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: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

Author	Adam Tooze
Country	England
Language	English
Subject	Nazi economy
Genre	Economic history
Publisher	Allen Lane Viking Penguin
Publication date	June 29th, 2006
Pages	799 pp
ISBN	978-0-7139-9566-4
OCLC	64313370
Dewey Decimal	320.94309043 22
LC Class	HC286.3 .T66 2006
Preceded by	Statistics and the German State 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge
Followed by	The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931

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 having failed to defeat Britain in 1940, the economic logic of the war drove the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union. Hitler was constrained to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 to obtain the natural resources necessary to challenge the economic superpowers of the United States and the British Empire. Operation Barbarossa sealed the fate of the third Reich because it was resource constraints that made victory against the Soviet Union impossible, especially when the Soviet Union received supplies from Britain and the US to supplement the resources remaining under Soviet control.

The book makes the case for the economic impact of the British and then Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign (though argues that the wrong targets were often selected), challenges the idea of an economic miracle under Albert Speer and rejects the idea that the German economy could have mobilised significantly more women for the war economy.