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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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