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

Author: Adam Tooze

Narrator: Adam Tooze, Simon Vance

Unabridged: 30 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 08/03/2021

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

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

An 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.

* This audiobook contains a downloadable PDF of tables and figures from the book.

About The Author

Adam Tooze is the author of The Deluge, winner of the Los Angeles Times book prize in history.. He is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He formerly taught at Yale University, where he was Director of International Security Studies, and at the University of Cambridge. He has worked in executive development with several major corporations and contributed to the National Intelligence Council. He has written and reviewed for Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Tageszeitung and Spiegel Magazine, New Left Review, and the London Review of Books.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Aaron on August 23, 2012

For all its horrors, World War 2 is undeniably a really cool war to look at from a military perspective. However, anyone who plays the Could Germany Have Won game (or even a few rounds of Axis & Allies) is confronted sooner or later by the fact that a lot of Germany's military decisions seem a bit........more

Goodreads review by Brett on April 30, 2022

"The conquest of Lebensraum [German living space taken through warlike conquest, pg 9] in the East had of course always been Hitler's central strategic objective. The threat posed by the Anglo-American alliance, masterminded by the world Jewry, simply made this more urgent and more necessary than ev......more

Goodreads review by Mike on March 03, 2015

Ever since middle school I have been a huge WWII buff. I couldn't get enough of the Manichean clash of good versus evil (with good triumphing naturally). As I grew up I developed a more nuanced view of the war. Neat planes and cool tanks were replaced by the appreciation grand strategy and the detai......more

Goodreads review by Kyle on January 14, 2011

As it turns out the way to write real history is by taking things seriously. Slave labor, genocide, hunger plans, making neat entries in logbooks concerning the planned deaths from famine in the early months of your next invasion- these are treated by historians in apocalyptic and sensational ways t......more

Goodreads review by fourtriplezed on August 07, 2018

Very long and dry at times but fascinating. For the non economist and lay history lover such as my self this really gave me the answers to a lot of questions I had had that were never been discussed in any depth in the many previous books and items I had read and the various documentaries I have see......more

Quotes

"One of the most important and original books to be published about the Third Reich in the past twenty years. A tour de force."
-Niall Ferguson

"Tooze has produced the most striking history of German strategy in the Second World War that we possess. This is an extraordinary achievement, and it places Adam Tooze in a very select company of historians indeed ... Tooze has given us a masterpiece which will be read, and admired; and it will stimulate others for a long time to come."
-Nicholas Stargardt, History Today

"It is among Adam Tooze's many virtues, in "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy," that he can write about such matters with authority, explaining the technicalities of bombers and battleships. Hovering over his chronicle are two extraordinary questions: how Germany managed to last as long as it did before the collapse of 1945 and why, under Hitler, it thought it could achieve supremacy at all."
-Norman Stone, The Wall Street Journal

"Virtually every page of his book contains something new and thought-provoking, making the whole an impressive achievement, in which original research has been combined with critical scrutiny of a vast literature that seems ripe for such a re-examination."
-Michael Burleigh, The Sunday Times (London)

"A magnificent demonstration of the explanatory power of economic history."
-The Times (London)

"Masterful . . . Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism."
-Financial Times

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