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The Wages of Destruction

Metadata

  • Author: Adam Tooze
  • ASIN: B008DR6YXO
  • ISBN: 0143113208
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008DR6YXO
  • Kindle link

Highlights

if it is true that ‘people make their own history’, it is also true, as Karl Marx put it, that ‘they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. — location: 221 ^ref-32461

In Hitler’s mind, the threat posed to the Third Reich by the United States was not just that of conventional superpower rivalry. The threat was existential and bound up with Hitler’s abiding fear of the world Jewish conspiracy, manifested in the shape of ‘Wall Street Jewry’ and the ‘Jewish media’ of the United States. It was this fantastical interpretation of the real balance of power that gave Hitler’s decision-making its volatile, risk-taking quality. — location: 329 ^ref-7160

research, I emphasize the connections between the war against the Jews and the regime’s wider projects of imperialism, forced labour and deliberate starvation. — location: 343 ^ref-18449

Land hunger was one, if not the most important impulse behind the European explosion into the world that had profoundly reshaped the structure of global power since the seventeenth century. — location: 3239 ^ref-21292

native populations in North America, much of Latin America and Australasia were subject to more or less deliberate genocide. — location: 3243 ^ref-19514

the revised anti-Western strategy of the post-Munich period. — location: 6026 ^ref-20155

Britain and France did not appease Germany because they expected to be defeated by the Wehrmacht, but because, in the words of France’s right-wing Prime Minister Daladier, another European war would mean the ‘utter destruction of European civilization’, creating a vacuum that could only be filled by ‘Cossack and Mongol hordes’ and their ‘culture’ of Soviet Communism. — location: 6035 ^ref-17953

The conquest of Lebensraum in the East had of course always been Hitler’s central strategic objective. The threat posed by the Anglo-American alliance, masterminded by world Jewry, simply made this more urgent and more necessary than ever. — location: 8436 ^ref-46676

The German invasion of the Soviet Union is far better understood as the last great land-grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism. — location: 8442 ^ref-21737

On the one hand, Gauleiter Sauckel made strenuous efforts to mobilize millions of workers for employment in the Reich. At the same time, the SS and the Wehrmacht were deliberately murdering millions of people, who could just as well have served as workers for the German war economy. — location: 9455 ^ref-31895

In relation to the cardinal problem of manpower, it is hard to avoid the impression that the Third Reich faced an unresolvable contradiction between its genocidal racial ideology and the practical imperatives of production. — location: 9457 ^ref-47708

local officials of the SS arguing for the murder of skilled Jewish workers, against the interests of the Wehrmacht and other agencies employing them on war work, of which the most famous example was Oskar Schindler in the General Government. — location: 9539 ^ref-28021

the Holocaust can be made to appear as a concession extracted from the pragmatic mainstream of the German state administration by the ideologically committed leadership of the SS. It was a concession to ideology, made possible by Sauckel’s success in recruiting non-Jewish labour from all over Europe. — location: 9543 ^ref-33195

once initial inhibitions were overcome, it was women, children and old people that tended to be killed first, particularly in 1942, the high point of the Judaeocide. — location: 9549 ^ref-40582

the Third Reich was an extremely effective mobilizing regime. Furthermore, it is clear that this mobilization was from the outset directed towards the resurrection of Germany as a military power and in some general sense towards the achievement of Hitler’s goals of conquest. — location: 12012 ^ref-21170

Hitler knew by the summer of 1939 that his effort to develop a long-term programme of preparation for a war with the Western powers had failed. — location: 12032 ^ref-20174

by the early summer of 1946 rations in many parts of urban Germany were below 1,000 calories per day. Despite the flourishing black market, the evidence of serious malnutrition was unmistakable. Mortality increased as did the incidence of hunger-related diseases. Infection rates for diphtheria, typhoid and tuberculosis in the British and American zones doubled. The birth weight of babies fell drastically. Even the most intrepid statisticians hesitate to plumb the depths to which Germany had fallen by the end of 1945. — location: 12224 ^ref-52724

one of the most persistent myths in post-war history that the Allies learned the lesson from World War I not to extract reparations from Germany. — location: 12235 ^ref-63572

both halves of Germany paid substantially higher reparations after 1945 than the Weimar Republic ever did. — location: 12236 ^ref-38152

it took barely two years for the same insight to impose itself in Washington and London. — location: 12251 ^ref-46518

To stave off collapse and a surge in support for the Communist party, reconstruction began already over the winter of 1946–7. — location: 12252 ^ref-43566

by 1947 that option was clearly off the table. First West Germany and then East Germany were resurrected as independent states. — location: 12271 ^ref-36720