Nazi Germany’s Grand Strategy of Racial War

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) by Columbia University historian Adam Tooze redefined our understanding of Nazi Germany by dismantling the myth of an economically unstoppable Third Reich. Tooze demonstrates that Germany's economy was fragile, constrained by resource shortages, and heavily dependent on territorial expansion for survival. By integrating economic analysis with political, military, and racial history, Tooze reveals how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision — ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology — was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to-be globalized world. The drive for Lebensraum was not only ideological but also an economic imperative, aiming to exploit land, resources, and populations for the benefit of the German war machine and state. This racialized economic vision, which sought to enslave or annihilate entire populations, underpinned Nazi expansionism and genocidal policies. (4.52 stars out of 5 on Goodreads)

Adam Tooze is a British historian specializing in economic history and the Director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He is renowned for his books, including The Wages of Destruction (2006), Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018), and Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021). In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top Global Thinkers of the decade.

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For the discussion, please read in advance Chapter 14: "The Grand Strategy of Racial War".

The PDF of the book is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tYiPoFC-6R88geZZahvS6aBDrVREXfzg/view