The History Thread!

We gave two hundred smokestacks to his hated enemy.

Okay, besides the destroyers, what did we ever do to you, Hitler!?

Umm...hmm.

There was that time an American destroyer launched an unprovoked attack on a German torpedo that was minding its own business! Clearly the ramming of the innocent German machine by an American warship that outmassed it by a factor of eight hundred times is a clear sign of American aggression! If that's not clear evidence, I don't know what is.

OMG, we're fiends!

That's nothing. This one time, Costa Rica's army massacred two Kriegsmarine torpedoes. By army I mean cargo ship. And by Costa Rican Army I mean it actually belonged to Panama. But was anchored in Costa Rica.

But still. Hitler was indeed cray cray. Seems like was bent for the Americas as well.

edited 19th May '15 3:47:57 PM by Aszur

I imagine that Hitler likened the world to dominoes, you take Europe, then their colonies across the world will fall right after them, then the world is his. The Americas were that annoyingly inconvenient part of the world lacking in colonies outside the Caribbean that ruined the dominoes falling.

Hitler had a chronic lack of foresight. His plan in WWII seemed to be "conquer Europe, figure out the details later". Things veered off its rails when Britain refused to ally with him (and later withstood attack) and the failure to crush the Soviets quickly. America entering the war just blindsided him further.

I don't think its so much lack of foresight as Hitler's foresight was completely delusional. If anything, the Nazis spent far too much time thinking about the future, as if it could be made reality if only they believed in it hard enough.

The belief that Britain was ever going to ally with Germany was in itself completely insane, for instance.

Clap if you believe and the third reich will reign.

Another thing about Hitler is that he seems to have either no or a very delusional economic hindsight. Many industrialists were thrown out of decision making, and he had issues with national debt prior to the outbreak of war. Hjalmar Schacht pretty much ripped into Hitler and Goring's plans, and met with resistance leaders to get rid of Hitler.

Whether he had no hindsight or a very delusional one is a matter of some debate - he had an image of Germany in his mind, but it was totally separated from what Germany was like. I'd call it a hallucination, but that would be an insult to those who suffer from hallucinations because it's too far from even that.

Well, Hitler did have an industry. A military one. That creates jobs and profit, just that solely based on military conquests which he did not end up achieving. Compare with the "New Deal", which built stuff like the Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam and other civil work projects did stuff for the long term, whereas Military rising would create the same job opportunities but without the long term planning

Basically, if Ug and Grug, the cavemen, were trying to develop stuff, Ug was making a farm, and Grug tried to make a spear to take Ug's farm. He failed. Both, however, were busy for a while, making either the farm or spear.

Actually, the German war economy was more efficient than people give it credit for. I'd recommend Adam Tooze's recent study, The Wages of Destruction. There were a lot of miscalculations and inefficiencies, but for the most part they're generally rational miscalculations instead of all-out insanity.

Sabre - one huge problem with it though is how long it would have lasted beyond Hitler's intended goal. It's not like for example how the modern US or Victorian Prussian economies could be shown to have a focus on the military but be able to slow down in times of peace, or how the British economy at points had a focus on naval trade but wasn't so focused on it.

It isn't flat out madness, but it does have an at points irrational focus on the military, and the question is often asked how long it would have lasted as it was.

edited 20th May '15 2:49:03 PM by RatherRandomRachel

As Oswald Spengler said in 1933, "Germany doesn't need a "heroic tenor but a real hero."

IIRC, the Germans hadn't really changed their war economy theories since WWI - which made sense, since the WWI German war economy was quite impressive and they believed they'd been cheated of victory by the Jews anyway - so it was still carrying a lot of institutional inefficiencies over.

I've said it before but everything I learn about Hitler and Nazi Germany really just makes me think they bullshitted their way through the war and it's nothing short of a miracle that they made it as far as they did.

That's the thing, though. Hitler's "peacetime" economic model predicated upon control of most of continental Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Urals. Anything short of that would not have been peacetime, since he did correctly forecast that a war between Germany and Russia would be to the finish.

Short of that, Nazi Germany's economic model was geared for war. It makes little sense to speak of what their peacetime economy would have looked like, since at no time did they put in place an economy that would have been designed for peaceful sustainment.

If Hitler had achieved victory, then the wartime economy is untenable for the long run. I mean, I am aware I am incredibly simplifying things, but yeah, if you make a gun to take the money of another person, technically you are not making more wealth but you can take the other's wealth and will end up wealthier than you began. If you win and you only keep making guns with no one to take it from, then there is where it stops making sense.

Relying heavily on slave labor is not "rational miscalculations".

Speaking of Nazi Germany, I have this to ask: What would have happened had Horst Wessel not died? Would he have been a victim of the Night of the Long Knives or not?

I had to read Malcolm X's autobiography for a project and I found out that while he was in Harlem, the secretary was named Walter White. I did not expect a Breaking Bad reference fifty years or so before the fact.

Morally? No. Purely economically? Yes. It is incredibly cheap to have slave labor do stuff and then brutally murder them, as opposed to keeping slave labor alive to do work. Heck, minimum wage employees are cheaper than slaves.

It also makes sense when you consider who was used for slave labor.

Don't forget that mass extermination was part of Hitler's program, too. The Holocaust against the Jews had no economic rationale; on the other hand, the plan for the mass slaughter of Slavs had an important economic component to it.

The lands of modern-day Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the western steppes of Russia were to be used as Germany's breadbasket, to be settled by German colonists. This in turn meant that the Slavs were to be starved out: their food would be seized for Germany's use. In which case, using them for slave labor made economic sense insofar that they were going to be killed anyway; why not extract some last use out of them?

(This is part of why the German extermination machine moved in fits and starts at times. When Nazi Germany faced a food shortage or a perceived food shortage, the orders went out to kill the concentration camp inmates faster. When it faced a labor shortage, the reverse happened; orders went out to try to slow the losses of slave laborers.)

The Bronze Age Egtved Girl was not from Denmark: "One of the best-known Danish Bronze Age finds, the Egtved Girl from 1370 BC, was not born in Egtved, Denmark, reveals new research. Strontium isotope analyses of the girl's hair, teeth and nails show that she was born and raised hundreds of miles from Egtved, most probably in Southern Germany, and that she arrived in Egtved shortly before she died."

People missed the point. Quality is important, especially with the German's penchant for overengineering. I've only read about Krupp (specifically that Krupp autobiography that starts in their entry on the cannon business before Prussia's rise iirc), but when your workforce has already passed the threshold for despair that they've already consigned themselves to death, the only thing they can do is to make it "meaningful" by incorporating hidden defects and consistently making substandard work.