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sean10mm posted:As a side note, I have never heard/read a good explanation of how Hitler went from a glorified bum and all around lazy wierdo with no discernable talent in Vienna, to being a pretty good soldier with no friends who couldn't get promoted to NCO because he showed no leadership ability or even interest in it, to then leave the army in 1919 and promptly take over a political party and create a mass movement out of loving nowhere. It didn't really come out of nowhere. The Nazis didn't become a mass movement overnight, they did so at the end of a decade and a half of building their movement and then happening to be in the right place, right time, to benefit from the collapse of the Weimar state. Throughout the 20s the Nazis were a tiny fringe party that got like 2% of the vote in elections, but their core was highly disciplined and organized, primarily (I would argue) due to the influx of former Freikorps members into the Nazi party, who wanted to carry out a militarization of daily life and so regimented the Nazi Party in a military fashion, with ranks and districts and hierarchies and also paramilitary groups that would get in street fights with Communists. Individual high-ranking Nazis were also good organizers, including some who had come directly from the Freikorps to the Nazis like Gregor Strasser, for example. The Nazi Party during this time, besides its political activities, was also heavily involved in social activities like hosting dances and film nights and speaking events for German youth across the country in order to increase their visibility, though for a while it seemed like this strategy was ineffectual because Germans would attend these social events but wouldn't necessarily make the connection between enjoying the events and supporting the political party that hosted them. It's worth mentioning at this point that the Nazis also benefited heavily from the conservatives in charge of the Weimar state and its institutions (guys like Hindenburg). Remember that Hitler and the Nazis literally tried to stage a coup and overthrow the Weimar government in the early 20s and were caught and convicted and sent to prison ... for about a year before they were pardoned and set free. Meanwhile, Communists would be extrajudicially murdered and the police and Weimar justice system basically didn't care. Weimar Germany's citizens may not have been overwhelmingly conservative or right wing at the time, but their institutions were in many ways just remnants of the imperial German state and absolutely loathed the left, which led to an at times grudging and at times openly welcoming tolerance of the extreme right. But I would argue that, overwhelmingly, the biggest factor in the rise of the Nazis to a mass movement was the Depression. Germany's economy cratered just as hard as America's did, putting millions out of work. The moderate Weimar politicians' answer to this should sound familiar today, because it was just successive rounds of massive, crippling austerity, over and over again. Every six months Hindenburg would appoint a new chancellor, that chancellor would slash the budget and be unpopular, and would fail to win elections or command a majority in the Reichstag. Hindenburg and the various chancellors were basically ruling by decree and bypassing the Reichstag, which meant bypassing the actual elected German representatives. Because of this, the moderate Weimar politicians were completely discredited and German voters overwhelmingly flocked to the extreme left and extreme right, the Communists and the Nazis, because they were the two groups that were actually promising to fix Germany's economic problems instead of continuing austerity. That was where the mass Nazi movement came from. It wasn't fervent Nazi supporters who tattooed swastikas on their foreheads and signed up to join the SA, it was unemployed Germans who grew to hate their moderate politicians and turned to whoever was available that was offering an alternative. And Hindenburg was an arch-conservative so of course he would turn to Hitler and the extreme right rather than Ernst Thalmann and the Communists when trying to co-opt an emerging political movement. There are a few things you should remember when discussing the nature of the Nazis as a mass movement up until 1933. First, mass support for the Nazis only emerged in the early 30s. Second, the most they ever got in a fair election was 37% of the vote in July 1932, followed by 32% in November 1932. Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 and instituted severe repression on other political parties almost immediately, beating and executing Communists and Social Democrats on the street and at political meetings, and arresting thousands of leftist politicians and activists after the Reichstag Fire. The opposition parties were essentially not allowed to campaign and many of their leaders were either arrested, went into hiding, or fled the country. Voters were intimidated into staying home or voting for the Nazis by gangs of paramilitaries roaming the streets and hanging out at polling stations. And still, under these conditions, the Nazis only got 44% of the vote in March 1933. The birth of the Nazi party is a weird thing but it can be explained. The biggest explaining factors, for me, are a) the presence of disciplined and organized Freikorps members in the Nazi Party, especially at high levels of leadership; b) the institutional conservatism of the Weimar state that favoured the extreme right over the extreme left; and c) the collapse of the political centre under the conditions of the Great Depression. As for Hitler himself, well, as mentioned above, his greatest talent was as an orator and political demagogue. On his own that wouldn't have been enough, but in the particular environment of the Nazi Party and Weimar Germany it was enough to get him in power. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 21:57
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sean10mm posted:This is what I meant; by most accounts he did a good job as a private first class in the German Army. As a military leader in WWII he was mostly garbage. That part you can probably attribute primarily to the demagoguery and oratory skills. He was one of the first members of what would become the Nazi Party and one of the big things that attracted people to them at all in the early days were his crazy speeches and ability to connect to a mass audience, so it's understandable that he would take on more and more important roles in the organization since most people who were joining were joining to follow him.
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Dec 8, 2015 23:11
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LeoMarr posted:Of course a second front is desirable. But what I am saying is that it was not needed to win the war in 1944. It was needed in 1941. It's almost like it took the US and UK two years to plan the largest amphibious invasion in human history or something.
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Dec 11, 2015 00:39
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LeoMarr posted:I'm sure Stalin wanted the Allies to restore Capitalist Europe. You know that's why we have the cold war, the berlin airlift, soviet occupation of Eastern europe. Really Stalin just wanted France and Germany as friends and not fiefs. Yes, and I'm sure that Churchill and Roosevelt/Truman would have loved to liberate Europe all the way to the Russian border if that had somehow been an option. What's your point?
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Dec 11, 2015 00:58
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Raskolnikov38 posted:What the hell are you even arguing? Duh Stalin would have taken more of Europe if he could have, he said as much at a conference later. I think his point is that Stalin was a supervillain whose master plan to take over Europe had been brewing for years and was only foiled by the Nazi invasion and the success of the Allied second front which Stalin didn't actually want despite repeatedly telling the Allies that he wanted it for years, which seems to me like a seriously confusing take on the fundamentally pragmatic, opportunist, and deeply paranoid foreign policy of the USSR under Stalin.
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Dec 11, 2015 01:11
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Taerkar posted:I like the entire idiocy of a military being capable of only being either offensive or defensive and that's why the Germans pushed them back like they did, rather than the well known facts of the disassembly of the original Stalin Line along the Polish border and the incomplete state of the Molotov Line along the new border leaving them with unfortified defensive positions. Oh and of course the reorganization and officer purges of the Red Army at the time. Soviet tanks and vehicles were only built able to drive west, so when they had to retreat east it was a disaster!!! And all the instructions were written in German so naturally the Russian-speaking troops were horribly confused. But do you know what is the decisive, conclusive proof that Stalin was on the verge of an invasion of Germany in June 1941? The fact that he was giving Germany massive amounts of resources useful for fighting a war, helping Germany bypass the British blockade. I mean, that's Stalin for you! Such a great guy, he wanted the Germans to have a fair fighting chance when his offensive-only army rolled across the border, so he made sure to give the Germans a shitload of war materials first.
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Dec 11, 2015 14:25
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Maybe we can get back on track with a different topic. How about military leaders? Best/worst and most over/underrated generals and admirals of the war?
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Dec 11, 2015 16:25
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Personally I've always been a fan of Wavell and O'Connor's handling of the North African campaign. They were admittedly helped by the sheer incompetence of the Italian Army but they still achieved miraculous results with numerical inferiority, and it seems like a lot of the subsequent defeats came about due to political interference (Churchill pulling forces away to send to Greece, Iraq, and Syria), not helped by O'Connor's capture, even as they were also due to the arrival of the Afrika Korps.
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Dec 11, 2015 17:14
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LeoMarr posted:Do you really think that defense was on STAVKA's mind? Yes, because the fundamental nature of Soviet foreign policy under Stalin was defensive and paranoid. The underlying assumption of all Soviet foreign policy in the 20s and 30s was that the capitalist states (which included literally everyone who wasn't the USSR--Germany, France, UK, US, Italy, Japan, all were just lumped in as "capitalist" states) were eventually going to invade the USSR because they couldn't abide the existence of a communist country. The vast majority of the speech you linked is discussing Stalin's plan to stay out of a European war, not to start one. He's basically saying "There are two choices: either we sign a pact with Britain/France and stop German expansion, which means the capitalists will inevitably team up to invade us, or we sign a pact with Germany which means Germany and Britain/France fight each other and leave us alone while we build up for the inevitable capitalist/communist war." Yeah there's some stuff thrown in there about a German revolution and Soviet support for them, but the primary thrust of the speech is "We want everyone to leave us alone while we build our army and industry." Soviet references to some unspecified eventual war are not signs of Stalin's secret plan to take over the world but signs of the recurring Soviet doctrine that a capitalist invasion was inevitable.
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Dec 11, 2015 20:28
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LeoMarr posted:What about when Japan practically announced that they were not going to attack the USSR and Stalin moved a large army group out of Siberia? Had those divisions not been freed up would Moscow have been liberated? Did you just refer to the Nazis taking Moscow as it being "liberated"?
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Dec 11, 2015 23:12
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LeoMarr posted:So why enact a 2 year draft and raise a 5 million strong army so rapidly that your officer corps suffers if you plan to crush your enemy after those forces are released in 1941? In all likelihood, a) because the Soviet Union, like the Russian Empire before it, would periodically draft people into the army even when there wasn't a war going on; b) because they wanted to establish a large number of young men with military training for whenever the war eventually did come; and c) because they were indeed involved in both a limited round of aggressive military expansion into Finland, the Baltic States, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia, and an ongoing but slow-burning conflict with the Japanese Kwantung Army, a reflection of the ongoing deterioration in peaceful foreign relations and outbreak of war around the world and around the USSR's borders.
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Dec 12, 2015 00:01
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Cerebral Bore posted:If they'd launched Barbarossa a couple of moths earlier it would probably have turned out worse for the Germans, as they'd be running headfirst into the spring Rasputitsa. There is never a good time of year to invade Russia.
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Dec 12, 2015 00:33
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LeoMarr posted:A) Russian Empire did this to cull uprisings by removing a large quantity of fighting aged males from areas of high revolt lol you really have no idea what you're talking about. The Russians did this to everyone, high revolt or no, across pretty much the entire empire. quote:Concentration of forces on German-USSR Border Hmm you're right, there's no reason for the deeply paranoid and insecure USSR to expand their military at all, or place them on the border with Germany for any reason, even after Germany conquered half of Europe. They should have stuck them all in the Urals training. Placing soldiers on the border of your powerful ideological enemy who has shown a proclivity for offensive warfare is completely illogical and the only reason why you would ever do that is if you were planning to invade them.
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Dec 12, 2015 04:04
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By this point I'm pretty sure the only thing that would convince you Stalin wasn't planning an offensive war would be if he had disbanded the entire Red Army on June 21, 1941.
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Dec 12, 2015 05:36
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Effectronica posted:Malta cannot economically outproduce the UK in any realistic scenario. Landmass is, in fact, a part of economic power. Sorry that the Will doesn't Triumph over material factors. Landmass is part, but definitely not the only factor, which is why the United States is a larger economic power than Canada even though Canada has a larger landmass. More landmass tends to correlate to more natural resources and gives you more space for population, but there's way more to it than just that. A small but industrially developed and densely populated country like Belgium or Austria is way more economically powerful than a large but industrially underdeveloped and sparsely populated country like Mongolia or Libya.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:03
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While we're on the subject of World War II books, I'm going to give my usual recommendation of A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman. I'm of the opinion that it is the best memoir written about the Eastern Front and one of the best of the entire war. It's formed out of a couple historians amalgamating together Grossman's war diaries and correspondent articles with historical context and covers everything from pre- to post-war. Grossman is a famous Soviet author and was a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, who covered a number of crucial battles and issues firsthand including the initial rout in front of Nazi forces, Stalingrad, Kursk and the liberation of Treblinka. Grossman was Jewish, so the Einsatzgruppen and death camps were particularly devastating in his coverage (his mother was trapped in Berdichev and died there during one of the massacres) but the bulk of the reporting is frontline stuff about combat and soldiers' lives. If you're at all interested in the Eastern Front and haven't read this book, you owe it to yourself to do so.
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Dec 22, 2015 18:38
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I read a theory once that one contributing factor to America's better DC was the increased American familiarity with machines and mechanical engineering, due to the better economic conditions of American sailors before they entered the Navy compared to Japanese sailors--i.e. the commonness of cars and other mechanical forms of transportation in America meant that Americans in general had a greater familiarity with how to operate and maintain machines than Japanese people did because of the decreased availability of machines in the Japanese economy. I'm not sure how much stock I put in this theory--I'd be more inclined to thing it had to do with the different training priorities that meant all American sailors had some idea of how damage control worked rather than it being a specialized role, but it might be worth mentioning just in case anyone knows more than I do about this particular theory.
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Dec 28, 2015 19:39
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Herv posted:I have a fuzzy memory of reading about German torpedoes being released and subsequently attacking the sub that released it. The pucker factor must have been strong. This happened with American torpedoes a couple of times I think. They would be fired and would go in a circle and hit the sub that had fired them in the first place.
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Dec 28, 2015 20:01
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Fojar38 posted:I hear this a lot but I haven't heard any substantial evidence in support of it beyond that it meant that the Soviets were off the table as potential mediators. Actual records of what people like the Emperor were thinking about were basically entirely about the bombs. Well, it means they were off the table as potential mediators but it also means that the one remaining military formation the Japanese had that they thought remained strong (the Kwantung Army, which was always significantly stronger on paper and in Japanese elites' minds than it was in the real world) was utterly crushed in a matter of days. American naval campaigns showed the Japanese were conclusively defeated at sea and August Storm showed they were conclusively defeated on land. It essentially meant they had no hope of any kind of victory, the best they could hope for was a horrific bloodbath of an Allied invasion of Japan. And the atomic bombs showed that even that wasn't necessarily an option because America could wipe out entire cities in one go. It's certainly a combination of factors but don't dismiss the Soviet invasion. quote:It sounds like Cold War left-wing historiography where the Soviets must have been the true champions on all fronts of the Great Patriotic War of National and Global Liberation. And this is just dumb bullshit but you probably know that.
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Jan 2, 2016 16:48
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ComradeKane posted:Anyway, has anyone read Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, by Catherine Merridale? I've read it. It's very good if you want to learn about the World War II Red Army, although if you find the prose hard to get through it probably won't get any better, I don't remember any significant shifts in quality or tone.
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Jan 8, 2016 01:24
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P-Value Hack posted:Now I wish there was a term for Russia/Soviet-philes who are obsessed with how badass Stalin was or whatever. One thing is to argue that the USSR was the biggest combatant in WWII and deserves more recognition in Western history, but another is some of the jerking off people do about the USSR (and even Russia today) Nowadays we call them RT
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Apr 11, 2016 19:29
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It's also really important to remember that Hitler was human. Thinking of Hitler as an inhuman monster who spent all day every day raging about the Jews--essentially, as a Bond villain, a caricature--makes it easier to dismiss him as a unique phenomenon that could never happen in a different context. Thinking of him as human, someone who could be nice to his dog and fall in love with his girlfriend and laugh with his friends, is deeply unsettling and even terrifying because it makes us question the darkness inherent to humanity in a fundamentally different way. It's not "what could create such an inhuman monster?" but rather "what is it about humanity that allows us to do such dark things?"
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Apr 14, 2016 14:12
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Woolie Wool posted:Saturation bombing on the scale of WW2 was not the "new normal". Maybe some places in Vietnam came close, but the wholesale annihilation of cities from the air is something that just didn't happen after 1945. I wonder how much of this is due to an actual change in what we would consider the conduct of war and how much of it is just due to the fact that we haven't seen developed nations fight a total war since World War II though. 1945 was really the last time that two industrialized nations with the capacity to annihilate cities from the air fought each other. The US certainly tried in Vietnam (if I remember right, they dropped more bombs in Vietnam than were dropped by all powers during all of World War II) but that was a different kind of war and as far as I know most of their bombing of cities like Hanoi was targeted strikes with fighter planes, the occasional Linebacker II-type mission aside. It's possible to say that war has changed since 1945 and saturation bombing is no longer normal, but I wouldn't say that for certain until you can point to a comparable situation to World War II and see it not happening. It's clear that even powers like the US are still not holding back on missions because of civilian casualties (in drone strikes and bombings, etc.), and that's before even getting to militaries that might be considered less scrupulous like the Russians.
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Apr 14, 2016 21:31
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Darkrenown posted:This is one of these "everyone knows this" facts that are totally wrong, caused partly by believing Speer after the war for a long time. Germany was on a war economy from at least 1938 and civilians were getting a lower share of the economic output than in the UK or France for the entire Nazi reign. "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" is a rather good book on this subject if anyone is interested, but this site quotes a few bits: My understanding is that this is true but also that the impact on German civilian life was mitigated up until about 1942 by the redistribution of plunder from conquered territories and murdered Jews to German civilians
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Jul 10, 2016 18:47
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Aliquid posted:How was the transfer of wealth from Jews to Germans handled on a practical level? Did people stand in lines to get art and jewelry and property deeds? I have no idea how it worked for personal items like things left behind after Jews were killed, but for the wider economy it was generally a case of "the state confiscated Jewish-owned businesses with no compensation, then sold them to ethnic Germans for low prices" and "the state instituted laws that fired Jews from certain occupations, opening job opportunities that ethnic Germans then filled". At least some of the loss of personal property (though by no means all of it) subsequently came from Jews selling personal items like art and jewelry to get money because they were no longer permitted to get money from participating in the formal economy.
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Jul 10, 2016 19:14
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Yeah the ridiculous amount of overspecialization in German vehicles meant that you would occasionally get ridiculous stories like "one Panther/Tiger happened to be in the right place at the right time and blew up ten enemy tanks" (though both sides tended to inflate these numbers, the Germans for reasons of pride and the Allies for reasons of making the Germans seem scary) but you get a ton more stories about tanks breaking down because their super specialized widget broke and there are no replacement widgets so the tank was abandoned or immobilized and easily destroyed, and the severe under-production meant they were constantly outnumbered once the Allies got their poo poo together. But the stories about widgets breaking tend not to get immortalized in newspaper articles and memoirs and TV specials and movies, so they didn't enter popular memory the way the occasional stories of German overengineering paying off did. PS yeah that Jonathan Parshall video is a ridiculous proclick if you want to know anything about WWII tanks.
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Aug 14, 2016 20:43
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Avocados posted:What army had the worst experience with mother nature during the war? World at War keeps one-upping itself with answers. The Germans in the eastern front during winter seemed terrible, but then watching British soldiers retreat in Burma made me feel exhausted just seeing it. Tank life in Northern Africa looked horrendous too for allied soldiers, although that was more lined up with dying in a tank fire rather than heat or sandstorms. I know misery is subjective, but this documentary is teaching me just how absolutely hellish some environments are when you add war to the mix. I used to think environment was more of a background component of war, but for the allies in SE Asia, it seemed like an immediate and direct opponent. Asking which army on the whole had it worst is really subjective since how do you compare freezing to death in the Russian winter with dying of malaria in the jungles of Burma, but there are a few specific examples of unpleasant encounters with nature from the war, like the Battle of Ramree Island where it's possible dozens or hundreds of Japanese soldiers were eaten by crocodiles (though strong doubts have been cast on the exact magnitude of this event) or the sinking of the USS Indianapolis whose survivors were left floating in the Pacific Ocean for three days with sharks eating them periodically. Personally I would probably say the Eastern Front was the worst just for sheer scale. For individuals the fighting in Pacific and Southeast Asian jungles may have been worse, but the army sizes there were never as great as they were on the Eastern Front, where literally millions of soldiers were directly affected by the horrendous winter conditions.
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Aug 25, 2016 04:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:Could you, uh, drown in mud? Like literally? It happened at Passchendaele in WWI, so yes. I don't know whether it happened to anyone in the rasputitsa, but it's not difficult to imagine it could.  e: I should clarify that the above picture is the Eastern Front, not Passchendaele. Passchendaele was more like this:   
vyelkin fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 13:05
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LeoMarr posted:Which country was the founder of state sponsored race based killings Sumeria, probably.
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Aug 25, 2016 16:17
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MikeCrotch posted:The reparations payments themselves however played a huge role in the leadup to WWII, since US refusal to write down either war debts owed by Britain and France to the USA or German reparation payments meant that huge amounts of the German economy were being siphoned off the US, either directly or via the allies. This among other mistakes made by the Weimar government in the 20's and 30's was one of the contributing factors to the economic collapse that allowed the rise of the Nazis to power. This is a bit of a misconception. Reparations were big enough to be noteworthy but not big enough to actually severely affect the German economy. The enormous numbers of reparations that the Allies calculated as the cost of the war that Germany should be liable for were for show, the actual numbers Germany was expected to pay were much smaller. In real terms, the actual reparations Germany paid between 1920 and 1931 were 20 billion gold marks (which apparently translates to about $20 billion 2016 US dollars according to an uncited source I saw, so take that with a grain of salt), of which 12.5 billion were cash, and most of that cash came from loans from the United States. In essence the United States was paying back its own loans to the Allies: France and Britain paid back war loans from America by getting reparations from Germany, which were paid using loans from American banks, set up under the 1924 Dawes Plan and the 1929 Young Plan, both of which reduced the amount Germany was required to pay per year. As for the hyperinflation that gets brought up a lot, that was actually a deliberate attempt by the German government to get out of paying their reparations by devaluing their currency and it didn't work. After they stopped printing money and reparations were stabilized under the Dawes Plan, Weimar actually enjoyed a period of economic stability in the latter half of the 1920s. The big problem with the German economy wasn't the reparations themselves, which weren't especially arduous for an economy the size of Germany's. The problem was that the mechanisms by which the reparations were being paid, i.e. the fact that the German economy was heavily supported by US banking loans, meant they were extremely exposed when the Great Depression hit and US banks withdrew their foreign loans. Germany was one of the worst affected countries in the world by the Great Depression, and traditional economic tools were insufficient to remedy the situation because a) they no longer had access to the US banks that had been supporting the economy before; and b) macroeconomic policy at the time was completely focused on austerity, which only made the Depression worse. It was the resulting economic and political chaos as Germany's political elites discredited themselves one by one, by entering power to try and fix the economic chaos and failing since they were unwilling to break with economic orthodoxy, that led to the rise of the Nazis, but that had very little to do with the size of reparations payments themselves.
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Sep 7, 2016 13:52
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Ardennes posted:I think a 1:1 exchange rate between 2016 dollars and Goldmarks is throwing off your analysis. A mark was 5 grams of Silver and comparable US dollar was 25.7 grams which means an effective exchange rate of 5.5 . There has been 1200% worth of inflation since 1920, which means 12:1 inflation ratio between 1920:2016 dollars. 1 / 5.5 x 12 = 2.18. The equivalent was 43.6 billion dollars,, the German economy was about 392 billion dollars (2016) in 1925 which means the reparations were a little over 10% of GDP. That isn't insignificant, it would be roughly 1.8-1.9 trillion for the current US economy. Also, a key part your missing here was that France and Britain were occurring the Rhur-Rhine industrial area in Germany ie its industrial heart, which was seriously effecting output and which pushed the Germans to print in the first place. It is also why re-militarizing the Rhineland was such a big deal for the Nazis. Well I'm happy to see someone actually do the math on the exchange rate, as I said that came from a random uncited source so I'm unsurprised it was wrong. That being said, even based on your own math I would dispute the centrality of reparations. The total reparations paid from 1920-1931 was 20 billion goldmarks or 43.6 billion dollars according to your calculations, but that's total reparations, not annual. Reparations changed from year to year based on which plan Germany was currently following (under the terms of the Dawes plan annual payments were supposed to annually increase from one billion marks to 2.5 billion over five years, while under the Young Plan they were set at two billion marks per year), but if we average out the total over 11 years it's roughly 4 billion 2016 dollars per year from an economy of 392 billion 2016 dollars (your figure), which is around 1% of GDP. Again, big enough to be noteworthy but not big enough to mean "that huge amounts of the German economy were being siphoned off" as the poster I was responding to said. Ardennes posted:The Great Depression was in the big nail in the coffin for the Weimar Republic but ultimately it was built on anger and distrust that had building across the 1920s and deep political divisions in German society which were readily apparent by 1918-1920. While the Versailles Treaty wasn't wholly the issue, it put additional pressure on a society that was already bitter and disunited and the few years of stability in the mid-1920s didn't really didn't fix this. I don't disagree at all with your analysis of the social and cultural factors stemming from Versailles or the lingering societal trauma from the war itself or from the postwar years of civil war, occupation of the Ruhr-Rhine, hyperinflation, and so on. It would take a lot more than five years of relative economic stability to mend those wounds. But I absolutely don't think you can really point to reparations as a major economic cause of Weimar's collapse, Hitler's rise, and the leadup to WWII except insofar as they contributed to the German economy's reliance on foreign capital and therefore exposure to the Depression. As a social-cultural cause, absolutely, the humiliation of paying reparations was significantly greater than the actual economic burden of the reparations themselves.
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Sep 7, 2016 20:36
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Ardennes posted:You have to remember though that the allies were demanding additional resources on top of simply monetary reparations, at one point 26% of German exports. Furthermore, the economic damage from the occupation of the Rhur-Rhine region is certainly more than 1% of German GDP. The baseline reparations weren't enough to cause a meltdown, especially after 1925, but the much of the additional demands surrounding them were. I would say this is very much a part of the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty. Non-monetary reparations are included in the 20 billion marks figure. It was 20 billion total of which 12.5 billion were cash and the other 7.5 were other resources. It was well within Germany's ability to pay had they had the political and social will to do so, but they didn't. Ardennes posted:I would say it is a major indirect cause, the direct economic cause being the Great Depression itself. However, societies usually meltdown in stages and the events of 1921-1925 was one of those stages in German society. I think it is an important different in understanding history, and ultimately also why events like the modern-day Eurocrisis shouldn't be swept under the rug. According to most statistics the Eurozone has improved in the first few years, but the scars of the 2009-2014 period are clearly evident and has put new pressures on European political culture which very well may erupt again if the right bank isn't able to pay its creditors. I agree completely, I would just point out once again that I see that as a socio-cultural influence rather than a direct economic one. If economically the Eurozone has recovered enough to be past the effects of the crisis, or if economically Weimar Germany had recovered enough to be able to pay the relatively modest reparations with ease, that doesn't mean that previous economic crises haven't left a mark on society--and, importantly, a mark that can also play out in economic terms, for example in risk-averseness or an excess of caution when it comes to regulating bank lending. That doesn't necessarily mean that the direct economic impact is any greater, even if it leads to larger indirect economic results down the line. Put another way, I think the social and cultural impacts of Versailles were much greater than the economic impacts in leading to the fall of Weimar, rise of Hitler, and start of WWII, especially because the economic impacts pale in comparison to the impact of the Depression. Reparations are one part of the treaty but I think they show the larger effects in microcosm, because even though on the whole they weren't actually devastating or incredibly onerous in the long run, the socio-cultural perception of them as devastating (and the Weimar government's unwillingness to actually commit to their payment rather than trying to find any possible way to get out of paying) was very different from the economic reality, the same way the socio-cultural perception of Versailles as a national humiliation was much greater than the actual territorial losses and future limitations placed upon Germany (accounting for the Allies' unwillingness to enforce the treaty when it was violated, temporary occupation of the Ruhr-Rhine notwithstanding).
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Sep 7, 2016 22:48
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By the time D-Day happened Germany had lost the war. At the same time as the Western allies were invading France, the Red Army was destroying an entire German army group in Operation Bagration. By June 1944 the Red Army was the most powerful and massive military fighting force on the planet and nothing Germany did was going to change that. D-Day helped end the war faster but its failure would not have meant Germany winning because by June 1944 Germany had a zero percent chance of defeating the Soviet Union. Any discussion of what happens after the Soviets beat the Nazis with a failed D-Day is speculation but the ironclad fact of the matter is that the Soviets would have beat the Nazis, so we can all stand around counterfactualing til we turn blue in the face about what that means for Europe but there was no feasible way for Hitler to win the war, at all. It's much the same story for a crushing Japanese victory at Midway. That's great and all but US industrial production was orders of magnitude higher than Japanese, to the point that one year after Midway (assuming no other carrier losses by either side), assuming all US carriers were sunk at Midway and no Japanese carriers were sunk, the Americans would have more carriers than Japan again. By two years after Midway the advantage is nearly two to one. Jonathan Parshall of Shattered Sword fame has done an entire writeup of why losing Midway wouldn't have mattered in the long run, though it may have extended the war, here. Japan was doomed the moment America resolved to fight to the bitter end rather than negotiate a peace, which happened about three minutes after the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.
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Sep 21, 2016 14:15
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Randarkman posted:I think you can make a decent argument that by the time the war ended the US military was more potent, but that's beside the point. Did anyone argue for Germany really having a shot at winning the war in 1944 though? Germany might not have a shot at winning the war but the Soviets still wanted the second front which, all in all, was the reason for the invasion of France. No, but you don't even need to go through to German cities getting nuked to get a scenario where D-Day fails and Germany still loses. Nukes or not, second front or not, the Soviets win. The second front makes it easier and significantly reduces Soviet casualties, but the Soviets win either way.
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Sep 21, 2016 14:39
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Wikkheiser posted:Reactionary would be a better word than conservative, I think. But hell, Nazism was downright revolutionary too in a ... really reactionary way. Though I've found when these words start getting thrown around, arguments start breaking out between the liberal and Marxist scholars. (Roger Griffin, who I prefer, is a liberal.) I think the reason people refer to fascism as right wing (and nowadays conservative and right wing are often used interchangeably) is to differentiate it from the left wing political movements and ideologies of the time, primarily communism and socialism. Communism and socialism were at their hearts universalist rather than nationalist ideologies, in that they appealed to universal human rights and universal economic principles as their fundamental intellectual basis. Socialism or communism might get put in place in one country or another but its appeal was designed to be broad--it was "workers of the world unite" not "workers of Germany unite", it just so happened to be that the various political parties, for quite obvious reasons, organized along national lines. (This is of course ignoring for the sake of argument the Soviet shift towards socialism in one country, but I would argue that such a shift didn't entail moving away from the intellectual argument for socialism as a universal doctrine but instead entailed a pragmatic shift towards strengthening the world's only socialist state because the Soviets believed they were constantly under threat from both external and internal enemies, but that's a discussion for another day) Fascism, on the other hand, was extraordinarily nationalistic, in that it aimed to unite its perceived national and political communities. As you say, it wasn't a typical conservative movement of the time because it didn't want to conserve the existing institutions of governance, it instead wanted to put in place a mythical version of the national community that it invented from supposed historical traditions, like the Roman Empire for Italy. That national community would then a) take priority over the individual, and b) merge with the political community. There could be no such thing as universal fascism because fascism believed so firmly in the importance of the nation-state, making its particulars unique to each nation based on that nation's fascist movement's invented mythical history. This is why fascism can be differentiated both from liberalism, which placed priority on individual over collective rights, and from socialism, which emphasized universal rather than national principles. This is of course a reductive and simplistic (and overly theoretical) explanation but essentially I think there's a reason why the formal name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Every word in there is important. Nowadays dumb people love to claim the Nazis were socialists because they have that word in there, but they differed from socialism by emphasizing the imagined national community so strongly (national socialism), whereas socialism, in theory anyway, emphasized shared humanity, shared class interests, and universal rights even across national borders. When people talk about Trump as the face of modern day fascism I think this is what they're referring to. Trump has imagined a national community of white Americans, an exclusionary nationalism that all but forbids the membership of people of colour or Muslims, and his political campaign is essentially trying to merge that imagined national community with the political institutions of state in the same way the Nazis or Italian fascists claimed to do.
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Sep 23, 2016 14:26
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