Germany was allowed heavy industry after the war, but defaulted on its reparation payment in 1923. France and Belgium thought Germany was holding out on them, and decided to “confiscate” (by occupying with soldiers) German industry.

This was pretty agregious, but Germany responded by the government asking workers to passively resist, more or less triggering a general strike, with the government printing money to cover the wages of all the striking workers. Naturally, if only a few workers are still making things, but the government is paying everyone their salary, it should be no surprise that this triggered hyperinflation.

I don’t know what you mean about “the west” pushing its ideology on Germany when Germany itself is part of that intellectual and cultural group. In fact, the Weimar Republic was culturally quite rich, and relatively progressive compared to other western nations. Unless you’re talking about how the Nazis took inspiration from the segregation in the United States, but I don’t think the US was particularly interested in exporting it.

I do read widely and appreciate your suggestion. What do you recommend as the must-read, accessible and honest and intelligent account of civilian life in Germany during that period. Thanks.

The US ""cut off"" oil to Japan by having possession of the Philiphines, which was situated directly between Japan and the Dutch East Indes. The Dutch East Indes had the oil, the Dutch didn't want to sell it to Japan, and Japan intended to take it by force so they could fuel their conquest of China. The American-occupied Philippines were between the two, so Japanese military leadership decided to eliminate the American Navy first.

Japan were not victims in this. It was their imperial ambition that did them in.

WW2 was an imperial war of aggression waged by a revanchist fascist state that felt entitled to land that other people were already living on, and resources other people already owned - a problem they attempted to solve by simply murdering all of them.

Boxed in? Boxed in by what, exactly? The inconvenient existence of the Czechs and Poles? Germany somehow manages to be far richer today than it was in 1933 - and it does this with less land / resources, and the overbearing influence of the Anglo-Saxon culture you openly deride. If Germany today can resist going on to murder millions of people for land and resources, it’s unclear to me why the larger and more resource-filled Germany of 1933 couldn’t similarly restrain itself. (Hint: because WW2 had nothing at all to do with any justifiable need for resources, but instead the jingoistic ambitions of a culture that saw itself as the master race, deserving of a place atop all others, and seething at its failure to secure the privileges it felt it was owed by reason of its own racial supremacy.)

Worst of all is your casual suggestion that Germany would be better off if it had retained more of its pre-1945 culture. I struggle to put this in any other way, but you’re saying you wish Germany today was culturally more like Nazi Germany, and I honestly don’t know what to say to that. As someone who would have been murdered for about three different reasons by the refined bearers of pre-1945 German culture, I have some choice words in mind.