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My Chicago Boyz fellow blogger, Dan from Madison, posted up on an important book – an economic history of Nazi Germany during WWII by Adam Tooze entitled The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy:

“Book Review – The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy”

….I have just finished up a book by Adam Tooze called The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. This book is about WW2 from an economic point of view. The book doesn’t really talk about generalship, tank tactics, or anything else military except in economic terms.

This book is simply outstanding. The beginning portions in particular are very dense and will require a basic understanding of economics to comprehend. I had to re-read several portions, especially in the first two hundred pages. Carl, who recommended the book to me, is an expert in economics and admitted to me that he even had to re-read portions. That aside, after you immerse yourself in this book you are in for a real treat and will learn a lot.

Too many times students of WW2 like myself tend to think of things happening in a vacuum. As an example, I knew that the Germans stormed across Europe in 1939 and 1940, but gave very little thought that this massive army didn’t just “appear”. The German economy had to be managed very effectively for them to be competitive on the world stage.

It was fascinating how the German economic minds managed their production in the thirties, all the while trying to escape from under their war reparations. In detail it is discussed how these minds bashed each other on how to manage their currency, trade, and raw materials.

Also interesting are many predictions by those close in Hitler’s circle of people that once the US got into the war on the side of the Allies all was lost. Germany simply could not produce enough of everything for long enough. After reading this book I can say with relative certainty that even if D-Day had failed, eventually the Allies would have prevailed, simply from the numbers involved. Not to mention Berlin would have been nuked, but that is certainly grist for another post.

Albert Speer, who for a time when he enjoyed Hitler’s favor as the Reichsminister for Armaments and War Production, was able to rationalize the crazy-quilt, quasi-planned, neo-autarkic Nazi economy by pushing decentralization (“industrial self-responsibility”) in the face of opposition by ambitious rivals (like Sauckel), corrupt gauleiters, the SS leadership and Nazi radicals. Such was Speer’s organizational abilities and skill at bureaucratic intrigue that Nazi Germany was actually becoming more industrially productive in the face of Allied bombing and invasion – to a point. Eventually, as Speer realized, critical resources such as wolframite, chromium and oil would simply become unavailable and the war machine would have come to a sudden, screeching, halt in late 1945, early 1946 at the latest, regardless of the progress of the Allied armies.

Economic strength and efficiency does not predetermine victory in war but the longer the war, the greater the weight economic power will have on the outcome.