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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28923 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.

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?

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.

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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