6 ms·

The myth of Nazi efficiency

60 points by antman 13y ago

venomsnake 13y ago
The formidable industrial and military power of Nazi Germany had little to do with the Nazi Party and more with the brilliant politics of Otto von Bismarck and the skilled balancing politics of Gustav Stresemann. Hitler just (prematurely) cashed on historical inertia.
- NameNickHN 13y ago
  Sources?
  - mseebach 13y ago
    I downvoted you. I'm really tired of the single-word, zero-effort "sources" or "citation" meme. It's not wikipedia here, and it creates a hostile environment to demand every two-line comment to be sourced like an academic paper. Please engage with the comment and ask for clarification if there's something you think is unclear. If you find something hard to believe, say so, and why. If you're just genuinely interested, ask for a book recommendation. But please write a full sentence.
    - kleiba 13y ago
      I downvoted you. I think the request for a full sentence is unnecessary because the one-word comment "sources?" effectively communicates an understandable message in a compact form. A full sentence would be a more standard (and, some would say, perhaps a more polite?) form of doing the same, for sure. But I don't think more syntax automatically adds more value in this particular case. What is being asked for is a source for the parent comment. You say you're tired of the single-word, zero-effort "sources" or "citation" meme. I can't follow that reasoning. Minimally, as I work in academia, I find the request for a citation normal. But also, I cannot agree with your opinion that only those comments can be valid that require from the author an effort that is greater than what you define as zero. I would think that your parent is actually interested in engaging in a discussion, but would like to do some background checks first - hence the request for sources. I don't find that asking for a source is creating a hostile environment, either. You've summed up possible reasons why someone might ask for sources in your second paragraph, so I have no doubts you understood the motivations of your parent. It's not quite clear to me, whether you're complaining about the content of your parent's post (that they are asking for sources) or the form of the post (that it's just a one-word post). In any event, I don't think it's fair to downvote someone because they ask for sources, just because that request was not written in a way that pleases you. EDIT: On second thought, I feel my comment is a bit wanky. I wish I could re-upvote you, I think I acted prematurely. I'm sorry. :-/
      - mseebach 13y ago
        Don't worry. My comment got more upvotes than it deserves. First point, HN is not academia, it's (mostly) intelligent people discussing interesting subjects. In such discussions, it's perfectly fine to make contributions that you can't immediately source. It's, of course, also fine to contest those, and if someone says you're wrong, and has sources, well, you should be prepared to concede the point. But even in academia, I strongly doubt that you've ever received a request for sources from a perfect stranger that didn't explain exactly which point they were interested in. Second point, form and style is important. Politeness is important. They are cornerstones of civil discourse. If we don't maintain a civil environment, intelligent people leave, and HN turns into the regular echo chamber that are par for the course on the Internet. Intelligent people interested in real discourse can and should explain their request when asking someone else to elaborate. Third point - yes, I could guess at a range of possible motivations, but I don't actually know which one it is. The range goes from "I think you're wrong and probably an idiot, but I'm not going to bother explaining why" to "wow, that's a fascinating thought, where I can learn more". Those are vastly different responses - one obviously has no place in civil discourse. My gut feeling is that one word requests for sources are more often towards the former than the latter, but obviously I can't know. Even if my gut feeling is wrong, it still creates grating uncertainly: Is this person a troll who's out to undermine my credibility on the cheap, or is it a genuinely interested person who just want to learn more.
      - doorhammer 13y ago
        I tend to think that politeness and tact are value added concepts, especially in discourse. Being terse is a good idea sometimes, but I'm not sure those times are as frequent as it actually occurs.
    - brown9-2 13y ago
      Sometimes people ask for sources because they are genuinely interested in what you have said and would like to learn more about the topic!
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Sure, the comment you replied to made that point as well. The proper response to your comment is already essentially what mseebach wrote, so I can only recommend that you go read it again and perhaps ask about a part you found unclear...
    - NameNickHN 13y ago
      If someone makes a comment that sounds like they state a fact, I want to know who or what they are quoting. That's usually how it's being done in academia. I don't know why some people think that HN, or any other forum for that matter, isn't worth doing the same. You can't just throw something in and expect people to take it.
      - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
        Merely referencing something written or said by somebody else, even if fancy academic titles and degrees are involved, in no way affects the validity of whatever is being claimed. It's trivial to write something that's blatantly incorrect, to add some obscure references that sound good (they may not necessarily even be related, and if they're hard to access, nobody will bother to check them), and then to pretend that such claims have merit. Sometimes this happens unintentionally, when the referenced material is taken to be correct, when it actually isn't. A lot of people here and in other online discussion forums are hostile to the "citations please" attitude because these people have experienced academia first hand, and know that references are often quite worthless. In many fields, they're more about adulating prominent members of the community than they are about making claims more robust. It ends up being a wasteful activity to engage in, for the most part.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Henry Kissenger's Diplomacy . I have heard that he is somewhat competent.
    - pitiburi 13y ago
      Competent on setting genocides, destroying democracies and lying to the whole world about it? Nice source you have there....
      - JoachimSchipper 13y ago
        Kissinger is not a good guy. He is, however, competent, and Diplomacy is very much worth reading. Although it probably doesn't leave you a nicer person.
      - jmduke 13y ago
        Ugh. You don't have to agree with Kissinger's personal or political views to acknowledge that he's an incredibly high-quality source, both from a scholastic and experiential perspective.
      - angersock 13y ago
        Don't hate the players, hate the game. Kissinger was alarmingly effective at what he did.
      - pitiburi 13y ago
        Wow I am being downvoted all over the place, even in old posts... Btw, my point was that someone that achieved horrible things through (among other things) lying, should never be a source. Is not only about him: Lying was and is a fundamental aspect of his profession. And Yes, he was very effective. And Yes, also both a War criminal and a Peace criminal. An effective one though.
        rayiner 13y ago
        You're being downvoted because your comment was textbook ad hominem.
  - psn 13y ago
    Not the OP, but this theme (Germany as economic powerhouse, Germany having a large population, Germany being more organized, than say, Russia) is the main theme in Brendan Simms's book "Europe The struggle for supremacy 1453 to the present). You could read that. Its about 500 pages (about a year a page!) and I'm cautious about some of the points, but I figure it will back up the OP. Churchhill's post second world war writings also cover this, but don't make the full claim the OP makes.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- jmduke 13y ago
  Personally, I always associated the WW2-era efficiency (perceived or otherwise) with Fascist Italy, rather than Nazi Germany -- "Mussolini made the trains run on time" and all that.
  - adamors 13y ago
    > Stalinist Italy wat
    - jmduke 13y ago
      Oof, the better word would have been Fascist -- still, Stalinist is a pretty acceptable adjective (at least according to my way-back-when history professors.)
      - saraid216 13y ago
        ...acceptable? Confusing them is like saying ultraviolet is infrared. They're both non-visible, sure, but for completely different reasons because they're on completely different extremes.
        mseebach 13y ago
        Different, yes, not "completely different extremes". It's fruitless to try to place communism, stalinism, fascism and nazism on any kind of scale of political ideologies that makes sense in the decidedly more moderate political climate of today. Their uniting feature of crushing totalitarianism completely overshadows the comparatively minor differences in political ideology. The Soviet Union had the victors privilege of writing the history, and they wrote it in a way that pitted pure and good communism against singularly evil nazism and fascism - completely ignoring the point that the they had been allies just a few years earlier, and that Mussolini started out as a socialist.
MichaelAza 13y ago
I won't go into the war in general since I'm no expert on world war 2 but I can tell you that I've heard enough stories of Nazi brutality in the camps to know that, at least in exterminating undesirables, they were good. Real good. The gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz worked like clockwork. There was, at all times, a line, a group in preparation for entry, a group in the gas chambers themselves and the crematoriums were working 24/7. It was, for all intents and purposes, a death factory. That's the real point to make about Nazi efficiency - they weren't more efficient than, say, the average factory but what they were doing (murdering people) was never done in such a factory-like manner, hence the semblance of efficiency.
- eru 13y ago
  > [...] but what they were doing (murdering people) was never done in such a factory-like manner, [...] I'd like to believe that, but I am afraid you are underestimating human brutality in general.
  - MichaelAza 13y ago
    I have yet to see another example. Can you provide one?
    - eru 13y ago
      I had mostly the Soviet Union, Communist China and North Korea in mind. Of these, the Soviet Union started there atrocities earlier than Nazi Germany. Some quick web searching gave e.g. this somewhat tasteless list (http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-horrific-genocides-in-history.php http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-horrific-genocides-in-his...). (The treatment itself is bearable, but just the idea of a top ten of genocides makes me cringe.) Wikipedia has an article as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history The USA was pretty determined in killing off the natives. Even though they never seemed to have industrialized the process.
      - MichaelAza 13y ago
bdesimone 13y ago
Probably the best primary account of the inefficiencies of the National Socialists was by Albert Speer, Hitler's foremost technocrat. In "Inside the Third Reich" Speer gives an account of just how much the Germans struggled to mobilize during the war. Though Speer was able to introduce streamlined methods of mass production and remove some excessive bureaucracy, what strikes me most was the admission that Germany never hit production levels seen during WWI. The Second World War, by John Keegan Inside the Third Reich, by Albert Speer
- michaelwww 13y ago
  I recommend as well, Why the Allies Won, by Richard Overy
- hga 13y ago
  Speer was hardly a disinterested commentator on this, and I seem to remember his book has more than a few problems, and isn't Keegan's book rather general in its scope? My current source is the relatively new economic history of Nazi Germany, The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze (http://www.amazon.com/The-Wages-Destruction-Breaking-Economy/dp/0143113208/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Wages-Destruction-Breaking-Economy...). It's very good, and shows how economics were vitally important from beginning to end. E.g. part of the motivation in invading the Soviet Union was to address the crippling loss of productivity in their "Greater Western European Co-Prosperity Sphere" from the end of British coal imports. They needed to get enough food to the miners of the Lowlands etc., and the scheme was to starve the USSR cities and redirect the agricultural surplus east. Of course it didn't work out, but they did have a plan that wasn't entirely irrational.
  - bdesimone 13y ago
    No, certainly not. The context of who Speer was -- despite escaping the hangman at Nuremberg -- should absolutely be kept in mind. I felt his memoirs were written, at least in part, to improve his own legacy, at one point remarking: “one seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.” I'm not sure I buy that but his unique view of the moving parts and gears of the economy were probably mostly accurate. Yes, I recommend Keegan's book as my favorite "big picture" book regarding the second world war. For an inside look at the third reich in general, I enjoyed Richard J Evan's trilogy. I have not read The Wages of Destruction, thank you for the recommendation.
pinaceae 13y ago
smart person, writing a long article full of facts completely missing the point. the nazi efficiency is defined by the holocaust and is measured against the performance of the nazis against other organizations attempting the same. the article points out that it is inefficient to kill all these skilled workers - as if the author came from an alien planet not understanding that the extermination of the jewish race (and later the complete untermensch) was at the core of the nazi ideology. as for their other actions - any country can go to war, nothing special there. other nations have killed more, more quickly (in percentage to overall inhabitants), but mostly within their own borders. nazi germany annexed territories and then went on to systematically exterminate a race. figuring out family trees, measuring pureness (ariernachweis) then either sending you off to the camps or the ostfront (my granddad was a beutedeutscher aka loot german, enough german to be sent to stalingrad). visit some of the camps, mauthausen, treblinka, whatever - the fact that they went from shooting to exhaust fumes to zyklon B. the fact that they systematically went trough the possessions of the arriving victims, even harvesting gold teeth and hair from corpses. the fact that they wiped out approx. 25% of poland, uprooting a large population from europe, forever. this and other facts make the nazis the most efficient genocide machine so far and hopefully forever. could they been more efficient? of course, modern nerds with no social consciousness could come up with even better ways, or to put it that way, imagine the nerd-energy behind google/facebook/amazon/HN moved from ad-click generation to a peoples extermination. "Fellow students remembered him as studious, and awkward in social situations." - a quote about Heinrich Himmler. "We know that these clashes with Asia and Jewry are necessary for evolution." and that is Himmler laying it out, scientifically, clear.
- andrewvc 13y ago
  Wow, what an egregious straw-man argument. The article sets forth its goal, to prove that violence aside the nazis weren't efficient, then proves that point. You're complaining that the article proves a point it explicitly didn't set out to prove. That's pretty disingenuous.
- arrrg 13y ago
  Eh. You are the one missing the point. “That Holocaust’s real awful, but the Nazi economic policies kicked ass!” is a common refrain you can hear from many, many people. Those people are not talking about the Holocaust, they are talking about the economy and jobs. It’s an argument that, I would argue, even made it into the mainstream. You won’t just hear Nazis regurgitating it. I would even argue that this, more than any other thing they could say, is the number one argument Nazis use to reel people in. It isn’t true, of course. The linked article retells some fairly standard stuff which everyone who visited a (a bit more in-depth) class or seminar about German history during the Third Reich will know. Of course, only very few people visit those classes. (I know all this because during my last two years of school I was in a advanced history class in Germany – five hours a week – but even in Germany very few people will go that much into depth and considering how little I learned about, say, US history in school, the rest of the world has probably even less hope of ever learning this.)
bayesianhorse 13y ago
A common thought I hear from fellow Germans is the Autobahn is an outstanding achievement of Hitler's. I can manage to curb my anger at this, barely. It's like saying "He started a war with more than 30 million deaths, but hey, at least he built some Motorways!
- skinnymuch 13y ago
  > He started a war with more than 30 million deaths, but hey, at least he built some Motorways! That isn't the same thing as merely pointing out he built motorways. Specifically the "but hey, at least" is making the intent of most Germans to be awful when it probably isn't.
- saraid216 13y ago
  I don't see why you're angry about this. Bad people are allowed to produce good effects.
- a_bonobo 13y ago
  The Autobahn-system was actually started by the Weimar Republic, but was halted due to WW1. The Nazis initially opposed it but took over the building once they came to power. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsautobahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsautobahn
firebrand39 13y ago
Kudos to this very, very good article. Let me add a couple of facets. - Walter Euckens 'ordoliberalism' which laid the foundation for the postwar German 'economic miracle' was a direct response to the chaos and ineptitude of Hitler's bureaucracy. I believe Eucken worked within Hitlers economic planning bureaucracy. - Albert Speer, Hitler's 'Minister of Armaments', removed the tangle of agencies and ministries by centralizing power over economic planning and by giving factories 'self responsiblity' allowing the german war economy to reach peak output in 1944. (see wikipedia) - The production of the V2 'wunderwaffe' actually cost more lives of forced labor (see Speer) than its deployment. - After the end of the war, german productivity leapfroged with the introduction of american machinery, like producing a Beatle car got faster by the order of ten times (I believe, if readers have precises figures, please share them). What is the moral of all this? Ethics and hard-nosed productivity are really not separate at all.
pbiggar 13y ago
Whatever about WW2, Germany's performance in WW1 was incredibly efficient. They had a complete plan for the western front, along with the logistics to back it up, including up-to-the-minute train schedules. It's been a while since I read the Guns of August, but Tuchman contrasts France and Germany's preparedness, and Germany seems the absolute pinnacle of efficiency.
larrys 13y ago
"At the height of the Autobahn building phase, in 1935, for every sixty people in Germany there was just one automobile, compared to one for every twenty in France, or one for every twenty-five in Denmark; in the United States, one person out of every five owned a car of their own." Impossible to believe. If you simply factor in age and sex it seems near impossible that in 1935 1 out of every 5 people owned a car at that time.

60 points by antman 13y ago

The formidable industrial and military power of Nazi Germany had little to do with the Nazi Party and more with the brilliant politics of Otto von Bismarck and the skilled balancing politics of Gustav Stresemann. Hitler just (prematurely) cashed on historical inertia.

NameNickHN 13y ago
Sources?
- mseebach 13y ago
  I downvoted you. I'm really tired of the single-word, zero-effort "sources" or "citation" meme. It's not wikipedia here, and it creates a hostile environment to demand every two-line comment to be sourced like an academic paper. Please engage with the comment and ask for clarification if there's something you think is unclear. If you find something hard to believe, say so, and why. If you're just genuinely interested, ask for a book recommendation. But please write a full sentence.
  - kleiba 13y ago
    I downvoted you. I think the request for a full sentence is unnecessary because the one-word comment "sources?" effectively communicates an understandable message in a compact form. A full sentence would be a more standard (and, some would say, perhaps a more polite?) form of doing the same, for sure. But I don't think more syntax automatically adds more value in this particular case. What is being asked for is a source for the parent comment. You say you're tired of the single-word, zero-effort "sources" or "citation" meme. I can't follow that reasoning. Minimally, as I work in academia, I find the request for a citation normal. But also, I cannot agree with your opinion that only those comments can be valid that require from the author an effort that is greater than what you define as zero. I would think that your parent is actually interested in engaging in a discussion, but would like to do some background checks first - hence the request for sources. I don't find that asking for a source is creating a hostile environment, either. You've summed up possible reasons why someone might ask for sources in your second paragraph, so I have no doubts you understood the motivations of your parent. It's not quite clear to me, whether you're complaining about the content of your parent's post (that they are asking for sources) or the form of the post (that it's just a one-word post). In any event, I don't think it's fair to downvote someone because they ask for sources, just because that request was not written in a way that pleases you. EDIT: On second thought, I feel my comment is a bit wanky. I wish I could re-upvote you, I think I acted prematurely. I'm sorry. :-/
    - mseebach 13y ago
      Don't worry. My comment got more upvotes than it deserves. First point, HN is not academia, it's (mostly) intelligent people discussing interesting subjects. In such discussions, it's perfectly fine to make contributions that you can't immediately source. It's, of course, also fine to contest those, and if someone says you're wrong, and has sources, well, you should be prepared to concede the point. But even in academia, I strongly doubt that you've ever received a request for sources from a perfect stranger that didn't explain exactly which point they were interested in. Second point, form and style is important. Politeness is important. They are cornerstones of civil discourse. If we don't maintain a civil environment, intelligent people leave, and HN turns into the regular echo chamber that are par for the course on the Internet. Intelligent people interested in real discourse can and should explain their request when asking someone else to elaborate. Third point - yes, I could guess at a range of possible motivations, but I don't actually know which one it is. The range goes from "I think you're wrong and probably an idiot, but I'm not going to bother explaining why" to "wow, that's a fascinating thought, where I can learn more". Those are vastly different responses - one obviously has no place in civil discourse. My gut feeling is that one word requests for sources are more often towards the former than the latter, but obviously I can't know. Even if my gut feeling is wrong, it still creates grating uncertainly: Is this person a troll who's out to undermine my credibility on the cheap, or is it a genuinely interested person who just want to learn more.
    - doorhammer 13y ago
      I tend to think that politeness and tact are value added concepts, especially in discourse. Being terse is a good idea sometimes, but I'm not sure those times are as frequent as it actually occurs.
  - brown9-2 13y ago
    Sometimes people ask for sources because they are genuinely interested in what you have said and would like to learn more about the topic!
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Sure, the comment you replied to made that point as well. The proper response to your comment is already essentially what mseebach wrote, so I can only recommend that you go read it again and perhaps ask about a part you found unclear...
  - NameNickHN 13y ago
    If someone makes a comment that sounds like they state a fact, I want to know who or what they are quoting. That's usually how it's being done in academia. I don't know why some people think that HN, or any other forum for that matter, isn't worth doing the same. You can't just throw something in and expect people to take it.
    - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
      Merely referencing something written or said by somebody else, even if fancy academic titles and degrees are involved, in no way affects the validity of whatever is being claimed. It's trivial to write something that's blatantly incorrect, to add some obscure references that sound good (they may not necessarily even be related, and if they're hard to access, nobody will bother to check them), and then to pretend that such claims have merit. Sometimes this happens unintentionally, when the referenced material is taken to be correct, when it actually isn't. A lot of people here and in other online discussion forums are hostile to the "citations please" attitude because these people have experienced academia first hand, and know that references are often quite worthless. In many fields, they're more about adulating prominent members of the community than they are about making claims more robust. It ends up being a wasteful activity to engage in, for the most part.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Henry Kissenger's Diplomacy . I have heard that he is somewhat competent.
  - pitiburi 13y ago
    Competent on setting genocides, destroying democracies and lying to the whole world about it? Nice source you have there....
    - JoachimSchipper 13y ago
      Kissinger is not a good guy. He is, however, competent, and Diplomacy is very much worth reading. Although it probably doesn't leave you a nicer person.
    - jmduke 13y ago
      Ugh. You don't have to agree with Kissinger's personal or political views to acknowledge that he's an incredibly high-quality source, both from a scholastic and experiential perspective.
    - angersock 13y ago
      Don't hate the players, hate the game. Kissinger was alarmingly effective at what he did.
    - pitiburi 13y ago
      Wow I am being downvoted all over the place, even in old posts... Btw, my point was that someone that achieved horrible things through (among other things) lying, should never be a source. Is not only about him: Lying was and is a fundamental aspect of his profession. And Yes, he was very effective. And Yes, also both a War criminal and a Peace criminal. An effective one though.
      - rayiner 13y ago
        You're being downvoted because your comment was textbook ad hominem.
- psn 13y ago
  Not the OP, but this theme (Germany as economic powerhouse, Germany having a large population, Germany being more organized, than say, Russia) is the main theme in Brendan Simms's book "Europe The struggle for supremacy 1453 to the present). You could read that. Its about 500 pages (about a year a page!) and I'm cautious about some of the points, but I figure it will back up the OP. Churchhill's post second world war writings also cover this, but don't make the full claim the OP makes.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jmduke 13y ago
Personally, I always associated the WW2-era efficiency (perceived or otherwise) with Fascist Italy, rather than Nazi Germany -- "Mussolini made the trains run on time" and all that.
- adamors 13y ago
  > Stalinist Italy wat
  - jmduke 13y ago
    Oof, the better word would have been Fascist -- still, Stalinist is a pretty acceptable adjective (at least according to my way-back-when history professors.)
    - saraid216 13y ago
      ...acceptable? Confusing them is like saying ultraviolet is infrared. They're both non-visible, sure, but for completely different reasons because they're on completely different extremes.
      - mseebach 13y ago
        Different, yes, not "completely different extremes". It's fruitless to try to place communism, stalinism, fascism and nazism on any kind of scale of political ideologies that makes sense in the decidedly more moderate political climate of today. Their uniting feature of crushing totalitarianism completely overshadows the comparatively minor differences in political ideology. The Soviet Union had the victors privilege of writing the history, and they wrote it in a way that pitted pure and good communism against singularly evil nazism and fascism - completely ignoring the point that the they had been allies just a few years earlier, and that Mussolini started out as a socialist.

MichaelAza 13y ago

I won't go into the war in general since I'm no expert on world war 2 but I can tell you that I've heard enough stories of Nazi brutality in the camps to know that, at least in exterminating undesirables, they were good. Real good. The gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz worked like clockwork. There was, at all times, a line, a group in preparation for entry, a group in the gas chambers themselves and the crematoriums were working 24/7. It was, for all intents and purposes, a death factory. That's the real point to make about Nazi efficiency - they weren't more efficient than, say, the average factory but what they were doing (murdering people) was never done in such a factory-like manner, hence the semblance of efficiency.

eru 13y ago
> [...] but what they were doing (murdering people) was never done in such a factory-like manner, [...] I'd like to believe that, but I am afraid you are underestimating human brutality in general.
- MichaelAza 13y ago
  I have yet to see another example. Can you provide one?
  - eru 13y ago
    I had mostly the Soviet Union, Communist China and North Korea in mind. Of these, the Soviet Union started there atrocities earlier than Nazi Germany. Some quick web searching gave e.g. this somewhat tasteless list (http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-horrific-genocides-in-history.php http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-horrific-genocides-in-his...). (The treatment itself is bearable, but just the idea of a top ten of genocides makes me cringe.) Wikipedia has an article as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history The USA was pretty determined in killing off the natives. Even though they never seemed to have industrialized the process.
    - MichaelAza 13y ago

bdesimone 13y ago

Probably the best primary account of the inefficiencies of the National Socialists was by Albert Speer, Hitler's foremost technocrat. In "Inside the Third Reich" Speer gives an account of just how much the Germans struggled to mobilize during the war. Though Speer was able to introduce streamlined methods of mass production and remove some excessive bureaucracy, what strikes me most was the admission that Germany never hit production levels seen during WWI. The Second World War, by John Keegan Inside the Third Reich, by Albert Speer

michaelwww 13y ago
I recommend as well, Why the Allies Won, by Richard Overy
hga 13y ago
Speer was hardly a disinterested commentator on this, and I seem to remember his book has more than a few problems, and isn't Keegan's book rather general in its scope? My current source is the relatively new economic history of Nazi Germany, The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze (http://www.amazon.com/The-Wages-Destruction-Breaking-Economy/dp/0143113208/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Wages-Destruction-Breaking-Economy...). It's very good, and shows how economics were vitally important from beginning to end. E.g. part of the motivation in invading the Soviet Union was to address the crippling loss of productivity in their "Greater Western European Co-Prosperity Sphere" from the end of British coal imports. They needed to get enough food to the miners of the Lowlands etc., and the scheme was to starve the USSR cities and redirect the agricultural surplus east. Of course it didn't work out, but they did have a plan that wasn't entirely irrational.
- bdesimone 13y ago
  No, certainly not. The context of who Speer was -- despite escaping the hangman at Nuremberg -- should absolutely be kept in mind. I felt his memoirs were written, at least in part, to improve his own legacy, at one point remarking: “one seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.” I'm not sure I buy that but his unique view of the moving parts and gears of the economy were probably mostly accurate. Yes, I recommend Keegan's book as my favorite "big picture" book regarding the second world war. For an inside look at the third reich in general, I enjoyed Richard J Evan's trilogy. I have not read The Wages of Destruction, thank you for the recommendation.

pinaceae 13y ago

smart person, writing a long article full of facts completely missing the point. the nazi efficiency is defined by the holocaust and is measured against the performance of the nazis against other organizations attempting the same. the article points out that it is inefficient to kill all these skilled workers - as if the author came from an alien planet not understanding that the extermination of the jewish race (and later the complete untermensch) was at the core of the nazi ideology. as for their other actions - any country can go to war, nothing special there. other nations have killed more, more quickly (in percentage to overall inhabitants), but mostly within their own borders. nazi germany annexed territories and then went on to systematically exterminate a race. figuring out family trees, measuring pureness (ariernachweis) then either sending you off to the camps or the ostfront (my granddad was a beutedeutscher aka loot german, enough german to be sent to stalingrad). visit some of the camps, mauthausen, treblinka, whatever - the fact that they went from shooting to exhaust fumes to zyklon B. the fact that they systematically went trough the possessions of the arriving victims, even harvesting gold teeth and hair from corpses. the fact that they wiped out approx. 25% of poland, uprooting a large population from europe, forever. this and other facts make the nazis the most efficient genocide machine so far and hopefully forever. could they been more efficient? of course, modern nerds with no social consciousness could come up with even better ways, or to put it that way, imagine the nerd-energy behind google/facebook/amazon/HN moved from ad-click generation to a peoples extermination. "Fellow students remembered him as studious, and awkward in social situations." - a quote about Heinrich Himmler. "We know that these clashes with Asia and Jewry are necessary for evolution." and that is Himmler laying it out, scientifically, clear.

andrewvc 13y ago
Wow, what an egregious straw-man argument. The article sets forth its goal, to prove that violence aside the nazis weren't efficient, then proves that point. You're complaining that the article proves a point it explicitly didn't set out to prove. That's pretty disingenuous.
arrrg 13y ago
Eh. You are the one missing the point. “That Holocaust’s real awful, but the Nazi economic policies kicked ass!” is a common refrain you can hear from many, many people. Those people are not talking about the Holocaust, they are talking about the economy and jobs. It’s an argument that, I would argue, even made it into the mainstream. You won’t just hear Nazis regurgitating it. I would even argue that this, more than any other thing they could say, is the number one argument Nazis use to reel people in. It isn’t true, of course. The linked article retells some fairly standard stuff which everyone who visited a (a bit more in-depth) class or seminar about German history during the Third Reich will know. Of course, only very few people visit those classes. (I know all this because during my last two years of school I was in a advanced history class in Germany – five hours a week – but even in Germany very few people will go that much into depth and considering how little I learned about, say, US history in school, the rest of the world has probably even less hope of ever learning this.)

bayesianhorse 13y ago

A common thought I hear from fellow Germans is the Autobahn is an outstanding achievement of Hitler's. I can manage to curb my anger at this, barely. It's like saying "He started a war with more than 30 million deaths, but hey, at least he built some Motorways!

skinnymuch 13y ago
> He started a war with more than 30 million deaths, but hey, at least he built some Motorways! That isn't the same thing as merely pointing out he built motorways. Specifically the "but hey, at least" is making the intent of most Germans to be awful when it probably isn't.
saraid216 13y ago
I don't see why you're angry about this. Bad people are allowed to produce good effects.
a_bonobo 13y ago
The Autobahn-system was actually started by the Weimar Republic, but was halted due to WW1. The Nazis initially opposed it but took over the building once they came to power. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsautobahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsautobahn

firebrand39 13y ago

Kudos to this very, very good article. Let me add a couple of facets. - Walter Euckens 'ordoliberalism' which laid the foundation for the postwar German 'economic miracle' was a direct response to the chaos and ineptitude of Hitler's bureaucracy. I believe Eucken worked within Hitlers economic planning bureaucracy. - Albert Speer, Hitler's 'Minister of Armaments', removed the tangle of agencies and ministries by centralizing power over economic planning and by giving factories 'self responsiblity' allowing the german war economy to reach peak output in 1944. (see wikipedia) - The production of the V2 'wunderwaffe' actually cost more lives of forced labor (see Speer) than its deployment. - After the end of the war, german productivity leapfroged with the introduction of american machinery, like producing a Beatle car got faster by the order of ten times (I believe, if readers have precises figures, please share them). What is the moral of all this? Ethics and hard-nosed productivity are really not separate at all.

pbiggar 13y ago

Whatever about WW2, Germany's performance in WW1 was incredibly efficient. They had a complete plan for the western front, along with the logistics to back it up, including up-to-the-minute train schedules. It's been a while since I read the Guns of August, but Tuchman contrasts France and Germany's preparedness, and Germany seems the absolute pinnacle of efficiency.

larrys 13y ago

"At the height of the Autobahn building phase, in 1935, for every sixty people in Germany there was just one automobile, compared to one for every twenty in France, or one for every twenty-five in Denmark; in the United States, one person out of every five owned a car of their own." Impossible to believe. If you simply factor in age and sex it seems near impossible that in 1935 1 out of every 5 people owned a car at that time.