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I think the best defense that can be made for the Kaiserreich was that the British and French empires existed and at least the Germans weren't that bad. Britain was committing holocausts before Hitler was even born. But basically all the European great powers were stone cold evil and the US was not significantly better.
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Dec 8, 2015 05:23
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HerraS posted:The last people on the planet who thought waging a war in 1938 was a good idea were the German commanders. Hitler was all gung-ho about starting one and a last ditch effort by Mussolini resulting in Munich is what prevented it from happening. Going to war against the czechs would've been a complete disaster for the germans. So a war in 1938 would have actually been a good idea, to see the Third Reich crash into a wall like a flying spitball.
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Dec 8, 2015 16:04
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I sometimes wonder what it was like to have been one of those Wehrmacht generals at the exact moment in '44 when he realized (a) what an catastrophic mistake the war was, (b) the enormity of what he was complicit in, and (c) the inevitable consequences, both for Germany and for him personally. Should have reconsidered your life choices, Herr Feldmarschall. 
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Dec 9, 2015 03:03
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cheerfullydrab posted:Walter Model is the best example of the sort of general who was a murderous rear end in a top hat, but not a Nazi murderous rear end in a top hat. An actual soldier who lasted the whole war, mostly by being just exactly enough of a toady to Hitler to get by at just the exact proper times. At least he ate his gun rather than becoming a slimy Clean Wehrmacht memoir-writer like Guderian. Counterfactual, but there's no way the Western Allies wouldn't have tried to rehabilitate Model and use him for their own ends. Thinking about various Nazi German military leaders and their often karma-deficient ultimate fates makes me also think there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of those sorts of people in every Western country, especially in America. There are Josef Blosches in American military and CIA interrogation sites laughing as a dog rear end-fucks some guy whose only crime was failing to pay his loan shark on time, so the lender denounced him to the coalition as a terrorist. There are vulgar populists ready to step into the shoes of Kool-Aid drinkers like Ernst Röhm and the Strasser brothers, to be used and them disposed of when a future fascist movement gains the high society connections that make such stooges unnecessary. There are untold thousands of upright bible-believin' Are Troops waiting for a führer. They're here. They're everywhere. They were everywhere the whole time during the flowering of liberalism after World War II. Surviving. Regrouping. Waiting for the stars to be right again. It's terrifying.  The FedEx guy who comes by my workplace to pick up the outgoing merchandise was telling me how he thought the Spartans would handle ISIS (tl;dr: they kill all Muslims everywhere). Of course he's a veteran. This is military culture. This is what it stands for. This is 'MERICA. God help us all.
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Dec 10, 2015 07:10
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From the perspective of Western Europe in 1938, containing the USSR was just as important as containing the Nazis. They hated communism and weren't going to give Russia anything until the Nazis overran the West all the way to the Pyrenees.
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Dec 10, 2015 19:07
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You can't do that. The centuries of Russian colonization and its aftereffects dominated politics in the region. The Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian Empire under new management as much as it was a communist state. IIRC Poland even wanted an alliance with Nazi Germany against Russia. You can't take the 1930s or any other period out of context. E: Poland also had a fascist government at the time and France had an active, powerful fascist movement of its own.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:46
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Count Roland posted:Would it have been possible for the Nazis to defeat the soviets militarily, by employing different strategies, attacking at a different time etc? Or were they always basically destined to lose against a country that was so huge, tough and productive. No. They would have needed two additional Germanies to win in the east. Their last chance for a victory would have been to sue for peace on favorable terms with the west before Barbarossa but their ideology made this impossible.
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Dec 12, 2015 00:11
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My Imaginary GF posted:It's the entire reason Hitler invaded Poland. From '33 to '39, Hitler was trying to recruit Poland into the anti-commintern pact and into alliance against the Soviets, offering generous land swaps in Ukraine and Belorussia for the Gdansk corridor. You moron, Poland was ruled by loving fascists who would have gladly went arm-in-arm with Hitler in an anti-communist pact but they were not going to hand their entire coastline over to do it. Being landlocked is a massive, massive handicap and no Polish leader with half a brain would have landlocked the country in exchange for favors from Hitler. Also there's the whole fact that German imperialists had been agitating for Drang nach Osten for almost an entire century. They even largely sat out the Scramble for Africa because they were more interested in colonizing the Baltic region. Polish and German conservatives had common interests in containing communism in general and the USSR in particular during the 1930s but they were not friends. Also [citation needed] on the land swaps part. Leaving out the fact that Belarus and Ukraine are landlocked and their land would not have been an acceptable substitute for the corridor, Germany could not afford to piss off the USSR in 1939 and Hitler knew it.
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Dec 12, 2015 19:27
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Sergg posted:Even moderately conservative Germans were outraged at the very existence of Poland since they saw that land as having legitimately been part of Germany for centuries. Poland knew that it was going to be invaded by Germany at some point and I believe their prime minister said something to the tune of "We'd rather be dessert than breakfast." Most of it wasn't though. Germany lost the Polish Corridor, Danzig, and...  (there's also Alsace-Lorraine, but that's  )The territorial losses in 1918 were insignificant compared to 1945, where they lost all of Prussia except Brandenburg, which was absolutely devastating.
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Dec 12, 2015 22:34
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steinrokkan posted:Oh yes, Germany has been totally devastated since 1945, completely in tatters. Thanks for the completely idiotic strawman. The first ten years after the end of the war were really loving bad and for the East Germans, the next thirty after that weren't so great either. Not that it excuses or even mitigates anything the Nazis did (the Nazis did much worse things to Russia) but Germany suffered immensely as a consequence of starting and losing World War II, and the West German economic miracle (on the back of massive American investment and the biggest bailout in human history, which should have been a lesson to future capitalist leaders) came after a lengthy period of privation and misery. And speaking of worse things done to Russia, Russia recovered in the 1950s, completed its industrialization, and had almost thirty years of success before Brezhnev and Andropov hosed everything up so I guess Nazi Germany turning the western USSR into a barren hellscape and killing 
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Dec 12, 2015 23:25
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So are you going to actually refute the assertion that the USSR had a period of expanded influence and prosperity during the 1950s and especially in the 1960s, and that subsequent recoveries of the various nations wrecked by World War II do not mean those nations were not severely affected or that world wars are really terrible things, or are you going to take content-free potshots again? P.S. the Soviet stagnation and eventual decline started in 1973, which indeed is almost thirty years after the end of World War II. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 12, 2015 23:32
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steinrokkan posted:Yes. If the US Air Force sends B-52s to carpet bomb your hometown into a pile of cinders, it's OK because it will just be rebuilt, right? No harm no foul!
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Dec 12, 2015 23:36
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steinrokkan posted:This post is gibberish. And Germany did not lose that? Half of their cities were burned to the ground by the Americans and British, and the other half were sacked and looted by the Russians. Both West Germany and the USSR benefited from temporary, massive capital infusions from outside (West Germany mostly from the United States, the USSR mostly from the territories it sacked to help rebuild itself). Both recovered during the 1950s and 1960s, but the Soviet Union could not keep it going--I suspect because of the sidelining of reformers like Khrushchev and Kosygin. Raubwirtschaft only works once, there is no way it would provide the USSR with over twenty years of economic growth. E: I wouldn't really want to live in the 1960s USSR or in Yugoslavia, but I kind of respect Khrushchev and Tito for running non-capitalist regimes that were functional and fairly prosperous considering how little they started off with. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Dec 13, 2015 |
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Dec 13, 2015 00:02
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My point wasn't even strictly economic, and indeed it was examining the psychological and military factors that fueled German nationalism, so your attempting to attack it from a purely economic basis was completely off base to begin with. The loss of Prussia was an enormous national humiliation and a humanitarian disaster (on top of the five hundred simultaneous humanitarian disasters already unfolding in the reason, the majority of which were of course Germany's fault). The devastation may have even been necessary for the denazification process to work depending on who you ask (most of the Allied leaders at the time would have probably said yes) but 1945-1955 was a very, very bad time to be a German. And as for national power, Germany and the entire EU are basically pawns on the United States' board, whereas pre-WWII and especially pre-WWI Germany were great powers in their own right and not part of somebody else's sphere of influence. The United States benefited massively from World War II at the expense of all other great powers except the USSR, including its own allies France and Britain. Maybe that's why our political class seem to be permanently living in it. The average German now lives better than the average American, but Germany's ability to oppose American interests, even if it wanted to, amount to gently caress all. By contrast, the Kaiserreich had great leeway to pursue its own interests even against the interests of other great powers, and was able to do so for decades until Wilhelm II got a bit too comfortable testing the limits of German power and turned a war between a dying empire and a third-rate Balkan country into World War I. So again, this whole thing you're attacking is a strawman and I regret even engaging you on your terms and letting you dictate what's being debated. Germany, since 1918, through waging two idiotic, unwinnable wars, has lost about half of its entire area, which happened to contain its political and cultural heartland (Prussia), two generations of young men (thereby negating what would be an entire century of population growth), and their ability to act independently as a great power without having to respect the imperial ambitions of the United States (indeed, until the collapse of the USSR and subsequent decline of the US opened power vacuums, there were no independent great powers for a long time, and it was largely Germany's fault), as well as immeasurable material losses. The population of Germany has endured two bouts of national humiliation, "that DDR thing" (kind of a big deal, don't you think?), the dispossession and dispersal of the Prussian people, and a total of at least 25 years of economic ruin (post-WWI, Great Depression, post-WWII). They have paid very dearly for their crimes and are nowhere near as powerful as they'd be if they hadn't committed them. LeoMarr posted:Stalins such a nice guy, liberating countries from the woes of industrialization. By removing their industry. There's like one tankie in all of D&D and he hasn't even posted in this thread, so I don't know why you even brought this up. Nobody here likes Stalin. steinrokkan posted:In this way your example is the exception that proves the rule. Europe alone has a large number of such "exceptions" who have very rich economies and very high standards of living and absolutely no way to leverage that prosperity into real power. Norway isn't going create a sphere of influence anytime soon, nor are the Netherlands, Monaco, Austria, Belgium, Estonia, or to go outside of Europe, Singapore, Taiwan, etc., etc. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Dec 13, 2015 |
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Dec 13, 2015 00:42
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steinrokkan posted:This sort of aggressively romantic view of the war outcomes fortunately belongs firmly on the trash heap of history. What is "aggressively romantic" about "world wars really suck and we keep losing them and getting humiliated, we should probably not wage world wars again", or "being evicted from the land your family called home for 400 years really sucks, we should not do things that will cause this to happen to us again"? The fact that I acknowledge that real humans who live in real countries are not beep boop robots and are affected in many ways by what their countries do and have happen to them? If none of these things would have affected Germany or the German people, why did Allies do them to Germany? Punishing the German state and even the German people was an essential part of the post-World War plans, to try to get them to stop being belligerent assholes all the time, and by all accounts the lesson eventually took. Raskolnikov38 posted:In light of the Greek crisis/EU, we really should have put the morgantheu plan into action. What makes you think, if the UK or France stepped into the power vacuum (or, God help Europe, the US did so directly) left by the Morgenthau Plan, things would be different? Ultimately austerity comes from global capital. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Dec 13, 2015 |
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Dec 13, 2015 00:56
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You mean the postwar generation that grew up under intense denazification?
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Dec 13, 2015 01:00
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steinrokkan posted:Constructing this sort of narrative, while compelling, tends to be one-sided and leading to revanchism. On the other hand, completely rejecting it seems pretty narrow and even Eurocentric considering that displaced and dispossessed groups today frequently describe the territorial, cultural, and psychological depredations as being as bad as or worse than the strictly material ones. The fact that European nationalists used land, culture, language, and heritage to terrible ends does not mean they are utterly meaningless--I couldn't even imagine saying such a thing to an Indian community (I hate "Indian" but "indigenous American" and "First Nations" are North America-centric, "New World" is a colonial idea, and merely "indigenous" is vague, if anyone has a more appropriate word help me out) leader--and considering that the indigenous peoples of the Americas have basically lost everything, if they talk about the importance of their homelands and culture and rites that white people stole from them, who am I to question them?
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Dec 13, 2015 01:22
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It pisses me off that not only did we promise Unit 731 leaders amnesty if they shared their research with us, we actually gave it to them. If you're going to cut such an odious deal, at least do the decent thing and break it once they've given you what you want.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:31
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steinrokkan posted:Unit 731 is just the tip of the iceberg, the Japanese systematically murdered something like 30 million people in China alone in their anti-Communist pacification campaigns. On the other hand the American government was quite happy to support the KMT which was about as brutal in their treatment of the civil population (Yellow River flooding, anyone?), so there were hardly winners in that theatre. Don't forget the British Empire, which killed something like 100 million people in Asia, and set India back 300+ years through its parasitism. When your skull count makes Hitler's look pathetic, you're really something. In Europe, you had Britain, in the Pacific you had the Empire.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:42
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I've heard Bavaria described as Germany's Texas and those maps go a long way towards explaining that.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:44
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Anosmoman posted:They inflicted 2:1 casualties on the Soviets while fighting Britain, France and the US and they did it with inferior technology. The whole endeavor was lost from the beginning but while it lasted the German military did kinda ok. Sometimes I wonder how much of wehrabooism comes from western Allied propaganda and folk history that inflated Germany into a supersciencey overdog to make their own victory seem like a glorious triumph against all odds rather than inevitable and minimize the importance of "the commies". And how much comes from Hitler's favorite engineer later putting his name on a certain very famous rear-engined sports car (that IIRC he had no personal hand in designing, and still owed a great deal to the Tatra like Volkswagens and the 356 before it). Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Mar 2, 2016 |
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Mar 2, 2016 22:59
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sparatuvs posted:And their plan once they beat the soviets? A massive return to the land where production was switched to agriculture by hand. Of all the harebrained Nazi schemes, Wehrbauern were the absolute dumbest idea they ever had, hands down. Holy poo poo. Perhaps they could have asked the British how peasant armies fare against regulars from an industrialized superpower.
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Mar 2, 2016 23:00
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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.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:11
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