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

I was reading Adam Tooze's great book, The Wages of Destruction about the German economy. And he says that they were never principally concerned as work creation measures and they didn't contribute at all really to the relief of unemployment.

I was again really interested reading Adam Tooze and he writes that the high status attached to the skilled work required to produce these armaments gave workers a sense of national pride, but the focus on armaments meant they were not investing in consumer durables.

I think that's why Adam Tooze emphasizes that the German economy was fundamentally backward, relying on imports for food and raw materials, which made the rearmament programme unsustainable without territorial expansion.

I know you're going to bring it up in this conversation, but I really think it deserves more attention.

Now you're going to do it. Well, there is a lot in there about Germany's turning coal into synthetic oil, a very detailed discussion of that, which Dale brought up.