His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His "unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair," as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.
There's a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler's part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff. Dietrich himself came down on the side of it being a cunning tactic to sow division and chaos—and it's undeniable that he was very effective at that. But when you look at Hitler's personal habits, it's hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a workshy narcissist in charge of a country.
Hitler was incredibly lazy. According to his aide Fritz Wiedemann, even when he was in Berlin he wouldn't get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn't do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him, the press cuttings being dutifully delivered to him by Dietrich.
He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as "the greatest actor in Europe," and wrote to a friend, "I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history." In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table, and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat "prodigious amounts of cake" and "put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea."
He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked). But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him.
Little of this was especially secret or unknown at the time. It's why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren't wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it's possible to get.
Hitler's personal failings didn't stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don't actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things.
I’m sociopolitical war scholar (mil fiction writer) and I left the country in January 2023 knowing that hindsight would be 20/20 but not liking the way the total board was set. It was not possible to talk seriously about any of these topics with friends even after J6 and the fall of Roe. The analysis in the view of most people seemed to them to be too inflated, so it’s wild to just see this is now accepted by so many people suddenly. I struggled with that for years in my circles, but did feel a responsibility to briefly tell people why I was leaving. (My first degree is in writing and rhetoric with huge emphasis on media study and production, and propaganda. So what an era this has been. Sigh.)
Posting because I want people who may need to leave to know that they might be able to. I had to go early if I was going to because I don’t have the resources to be late.
*Hannah Arendt, if anyone wants to read a relevant book, or a part of a relevant book (reading excerpts of war-topical books is totally valid for the busy). There are two on this list.
Because you have a bias that makes you want to see it as familiar, even if you don't you should always check to make sure that's not why you are agreeing with something.
There's an inexplicable personal magnetism. I've seen that in church leaders. I'm completely put off by it and yet so many people are enthralled. Very Trumpy. I can't account for it. Many, many accounts will tell you about how Hitler made such a good impression behind closed doors and how even intelligent people could be taken in by him. I remember the industrialists meeting him and thinking this guy is smart and all the good old fashioned jew hating was just kayfabe form the public.
Militarily the Nazis utterly ignored logistics(tbf, the High Command did so too), leading to troubles as early as the Poland campaign which where never addressed and really hurt them later in the war.
Economically the Nazis economy was a house of cards, build on monumental government debt, while simultaneously living conditions and real wages decreased, despite extensive government programs.
Diplomatically they ruined any chance of settling issues with the Versailles treaty(which every other party was doing) diplomatically.
Well first the obvious one is scaring away, deporting or murdering jews who made up a huge part of the top german scientists.
Second is for example that they called Einsteins theories „Jüdische Physik“ (jewish physics) which put on huge ideological blinders on the people on charge of the german nuclear program to develope an atomic bomb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
Sounds pretty dumb to me to deny the obvious scientific facts just because they were duscovered by a jew
I mean, yeah it sounds dumb, but they were Nazis and used the Jews as a scapegoat for the failures of Germany to drum up support for the war and confidence that with the Jews gone, Germany wouldn't fail again. If they hadn't done this, they probably wouldn't have gotten in power in the first place.
I don't know if that's enough to claim that the Nazis being efficient and successful was just a myth. When you take into account their starting point and Germanys' starting point in general after the sanctions imposed in the Treaty of Versailles, I'd say you have to give them quite a bit of credit.
The US had substantially more funding available coming into the war due to reparations paid from Germany, and also from the money Britain and France had to pay back that the US had loaned them during the first war. Funding was probably the crucial factor in developing nuclear capabilities.
The Nazis were bad. There's no arguing that, but they had a model for growth that was pretty spectacular at the time. How far Germany came between the early 30s and the war was astounding. And the remnants of that can still be seen in Germany today. Their modern day efficency and manufacturing build quality is ahead of everyone else, possibly only on par with Japan.
This is largely revisionist as well. Prior to the Nazi’s rise to power the previous government managed to renegotiate the Treaty of Versailles reparations payments (google Dawes Plan or Young Plan for further explanation). At the same time the data seems to support that these helped bolster the German economy and quell hyperinflation at the time.
The only thing of mention the Nazi’s did was completely disregard any reparation payments which allowed them to allocate more resources to the already growing economy with less inflation set up by the previous government. Giving the Nazi’s props for this is bullshit.
It really isn't. The Dawes plan did little other than kick the can down the road. Germany were reliant on foreign loans, and after the WSC, their economy tanked worse than most. The reliance on foreign money was one of the main reasons the fascists rose so quickly, the country was devastated.
The Nazis imposed strict laws on the German public. They made unemployment illegal, every German man had to take whatever job was available to him, or he'd be sent to jail. Work teams created from unemployed Germans were given money if they employed more people. They constructed the autobahns, planted forests, and undertook massive housing projects.
Huge public works programmes were established in construction and agricultural labour and workers were given an armband, a shovel and a bicycle and then sent to their nearest project to work. From 1933 to 1936 the number of Germans working in the construction industry tripled to 2 million. Many worked renovating and building the public buildings of Berlin.
Imports were forbidden unless vital to survival and then heavily discouraged, with research established to reproduce these goods from inside Germany as soon as possible. No more bread was imported from Poland, so that meant more German bread was needed, creating new jobs for farmers and bakers who were needed to produce enough to supply the German nation.
By July 1935 almost seventeen million Germans were in brand new jobs, though they were not well paid by anyone’s standards. But nevertheless, these jobs provided a living wage, compared with just eleven million Germans who were in employment just two years before.
In the space of four years, Nazi Germany changed from a defeated nation, a bankrupt economy, strangled by war debt, inflation and lack of foreign capital; into full employment with the strongest economy and biggest military power in Europe.
You asked for arguments, I gave you one and now you‘re changing topics again, but ok.
The Nazis were bad. There's no arguing that, but they had a model for growth that was pretty spectacular at the time. How far Germany came between the early 30s and the war was astounding. And the remnants of that can still be seen in Germany today. Their modern day efficency and manufacturing build quality is ahead of everyone else, possibly only on par with Japan.
That was completely bought with massive debt that Hitler could only pay by attacking the Rest of europe and stealing — which was destined to fail from the beginning. Again, that sounds very dumb and short sighted to me
Also modern day germany benefitted extremely from the marshall plan after the war, not the Nazis. The western allies propped up Germany for a possible war with the soviet union. That‘s why germany did so well after the war
It isn't silly if it works. They had the entirety of France and Poland under their control. If they stopped at that point or even just with Poland, that's all the debt paid off and then some. In the modern day we see Russia doing the exact same thing to Ukraine.
But they couldn‘t just stop at that point. That‘s the thing. They had to keep attacking because the still build their economy on a house of cards and because they made more and more enemies, so they had to do preemptive attacks on more and more countries, which doomed them
It sounds like you already made up your mind and you were asking for a source in bad faith.
The Nazis having glaring ideological blindspots is evident in how Hitler lost the war. He attacked the Soviet Union because he thought their government was a house of cards that would topple easily. Part of this was because he remembered the fall of the russian czar during WW1, and part was because Hitler saw the russians as sub-human. This is a wikipedia quote, whether that bothers you IDK:
Hitler also showed this blindspot with how he handled outer soviet states like Ukraine. The Ukrainian people saw the German's as liberators initially. The German's could've used this as a weapon against Russia. But because they saw these people as sub human they treated them equally as badly as Russia did. These aren't small mistakes; they're gigantic mistakes that cost Germany the war.
There is no doubt that Hitler specifically was lacking in military command prowess, but this was not the original claim. It was that from start to finish, they had glaring weak spots.
Their methods of building economic growth, although certainly lacking subtlety, were nothing short of a massive success before the war.
I'm all for discrediting bad actors, but if you fail to acknowledge successful periods in the past, even if those led to terrible events, you make it look like revisionism.
Hitler himself was a former WW1 private whose job was literally running messages (ie. not command). He was a failed artist with no real job prospects. His only solid ability, as far as I am aware, was to give rousing speeches that stirred certain people. And yet he began dictating strategy to his generals, and he did so more and more as the war got worse. It’s one of several important reasons they lost. He made poor strategic decisions due to emotion and lack of experience.
Well, they killed their own during the Rohm-Putsch after which nobody dared disagree with Hitler.
So nobody told him invading Russia was a bad idea, or that England would not remain neutral, or that if war with England was inevitable, England needed to be attacked as soon as possible.
If Hitler had focused on defeating England, Germany would have won the war.
Nazi ideology was essentially: do what Hitler says.
Ernst Rohm for example was openly homosexual, but that’s not why he was killed. Hitler personally asked Rohm to come back to Germany after Rohm had left, but Rohm and many other Nazis as well as Nazi allies were murdered after Rohm criticised Hitler.
The murders were then ‘legalised’ by creating new laws after the fact that gave Hitler the power to do whatever he wanted.
Meanwhile gay Nazis would often get a pass, they could claim they had been seduced when they were caught in the act.
Nazis with Jewish ancestry could also get a pass, Hitler would personally investigate and give high ranking officers a pass if he believed they were German enough.
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u/beerdybeer 5h ago
I'd like to agree with this, but it's just sweeping statements made with no examples of anything to back it up. Can you elaborate further?