site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28511 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

Its not that they didn't have cars, trucks, or locomotives at all. It's that they had so few of them.

And yes a good part of the blame goes to the the steel shortage described by @WestphalianPeace but the simple facts remain.

Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.

More comments

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.

Correlli Barnett's works, however, paint a rather unflattering picture of the British war economy, don't they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlli_Barnett#The_Pride_and_Fall_Sequence

More comments

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.

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.

You allude a couple times that you don't believe Germany was an "economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case." I believe you are correct. Oil and fuel shortage is one alternative explanation for "why does this technologically advanced nation still uses horses when its peers do not?" It is one of the most straight forward explanations, even.

Maybe it fits better elsewhere, or nowhere at all, but you say you have no interest in history so you're a juicy mark for information you did not ask for.

More comments

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.

but that does not mean that everyone who didn't is a primitive economic basketcase

Ah, well I don't agree with those other posters' assessment there. I was just pointing out that Germany (and the Soviets) used far more livestock for their logistics than you would be led to believe from just seeing random photos/footage of their militaries in WW2

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?

it was easily in the top 10

Oh, definitely. It was tied for 2 when the war started: https://i.redd.it/wyaw5ffttz871.jpg or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)#1830%E2%80%931938_(Bairoch)

Or per capita: between 10th (1929) 6th (1937) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Here's some rambling detail:

Really, everything's a comparison to the US with its cartoonish relative economic strength. My personal takeaway of their economy: Germany took out massive loans, made fake money (Mefo bills etc.), invested almost everything into the military and were forced to start the war early, lest they default.

I have seen cool figures for this, but don't want to dig now, here's a video-graph: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UrUp5Rm_Ncw?si=bgnTAdqvsmnJ6S9v&t=227 I don't quite trust those numbers, but meh. They suggest Germany'd have massive overmatch in Europe (or a lot of embezzlement), which makes sense (since they steamrolled everyone). I'm unsure to what extent it presents/exposes difficult issues like training etc. where longer investments pay off (vs. just buying a bunch of equipment today.) On the other hand, it shows the German citizens were using less of their productivity for themselves, such that life in the UK was perhaps 40-60% "richer". This can make sense in some ways, perhaps exposing the huge infrastructure projects which didn't have civilian use (road network but no cars...)

I dug into this some years, ago, and learned German industry largely rejected assembly lines, struggled to make interchangeable parts (thus making new vehicles to arm new units, instead of supplying veteran units, though weak transportation infrastructure also played a role), wouldn't share designs such that each company would build its own model and its allies would have to develop their own equipment from scratch. And yet, that was still better than most. It's really a world away from our ideas of modern industry or what the US was doing. It's hard for many to realize how close we are to the drudgery of subsistence farming most of our ancestors did in the last 1-200 years.

Czech industrial infrastructure was largely built by Germans

This is a big topic. Short summary: The main industrial centers were in Czech lands with fewer Germans (the Sudetenland was mountainous and poor.) However those Czechs had largely German speaking ancestors 100 years prior. The national revival saw the language spread in the cities etc. Czech leadership in Austria(-Hungary) drove industrialization harder than in Austria itself! Austria, for whatever reason, got stuck in the first industrial revolution (steam and water power etc.) but was behind even Hungary by 1880 in the second industrial revolution (electrification, trains, standardization). In 1918, Czechoslovakia had 3/4 of the former empire's industrial capacity. Slovakia was extremely poor, however; driving the statistics down. To accentuate the issue of identity, though German townfolk became Czech over time, rich Czechs became Germans. Škoda was born to well to do (Czech) peasants (doctor and politician), founded a huge factory, but his son identified as German! Indeed, as Germany in WWII, so Austria-Hungary in WWI. Why is Austria-Hungary, a more industrialized country than France, considered so backwards?

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.

I don't know the full extent of your knowledge of WW2. We could spend all day speaking past each other. You've got military production figures on hand from an archived source. I do take that seriously as more than the average person.

If you are interested, if you think the case is at least intriguing then please, at least watch the youtube videos. If you're convinced afterwards that I'm not arguing in bad faith then consider the books. Citino's books are actually rapt reading. Tooze is dry as a bone but if you can get past the first bit about manipulation of exchange rates then it becomes more engaging. The exchange rates chapters really do suck. It's worth it to get past them. I listened to it on audible and digested it over the course of a month. Because you get eye popping accounts of daily economic life like the following. Bolding & titles added by me

On the inability to stop a housing crisis in peacetime.

"Facing a continuing problem of overcrowding in the cities, in 1935 the Reich Labour Ministry launched an alternative vision of National Socialist housing in the form of so-called Volkswohnungen. Stripped of any conception of settlement or any wider ambition of connecting the German population to the soil, the Volkswohnungen were to provide no-frills urban housing for the working class, built according to the first projections for as little as 3,000-3,500 Reichsmarks. Hot running water, central heating and a proper bathroom were all ruled out as excessively expensive. Electricity was to be provided but only for lighting. Each housing unit was to be subsidized by Reich loans of a maximum of 1,300 Reichsmarks. Rent was to be set at a level which did not exceed 20 per cent of the incomes of those at the bottom of the blue-collar hierarchy, or between 25 and 28 Reichsmarks per month.

To achieve this low cost, however, the Volkswohnungen were to be no larger than 34 to 42 square metres. Though this was practical it was far from satisfying the propagandists of Volksgemeinschaft. The Goebbels Ministry refused to accept that accommodation of such a poor standard deserved the epithet 'Volkswohnung' and the DAF insisted that the minimal dimensions for a working-class apartment should be 50 to 70 square metres, sufficient to allow a family to be accommodated in three or four rooms.

But, as experience showed, the Labour Ministry's costings were in fact grossly over-optimistic. By 1939 the permissible cost of construction even for small Volkswohnungen had had to be raised to 6,000 Reichsmarks, driving rents to 60 Reichsmarks per month and thus pricing even this basic accommodation out of the popular rental market. The very most that working-class families were willing to pay was 35 Reichsmarks per month. Instead of the 300,000 per year that the Labour Ministry had intended, construction on only 117,000 Volkswohnungen was started between 1935 and 1939. As in the case of the Volkswagen, what Hitler's regime could not resolve was the contradiction between its aspirations for the German standard of living and the actual purchasing power of the population. But as in the case of the Volkswagen this did not prevent the D AF from espousing a Utopian programme of future construction.

By the late 1930s, the official ideal of 'people's housing' was a large family apartment of at least 74 square metres, fully electrified, with three bedrooms, one each for parents, male and female children. At the same time it was estimated that an apartment built to the DAF specification would cost in the order of 14,000 Reichsmarks, 40 per cent more even than those constructed by the Weimar Republic. The limitations of German family budgets, however, demanded that these generous apartments were to be provided to the Volksgenossen at monthly rents of no more than 30 Reichsmarks. In part, the costs would simply have to be borne by the Reich." - Wages of Destruction, pg 161

On the inability to produce cars economically in peacetime

In July 1936, the project began to slip definitively out of the hands of German industry. After a successful demonstration on the Obersalzberg on 11 July 1936 Hitler decided that Porsche's car was to be built, not in any of the existing car factories in Germany, but in a new special-purpose plant. Hitler claimed that this could be constructed for 80-90 million Reichsmarks. The factory was to have a capacity of 300,000 cars per annum and deliveries were to begin in time for the International Motor Show in early 1938. Faced with the impossibility of meeting the 1,000 Reichsmarks target on commercial terms, it seems that Germany's private car industry was on the whole content to see Porsche and his troublesome project transferred to the state sector. As a commercial project the VW was not viable. A factory built through the compulsory conscription of private business, along Brabag lines, would damage the entire industry. Far better to use public funds, or rather the funds of the German Labour Front (DAF). This suggestion seems to have come from Franz Joseph Popp, the founder of BMW, who also sat on the supervisory board at Daimler-Benz. Popp suggested that the DAF should take on the Volkswagen as a not-for-profit project. Non-profit status would qualify the factory for tax concessions that would help to cut the final price of the car. More importantly, from the point of view of industry, it would allow the sale of Volkswagens to be limited exclusively to the blue-collar membership of the DAF, thus reserving the profitable middle-class car market for the private manufacturers. The leadership of the DAF jumped at the chance. As Robert Ley, the leader of the DAF, later put it, the party in 1937 took over where private industry on account of its 'short sightedness, malevolence, profiteering and stupidity' had 'completely failed'.

In May 1937, with payments to Porsche and his design team totalling 1.8 million Reichs- marks, the industry cut its losses and ended its association with the VW project. On 28 May 1937 Porsche and his associates founded the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (Gezuvor). A year later, construction began on Porsche's factory at Fallersleben in central Germany. In October 1938, along with Fritz Todt and the aircraft designers Willy Messerschmitt and Ernst Heinkel, Porsche was awarded Hitler's alternative to the Nobel Prize, the German National Prize. The basic question, however, remained unsolved. How could the Volkswagen be produced at a price affordable to the majority of Germans? The DAF claimed that the Volkswagen was now to be promoted in conformity with Nazi ideology as a tool of social policy rather than profit. However, it too lacked any coherent system for financing the project. From the outset it was clear that the capital costs of building the plant would never be paid off by the sale of cars priced at 990 Reichsmarks per vehicle. The construction of the plant would therefore have to be financed through other than commercial means. The DAF, which had inherited the substantial business operations of Germany's trade unions, had assets in 1937 estimated to be as much as 500 million Reichsmarks. It also commanded a huge annual flow of contributions from its 20 million members. However, the demands of constructing the VW plant were enormous. Rather than the 80-90 million Reichsmarks originally mooted by Hitler, Porsche's planning now envisioned the construction of the largest motor vehicle factory in the world. The first phase, to reach a capacity of 450,000 cars per annum, was costed at 2.00 million Reichsmarks. In its third and final phase the plant was to reach an annual output of 1.5 million cars, enough to out-produce even Henry Ford's River Rouge facility. Investment on this scale placed huge demands on the DAF. The initial tranche of 50 million Reichsmarks to start work on the factory could only be raised by a fire sale of office buildings and other trade union assets seized after May Day 1933. Another 100 million were raised by over-committing the funds of the DAF's house bank and the DAF's insurance society.

The cars themselves were to be paid for by the so-called 'VW saving scheme'. Rather than providing its customers with loans to purchase their cars, the DAF conscripted the savings of future Volkswagen owners. To purchase a Volkswagen, customers were required to make a weekly deposit of at least 5 Reichsmarks into a DAF account on which they received no interest. Once the account balance had reached 750 Reichs- marks, the customer was entitled to delivery of a VW. The DAF mean- while achieved an interest saving of 130 Reichsmarks per car. In addition, purchasers of the VW were required to take out a two-year insurance contract priced at 200 Reichsmarks. The VW savings contract was non-transferable, except in case of death, and withdrawal from the contract normally meant the forfeit of the entire sum deposited. Remarkably, 270,000 people signed up to these contracts by the end of 1939 and by the end of the war the number of VW-savers had risen to 340,000. In total, the DAF netted 275 million Reichsmarks in deposits. But not a single Volkswagen was ever delivered to a civilian customer in the Third Reich. After 1939, the entire output was reserved for official uses of various kinds. Most of Porsche's half-finished factory was turned over to military production. The 275 million Reichsmarks deposited by the VW savers were lost in the post-war inflation. After a long legal battle, VW's first customers received partial compensation only in the 1960s. But even if the war had not intervened, developments up to 1939 made clear that the entire conception of the 'people's car' was a disastrous flop. To come even remotely close to achieving the fabled target of 990 Reichsmarks per car, the enormous VW plant had to produce vehicles at the rate of at least 450,000 per annum. This, how- ever, was more than twice the entire current output of the German car industry and was vastly in excess of all the customers under contract by the end of 1939. Assuming a production of 'only' 250,000 vehicles per annum - which was significantly more than the German market could bear - the average cost per car was in excess of 2,000 Reichsmarks, resulting in a loss of more than 1,000 Reichsmarks per car at the official price. Furthermore, even priced at 990 Reichsmarks the VW was out of reach of the vast majority of Germans. A survey of the 300,000 people saving towards a VW in 1942 revealed that on average VW savers had an annual income of c. 4,000 Reichsmarks, placing them comfortably in the top tier of the German income distribution. Blue-collar workers, the true target of Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric, accounted for no more than 5 per cent of VW's prospective customers. - Wages of Destruction, pg 156

More comments

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats