Why Germany Started the War—and Lost
Review: Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Adam Tooze. 2006.
Note: I wrote this review in March 2022, immediately after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is the best book on the economics of warfare I have read, a subject which current events have made tragically timely once again. The early chapters masterfully show the interaction between Germany's foreign exchange crises, its rearmament program, and the breakdown of European cooperation that might have averted war.
It's a little silly to try reduce this 700-page behemoth to an elevator pitch, but here's one attempt, which I will not belabor with the obvious analogies to the present day: in war, vastly superior economic power can take a long time to make itself felt. In the interim, this may encourage dictators (motivated by racist or nationalist ideology) to make horrific gambles to take advantage of their temporary superiority. Often these gambles succeed. And though, in World War II, the cold logic of economic superiority eventually prevailed, this was small consolation to the tens of millions who had already died.
Here are what I think are the major themes of the book, in greater detail:
(1) Nazi Germany was outmatched several times over by the economies of its enemies, most of all by the United States. Hitler was obsessed with this fact, as were Weimar planners before him. In a total war, any rational expert would say that Germany would eventually be crushed. (And so it was.)
(2) Hitler's goal was to conquer the lands of Eastern Europe for the German people, which he would depopulate with the mass murder of forty million of their inhabitants (an act he likened to America's genocide of the Native Americans). Only by building its own continental empire, he believed, could Germany achieve the same economic might and living standards of the United States. On this point, racist, anti-semitic ideology and a kind of twisted economic logic were in agreement.
(3) Knowing (1), that Germany's military advantage at the eve of war would always be temporary, Hitler embarked on a series of ever-larger gambles (Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Poland, invading France and the Low Countries, the Soviet Union), which through a combination of Allied confusion and sheer blind luck resulted in massive payoffs. None of these, however, altered the basic strategic logic of (1), so long as the USA and the Soviet Union remained unconquered.
(4) By 1942, Germany's luck started running out, and the inexorable logic of (1) began to reassert itself. Reorganizations and rationalizations and horrific slave labor (again showing the interplay between racist ideology and economics) helped squeeze more juice out of an ever-draining stockpile of natural resources, but even on that front the efficiency of German war mobilization was likely exceeded by the USS.R. Still, these efficiency gains and several Allied strategic blunders prolonged a war whose outcome was already clear by 1944. Millions more died.