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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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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

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.

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.

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.

them just being kind of a backwards low-tech economy to begin with

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.

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.

Compared to the rest of the continent... I don't know, that's a tough question.

Compared to Italy, Spain, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary? Very certainly not.

It was not, for most average people, a country of cars driving through cities the way Nazi propaganda films made it look.

Not even Nazi propaganda films portray it as a country of average people in cars.

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.

One thing I never really appreciated was that the Czech 38(t) chassis was in production right until the end of the war as a tank destroyer and mobile howitzer. I only ever knew it as the best starting tank for a Steel Panthers campaign.

The Germans really snowballed with the diplomatic takeovers right up until poland. Huge value in some of those wins.

The very mundane explanation for that is that after annexing Czechia and Moravia in 1939 the Germans instantly got their hands on enough weaponry of all sorts to equip roughly 45 divisions.

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!

but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense.

...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.

I would imagine that the sheer scale implies the use of some sort of mass transportation system, like a railway, to deliver the raw resources needed for their production. Also factories. But if Tooze says it's mules all the way down, I guess I better trust the experts.

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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.

I mean, even there that's not particularly backwards and low-tech for that era. Especially if you look at the amount of infrastructure in the east, and the German's chronic problems with just finding enough oil, it might even start looking like a rational choice.

But in any case, the reason I did a double-take, and an now at the stage where I'll die on this hill, is that they were talking about the economy, not army logistics.

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 see [settlement inside German territories] as a fundamental solution to Germany's problems was [perceived by Hitler as] a dangerous illusion. It was one more instance of the liberal fallacy that Germany could prosper through an ever more intensive utilization of its national resources.

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?

When it comes to mechanization, he gives the US and Australia pre-WWII, which basically just means the US. I don't know for post-1938, since Tooze doesn't get into the numbers for that and I've had trouble finding any serious efforts to pull apart the results of policy from the results of everything with wheels getting blown up. Much of the productivity difference beyond that is more prosaic: German agriculture focused more than the typical country on staple crops than cash crops or animal products, run by small and often inefficient farms, which had major labor shortages, while dependent on external feedstocks of fertilizers and vulnerable to bad weather.

But Tooze's argument is more:

What is more surprising, from our early twenty-first-century perspective, is Germany's marked inferiority relative to Britain. According to Clark, Britain not only had a higher per capita income than Germany; he believed that despite the much smaller size of the British population, the British economy was still somewhat larger than that of Germany. This conclusion has been modified by more recent calculations. We now believe that the German economy in the 1930s was slightly larger. However, the claim that per capita incomes in Germany were substantially lower than in Britain has proved robust. This difference was clearly not attributable to any qualitative difference in the productivity of British and German manufacturing. In virtually every industrial sector, German and British firms were closely matched. What dragged Germany down was its large and highly inefficient agricultural sector and the substantial tail of small shops and workshops in the craft and service sectors. In the 1930s productivity per head in German agriculture was only half that in German industry, at a time when more than 9 million people were still employed in farming.

The comparison is unfair, and Tooze knows it's unfair -- the British economy shrunk its agricultural sector by having someone else do it, in a way that post-WWI and pre-Nazi Germany wasn't going to be allowed to do. But it's the argument he makes.

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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.

I see nothing objectionable in what you said here, but it doesn't sound to me like this is what the other posters were getting at.

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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

Both Germany and the USSR primarily used horses and mules for logistics in WW2

Yeah, and so did France as per your own link. The UK got early on the mechanization train - good for them - but that does not mean that everyone who didn't is a primitive economic basketcase, because that would include practically the entire rest of the world, and the word loses it's meaning. The second issue is that all that mechanization somehow didn't seem to help them significantly outperform Germany in terms of production. Those numbers should not be possible if this portrayal was accurate.

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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

  • an ongoing housing crisis sucking up peoples meager wages
  • bizarre financialization schemes to trick people into buying vehicles they'd never get
  • the inability to create a decent radio that could compete in the international market
  • the average german still being so poor that their diet lacks sufficient protein
  • lack of mechanization on farms
  • large swaths of the economy still being literally small land owning peasant farmers
  • subsequently an obsessions with land inheritance laws as early at 1933.
  • price controls on both ends of the market for the purpose of political support.
  • lack of enough labour for the farms requiring requisition/corvee labour/slavery
  • still not enough food to create a net calorie balance

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.

It drives home the incredible degree to which Nazi Germany was this backwards economy pulling off a Potemkin village of industrialization.

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

Frederick the Great’s Prussia was a small resource poor kingdom, surrounded by more powerful states. To survive, its army’s military culture became one based on initiative at all costs. When a Prussian commander found the enemy, he attacked. The odds faced did not matter, while other forces converged on the battle. The goal was always a quick victory because Prussia could not survive a long war. As Citino highlights, taking a pre-industrial age concept of war and applying it to a 20th Century war of material worked as long as the enemy did not have time to draw upon their resources. Once the Soviet Union and the United States were in the war, Germany was up against the world’s titans of industry, but its Army’s concept of war was still mired in an age of lesser production. German commanders did not have any other plan nor was it possible for them to distil one. The blinders of culture ruled all decision-making.

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:

On paper one the Henschel production facilities should be capable of producing 240-360 units. The highest monthly production goal was 95. The highest monthy production ever achieved is 104. For the majority of the lifespan of the Tiger they were averaging 60 tanks a month. 2 tanks a day.

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 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...

Thanks for addressing my argument directly. While that does force me to readjust somewhat, I'm not sure it's enough to go all the way and vindicate the portrayal of Germany that the other posters have put forward. So before we continue I just want to make clear what I am, and am not arguing for.

What I'm NOT saying: Germany was Aryan Wakanda, the most advanced nation on Earth that only lost because they were outnumbered.

What I AM saying is: Germany was not a backwards and low-tech economy. While not the most advanced in the world, it was easily in the top 10, if not the top 5 most advanced nations on the planet. I don't think this is particularly due to the Nazis coming up with some brilliant formula to manage their country, quite the opposite in fact, I think national socialism was quite a bit of a clusterfuck. In fact I'm somewhat bemused at the idea that Tooze discovered something new, or cleared up some misconception, when these arguments were being made since the war started. The Nazis simply inherited way too much capital for the portrayal as backwards, low-tech, and Potemkin-industrialized to stick (in fact, I'll take a wild guess that that Czech industrial infrastructure was largely built by Germans as well).

I accept that the numbers I gave conflated the quality of the equipment being produced, and that the UK and US advanced quicker and performed during the course of the war, but I don't think that's relevant to the arguments being made in the course of this conversation. Achieving the level of production for even these simpler aircraft would have been impossible without a strong industrial base. If you could pull that off while being backwards and low-tech, Poland would have boasted of a similarly-sized and equipped air force.

I concede that the numbers also included external territories, and thus overestimated German performance. It was, after all, a simple sanity check. But if we drill down, do you think we'll find a backwards and low-tech country, or one of the most industrialized ones at the time?

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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.

Sorry, if my antagonism / frustration is directed at anyone, it's more at people like Tooze.

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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.

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.

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.

The problem with this argument is that it would require Britain to be a backwater as well, because their production was pretty much on-par, and at that point what does "backwater" even mean?

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.

That doesn't change the fact that following the publishing of his book, lot's of people were running around saying that you can't tame zebras, which is a pretty good analogue for this situation, because I expect "Wages of Destruction" to be full of strictly correct statements painting a false picture.

The other issue is Diamond was playing fast and loose with his definitions. If memory serves, under the one he gave every animal subject to Mendelian heritability is domesticable. Then he kind-of-sort-of implied that for an animal to be domesticable, tameness would have to be hereditary, but never outright said it, because it would violate the definition. Then he tried using an experiment that ran for all of 6 years to prove that zebras are impossible to domesticate.

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.

I'm not into calling any population "dumb", but if it was so impractical, why was one the first thing done by Europeans, when they showed up, to tame them and use them for transport? I think it was more practical in the neolithic times, then when we already started seeing the beginnings of motorization.

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