Wednesday, 2023-10-04

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze

A book of myth-busting.

Female participation in the workforce of Nazi Germany wasn’t much lower than in the UK. The issue was that most women were working in the agriculural sector, which was much less mechanized than in the UK, and much less productive.

If Nazi Germany had stopped doing war crimes and genocide after Barbarossa, the deliberate starvation of a million Soviet prisoners-of-war would already have counted as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Albert Speer was a self-promoting card-carrying Nazi who suavely dodged the gallows even though he and everyone else at his level knew full well what was going on.

The Messerschmitt Bf 109G, despite what Wikipedia will tell you, was a death trap that killed countless German pilots who tried to dogfight the superior Allied fighters and crashed into the ground. Oh, and it was built by slave labor (Wikipedia does mention that, at least).

Highly recommended.