The Wages of Destruction

I turn to this book to remind myself how good economic history should be written: by foregrounding the political stakes and by angling for compelling prose. In Tooze’s telling, when Nazi ideological rage met the grim realities of a global Depression, the result was the lethal gamble to conquer Germany’s way out of isolation.

It’s so instructive to watch Tooze adroitly move between narrative registers—absorbing, emphatic, mordant, even humorous—as he tackles this hair-raising topic. The thorniest subjects—foreign exchange controls and machine tools, forced labor, and racial war—come to life to awesome and awful effect.

Tooze uses his mastery of economic sources to construct a brilliant, often startling, reinterpretation of Nazi geopolitics. He offers a comprehensive economic interpretation of the Nazi drive for expansionism in the 1930s, Hitler’s decision for war in 1939, and the timing and shape of the Barbarossa offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941. The Wages of Destruction also explores the economic dimensions of Hitler’s plans to liquidate the European Jews and other racial enemies. Perhaps his most arresting argument is that the rise of the United States as an economic superpower in the early twentieth century drove the politics of… show more.