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I have an effortpost somewhere in my notebook brewing, ever since I finished Tooze's Wages of Destruction on the topic of all the different frames that one can use to examine WWII in Europe. There are at least seven framings I can think of that I can make a full argument out of, and completely justify the beginning of the war. WWII was, in some ways, vastly overdetermined.
WWII was primarily a replay of WWI with a little shuffling around the edges. The core conflict was once again Germany-Austria-Hungary vs England/France/Russia/USA, with Italy going from a liability for Britain to a liability for Germany and Japan getting involved. This was known even before the war started, Ferdinand Foch famously called the treaty of Versailles a twenty year ceasefire as it was signed. The flow of conflict runs directly through Versailles, much of Germany's chaos and depression resulted from the aftermath of WWI, and the conflicts with the western Allies began with conflicts over reparations and the removal of formerly German territory into creations of Versailles like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
WWII was primarily a result of the early Cold War, a symptom of the struggle between Communism and Capitalism, which began before WWII and continued after; Hitler is best understood as a Golem figure, built by both Communists and Capitalists to protect against the Other, only to turn on each in their turn. The Cold War didn't start in 1945 Berlin, it started in 1917 at the latest. The first Red Scares in the US and the rest of the West happened long before Hitler rose to power. Hitler could not have achieved what he achieved, could not have been half as destructive as he was, without the support he garnered from both sides of the Cold War. Without Stalin's material support in the years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Barbarossa, Hitler never could have achieved the Blitzkrieg victories in the West. Stalin and his crew were ideological Leninists, and believed in the science of history, that Capitalist imperialist powers must go to war, they can't help it, the competition over economic markets is too powerful a motive. Threatened by the capitalist western powers, Stalin supported And the western Allies significantly aided the rise of fascism diplomatically, seeing it as a counter to Communist revolutionary fervor in Germany, Spain, and Italy; believing that Hitler would naturally fight the Communists because, you know, he kept saying he was going to fight Bolshevism and invade Russia.
WWII was primarily an economic conflict. Germany could not sustain its economy without the resources it did not have access to within its own territory, and England and France were constantly threatening to cut Germany off. Germany had to go to war to secure economic resources to support its economy, and England had to go to war to defend its economic predominance. Balance of payments tells us more about the leadup to the war than any amount of studying battlefield choices.
WWII was a "don't be racist" contest with golf scoring, and Germany and Japan lost. It's very difficult to look at many of the decisions that were made by conquering German and Japanese armies in the first phases of WWII, and not think to oneself that if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit, maybe they could have gotten some of their conquered peoples to buy into the project a little bit, and then they would have won the war quite easily. Japan stormed into Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor, and they threw out the hated white colonial governments, and then instantly proceeded to behave so much worse that many of the freedom fighters who had been fighting against the European colonial overlords flipped to working with the European colonial overlords. The Japanese could have been recruiting Vietnamese auxilaries to fight against the British and Americans, instead they were unable to exploit Indochina to its greatest extent because of local resistance. If the Nazis had aligned with the Banderites at the start of the war, instead of imprisoning Bandera for most of the war before springing him near the end of the war in a last desperate shot; if the Nazis had aligned with Poland to invade Russia together instead of destroying Poland; if the Nazis had at least made vaguely credible motions in the direction of a future Free Russian state rather than making their exterminationist intent obvious; if the Nazis had utilized their Jewish population properly instead of destroying them in a tremendous waste of human capital. The British Empire and the United States were racist governments at the time, but they were less racist than their enemies and that was enough. Stalin killed millions of Jews, too, but he didn't make explicit his intent to exterminate the populations his armies sought to subdue, putting their backs to the wall. The only way to square the circle is to assume that Hitler actually did believe all that racial superiority stuff, otherwise his actions are inexplicably illogical.
And so on and so forth.
It is possible to draw so many different framings for WWII, that are all perfectly cohesive, and are perfectly adequate explanations for why the war took place. And part of the upshot of this is that the guilt for the war is overdetermined. It's possible to say everyone is at fault. The British are at fault and Stalin is at fault and the Germans are at fault. It was the inevitable result of the avarice of Clemanceau at Versailles, and it was the contingent result of decisions made regarding Czechoslovakia and Poland. There's a ton of different ways to slice it up, but the nature of guilt for the deaths of millions is that they can all slice up a share of guilt that is more than enough for one lifetime.
That all being said, while I love some of Daryl's, he's long been pushing credibility with increasingly edgy contrarian takes, and when you play the oh my aren't I an edgy boy game, it's dangerous to dance this close to power. Tucker Carlson was reported to have significant influence, it is a reasonable attack surface to look at who he has on his show. Daryl himself has been retweeted by JD Vance. These aren't random folks engaging in a touch of edgy trolling on the motte or 4chan, of course this bullshit is going to stir up a kerfuffle. Kulak has not, yet, been a Twitter Main Character for his pas-de-deux with Hitler apologism, because he hasn't yet presented a valid attack surface against mainstream right wing politicians.
I mean, AFAICS you need all of:
On the Japanese side... again, the land stuff is kind of a sideshow. Indeed, the Japanese actually were doing pretty well on land the whole time, at least until the last few days when the Soviets invaded Manchuria. And none of the places they conquered really had the industry to contribute to the sea/air fight out in the Pacific - at best, they could have reallocated manufacturing toward the sea theatre from a calmer land theatre.
Bear in mind that 1940s fission bombs were not all that powerful. They were devastating to Hiroshima because that was a densely packed city of thin wood and paper. The brick/cement buildings of Germany were actually pretty resistant to bombing, which was part of why the strategic bombing campaign never worked as well as the allies hoped. So it's plausible we could have gotten a 1984 style world where they are regularly getting hit by nuclear bombs, but people survive and life goes on.
The most plausible scenario i've seen is where Germany simply avoids declaring war on the USSR, and coordinates better with Japan to avoid provoking the US. Instead they focus on the Mediterranean and taking apart the British Empire. If they could take Malta, Gibralter, and the Suez, that would pretty much lock up the entire med, protecting their southern flank and forcing the British to reroute shipping around Africa. Then they offer to come "liberate" Iraq, Iran, and India, which were all sympathetic to the Axis. At that point it's no longer a "world" war, it's simply a war against the British being fought in the middle east, so there's no particular need for the US or USSR to get involved, and the logistics for the Uk become nightmarish. No need to invade Britain, you can just ignore them, or build up a huge fleet of next-gen type XXI submarines to strangle them.
The problem there is the Japanese oil crunch. With Britain, the Netherlands and the USA all embargoing Japan and guaranteeing each other's colonies, there weren't really a lot of good options for the Japanese. Also, Roosevelt wanted a war and was already giving substantial aid to the British; while Pearl Harbour certainly made things much easier for him, it's not certain that Roosevelt couldn't have dragged the USA in anyway.
(As it actually happened, of course, Hitler was high on meth and wanted to declare war on the USA, so what we're positing here is a saner Hitler as well as the Japanese listening to him.)
Avoiding invading Russia, yeah, that could be done.
If. Historians are split on whether the logistics could be stretched far enough to let Rommel reach the Suez, even with ~unlimited troops due to no Barbarossa.
Not as powerful, no (although hollow pits were considered at Manhattan, just not deployed by war's end). They're not "city off the map" unless the city is made of paper. But they're a hell of a lot more effective than TNT and once the production line had spun up the losses would become unacceptable.
Well, the oil they wanted was in the Dutch east indies, not the American Phillippines. So they could have just gone for that without attacking the USA. I do agree that the US would have likely gotten involved eventually, but just delaying that a bit could have made a difference. Notably, it was Germany that declared war on the US, not the other way around- Hitler wanted to show support for his new ally.
Well, there's no way to know for sure of course. But Malta is a small island. In 1940 it was defended by a grand total of 3 biplanes. So if the Italians had gone for it they probably could have taken it. Or Germany could have taken it in 1942 with greater numbers. Then with Malta gone, Axis shipping in the Meditteranean becomes much safer. Plus with no Barbarossa they'd have the entire air force at their disposal for support, and could focus more resources on building ships, so logistics overall would be better. There's also the option to go after Turkey and/or Spain, opening another land route.
I'm not trying to see this would be easy or guaranteed. But I do think it was possible.
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I have some problems with that statement.
In the subtext, one of the defining features of the Golem is that it is a Jewish creation. If you want to imply that Hitler's rise was the result of him being backed by Jewish interests, please state so outright. Otherwise, a better metaphor might be 'a demon summoned' than 'a golem built'.
Before his rise to power, Hitler was definitely backed by German industrialists. They could see the specter of communism looming, and were seeing Hitler as the strong man who could defeat communism. Industrialists (at least the ones considered proper Germans by the Nazis) mostly fared much better under the Nazis than they would have under communist rule, especially once the anti-capitalist SA was out of the picture. (I guess they had more influence in the Weimar Republic, where they could not be arrested on a whim, but mostly they got to keep their riches as long as they were willing to build tanks when ordered.)
I am unsure how much international backing there was for Hitler in the Weimar time, outside of German expats. I mean, on the one hand he was likely seen as necessary against the commie threat, on the other hand the Western allies had fought a long and bloody war against an expansionist Germany.
Before Hitler became chancellor, communists were strictly anti-Nazi. While united in their disgust at parliamentary democracy, they both had very different and incompatible revolutions in mind for Germany, and both knew that the other side winning would result in their side getting purged and losing.
By contrast, in 1939, Stalin knew that a commie revolution in Germany was not in the cards. It is true that with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he gave a ton of resource aid to Germany which enabled the Blitzkrieg. I am unsure how militarily sound that was as a strategy, in hindsight. I have a hard time imagining Western Allies to decide to enter a land war with Russia to rid the world of communism, so Hitlers defeat of France likely bought the USSR no security.
I am not sure if Nazi Germany ever got significant aid from the Western allies between 33 and 39. At the most, I think that the obligations under the Versailles treaty were not imposed, and he was allowed to amass troops about that treaties limitations.
Of course, both Western allies and the USSR were not in a position to fight a war against Germany in 1933, so Appeasement might have been the best strategy. As the old adage goes, diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice dog' while looking for a bigger stick.
This is true, but Marxists overstate its importance for obvious reasons, and this rubs off on normies who read textbooks written by people who read academic papers by Marxist historians. Germany was not a bourgeoisie-ruled society before WW1 - the Kaiserreich had a functional warrior-aristocracy of men who had von in their names, lived off inherited landed wealth, spent their youths as army officers, and if successful would move into the General Staff, politics or both. The pro-regime middle-class was what we would now call the PMC of civil servants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, Lutheran priests* etc. This PMC group plus rural voters were the base of the DNVP, which was the main right-wing party in the early Weimar Republic.
Hitler's key useful idiots were mostly aristocrats. von Papen had a classic aristocratic career of army followed by politics. von Schleicher and von Hindenberg were career generals. The others were PMC - Ludwig Kass (the Centre Party leader who convinced his party to vote for the Enabling Act) was a Catholic priest. You can argue about whether Hugenberg was PMC or an industrialist, but his background looks more PMC on balance - his father was a civil servant, he did a PhD in economics, worked as a civil servant for 17 years, worked as a salaried manager at Krupp's for 10 years (being made de facto CEO based on a personal intervention by the Kaiser), spent the money he made at Krupp's buying newspapers, and was a press baron by the time he became DNVP leader.
This is false. By 1928 the KPD reliably followed orders from Moscow, and whether Moscow wanted them to actually oppose the Nazis or not depended on the twists and turns of Stalin's foreign policy. During the critical period in 1932-3, Stalin was more worried about the democratic parties restoring a functional western-oriented Germany than he was about a Nazi takeover, so the KPD focussed on trying to take left-wing votes off the SPD and weakening the Weimar government by direct action (occasionally co-operating with Nazi SA or DNVP-aligned Stahlhelm to do so).
The KPD leadership had plans to flee to Moscow if it looked like they were losing. Most of them successfully got out, although party leader Ernst Thalmanm didn't.
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It wasn't a wise strategy, but Stalin did not expect France to fall as quickly as it did -- nobody did.
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While this is true, the biggest reason for Japanese lack of benefit from conquered territories was that it lost the naval war and so the merchant fleet wound up on the bottom of the sea, instead of moving war material(Japan, unlike Germany, didn’t really have a personnel shortage).
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The concept behind Operation Barbarossa hinged on the assumption that the Red Army can be decisively defeated before the autumn rainy season - that is, in a matter of weeks. In that context, it doesn't matter much if the average Ukrainian, Cossack, Chechen, Kalmyk etc. can be won over for the National Socialist cause or not. In the Pacific, the situation was the same i.e. that the US Navy was to be defeated decisively in short order according to Japanese planning (such as it was) so that the Americans have no other option but to sue for peace, because the US population won't want to fight another big war. The sentiments of the average Vietnamese, Filipino, Malay etc. don't matter one iota in that context. (Was there even any meaningful combat in WW2 in Indochina anyway? Between the Japanese and the Allies, that is?)
And that didn't work out, so in the second phase of the war not making the decision to throw away the military and productive value of Poland, the Ukraine, etc would have been really valuable, might have made all the difference. Germany perpetually faced piss-poor productivity from its foreign nationals in armaments factories, largely because they were treated so poorly. Slave labor is less productive than free labor, especially when the slaves are pretty sure they're to-be-executed. Much of Tooze's work covers how the "armaments miracle" was the result of easing (in certain cases) the racist brutality of the Nazi slave labor system. Improve German armaments manufacturing earlier, and it could be the difference.
My understanding is that the plan was to deal a blow to the US Navy that would leave it reeling, seize as much territory as possible to push the defensive ring far from the Japanese homeland as possible, then bleed the Americans for every mile on the way back to Japan, while utilizing the resources controlled as a result of the earlier conquests to fuel the Japanese war machine.
I'll admit my argument is more shaky here, as it is quite likely that once the US got into bombing range of Japan, and certainly once the atom bomb arrived, there was no likelihood of Japanese victory. The possibility of inflicting damage on Japan itself without penetrating the entire defensive front obviates some of the value of the extended defensive ring.
Nevertheless, I'd still argue that significant Japanese resources were wasted on efforts that would not have needed to be made if they had chosen differently.
This raises some questions: when was the most recent time a conqueror seriously benefited from free labor?
My first thought was Alsace-Lorraine. But apparently the economic richness is hindsight bias; Germany originally took it on nationalist and military planning grounds. France took it back for similar reasons. I assume Hitler was eager to tap its manpower and natural resources, but I couldn’t confirm what was actually extracted. Does Wages break down how many rifles, airframes, etc. were sourced from which territories?
Anyway, I think we have to go back further. Plenty of colonization had economic motives, but I’m reluctant to count cases where the free labor was all imported. Not sure about the later colonial banana republics, either. Maybe administrations like the Raj are a better fit.
My point is that free labor is hard to get. Back when the only income was feudal dues, maybe you could reasonably expect a ceded province to improve cash flow. But that was based on the unfree nature of serfdom and the limits of human capital. Add mobility, and your free labor becomes no labor. Raise complexity, and serf labor won’t get you a new airplane.
The states which won WWII benefited from free labor because they weren’t relying on conquered territory. As soon as you start conquering, I think all the good options are off the table.
Depends how we define "Conquest."
If we count the takeover and integration of territory regardless of violence, we'd be talking about Hong Kong going back to China, right?
Before that, we have South Vietnam conquered by North Vietnam, though they would have labeled that as liberation rather than conquest, and they did not benefit solely or immediately.
The USSR did not conquer most of the Eastern Bloc in the sense of integrating them into their territory, but they had effective control over their labor and benefitted from it, though you could also quibble with "free" under Communism.
This is why I think the idea of prc violently taking Taiwan is unlikely. They can't take TSMC, within a few years tsmc would be irrelevant, if it even survived the war. They must non violently absorb Taiwan to benefit.
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At the oldest possible candidate, the Japanese conquest of Korea. There’s almost certainly Soviet examples in the late forties or early fifties, as well, I just don’t know them.
As a borderline example in the 21st century, the junta in Myanmar had been making use of forced labor in territories conquered from the rebels to produce cash resources which financed the war machine.
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Does this not apply to both theatres of the war? The "if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit" hypothetical doesn't bring Einstein and his "Jewish physics" back to Germany.
I wonder what the modern left attitude would have been about the atomic bombing of Bremerhaven or whereever. On the one hand, if you see everything on an oppressor-oppressed axis then it's hard to get more oppressed than "lethally irradiated". On the other hand, literal non-metaphorical Nazis.
Who are white, and therefore not going to have that hint of "Well, the USA was only willing to be that callous out of racism". Which, mind, is a take I think is stupid, but I've seen it more often than you'd think.
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Large numbers of Soviet citizens, mostly Ukrainians, served in the German army as Hiwis. More fought in the SS. The official plan was to move the Russian people off the good land in Western Russia and resettle it with Germans, that necessitated a Free Russian State albeit with much less territory.
Assuming Germany won the war, they'd inevitably find that there just weren't enough Germans to populate the enormous swathes of land they conquered, even including their optimistic reclassifications of the Danes, Dutch and so on as German. This would probably necessitate moderation. The Allies moderated their post-war plans (to render a diminished Germany a deindustrialized wasteland), it's reasonable to assume that a post-war Germany would also moderate.
The Galician SS division wasn't formed until 1943, and the Ukrainian National Committee wasn't recognized as the government of Ukraine until two months before V-E Day. These were desperation moves made by a government already realizing they were on the ropes, compromises with ideology in the face of defeat. Stalingrad was a close fought battle, where a few extra divisions arriving at the right time would have made a difference.
This is to say nothing of the complete destruction of the Polish state.
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My take from Wages of Destruction was that the problem was more short-term. Between war production, the blockade, the bombings, and the linger effects of WW1 and the great depression (plus them just being kind of a backwards low-tech economy to begin with), they were really struggling even to feed their own people. Conquering a bunch of farmland was one of those "yeah, in the long run this will help, but in the long run we're all dead" kind of things. There was so little food to go around, they had to make some hard decisions, and there was a certain cold logic to it. Full rations for the soldiers and key factory workers, half-rations for the civilians and prisoners from the people they liked, slim-to-nil rations for the people they didn't like. But OK, maybe they would have moderated in a hypothetical future where the war was over, the blockade was lifted, and there was plenty of food to go around.
Huh?
More horses than tractors
Do you actually think that counted as backwards and low-tech back then in the European continent?
Welll, what's the point of comparison? Compared to the UK and USA they were decidedly backwards. Compared to Russia and Eastern Europe they were more advanced. Compared to the rest of the continent... I don't know, that's a tough question. Probably not a huge difference, but France and the low countries might have been a bit more advanced since they weren't suffering from WW1 reparations. I know the Germans seized a lot of material from the occupation of those countries, which was absolutely critical for them to keep their war economy going.
At any rate, its important to keep in mind just how pre-modern this country was. It was not, for most average people, a country of cars driving through cities the way Nazi propaganda films made it look. It was a country of people living in rural farms, where they didn't have electricity or radios, and had to take a train to the nearest city if they wanted to watch a news reel.
If someone is basing their view of the German tech-level on propaganda and WWII Hollywood action films, I can see why you might want to correct that. But if you fight propaganda with propaganda, you're not going to end up with a more accurate picture of the world, you're going to snap right back around to something just as inaccurate, but from the other side. Like, yeah, people don't understand how pre-modern Germany was, but that's not because of anything specific to Germany, it's because they don't realize how pre-modern the world was at the time.
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Compared to Italy, Spain, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary? Very certainly not.
Not even Nazi propaganda films portray it as a country of average people in cars.
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Relatively speaking? Yes.
But Europe includes the Mediterranean region, Poland, the Balkans etc. as well.
Fair point, but still. Germany was if not "backwards" at least lagging significantly behind the UK, France, Italy, and the Scandinavian nations on multiple metrics.
One of the reasons so many Chezk guns and Chzek Tanks show up at the battle of France is that they were broadly equivalent if not superior to anything the Germans had been able to produce domestically at the time and unlike the German gear they could be produced in bulk.
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Exactly what it says on the tin.
Things like the tiger tank and various "wunderwaffe" get most of the attention but the Wehrmacht and the wider German economy was still very much a horse and mule drawn affair going into WWII and this significantly contributed to thier food shortages.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...
Sure, I can buy the Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector, to the detriment of civilians, but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense. Forget about the Wunderwaffen, tell me how the horses and mules produce, in terms of raw numbers, enough tanks, fighters, bombers, and their respective munitions, to conquer France, challenge Britain, and drive deep into the Soviet Union at the same time!
...and yet it was so. In 1938 there were an estimated 2.5 million operational motor vehicles (cars, trucks, tractors, locomotives, etc...) in Germany servicing a population of approximately 68 million. IOW a per capita rate of 0.036
Compare that to an estimated 30 million vehicles servicing a population of 130 million people (a per capita rate of 0.230) in the US.
"Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector" doesn't quite capture how heavily skewed it was, or just how hard it ended up screwing them.
Whats that old Napoleon quote? Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
One of several reasons the Germans lost is that they put lots of time and energy into developing fancy toys and a comparatively little energy into developing the ability to produce them and keep them in the fight.
Then please step me through how these horses and mules built something to the tune of 100K aircraft - roughly the same number that the Brits did. Did the Germans use some Aryan über-mules, or were the Brits fake-industrialized as well?
What is there to step through? Nothing in the design of a Messerschmitt precludes fueling it from the back of a horse-cart.
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The Germans had trains and barges to connect the mines and factories in their own territories and move goods and people. This doesn't help your army on the march.
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Yeah, the consensus(?) in this chain of comments appears to be bizarre.
It's true that the British and American land armies were fully mechanized in WW2, mainly because they were relatively small. The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, wasn't. And yes, the peasantry was something like a quarter of the whole German population. But to conclude from that it was a backwards low-tech economy to begin with is really far-fetched.
The Toozian argument is that, before WWII, a large portion of the German economy remained focused on 'conventional' production, matters like textiles, farm labor, mining, etc, while more advanced or complicated technologies were either unavailable or made up smaller portions of the full sector. The Nazis were very much able to exploit this; despite often tragicomedic levels of incompetence, there were so many low-hanging fruit in a country with a lot of industrial technology but not anywhere near as much industrial economy that they could pick winners.
Tooze focuses a lot on textiles as one particular example: in 1933, the German textile industry was a vast part of both German labor force and total import balance sheet, but it was also not especially advanced or unusually automated by the standards of its time. Nazi policy squeezed the entire sector hard (Tooze has a chart showing nearly a 15% drop in total employment in the sector), and at the same time pushed the remainder toward more emphasis on synthetic fibers and final productions, mostly a side effect of their autarky policies.
Similarly, while agriculture was a massive portion of the German economy in 1933, with just over a quarter of the working populace, much of these people were just barely above sustenance farming on tiny parcels of land, while agricultural automation and electrification had stalled badly post-WWI. Germany had pioneered artificial nitric acid and ammonium nitrate during WWI (and the Haber process was a good part of how Germany had been able to fight as long as it did), but there was no German 'green revolution'; these technologies were focused almost entirely into the military, industrial, and transportation sectors.
((To its credit, this lack of focus on agricultural automation and efficient use of labor is probably why some local populaces in conquered territories were supposed to be useful after invasion... as, uh... 'not-quite-voluntary labor'. So not much credit.))
By 1938, the urban areas and military matters had been heavily revamped, but large sectors were basket cases, both urban and otherwise -- Tooze highlights the extent that rural agriculture was often overlooked in the buildup with a lengthy segue about Nazi ponderings to encourage farm labor that, after politics hit, turned into a counterproductive tax on the dairy farms somehow. And while Tooze doesn't focus on it, a lot of the Nazi policies emphasizing centralized control of the electricity infrastructure pushed toward urbanization and against agricultural automation.
((That said, I do think Tooze's argument overlooks the extent this was a choice. Tooze says:
But, to borrow from Hellsing Abridged, if you call heads, it matters what face the coin falls. The liberal fallacy about utilization of national resources not only ended up working in Mexico, it ended up working in no small part thanks to pre-Nazi German technology!))
Ignoring the US for a moment, where else was there an agricultural sector that was more mechanized and advanced than the German in 1933?
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That's the thing, they didn't. They frequently outran their logistics, had an impossible time recovering damaged tanks, and almost never had enough of them in the first place.
The conquest of Poland resulted in a lot more casualties than normally acknowledged, and the invasion of France was a nearer-run thing than you'd expect. For the first few years of the war they managed to do wonders, but behind the propaganda reels of blitzkrieging tanks those early fights cost them a lot of their best infantry
This is all with the caveat that I barely even have a passing interest in history... but it's just not adding up.
You can tell me all about how they outran their logistics, and couldn't recover their tanks, but I still don't see how we get to a 6 year war, that got as far as it did, if one of the belligerents is an economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case. Either all of them are, and the fight went the way it did, for as long as it did, because they were more or less evenly matched, or this portrayal is itself propaganda.
My understanding is not that Germany was some sort of backwards pre-industrial nation. Germany was a technological innovator in many fields. It was a steel producing giant with a highly industrialized economy. German economy had some unique, and other not so unique, financial issues following WW1 but I don't know quite as much about that.
The German military more heavily relied on horse power due to oil shortages and supply allocation compared to its peers. All nations were limited by fuel to some extent. Germany to such an extent that it structured major parts of its strategy around the acquisition of oil sources and did lots of science to help alleviate fuel concerns. This author has written a dissertation on oil, Germany, and WW2. If Nazi Germany was built on Texas, or modern Saudi Arabia, it would have had lots of more motorized elements and supply. It could have fed its offensive operations for much longer, committed to more of them, and the big picture strategy may have be different.
It would have built a lot more trucks and had less horses. Whether more fuel and trucks wins the war for them is up to whatever fanciful counter-factual you'd like to imagine.
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Both Germany and the USSR primarily used horses and mules for logistics in WW2 (about 2.5 million horses were used by the Germans, about 3.5 million used by the Soviets). This is why the US providing tons of trucks to the Soviets (and tons of fuel) under Lend-Lease was such a huge deal. Both sides tended to film their more highly mechanized divisions for their propaganda videos, which is why you don't see the horses in WW2 footage too much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_World_War_II
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so this is actually one of the really interesting parts of Wages of Destruction. It drives home the incredible degree to which Nazi Germany was this backwards economy pulling off a Potemkin village of industrialization. I'm recalling from memory but if i recall correctly
and finally not enough steel for everything. there's just not enough steel for construction, fortifications, tanks, airplanes, ships, & ammunition. Let alone the domestic economy. And so one of the central ideas in Wages of Destruction is that the Nazi state uses this scarcity of steel and turns it into a means of political control. Dolling out steel here and there to favour one industry/military faction over another.
The Nazi's take this total control and use it to focus everything into one area or another the result is visible, legible, & shocking. But it's going all out for short term sugar highs over and over again. And the underlying health of the economy is nowhere near that of the US, UK, or France. And it doesn't have the comparative scale of the capacity of the USSR.
I kinda have a problem with this. How do you do 6 years of basketcase "Potemkin industrialization", and proceed to whoop the ass of half of Europe?
That's a very reasonable question! The mainstream account focuses on the dangerous potential and near victory of the Nazi's. It also tends of overlook economics in favour of operational accounts of the war. With a further focus on the sexy attention getting offensives of 1939-41 (42 for some).
For reading I would combine Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction alongside Robert Citino's "Death of the Wehrmacht". The two compliment each other quite well. Death of the Wehrmacht deals with the military from the start up to 1942. His subsequent books The Wehrmacht Retreats for 1943 and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand are also engaging and accessible for average war nerd.
If you'd prefer the cliffnotes version here are some youtube video's for each.
Citino
Tooze
Tooze economics highlight the constraints the domestic economy puts on the war effort. How resource & industrial capacity constraints affected decision making. Citino's account emphasizes continuity with the old Prussia tradition and the concept of Bewegungskrieg (Maneuver Warfare) over the incoherent concept of Blitzkrieg (a journalistic invention). Citino's account also explains why Prussia developed such a tradition, namely on account of the comparative poverty of Prussia and the awful geographic situation it was placed in. To quote from the first source online i could find that summarizes it neater than I can
I'd ask you to consider it this way: Germany starts off by fighting a bunch of small doomed states. Victory over Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, & the Netherlands are not prestigious victories. They are assumptions. However the real impressive victory is over France and while this is an accomplishment it comes from a mix of French failure and German operational art. And it's an incredible upset that shocks the world!
But it does not come from a well calibrated economic engine developed by the Nazi's which overpowers the French in an attritional warfare contrasting each countries total industrial capacity. And the moment it becomes a match up between the other real players on the world stage, the UK, US, & USSR, the Nazi war economy simply isn't capable of handling the challenge.
also here's another great video by John Parshall of Shattered Sword fame comparing the Nazi tank production economics to that of the Soviet Union.
Parshall
flipping back through it there is a great slide that really highlights things. From 43 minutes in:
I would suggest that having one of your major tank facilities only able to crank out 2 tanks a day while fighting the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US might not be a sign that they had the best possible economic/industrial set up before the war.
I've been pointing to this link throughout this thread, that I lifted from Wikipedia for a quick sanity check. They seem, at first glance, roughly on par with Britain. Those are not basket-case numbers no matter which way you slice it, though obviously not enough to withstand the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US, and I still don't see how WWII even gets started on Potemkin industrialization, let alone gets as far as it did.
This whole thing feels like playing zoom/pan/crop with facts to paint a very specific picture.
The numbers in that link include factories in occupied lands. The Czech Republic in particular was very industrialized. E.g. France was making 1400 planes/month for Germany: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft9m3nb6g1&chunk.id=d0e5350&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e5350&brand=ucpress This is obvious when you notice the Czechs continued operating the same factories, exporting thousands of BF 109s.
Wikipedia shows the same numbers in more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_production Note how in 1941 the UK had almost 2x the production.
Germany couldn't mass produce a 4 engine bomber; even their larger 2 engine bombers like the He 177 had tortured developments. The UK made at least 20k. Why did Germany's 1944 aircraft production soar to 40k while the Western allies lowered production? Germany had been retooling captured factories, moving facilities around etc.
So when you talk in another thread about "Potemkin" production, you are making the mistake of equating single engine fighters with 4 engine bombers with far more advanced engines etc. Germany was never able to even replace the BF-109 (40,000 built) and couldn't retool existing factories to e.g. the FW 190, which struggled at altitude. The Ta 152, with an engine capable of bringing it up to the Western bombers was only produced 69 times. Britain continuously created new planes (e.g. the Firefly) and phased out older types (e.g. the Defiant) besides the famous Spitfires and Huricanes.
More damning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Land_forces
Although this conflates Canada etc. with Britain, 10x "other vehicles", 1.5 million compared to 150k for Germany. 3x the artillery...
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I am not making my argument in bad faith. I stopped, considered your question and considered it legitimate. I tried to figure out which books would be best for an interested reader. I found talks the authors gave on youtube to summarize their arguments in case you didn't want to read Tooze's dry tome of a book. The book is ~800 pages long. It is dry. The talk is an hour & a 45. Believing that mere economics does not determine wars I recommend the most accessible operational history of the Germans to explain how they have a culture of achieving military victory inspite of poverty. I then remembered an illustrative case and provided a timestamped link to take you straight there.
You respond in 20 minutes, accuse me of bad faith, and provide as counter example a table of raw military production figures without consideration of any other economic factors.
I cannot help someone who, when provided extensive resources handmade specifically to make things easy, cannot even be bothered to look.
To anyone onlookers who've gotten this far. At least watch the Tooze video. See if my position is distortionary for yourself.
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I'm aware of at least one thing on the his list that is 100% wrong. One reason the invasion of France was so successful was thst they DID do a great job inventing small high quality radios.
They were used extensivly by the military and by the civilians. I believe that right before the war there were more Volksempfänger radios in Germany than total radios in the rest of europe. France had almost none. There wasnt even a radio at French military headquarters! They needed to relay messages via motorcycle messengers because the first thing germans did was shoot out the phone lines with air power...
German radios were never particularly good, but unlike the Poles they actually had some, and unlike the French they trained thier regular troops in thier use.
What metric are we going when judging the German economy, production levels, or production quality? Because I'm seeing a lot of picking and choosing depending on what's convenient (Wunderaffen are irrelevant, it's all about production / The number of German radios is irrelevant, it's that they never were that good). If you want to say "well, obviously it should be a combination of these factors", then I'd propose that the country that Blitzkrieged France got the trade-offs right, rather than the other way around.
This whole meme is just bizarre to me. Like, if you want to say that the German economy had fatal flaws that ultimately cost them the war, that's one thing, but it's insane to claim it was a low-tech backwater.
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Yeah, I think I'm starting to see what's going on here. That point said "international market" so "ho hum, while it may be true that Germany had more radios than the rest of Europe put together, but other countries weren't buying German radios, so we weren't lying".
This is starting to get all the smell of "it's literally impossible to tame zebras" that Jared Diamond spawned.
Idk about radios but you can read the aforementioned book to get all the details about backwardness and ridiculous inefficiency of nazi economy. They had their moments because their opponents weren't much better and for most of the war their main one(USSR) had economical system even more backward and inefficient.
It's funny that you mention Diamond zebras thing because it's one of the greatest examples of WNs not being able to read. Diamond specifically makes a point of distinctioning between taming and domesticating animals. Elephants were tamed many times throught history but they aren't domesticated because it is hard to engage in selection with that animal. Also, he again writes not about abstract possibility of domestication, but of it feasibility and desurebility for Neolithic tribesman on large time scales that are necessary for this. Of course in modern times some Siberian biologists can and did domesticated foxes in half of century but I don't think we should consider native European population more dumb because they didn't do it thousands of years ago.
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1, 2, and 3 are not all that different given the economics and politics of the.
Basically every wealthy country followed the same idea, of not just free-market capitalism, but imperalistic capitalism. The way to get rich was to conquer some 3rd countries, take their resources, and then sell them back manufactured goods at an inflated price. Then you use your high-tech manufacturing to dominate the world, forever.
Britain especially, but also France, Dutch, Belgium, and some others had all emerged as "winners" of the great imperialism game of the 19th century. They had nice little empires for themselves, and were raking in the cash. Germany, eastern Europe, Italy, and Japan were "losers"- potentially strong nations which had lost their chance to grab an empire and were now falling behind. Russia was sort of a weird case where it had a ton of land and resources but was still undeveloped and uncolonized, so it had the chance to either emerge as a great power in its own right or get colonized by someone else.
Once you're in that kind of system, there's an obvious dividing line for how the alliances would shake out. Britain et. al. wanted to maintain the status quo of capitalism. Germany and the others still wanted to do capitlism, but rearrange the map a bit to grab some colonies for themselves. Russia wanted a whole different system where they could develop and be left alone. Nobody was thinking "let's just develop our service sector and leave the 3rd world alone in peace" because that just wasn't how people at the time thought, at all.
It's weird to say this about a country that very aggressively tried to invade almost everybody around itself.
The Soviet idea of empire wasn't a perfect analogue to English or French or Dutch imperialism... but it wasn't that far off either!
Fair point. It's easy to think of "the USSR" as being a singular country, but it really wasn't. It was the Russian Empire. So you could slide them into that side of "winners of the global imperialism game" alongside the English, French, Dutch, etc. But they were kind of different in that they didn't have any wealthy, 1st-world "core" to the country the way those other countries did.
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