Adam Tooze

"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.

The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

The Wages of Destruction

Soham Dasgupta

As Hitler himself put it, in what is surely one of the key passages in his 'Second Book':

"The European today dreams of a standard of living, which he derives as much from Europe's possibilities as from the real conditions of America. Due to modern technology and the communication it makes possible, the international relations amongst peoples have become so close that the European, even without being fully conscious of it, applies as the yardstick for his life, the conditions of American life ..."

And not surprisingly, what most caught Hitler's eye was the American domination of the motor vehicle industry. Hitler, of course, was a motor enthusiast. But what concerned him in his 'Second Book' were the strategic implications of America's leadership in this crucial new industry. In their imaginings of a future of American affluence Europeans were apt to forget 'that the relationship of surface area to the population of the American continent is vastly superior...'. America's enormous competitive advantage in industrial technology was above all a function of 'the size of America's 'internal market' and its 'wealth in purchasing power but also in raw materials'. It was the huge volume of 'guarantee[d] ... internal sales' that enabled the American motor vehicle industry to adopt 'methods of production that in Europe due to the lack of such internal sales would simply be impossible'. Fordism, in other words, required Lebensraum.

The Wages of Destruction quotes

Join the club