A "provocative" account of great "intellectual significance," illuminating the economic workings of the Third Reich--and the reasons ordinary G...
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reviews
Dec 25, 2009
Michael
rated it: 
You don't know much about the Nazis. That's because we don't get much about the Nazis in school and most of the "common knowledge" about them is wrong. For example, many people are under the false impression that the Nazis were "right wing" or conservative, yet the term "Nazi" is short for "National Socialist German Workers Party." That doesn't sound like a right wing party to me. This book, while it is not entertaining, will teach you that the Nazis w
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Jan 18, 2010
Branco
rated it:
The book is easy to read although you can easely get lost in the annotations that the author uses, I found that in a first read it is better to ignore them. Also I bought the portuguese version but the images were not translated from german which was a shame. Fortunately my wife speaks german and I asked her to translate some for me which I found very usefull.
Other than that it makes it easier to understand not the active support that the germans gave to Hitler but the silent consent More...
Other than that it makes it easier to understand not the active support that the germans gave to Hitler but the silent consent More...
Jul 08, 2009
Russell
rated it: 
The conventional view is that the Holocaust was mostly about racial ideology, and only partly about plunder. With reading books such as this one (and one of my other current reads, The Secret War Against The Jews) I’m really starting to believe it was probably the other way around!
Update after finishing the book:
We’ve traditionally seen the Holocaust as a racial war by Hitler’s Europe against its Jewish population; as a program of extermination accompanied by incidental More...
Update after finishing the book:
We’ve traditionally seen the Holocaust as a racial war by Hitler’s Europe against its Jewish population; as a program of extermination accompanied by incidental More...
Jul 30, 2011
Malaga
rated it:
It only took me 6 years and probably as many restarts to finally read this book but it was worth it. He cites so many aspects of the same data - extensive data about where goods and money went during the Nazi regime - that it's hard to process but it's the only way to make the point.
He shows that Nazi plunder of invaded countries and the taxes and levies imposed on them funded the war machine and kept the German population at the time well taken care of an happy. It's mentioned that More...
He shows that Nazi plunder of invaded countries and the taxes and levies imposed on them funded the war machine and kept the German population at the time well taken care of an happy. It's mentioned that More...
Sep 10, 2009
Hugolane
rated it:
So far I'm enjoying this book. Aly's focus on the economics and social policies of the Nazis I think is highly enlightening. Years ago there was a book I believe called, Anti-semitism: The Socialism of Fools, and what Aly describes here is how Nazi racial ideology provided a means to support the house of cards that was the Nazi economy. Some reviews I have read suggest that Aly may draw too materialist an explanation of why Germans continued to support Hitler, and I have not gotten so far a
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Apr 10, 2011
Lindsay
rated it:
Fascinating. Very easy to read, especially once I stopped reading every single footnote.
Volkmar suggested this to me, and this book did not disappoint. I had no idea that the Nazis stole as much as they did. I'm not sure why this was a surprise to me.
Volkmar suggested this to me, and this book did not disappoint. I had no idea that the Nazis stole as much as they did. I'm not sure why this was a surprise to me.
Oct 28, 2007
Bill
rated it:
Gotz Aly shows how every German benefited from the Nazis' system of plunder during WWII and justifies how that plunder kept the German populace quiescent. While it's way too detailed on the financial records, it's an utterly fascinating read. He gives the monetary reasoning behind the Holocaust and destruction the Nazis perpetrated and has it all make sense. You'll never look at WWII the same way again.
Jun 09, 2008
C.R.
rated it:
Very dry, very scholarly, lots of numbers. The book does an excellent job, though, of demonstrating the oft-ignored "Socialist" part of National Socialism. In particular, just how utterly rapacious the socialist system can be in its rawest form.
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