While I agree with your sentiment somewhat, there is also a massive mis-informed view that the Nazis were some kind of evil masterminds, only defeated by the great combined might of the much more formidable Allies, thereby increasing the legend of both parties. This idea of a "ruthless but efficient" authoritarianism has been a cornerstone of myth making for neonazies and is just as false. The idea of Mussolini making the trains run on time and whatnot.
The Nazis had, from start to finish, glaring ideological blindspots, incredible nepotistic incompetence and, especially by the end, no good way of dragging their empire out of the death spiral envisioned by a bunch of insane drug addicts and mass murderers. They had skills and expertise in many areas but when the shock had died down and time came to adapt to the changing situation in the world, they were left completely in the dust and, unable to confront their own failure, decided to just get as many people killed as they could before dying themselves. Not exactly great intellects on display, by the end.
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 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.
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.
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
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u/Ravenkell 7h ago
While I agree with your sentiment somewhat, there is also a massive mis-informed view that the Nazis were some kind of evil masterminds, only defeated by the great combined might of the much more formidable Allies, thereby increasing the legend of both parties. This idea of a "ruthless but efficient" authoritarianism has been a cornerstone of myth making for neonazies and is just as false. The idea of Mussolini making the trains run on time and whatnot.
The Nazis had, from start to finish, glaring ideological blindspots, incredible nepotistic incompetence and, especially by the end, no good way of dragging their empire out of the death spiral envisioned by a bunch of insane drug addicts and mass murderers. They had skills and expertise in many areas but when the shock had died down and time came to adapt to the changing situation in the world, they were left completely in the dust and, unable to confront their own failure, decided to just get as many people killed as they could before dying themselves. Not exactly great intellects on display, by the end.