany was facing a much deeper strategic dilemma than a simple economic depression. Germany was dependent on the goodwill of other powers for its export markets and for its essential food and material imports, but those powers were demonstrating that in a crisis they would look entirely to their own interests and would quite cheerfully close their markets and let Germany suffer. Given this behavior, the long-term economic and political future for Germany looked extremely grim. Hitler offered a radical solution to this problem: Germany needed to expand to the East and become self sufficient in resources in the same way as the British Empire or America. Given the depth of Germany's problem, it becomes easier to understand why many thinking Germans either enthusiastically or reluctantly accepted Hitler's solution.In succeeding chapters, Tooze describes how Hitler rapidly switched the Germany economy to focus on rearmament. He argues that while the Nazi propaganda machine emphasized efforts to increase employment and visionary projects such as the autobahn system, this was really mere window dressing and the regime was massively focused on military preparations for war. More interestingly, he also highlights how the continual shortages of hard currency (and thus of key materials) continually constrained and shaped rearmament. By 1938 lack of currency and other economic constraints were limiting further military expansion. Hitler was thus faced with a situation where Germany could see its own military abilities peaking and simultaneously see other powers starting to accelerate their own rearmament, weakening Germany's relative advantage. Hitler being Hitler, this drove an impatience for war, while Germany had its best relative position. As the war progresses, Tooze revisits this theme from several angles. Hitler was continually faced with situations where enemy military production would quickly eclipse Germany's and he reacted by trying to knock particular opponents out of the war quickly.Tooze's major focus is on the operations and outputs of the German wartime economy. Overall, he shows us an economy that was reasonably well run and efficient but where production was dominated by shortages of key resources, especially steel and skilled manpower. By making high-level decisions about reallocations of these resources the Reich leadership could cause major leaps (or declines) in production in target sectors such as aircraft or tanks or munitions. Typically these resource shifts would take about six months to work through the system. The lucky Nazi bureaucrat who happened to be in charge of a target sector at the end of the six months would then happily boast of his productivity miracle as his sector suddenly produced startling jumps in output.Tooze does not shy away from describing and condemning the many darker aspects of the Third Reich's war economy. A major aim of the expansion to the East was to improve Germany's food supplies. But that land was already inhabited and that food was already being consumed. So the Nazi solution was the "Hunger Plan" which quite casually assumed that food would be diverted from Poland and the Western USSR to Germany and that many millions would be deliberately starved. Tooze argues that this appalling plan was widely circulated, understood and accepted among the German political and military leadership in 1941. Thankfully, it proved difficult to execute and while there was widespread suffering, the East avoided the systematic mass starvation called for in the plan. However, in subsequent years the same desire to remove what were seen as "useless mouths" and free up food supplies was one of the many input factors towards the holocaust. In parallel, Germany manpower shortages led to large drafts of forced labor from occupied countries to German factories. Tooze illustrates both the appalling conditions of the laborers and the folly of a regime that for ideological reasons oppressed and starved the very labor it was trying to exploit.Overall, I found this book a very enlightening read. Tooze's thorough analysis of the details of exports, imports, and production constraints provides a convincing base for his explanation of how the constraints and limits of the German economy drove high level German economic and military planning.

If you do a word search on this book, I bet you the two first entries will be “coal” and “steel.” What we have here, basically, is a history of German coal and steel production from 1933 to 1945: what motivated it, what it actually was used toward, and who made it possible.Needless to say, the book is interesting precisely because coal, steel and (to a lesser extent, presumably for lack of data) wheat, oils and fat are the currency in which author Adam Tooze deals in Nazi Germany’s motivation, timing and the conduct of WWII, including its worst crimes.In broad terms, and yes, I’m oversimplifying (read the full 675 pages to get the actual detail –you will not regret it) the author’s reading of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and “second book” forms the basis on which he gets into the dictator’s head to arrive at the following a priori judgements:• The world’s mightiest empire, the British Empire, was about to be usurped by the United States of America, chiefly thanks to the immense success of American capitalists such as Henry Ford in developing the methods of mass production. This opened an opportunity for Germany to side with the US in the struggle for primacy and become the biggest European power. (Significantly, the author points out that this was not an enormous deviation from his Weimar Republic predecessors’ world view.)• In the early 20th century, Germany was a less-developed economy than France or Britain from a manufacturing perspective and could not hope to catch up without a concerted, state-driven effort, which would have to start with the end of WWI reparations and the reclaiming of the Ruhr. (Again, this was hardly a radical view for a German statesman to hold at the time.)• Germany, given its early 20th century borders, was doomed to lack of self-sufficiency in agriculture. For a number of reasons (all detailed in the book), redistribution of land would simply not suffice. (True enough, but also true of many other industrial powers)• To achieve self-sufficiency, (and here’s where it all starts to go horribly wrong) it was necessary for Germany to expand eastward. Along the lines of the American ideology of the frontier a militarized Germany would have to re-claim the fertile plains of Poland and the Ukraine. This would entail driving out the current, lesser human inhabitants of these lands, along the lines (p. 469) of what had happened to the American “Indians.”• The two arch-enemies of Germany in its efforts to achieve its destiny would be 1. the “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” and 2. a chiefly “British / free markets / Jewish conspiracy” orchestrated by the likes of (American and 100% secular!) Louis Brandeis that for example favored free trade and whose appointed puppet in the world of politics was (p. 665) none other than Franklin Roosevelt.The reign of the National Socialists (including industrial policy, economic policy, monetary policy, decisions regarding both when to start war and how to wage war, all the way through to the fate of the conquered peoples) is recounted through the prism of these basic judgements and always with an emphasis on Germany’s ability to produce coal and steel.The book has three parts: before the war the protagonist is Goering and the story is told of how he and Schacht combined their efforts to bring about rearmament, which would have rendered Germany ready to fight by sometime in 1943-44, had Hitler been patient enough to wait.Goering and his minions (as the book progresses it’s increasingly faithful party members like Autobahn-layer Todt who replace technocrats) are “credited” with both “laying down the law” with the industrialists, using coercion and threats and making them complicit in the crimes against humanity the regime had in store right from the beginning, but also allowing them to make solid returns on the necessary heavy investment by guaranteeing both volumes and profitability levels.Schacht, on the other hand, is credited with succeeding in preventing the economy from running hot, in an environment where unemployment went from “worst ever” to literally zero. To do this, uniquely among developed nations, he never officially abandoned the gold standard, thereby creating a chronic lack of gold / currency, against which he had to suppress imports via a system like the one China runs today, whereby all transactions with foreign entities, and imports in particular, first had to be approved by the Reichsbank; a truly monumental endeavor.A much darker corollary of this suppression, and the author goes into quite some detail on the topic, was that many Jews delayed their emigration until they could find a way past these controls in order to export their liquid wealth, to say nothing of the fact that it encouraged pogroms that were intended to persuade them to leave without having done so.(N.B. the author has as good as expunged gold from the account, with zero loss to the story)Adam Tooze takes the time to explain that the economic renaissance Germany went through in this period was entirely down to the rearmament effort. The sundry highways and vanity projects like the people’s radio and the people’s car were 99% propaganda and barely register in the numbers. Indeed, even investment in railways, the ultimate infrastructure of the period, suffered. This was actually a rare way in which the Nazis left Germany in 1939 less prepared for war than they found it. Also, rearmament took priority over consumption, which was suppressed in a large number of overt and covert ways.From Goering’s preparations the author moves on to the decisions regarding the war itself. He does not get mentioned near as much as his lieutenants in the book, but the main character of the book at this stage is Hitler himself.To cut a long story short, the decision to attack France came down to numbers: every day that went by, and despite the best efforts of the Germans, the finite capacity of the German war economy in conjunction with the squeeze from the balance of payments situation meant that the allies were producing steel at a rate that eclipsed that of the axis powers. In other words, every day that went by the French would be better able to defend themselves. So the best time to attack was the earliest possible! The trigger came when the Ribbentrop – Molotov agreement allowed Hitler to relax about the “Jewish-Russian conspiracy.” That was his chance and he grasped it with both hands.The story Tooze tells next is fascinating: for all the talk about technological advances, the German army mainly moved on foot. WWII was the last war fought in Napoleonic style, not the first war of the modern era. And the swift conquest of France was down to the utter genius of von Manstein, who moved his army through the Ardennes and caught the British and the French napping. The myth of German “Blitzkrieg” was invented after the fact and was convenient to both the allies (who could claim to have lost to a new, mechanized, foe, rather than having been beaten on strategy) and to the Germans, who could suddenly believe they were conducting a winnable war.The conquest of France / Holland / Belgium / Luxembourg also changed the balance very significantly in the race for armaments, of course. Germany could suddenly dream that it was no longer waging a war at a material disadvantage. The fascinating story is told about how Germany did not violate the market system in availing itself of these resources. Quoting from p. 388, “Exporters in each country were paid, not by their customers in Germany, but by their own central banks, in their own currency. The foreign central bank then chalked up the deficit to Germany’s clearing account in Berlin. The Germans received their goods, the foreign suppliers received prompt payment, but the account never settled. At the end of 1944, the Reichsbank recorded almost 30 billion Reichsmarks owing to members of the clearing system.” (nothing like a bit of history to drive one’s understanding of what Hans Werner Sinn is talking about when he complains about Target 2)But the balance was not changed enough and Germany did not have the naval ability to conquer Britain, so in 1941 the exact same logic that had dictated the invasion of France dictated the invasion of Russia, this time on a very deliberate Blitzkrieg basis. In the conclusion to the book the author claims that Hitler's twisted ideology must also have played a part in this decision. In my view it’s the one bit of the book that’s probably a bit contentious. Yes, Hitler was ideologically driven to clear Germany’s Lebensraum of “lesser peoples,” but I find it hard to believe that even a madman of his caliber was fearful enough of what “world Jewry” might have had in store for him to precipitate an attack on Russia with inadequate resources that depended entirely on the hope of delivering a knock-out punch. In all probability, he’d started drinking some of his own “Blitzkrieg” cool-aid. Tooze himself backs up the idea that Hitler consciously shifted to Blitzkrieg (p. 667), if only because that was the only workable plan that would allow him to wage war on two fronts.Militarily, the rest is history, as they say, and it’s recounted here well (with coverage for North African campaign to boot). Special emphasis is given to the extermination of the Jews in the Ukraine and Belarus. It appears that some 11.3 million were specifically targeted for extermination! The author chooses not to comment on whether the operation in which they perished (called Taifun) was a military blunder, given that it diverted the German war effort away from the prime objective of taking Moscow and dealing Stalin a blow he would not recover from, or a sine qua non, given Hitler’s intentions to exterminate the Jews.But this is not a military history per se, so it shifts to Albert Speer and Fritz Sauckel and the way they conducted the losing war against the Soviets. In particular, and in keeping with the book’s unwavering theme, it is the story of how they went about producing the steel and armaments necessary to conduct that losing war.This is, by some margin, the part of the book where I learned the most and by an even bigger margin, the most important work of historical research to be found in this tome.The story is told of the millions of Slavs, chiefly, who were uprooted from their lands and sent to work in keeping the German war machine running. Their working conditions, the means by which they were rewarded and how they were actively worked to death.What you get here, more than in any sci-fi movie or, indeed, 21st century computer game, is a picture of what Europe would have looked like after a Nazi conquest: a world where the able bodied of the slave race man the engine room of the master race. Tooze goes out of his way to mention that it is under this light that we should look at Schindler, even. (p. 524)The author goes beyond penning an indictment of Speer, here: he takes you through the factories and camps and back to the times when wars were not yet fought for territory, but to bring back slaves.It is ironic that this should be the most poignant element of a war allegedly fought for Lebensraum.And it is doubly ironic that, in the author’s view, at least, this “third front” could be precisely where Hitler lost his war: had he spared the lives of the millions of slaughtered Jews and millions of starved Red Army prisoners and turned them to slave labor some two years earlier, his millennial plans could well have become our nightmare.Agree or disagree, this was a monumental read.

I recently completed Adam Tooze's 'Wages of Destruction' after a hiatus of several years between parts one and two.It struck me as quite an uneven book in parts, partly because it can be read at a number of levels. On the most basic of levels it states the obvious - that there was no way that Germany could win a protracted war and was doomed after the Wehrmacht stalled at the gates of Moscow given the industrial might of Britain, Britain's empire, the USSR and the USA ranged against Germany.But there's a deeper level of understanding to be gleaned if the reader keeps in mind Tooze's Preface where he says:"The originality of National Socialism was that rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilise the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its own imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States.... The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalised as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today. (xxiv-xxv)"Then there's another level if you contemplate the development of capitalism and an industrial economy in Germany and how the Third Reich was completing Germany's bourgeois revolution - if one thinks of that in a consequentialist sense.Some of the writing is superb - Chapter 16 'Labour, Food and Genocide', for example, is a master class in dialectical history writing.

Economics, by definition, is the study of scarcity. How the Nazis paid for their program of works in the 1930s/40s is probably a question that seldom bothers us. Our vision is of an Aryan uber-economic machine, over-coming all obstacles, like some fiscal-Blitzkrieg. This could not be more wrong. The Nazis could not suspend the laws of economics in the way they could not suspend the laws of physics. The tale revealed in this book seems so banal and so “modern” - even if the economics of the 1930’s seem so far away for anyone living in a modern liberal western democracy. This was a world of endless trade wars and the Gold Standard. Europe was in a race to compete with the burgeoning economic hegemony of the United States. Regardless of how much Hitler wanted to re-arm Germany his wildest fantasies were held back by quite mundane matters. Germany never had the foreign currency reserves to pay for the war materials it needed for full rearmament. It lacked the currency due to export restrictions.Starting the war itself was a gamble inspired by the growing arms race with France, Britain and America. Combined, the Allies were out-spending Germany yet they could better afford it as it represented a much smaller percentage of their overall earnings. The Germans were operating at the maximum armaments productive capacity through the 1930s and achieved brief superiority over Allies in only some areas, ie the Luftwaffe. The gamble in 1939 was based upon the perception of a very brief window of opportunity for a quick victory before the Allies started out-gunning Germany. That window closed quickly.... Regardless of popular myth, the Nazis were never short ingenuity. Yet even with millions of slave labourers (to propel Speers alleged “armaments miracle”) they could not build what they wanted for lack of steel and oil. Spikes in output in one industry came at the expense of another from where the raw materials were diverted. The German Navy & domestic consumption suffered. In the end the numbers never stacked up. They simply could not get access to the quantity of resources that the combined American, British & Soviet economies had. Even if money was no object this mattered little.The author casts himself as a revisionist historian yet his revelations are far from shocking (IF you understand them - since they are somewhat esoteric). Still, he does reveal many interesting facts as he goes back to look at real statistics rather that self-serving post-war memoirs. For example the popular myth about the lack of women in industry: Germany always had a higher percentage of women in the workplace than the Allies. He also reveals the crushing economic logic behind the “Hunger Plan” that was to wipe out millions of lives without needing a single person to step inside a gas chamber. Nazi Germany was never run for the benefits if its people. It was quickly converted to a war economy until its inevitable destruction. This re-interpretation, through the eyes of an economist, is quite revealing. Lessons for today?

I don’t think I can add much more than other reviewers. The best thing about this book is that you realise even a genocidal evil regime like the Third Reich couldn’t ignore economic reality and you appreciate how much of their thinking was based around this reality.It can resort to statistical dryness at times but that shouldn’t distract from the fact it is one of the best books ever written on the Nazis.

WW2 and pre WW2 have been the object of many books that focus on the narrative of what happened and wrong causality. Instead, this book is amazing. Focus on economics and finance a marginal area for many ideological historians but the fundamental that explains clearly how it was possible WW2. It is a fantastic book full of relevant data and evidence and properly written. It is not a novel. However, it clearly explains that the evidence shows without any doubt that the National Socialist Party was a socialist party without any doubt. In spite of many ideological and Marxist historians that fail to see what is obvious. Strongly recommended I rarely give 5 stars