However, during the early days of the space race, there was literally nothing the US could do to catch up with the Soviet Union space program. Their best hope was a former Nazi engineer.
Take that number. Subtract all women and Kurds, people who speak critically of the government. Adjust for the academics held as political prisoners and brain drained talent.
That’s your engineering base. You can’t square the engineering circle when your government is actively engaged in repressing the population.
Women in Turkey are allowed to study and participate active in the economy. Ditto with Kurds. The purges of academics were mostly in humanities.
There are a shitload of tensions between the white and black turks, between turks and kurds, erdogan is hardly the most pleasant person in the world and has lots of enemies, with the slowing economy country imploding at some point is not unthinkable, but so far the day to day life in Turkey is chugging along just fine.
As well there are notable examples of Germans who didn't build weapons "with a smile" for the Nazis, and the usage of slave labor in the war machine harmed their industrial capacity through sabotage.
And 15% of the scientists that we're fired from universities were responsible for 64% of academic citations.
Also, many ways Germany had the inferior war technology and progress: encryption. nuclear. Soviet tanks we're better. Germany didn't have long range bombers. British anti-aircraft systems were better.
And all that from a country that led the world in science and engineering before WWII.
But superior in conventional warfare at the beginning of WW2. Stukas, tanks and infanterie well (radio) coordinated.
MG42, the basemodel is still in use as MG3 today
Also later: ME262 (first jet engine), STG44 (first assault rifle), V1 and V2 (rockets)
So given the size, german wartechnology was very advanced.
But it was because this was the sole focus of the ruling nazi party: war tech.
Basic university research is about anything and mostly civilian and the nazis were no academics: they cared about war technology and "scientific" proof, that the aryans are superior. So they did not feel the loss of the fleeing jewish based intellectuals so hard.
"And all that from a country that led the world in science and engineering before WWII."
And this statement is probably more likely true before WWI.
I know Turkey had a Kurdish president as well as many kurdish senators in parliament. Some member of opposition party some members of Erdogan's party.
I know some cities have Arabic people more than Kurdish in east of Turkey.
The problem historical, needs to be closed for the sake of the citizens.
Weapons just need to work, a consumer vehicle need to be cost effective, your 80s style Soviet radas are not going to sell at all despite relative ease of production.
South Africa has more than 50,000,000 - still can't build coal power plants without mucking it up. So ... not sure why you think what you think.