Richard Overy
Counting the Cost
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
By Adam Tooze
Allen Lane / Penguin Press 800pp £30 order from our bookshop
It is remarkable that, in the huge tide of material written on Hitler’s Third Reich over the past half-century, there has not been a single-volume history of the Reich’s economy in English (though there are, of course, a number in German); even more, so given the persistent arguments about why the German economy recovered in the 1930s, or over the extent of German mobilisation for war, or the convoluted explorations of the role of Albert Speer, that malign sphinx who told the world that he ran the German war economy because he enjoyed the technical challenges in doing so.
Adam Tooze has risen to this challenge in a powerful and provocative reassessment of the whole story. This is, as he makes clear from the start, more than just economic history, though the economics are refreshingly up to date and accessibly presented. His purpose is to inject back into the
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