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When, if ever, is it appropriate to provide an apologetic defense of Nazi Germany?
Darryl Cooper, host of the widely acclaimed Martyr Made podcast, recently did a 2+ hour interview with Tucker Carlson. Darryl Cooper is known for two things. One: being meticulously empathetic with regards to the plight of the disaffected groups that are the subject of his 30-hour long history podcasts, bringing out the vivid details that form the background milieu for poorly-understood events like Jonestown. And two: his unhinged Twitter takes.
As one can imagine, jimmies were rustled. The most common line of attack was “Tucker Carlson platforms Nazi apologetics.” In a literal sense this is true. Cooper gives the German perspective on Winston Churchill. One might make the obvious point that Germany started the war by invading Poland, but the Soviet Union also invaded Poland. Yet the Western allies did not declare war on Stalin. This AskHistorians thread (no haven for Nazi apologetics!) is enlightening. What masqueraded as a mutual defense treaty was actually an anti-German treaty. Britain really was out to get them.
Once we dig deep enough, the real reason World War II started was to preserve Anglo hegemony over Europe, the exact same reason that Britain joined World War I. Post-hoc rationalizations are just that, post-hoc. It certainly isn’t irrelevant when studying World War II that the holocaust happened, but that isn’t part of the causal chain of events the way many seem to believe.
I want to emphasize that I personally like Anglo-American hegemony. Churchill’s aggressive stance towards Germany is good for me and for the vast majority of the people reading this, but in order to understand history (or current events for that matter) one has to understand the people who do not like Anglo-American hegemony. I do not know where on the doll Anglo imperialism touched him, but I do not believe that Darryl Cooper says the things that he does out of hate for his fellow man.
I have an effortpost somewhere in my notebook brewing, ever since I finished Tooze's Wages of Destruction on the topic of all the different frames that one can use to examine WWII in Europe. There are at least seven framings I can think of that I can make a full argument out of, and completely justify the beginning of the war. WWII was, in some ways, vastly overdetermined.
WWII was primarily a replay of WWI with a little shuffling around the edges. The core conflict was once again Germany-Austria-Hungary vs England/France/Russia/USA, with Italy going from a liability for Britain to a liability for Germany and Japan getting involved. This was known even before the war started, Ferdinand Foch famously called the treaty of Versailles a twenty year ceasefire as it was signed. The flow of conflict runs directly through Versailles, much of Germany's chaos and depression resulted from the aftermath of WWI, and the conflicts with the western Allies began with conflicts over reparations and the removal of formerly German territory into creations of Versailles like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
WWII was primarily a result of the early Cold War, a symptom of the struggle between Communism and Capitalism, which began before WWII and continued after; Hitler is best understood as a Golem figure, built by both Communists and Capitalists to protect against the Other, only to turn on each in their turn. The Cold War didn't start in 1945 Berlin, it started in 1917 at the latest. The first Red Scares in the US and the rest of the West happened long before Hitler rose to power. Hitler could not have achieved what he achieved, could not have been half as destructive as he was, without the support he garnered from both sides of the Cold War. Without Stalin's material support in the years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Barbarossa, Hitler never could have achieved the Blitzkrieg victories in the West. Stalin and his crew were ideological Leninists, and believed in the science of history, that Capitalist imperialist powers must go to war, they can't help it, the competition over economic markets is too powerful a motive. Threatened by the capitalist western powers, Stalin supported And the western Allies significantly aided the rise of fascism diplomatically, seeing it as a counter to Communist revolutionary fervor in Germany, Spain, and Italy; believing that Hitler would naturally fight the Communists because, you know, he kept saying he was going to fight Bolshevism and invade Russia.
WWII was primarily an economic conflict. Germany could not sustain its economy without the resources it did not have access to within its own territory, and England and France were constantly threatening to cut Germany off. Germany had to go to war to secure economic resources to support its economy, and England had to go to war to defend its economic predominance. Balance of payments tells us more about the leadup to the war than any amount of studying battlefield choices.
WWII was a "don't be racist" contest with golf scoring, and Germany and Japan lost. It's very difficult to look at many of the decisions that were made by conquering German and Japanese armies in the first phases of WWII, and not think to oneself that if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit, maybe they could have gotten some of their conquered peoples to buy into the project a little bit, and then they would have won the war quite easily. Japan stormed into Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor, and they threw out the hated white colonial governments, and then instantly proceeded to behave so much worse that many of the freedom fighters who had been fighting against the European colonial overlords flipped to working with the European colonial overlords. The Japanese could have been recruiting Vietnamese auxilaries to fight against the British and Americans, instead they were unable to exploit Indochina to its greatest extent because of local resistance. If the Nazis had aligned with the Banderites at the start of the war, instead of imprisoning Bandera for most of the war before springing him near the end of the war in a last desperate shot; if the Nazis had aligned with Poland to invade Russia together instead of destroying Poland; if the Nazis had at least made vaguely credible motions in the direction of a future Free Russian state rather than making their exterminationist intent obvious; if the Nazis had utilized their Jewish population properly instead of destroying them in a tremendous waste of human capital. The British Empire and the United States were racist governments at the time, but they were less racist than their enemies and that was enough. Stalin killed millions of Jews, too, but he didn't make explicit his intent to exterminate the populations his armies sought to subdue, putting their backs to the wall. The only way to square the circle is to assume that Hitler actually did believe all that racial superiority stuff, otherwise his actions are inexplicably illogical.
And so on and so forth.
It is possible to draw so many different framings for WWII, that are all perfectly cohesive, and are perfectly adequate explanations for why the war took place. And part of the upshot of this is that the guilt for the war is overdetermined. It's possible to say everyone is at fault. The British are at fault and Stalin is at fault and the Germans are at fault. It was the inevitable result of the avarice of Clemanceau at Versailles, and it was the contingent result of decisions made regarding Czechoslovakia and Poland. There's a ton of different ways to slice it up, but the nature of guilt for the deaths of millions is that they can all slice up a share of guilt that is more than enough for one lifetime.
That all being said, while I love some of Daryl's, he's long been pushing credibility with increasingly edgy contrarian takes, and when you play the oh my aren't I an edgy boy game, it's dangerous to dance this close to power. Tucker Carlson was reported to have significant influence, it is a reasonable attack surface to look at who he has on his show. Daryl himself has been retweeted by JD Vance. These aren't random folks engaging in a touch of edgy trolling on the motte or 4chan, of course this bullshit is going to stir up a kerfuffle. Kulak has not, yet, been a Twitter Main Character for his pas-de-deux with Hitler apologism, because he hasn't yet presented a valid attack surface against mainstream right wing politicians.
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.
My take from Wages of Destruction was that the problem was more short-term. Between war production, the blockade, the bombings, and the linger effects of WW1 and the great depression (plus them just being kind of a backwards low-tech economy to begin with), they were really struggling even to feed their own people. Conquering a bunch of farmland was one of those "yeah, in the long run this will help, but in the long run we're all dead" kind of things. There was so little food to go around, they had to make some hard decisions, and there was a certain cold logic to it. Full rations for the soldiers and key factory workers, half-rations for the civilians and prisoners from the people they liked, slim-to-nil rations for the people they didn't like. But OK, maybe they would have moderated in a hypothetical future where the war was over, the blockade was lifted, and there was plenty of food to go around.
Huh?
so this is actually one of the really interesting parts of Wages of Destruction. It drives home the incredible degree to which Nazi Germany was this backwards economy pulling off a Potemkin village of industrialization. I'm recalling from memory but if i recall correctly
and finally not enough steel for everything. there's just not enough steel for construction, fortifications, tanks, airplanes, ships, & ammunition. Let alone the domestic economy. And so one of the central ideas in Wages of Destruction is that the Nazi state uses this scarcity of steel and turns it into a means of political control. Dolling out steel here and there to favour one industry/military faction over another.
The Nazi's take this total control and use it to focus everything into one area or another the result is visible, legible, & shocking. But it's going all out for short term sugar highs over and over again. And the underlying health of the economy is nowhere near that of the US, UK, or France. And it doesn't have the comparative scale of the capacity of the USSR.
I kinda have a problem with this. How do you do 6 years of basketcase "Potemkin industrialization", and proceed to whoop the ass of half of Europe?
That's a very reasonable question! The mainstream account focuses on the dangerous potential and near victory of the Nazi's. It also tends of overlook economics in favour of operational accounts of the war. With a further focus on the sexy attention getting offensives of 1939-41 (42 for some).
For reading I would combine Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction alongside Robert Citino's "Death of the Wehrmacht". The two compliment each other quite well. Death of the Wehrmacht deals with the military from the start up to 1942. His subsequent books The Wehrmacht Retreats for 1943 and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand are also engaging and accessible for average war nerd.
If you'd prefer the cliffnotes version here are some youtube video's for each.
Citino
Tooze
Tooze economics highlight the constraints the domestic economy puts on the war effort. How resource & industrial capacity constraints affected decision making. Citino's account emphasizes continuity with the old Prussia tradition and the concept of Bewegungskrieg (Maneuver Warfare) over the incoherent concept of Blitzkrieg (a journalistic invention). Citino's account also explains why Prussia developed such a tradition, namely on account of the comparative poverty of Prussia and the awful geographic situation it was placed in. To quote from the first source online i could find that summarizes it neater than I can
I'd ask you to consider it this way: Germany starts off by fighting a bunch of small doomed states. Victory over Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, & the Netherlands are not prestigious victories. They are assumptions. However the real impressive victory is over France and while this is an accomplishment it comes from a mix of French failure and German operational art. And it's an incredible upset that shocks the world!
But it does not come from a well calibrated economic engine developed by the Nazi's which overpowers the French in an attritional warfare contrasting each countries total industrial capacity. And the moment it becomes a match up between the other real players on the world stage, the UK, US, & USSR, the Nazi war economy simply isn't capable of handling the challenge.
also here's another great video by John Parshall of Shattered Sword fame comparing the Nazi tank production economics to that of the Soviet Union.
Parshall
flipping back through it there is a great slide that really highlights things. From 43 minutes in:
I would suggest that having one of your major tank facilities only able to crank out 2 tanks a day while fighting the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US might not be a sign that they had the best possible economic/industrial set up before the war.
I've been pointing to this link throughout this thread, that I lifted from Wikipedia for a quick sanity check. They seem, at first glance, roughly on par with Britain. Those are not basket-case numbers no matter which way you slice it, though obviously not enough to withstand the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US, and I still don't see how WWII even gets started on Potemkin industrialization, let alone gets as far as it did.
This whole thing feels like playing zoom/pan/crop with facts to paint a very specific picture.
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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.
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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.
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