The Wages of Destruction

“One of the most important and original books to be published about the Third Reich in the past twenty years. A tour de force.” -Niall Ferguson “Tooze has produced the most striking history of German strategy in the Second World War that we possess. This is an extraordinary achievement, and it places Adam Tooze in a very select company of historians indeed … Tooze has given us a masterpiece which will be read, and admired; and it will stimulate others for a long time to come.” -Nicholas Stargardt, History Today “It is among Adam Tooze’s many virtues, in “The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy,” that he can write about such matters with authority, explaining the technicalities of bombers and battleships. Hovering over his chronicle are two extraordinary questions: how Germany managed to last as long as it did before the collapse of 1945 and why, under Hitler, it thought it could achieve supremacy at all.” -Norman Stone, The Wall Street Journal “Virtually every page of his book contains something new and thought-provoking, making the whole an impressive achievement, in which original research has been combined with critical scrutiny of a vast literature that seems ripe for such a re-examination.” -Michael Burleigh, The Sunday Times (London) “A magnificent demonstration of the explanatory power of economic history.” -The Times (London) “Masterful … Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism.” -Financial Times

Adam Tooze is the author of The Deluge, winner of the Los Angeles Times book prize in history. He is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He formerly taught at Yale University, where he was Director of International Security Studies, and at the University of Cambridge. He has worked in executive development with several major corporations and contributed to the National Intelligence Council. He has written and reviewed for Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Tageszeitung and Spiegel Magazine, New Left Review, and the London Review of Books.