The Wages of Destruction review by Josh

This book gave me a new understanding of the World War Two (and the lead up to it). The histories of the period I'd read before tended to focus on political events, as Tooze argues, many of the political events only come into focus if you understand the economic factors and beliefs that motivated them.

As Tooze also notes, the NAZI economy operated like no other before or since and thus is of some interest to economic historians. Early on the finance minister was a guy named Hjalmar Schacht, who became known as "The Dark Wizard of Finance" for having seemingly revived the German economy in the 1930s.

As the 'wizard' moniker denotes most Germans most likely had little idea what Schacht was up to, but he managed some pretty impressive financial and economic feats. Without his ability to drum up hard currency the Reich never would have been able to afford Hitler's aggressive rearmament program.

One source of revenue was the expropriation of the wealth of Germany's Jews, via the "Jewish Capital Levy" and"Reich Flight Tax." Tooze discusses these measure from a game theoretic perspective, in which the German government was trying to extract the maximum amount from the Jewish population which, as he illustrates, they did pretty effectively.

Tooze also, I think, does a good job of explaining how Hitler's economic and political beliefs were integrally connected. Hitler saw the growth of British and French colonial empires and how they benefited domestic industry. Germany had no colonies and thus could find itself at the mercy of other countries which could threaten to cut off key imports. Hitler's strategy, to take land in the east, was essentially to establish what other economic powers already had - an economic hinterland to supply raw materials and markets to the core.

If stuff like that is interesting to you then I would recommend this book (5*), but if it's not then you should probably read something else.