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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.
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?
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.
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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