The Wages of Destruction
The Wages of Destruction is a non-fiction book detailing the economic history of Nazi Germany. Written by Adam Tooze, it was first published by Allen Lane in 2006. The Wages of Destruction won the Wolfson History Prize and the 2007 Longman/History Today Book of the Year Prize. It was published to critical praise from such authors as Michael Burleigh, Richard Overy and Niall Ferguson. In the book, Tooze writes that after the Germans had failed to defeat Britain in 1940, the economic logic of the war drove them to an invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler was constrained do so in 1941 to obtain the natural resources necessary to challenge two economic superpowers: the United States and the British Empire. That sealed the fate of the Third Reich because it was resource constraints that made victory against the Soviet Union impossible, especially when it received supplies from the Americans and the British to supplement the resources that remained under Soviet control. The book makes the case for the economic impact of the British and then Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign, but it argues that the wrong targets were often selected. The book also challenges the idea of an economic miracle under Albert Speer, and rejects the idea that the Nazi economy could have mobilised significantly more women for the war economy. (from Wikipedia)
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What Hacker News says
- It's also possible to run an economy on empty for a long, long time provided there's a war on. Look at Germany, who literally ran the country on empty throughout all of WWII, books like Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction" cover this in great detail. There was a saying in the last few years, "enjoy the war, the peace will be terrible", and it was, because once you took the wartime tourniquet off all the toxins flooded your body. It wasn't until the Marshall Plan that the bare subsistence life was slowly eradicated.
Now, can you see anyone giving Putin's kleptocracy a few trillion dollars to rebuild Рашка? The Marshall Plan rebuilt Germany because the US realised that without that as the economic powerhouse of Europe the place would be a basket case in need of US support for decades, but when you're just a gas station masquerading as a country (McCain) no-one's going to bail you out except insofar as it keeps the gas flowing, and if you look at places like Nigeria you don't need much to keep the gas flowing.
- > the part that has been the most surprising is how stupid it is
Read The Wages of Destruction.
The Nazis were economically inept. This part of fascism’s history—its incompetence–is often overwritten by stories of gleaming German engineering and Italian timeliness.
- The book "Wages of Destruction" is a fantastic deep dive into the economics of Nazi Germany. It's one of the rare books that upended my understanding of WW2
- >The Nazi were a mess, plagued with infighting, and completely incapable of measuring the strength of their opponents, which eventually led to their downfall.
no the Nazis weren't entirely a mess or completely incompetent.
There was lots of infighting, partly deliberately designed to be that way by Hitler's tactics for organizing his own subordinate leadership levels, but there was also a massive amount of military, industrial and logistical competence and a robust amount of cohesion and careful, powerful cooperation on fundamental aims.
Had there not been, the Nazi's never would have risen to power so effectively, formed their dictatorship so effectively or managed a colossal war against multiple enemies for so many years so effectively, and only been defeated at such a gargantuan cost in lives and resources. The Nazis underestimated the military strength of their enemies, but not nearly so badly as to not wage very effective war and pose a very, very serious threat to these enemies for several years.
I really suggest a book called "The Wages of Destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze, as a nice basic primer on how wrong these ideas of supposedly incompetent Nazis are.
The above is all deviating a bit from the topic at hand but with this sidestep into a look at the Nazis, you're working from a simplistic caricature view of a more complex situation with complex evil people, and I fear that this is also all too common when many critics today view the Trump government. It's not staffed entirely by caricaturesque evil idiots. Many of its supporters are intelligent and cohesive in their guiding methodologies. (Also, no, the above isn't to compare the bad actions of Trump's government to the completely unrestrained monstrosities of the Nazis. I'm comparing defects of external analysis)
- I recommend reading Wages of Destruction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
Part of the problem is incorrect assessments of the balance of power, combined with stubbornness. Both the Germans and the Japanese assessed that their martial spirit would enable them to overcome their industrially-superior adversaries. Both were wrong. Also militaries the world over have a culture of stoicism under conditions of adversity. At the tactical level it sometimes means you can turn around what appears to be an unwinnable situation. I'd have to dig to see where this has reliably worked at the strategic level. My initial thought is "it doesn't, but military officers who have spent their entire adult lives inculcated to act otherwise will never acknowledge that".
Look at some of the ridiculous propaganda that was written at the start of Ukraine's 2023 summer offensive: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/09/british-made-tan...
There's been interviews where Ukrainian troops said "we thought the Russians would just run away after the first day of seeing our Leopards".
Both sides in this conflict have underestimated each other in different ways, but industrial attritional warfare is the great equalizer: it doesn't matter what men THINK will lead to victory if enough steel is thrown in the other guy's direction to remove all subjectivity.
- I strongly recommend Wages Of Destruction if you want a really deep dive into this topic. I find this period in time fascinating, and this book changed my entire perception of it.
