The myth of Nazi efficiency
coffeecuphistory.wordpress.com
coffeecuphistory.wordpress.com
The Second World War, by John Keegan
Inside the Third Reich, by Albert Speer
Why the Allies Won, by Richard Overy
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...). 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.
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.
- 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.
I'd like to believe that, but I am afraid you are underestimating human brutality in general.
Wikipedia has an article as well: 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.
It's the only source for large-scale organ harvest I have found except of course Falun Gong, which I still don't know what to make of.
The story about US and native Americans was completely different. Most deaths occurred from disease and circumstances brought on by settlers and colonists. Many other native Americans were killed while raiding white settlers, or in retribution for raids. It's easier to kill a human being when he is trying to kill you.
A lot of harm has been done to native Americans, but the scale, motives and methods were completely different.
But couldn't they still hear them scream, and had to clean up the corpses? I am German and I have never understood why they used Cyclon B. Maybe I just suck at understanding chemical weapons, but it took up to 20 minutes to kill a room full of people, is that even faster then letting them suffocate?
Not safe for sanity, but source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B#Use_on_humans
Did they have to clean up the corpses? Nope, that's what the Sonderkommando were for. Jewish prisoners who cleaned up the corpses and operated the crematoriums.
Why they used Zyklon B - god only knows, but they didn't use just Zyklon B. They also used carbon monoxide and car exhaust gas quite frequently (mainly on the eastern front and early on in the war)
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.
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.
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.
Hitler just (prematurely) cashed on historical inertia.
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.
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. :-/
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.
Being terse is a good idea sometimes, but I'm not sure those times are as frequent as it actually occurs.
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.
Kissinger was alarmingly effective at what he did.
Churchhill's post second world war writings also cover this, but don't make the full claim the OP makes.
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.
That's pretty disingenuous.
“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.)
But it only fixes medium term (~10 year horizon) problems. Once the monetary / investment system is fixed, Germany would have stalled. It suffered from massive brain drain (if you literally have Einstein, making him flee isn't a great idea). And totalitarianism isn't great for creating an innovative workforce, even if you can keep your population from fleeing.
In the case of Nazi Germany Hitler purposely took on massive amounts of debt to rearm the country. Any economic success was temporary and entirely dependent on the massive arms program. Not only was the Nazi state inefficient arms investment couldn't possibly have ever paid back the investment in borrowed money that created the Nazi military.
I'm sorry, could you clarify this? I'm hardly an expert, but I can't imagine that your average skinhead-type was drawn in by the economic allure of fascist state corporatism...
This hints at the fact that the Holocaust was far from "efficiently" organised and, to a degree, not pre-planned in its final form with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Instead, changing circumstances lead to a change in organisation and thus ultimately to the Wannsee conference and the final stage of the Holocaust.
This tendency to have a very short term memory when it comes to these types of events does not serve us well when it comes to these types of discussions.
Pol Pot is an example of the other archetype of mass murder. He killed 1/4 of his country's population in 3 years in truly horrific fashion. But, in doing so he caused great harm to his own country's economy. What separates the Nazis is they efficiently eliminated large segments of the population without destroying society. It's horrific but also demonstrates at a somewhat visceral level that a large chunk of society is not that important. If 3/4 of the worlds bankers died tomorrow not much would change, if 3/4 of the worlds farmers died tomorrow there would be huge issues.
The majority of the jews killed in the Holocaust were not German, they were from all the occupied territories, most notably Poland.
Endlösung didn't kill anywhere near 1/4th of the population - it killed 1/3 %, and that fraction had already been systematically marginalised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_and_deat...
Arguably step one had been occurring for hundreds of years before the Nazi's rise to power, but they really pushed the envelope.
What I find fascinating is I suspect for a great number of the leaders they really where just looking for something to vilify at the start and things just snowballed. It was only latter in the process as this huge segment of the population because less necessary that the idea of killing them showed up. Something like mass sterilization would have been as effective if there idea really was a twisted form of eugenics and they had been forcibly sterilizing people there and even in the US. However, while the initial idea may have been slave labor they kept sending so many people to these camps that they needed a 'solution'.
E.g. Mao Zedong killed a much larger number of people through his policies than the Nazis did, but letting your own population starve is not defined as "efficiency", rather the opposite of it. The grandparent apparently thinks of efficiency as in technology/engineering, and nothing that the Mongols used to kill people sounds very advanced to us. The Nazis had a very distinct way of using technology and bureaucracy for evil IMHO. And the OP seems to think in terms of economic efficiency.
While it was industrialized it was far from efficient.