Adam Tooze's classic Wages of Destruction, An Economic History of the Third Reich.
Though Hitler from the start had advanced an economic program meant to help Germany’s poor, and though he paid for the war machine not by taxation but by a steady project of rationing and “rationalization,” the chief beneficiaries of his policies were rich and major corporations such as I.G. Farben and Porsche. And anyone who paid attention could have seen the war coming: Though it was on its face economically ruinous, Hitler had demanded in 1936 that the “German economy must be fit for war within four years,” and the state and economy obliged as best they could.
A strong contribution to the historical literature surrounding WWII and the Nazi era; indeed, one of the most significant to arrive in recent years.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/adam-tooze/the-wages-of-destruction/
Tooze describes among other things the powerful corporate committees of the Todt Organization which set the war production and rationing objectives of the Third Reich. Food rations in calories, meat, butter, etc., were determined by one's role in the economy. The Todt Organization was the institutional body that embodied the military industrial complex. The switch of the Nazi economic objective from consumer economics like electronics and Volkswagens to an untenable level of war production reminds one of current bait and switch politics on the right in the US.
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