Probably the best primary account of the inefficiencies of the National Socialists was by Albert Speer, Hitler's foremost technocrat. In "Inside the Third Reich" Speer gives an account of just how much the Germans struggled to mobilize during the war. Though Speer was able to introduce streamlined methods of mass production and remove some excessive bureaucracy, what strikes me most was the admission that Germany never hit production levels seen during WWI.
Speer was hardly a disinterested commentator on this, and I seem to remember his book has more than a few problems, and isn't Keegan's book rather general in its scope?
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.
No, certainly not. The context of who Speer was -- despite escaping the hangman at Nuremberg -- should absolutely be kept in mind. I felt his memoirs were written, at least in part, to improve his own legacy, at one point remarking: “one seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.” I'm not sure I buy that but his unique view of the moving parts and gears of the economy were probably mostly accurate.
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.
Kudos to this very, very good article. Let me add a couple of facets.
- 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 won't go into the war in general since I'm no expert on world war 2 but I can tell you that I've heard enough stories of Nazi brutality in the camps to know that, at least in exterminating undesirables, they were good. Real good.
The gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz worked like clockwork. There was, at all times, a line, a group in preparation for entry, a group in the gas chambers themselves and the crematoriums were working 24/7. It was, for all intents and purposes, a death factory.
That's the real point to make about Nazi efficiency - they weren't more efficient than, say, the average factory but what they were doing (murdering people) was never done in such a factory-like manner, hence the semblance of efficiency.
I had mostly the Soviet Union, Communist China and North Korea in mind. Of these, the Soviet Union started there atrocities earlier than Nazi Germany. Some quick web searching gave e.g. this somewhat tasteless list (http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-horrific-genocides-in-his...). (The treatment itself is bearable, but just the idea of a top ten of genocides makes me cringe.)
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 actually hard to get humans to kill other humans with intent and close-up, as can be seen in various examples over history. To kill a few million Humans in short time, shooting was no option. The gas chambers were not much more efficient, but the murderers didn't have to look their victims in the eyes. They were not forced to recognize them as Humans.
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.
> The gas chambers were not much more efficient, but the murderers didn't have to look their victims in the eyes. They were not forced to recognize them as Humans.
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?
Could they hear them scream? Depends on the gas chamber in question. In Majdanek, the gas chamber had a viewing port for the operators. In Auschwitz, it was an underground bunker.
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)
I still don't believe it is harder than shooting from a human point of view. In World War I there are several accounts of soldiers being trained to kill, put in a situation were an enemy is shooting at them, and they still can't pull the trigger.
The Soviet Union was never very industrial about the whole thing. They had camps and all but you can hardly compare a Gulag and a Nazi extermination camp. Gulags were prisons, basically. Extermination camps were... well, extermination camps.
China and the DPRK are, to my knowledge, more akin to the Soviet model. People were (and are, in the case of China and the DPRK) dying but it's hardly the arrival-stripping-death sequence of a Nazi camp. In some camps you'd be dead within an hour of arrival. That's crazy efficient and isn't a characteristic of the Soviet, Chinese or Korean camps (to the best of my knowledge)
Sure there were larger and more brutal genocides than that of the Nazis, but the Holocaust was uniquely factory-like in its execution. Every single concentration camp inmate was numbered, processed, seen by a doctor, and tracked on a daily basis.
"At the height of the Autobahn building phase, in 1935, for every sixty people in Germany there was just one automobile, compared to one for every twenty in France, or one for every twenty-five in Denmark; in the United States, one person out of every five owned a car of their own."
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.
Whatever about WW2, Germany's performance in WW1 was incredibly efficient. They had a complete plan for the western front, along with the logistics to back it up, including up-to-the-minute train schedules.
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.
A common thought I hear from fellow Germans is the Autobahn is an outstanding achievement of Hitler's. I can manage to curb my anger at this, barely. It's like saying "He started a war with more than 30 million deaths, but hey, at least he built some Motorways!
> He started a war with more than 30 million deaths, but hey, at least he built some Motorways!
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.
The Autobahn-system was actually started by the Weimar Republic, but was halted due to WW1. The Nazis initially opposed it but took over the building once they came to power.
Personally, I always associated the WW2-era efficiency (perceived or otherwise) with Fascist Italy, rather than Nazi Germany -- "Mussolini made the trains run on time" and all that.
The beauty of being a leader is that when you require metrics to be reported at a certain level, on pain of a bad annual review or a firing squad, then those metrics will almost certainly be reported at the required level or better. Which makes you look good when you report to your leader.
Oof, the better word would have been Fascist -- still, Stalinist is a pretty acceptable adjective (at least according to my way-back-when history professors.)
...acceptable? Confusing them is like saying ultraviolet is infrared. They're both non-visible, sure, but for completely different reasons because they're on completely different extremes.
Different, yes, not "completely different extremes". It's fruitless to try to place communism, stalinism, fascism and nazism on any kind of scale of political ideologies that makes sense in the decidedly more moderate political climate of today. Their uniting feature of crushing totalitarianism completely overshadows the comparatively minor differences in political ideology.
The Soviet Union had the victors privilege of writing the history, and they wrote it in a way that pitted pure and good communism against singularly evil nazism and fascism - completely ignoring the point that the they had been allies just a few years earlier, and that Mussolini started out as a socialist.
> Their uniting feature of being invisible completely overshadows the comparatively minor differences in wavelength.
Fixed that for you. Congrats on illustrating my point. I mean, are we really trying to argue that communism makes the trains run on time?
In our "more moderate political climate of today", are we just incapable of using the word "totalitarianism"? Are we, as a culture, so laughable under-educated that we don't know what it means and can't use it in favor of butchering nuanced history?
"Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists."
I actually don't think so. I believe the wide spread belief about us Germans being so efficient came about only after the second world war and was later retrospectively added to Prussia and the Third-Reich. Considering that, Germany did have an obsession about rules and "officialdom" for lack of a better word, which was beneficial over all that time.
Gründlichkeit can lead to efficiency, but it is not efficiency; it is being thorough. That led them to spend ages to design and build their tanks in zillions of variants, while the Russians sent ten times as many to the front without a paint job.
Similarly, I guess it would have been more efficient for them to keep building V1's instead of spending time to build V2's.
I'd like to read more about that. I have lived in Germany, and don't recall the Nazis there being seen as more efficiency minded than other Germans (or Austrians).
I don't think that's what the guy meant.
He probably meant something along the lines of "I've lived in Germany and don't remember the perception of Nazis there being efficient"
I was talking about the original Nazi, but about more recent views on them ("[...] the Nazis there being seen as [...]"). The Nazis did not put much stock in intellectual pursuits (as opposed to the communist dictators that came to Germany later), and would only tolerate voelkisch inventiveness and creativity at most.
There were no communist dictators reigning over German territory. The DDR (GDR) was communist, but it was mainly party-driven. They did have a head of state, but while the regime wasn't exactly commendable, a dictatorship of one man it was not.
I agree, it was not a one-man show. It was a party-dictatorship. Even their own propaganda used the term Diktatur des Proletariats.
We could argue about the precise definition of the term dictatorship---a non-productive discussion. (You'd win based on original meaning in Latin, I'd do well by current usage.) Otherwise, I guess we agree.
The formidable industrial and military power of Nazi Germany had little to do with the Nazi Party and more with the brilliant politics of Otto von Bismarck and the skilled balancing politics of Gustav Stresemann.
Hitler just (prematurely) cashed on historical inertia.
I downvoted you. I'm really tired of the single-word, zero-effort "sources" or "citation" meme. It's not wikipedia here, and it creates a hostile environment to demand every two-line comment to be sourced like an academic paper.
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.
I downvoted you. I think the request for a full sentence is unnecessary because the one-word comment "sources?" effectively communicates an understandable message in a compact form. A full sentence would be a more standard (and, some would say, perhaps a more polite?) form of doing the same, for sure. But I don't think more syntax automatically adds more value in this particular case.
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. :-/
Don't worry. My comment got more upvotes than it deserves.
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.
Sure, the comment you replied to made that point as well. The proper response to your comment is already essentially what mseebach wrote, so I can only recommend that you go read it again and perhaps ask about a part you found unclear...
If someone makes a comment that sounds like they state a fact, I want to know who or what they are quoting. That's usually how it's being done in academia. I don't know why some people think that HN, or any other forum for that matter, isn't worth doing the same. You can't just throw something in and expect people to take it.
Merely referencing something written or said by somebody else, even if fancy academic titles and degrees are involved, in no way affects the validity of whatever is being claimed.
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.
Not the OP, but this theme (Germany as economic powerhouse, Germany having a large population, Germany being more organized, than say, Russia) is the main theme in Brendan Simms's book "Europe The struggle for supremacy 1453 to the present). You could read that. Its about 500 pages (about a year a page!) and I'm cautious about some of the points, but I figure it will back up the OP.
Churchhill's post second world war writings also cover this, but don't make the full claim the OP makes.
Ugh. You don't have to agree with Kissinger's personal or political views to acknowledge that he's an incredibly high-quality source, both from a scholastic and experiential perspective.
Wow I am being downvoted all over the place, even in old posts...
Btw, my point was that someone that achieved horrible things through (among other things) lying, should never be a source. Is not only about him: Lying was and is a fundamental aspect of his profession.
And Yes, he was very effective.
And Yes, also both a War criminal and a Peace criminal. An effective one though.
I have come across no book that better explains the how and why off the world than Diplomacy. Its one of the few books I've ever found really worthwhile to read.
I really, strongly recommend you to read "The Prize", by Daniel Yergin. Won the Pulitzer. If you want to understand the world and how it works, and the REAL reasons for the History to be what it is, this is it. Best book in existence for Diplomacy, global economy and geopolitics. You will be amazed. You will never look at the world the same way again.
Kissinger is not a good guy. He is, however, competent, and Diplomacy is very much worth reading. Although it probably doesn't leave you a nicer person.
smart person, writing a long article full of facts completely missing the point.
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 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.)
There's reasons to think that a Keynesian program (even one which focused on war, not building useful infrastructure) could have ended up fixing a truly out-of-kilter economy.
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.
If you are embarking on such a Keynesian program in a climate of general depression and lack of investment in other countries then you will enjoy generally low interest rates but you lose the ability to make short term investments and must make longer term ones.
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 would even argue that this, more than any other thing they could say, is the number one argument Nazis use to reel people in.
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...
It’s not just Skinheads who are Nazis. And even Skinheads probably will think something along the lines of “when the Nazis were in power the economy was strong”.
Wow, what an egregious straw-man argument. The article sets forth its goal, to prove that violence aside the nazis weren't efficient, then proves that point. You're complaining that the article proves a point it explicitly didn't set out to prove.
This answer demonstrates a very narrow grasp of history. While about 11 million people died in the Holocaust, the Mongols HALVED the population of China from about 120 million to about 60 million. Not to mention completely erasing several races (such as the Persians) from the earth.
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.
Genocide was not the Mongols goal. They did not pick some segment of China's population and decide they needed to die. They like the Romans where conquerors. And as all large civilizations have done so at some point there viewed less hardly, and perhaps with a little awe as they created the largest empire in history granted a short lived one.
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.
So, settling the Jewish question was more than just killing the jews from one day to the other - the concentration camps were "just" the culmination of years of systematic persecution, beginning with boycotts in 1933, the anti-interracial marriage laws 1935, Kristallnacht 1938. In 1933, 533,000 jews lived in Germany, by the time WWII commenced, it was down to 214,000 - almost all of which were subsequently murdered.
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.
Exactly, the efficiency had little to do with the method of death, the methods where simply the an example of said efficiency. It's a twisted blueprint. First vilify them, second remove them from anything approaching important positions (collage professors etc), third separate them from society (concentration camps), and finally murder them site unseen. Of course each of those steps where rather complex but the specifics are less important than the overall process. Because, it take a huge number of people willing to do horrible things to create atrocities on that scale.
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'.
Where would the farmers get capital then? I think it's misinformed to claim that bankers are less important than farmers. There are clearly huge issues in the world of finance, but banking does serve an important and legitimate function.
From farmers and other business people. I'm not claiming businesses are unimportant, simply that bankers are (because they redistribute that capital as loans to potentially successful new enterprises).
A less snippy response is bankers are distributing the same finite pool of money so having twice as many bankers might make thing more efficient but it's not going to increase the available Capitol any time soon, ditto for having half as many bankers. Banking is important, but it's also highly automated.
The problem is that none of us agree what "Nazi efficiency" is.
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.
As the actual article points out, the idea of the Star Trek episode was to have the efficient economy minus the genocide, which I think points out that to at least some people the ideas are not inextricably linked. I don't think most people who say that they had a good economy are consciously also thinking "because they were so good at murder".
What you fail to see though is that the Holocaust in itself is part of a development process. It started with the Polizei-Bataillone and SD-units behind army lines, moved to widespread incarceration and ultimately to the erection of the first dedicated death camps in 1942 (Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka).
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.
Sorry, but you are the one who missed the point. The Nazi killing machine was hideously efficient. Nobody is contesting that. The article concerns, and debunks, an oft-repeated claim that the Nazi state as a whole was, violence aside, a ruthlessly efficient apparatus.
The Second World War, by John Keegan
Inside the Third Reich, by Albert Speer