The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

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.