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TapTheForwardAssist posted:and let me just put some security observers in Tangayika while we litigate some ownership disputes... Samoa too". Like basically uniting every remotely defensible Germanic diaspora and prior claim while insisting he was just trying to address wrongs? Hitler makes it clear in Mein Kampf that he considers Imperial Germany's old colonies garbage that they're better off without, as they dispersed the Nordic population, polluted Aryan blood, and distracted the volk from where their true area of expansion should be. I don't remember the exact line but it's something very close to, "in the future, our 'Africa' will be in the east."
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Oct 1, 2016 04:02
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LeoMarr posted:So a repeat of WW1 but ending with nuclear weapons being utilized large-scale (meaning berlin hamburgmunich, London paris nice lowe etc etc) Germany came closer to being nuked than most people know. A fair amount of U-235 was lost at the Oak Ridge facility due to mishandling sometime in early 1945. Had this not happened, the first atomic bombs would've fallen on Berlin and Hamburg, ending the war in Europe.
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Oct 1, 2016 04:06
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LeoMarr posted:So a repeat of WW1 but ending with nuclear weapons being utilized large-scale (meaning berlin hamburgmunich, London paris nice lowe etc etc) Eh, maaaybe. The Manhattan Project wouldn't have received nearly as much effort as it did without an active war, and nobody else other than the American government had the resources available to do everything. It probably depends on whether you delay it by 3 years or 10, and then there's a thousand other dominos that need to fall perfectly for that to happen.
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Oct 1, 2016 04:11
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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LeoMarr posted:So a repeat of WW1 but ending with nuclear weapons being utilized large-scale (meaning berlin hamburgmunich, London paris nice lowe etc etc) Slight issue with that idea though. Hitler had no faith in the development of the atomic bomb so the Germans would never have had it.
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Oct 1, 2016 04:58
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Dialing back the slow-Anschluss idea and discarding the "useless" overseas colonies (and I realized we're gettIng way into Turtledove territory here), how about this: What if Germany had only moderate military buildup but focused on moderate Anschluss and heavy on soft-power, could Naziism have lasted decades longer? Like a concerted effort to just-plausibly regain Austria, East Prussia, Sudetenland, while re-arming just enough be a deterrent? And then heavily nudging other "Aryan" nations like the Scandavians and Finns to join some league (getting privileged access to their raw materials). Then building up eugenics, pan-Germanism, national socialism in Germany and the Aryan League, gradual marginalization/expulsion of "undesirables". Then subtle soft-power work to back American Bund and other sympathetic groups, as well as encourage Germans to keep immigrating to South America and Canada and immediately demanding more cultural autonomy in their little enclaves. Could Naziism have had staying power by long-game playing their hand just below the threshold of seriously pissIng the world off?
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Oct 1, 2016 05:25
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Dialing back the slow-Anschluss idea and discarding the "useless" overseas colonies (and I realized we're gettIng way into Turtledove territory here), how about this: i move my eye stalks in agreement and deference
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Oct 1, 2016 05:26
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Dialing back the slow-Anschluss idea and discarding the "useless" overseas colonies (and I realized we're gettIng way into Turtledove territory here), how about this: You're describing a version of Nazism that isn't Nazism. And either way the Nazis run in to problems from chronic mismanagement of the economy.
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Oct 1, 2016 05:27
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Hitler wasn't building up germany, he was running it into the ground. They needed a huge war to distract everyone and to rob the countries next to them to fuel their crippled mismanaged economy. Nazi germany was a household that decided to kill and rob its neighbours to pay the bills and keep the lights on. If there was no war hitler probably would have been tossed out and the nazi's remembered as a lovely failed government.
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Oct 1, 2016 05:36
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Dialing back the slow-Anschluss idea and discarding the "useless" overseas colonies (and I realized we're gettIng way into Turtledove territory here), how about this: In your scenario, re-arming only moderately would've left Germany vulnerable to military action by Britain and France. Any attempts at making land-grabs in places like Austria, Danzig, or the Sudetenland would bring consequences (East Prussia was still part of Germany until 1945). Large numbers of Germans immigrants in the Americas making demands for autonomy would tarnish Germany's image in world public opinion. The Reich would be thought of as a pariah state, much like Myanmar was until recently.
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Oct 1, 2016 06:08
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Dialing back the slow-Anschluss idea and discarding the "useless" overseas colonies (and I realized we're gettIng way into Turtledove territory here), how about this: Yeah, the Finns and the Scandinavians, the most warlike people  .This reads like a fantasy-novel that would exist only in the minds of certain White supremacist writers. Long and short, once Germany rolled into the Sudetenland, clearly repudiating the Versailles Treaties, the gears of rearmament began to turn. War would've happened one way or another, even if Germany took two or three decades to get it done. As other posters have said, the Nazis would've been booted from power eventually, as their cosmic mismanagement of the economy would've run them into the ground in the long run. If you've ever read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the writer points out a time where Herman Goering basically stole millions of dollars from the German insurance industry under the threat of throwing the head executives into concentration camps. You can't run an economy like that forever and expect things to work out in the long term - see Venezuela, Zimbabwe etc.
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Oct 1, 2016 06:17
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Exactly, they robbed their own country blind by demonizing and criminalizing a huge portion of the population, then to keep that scam running had to invade other countries. It was not a sustainable model at all.
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Oct 1, 2016 06:21
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A White Guy posted:Yeah, the Finns and the Scandinavians, the most warlike people Revanchism was a real thing in Finland after the Winter War, but then again even in the real WW2 Finland was never on board with many of Hitlers crazier ideas and Mannerheim actively disliked him.
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Oct 1, 2016 07:10
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The Finns were some of the biggest losers of WW2. The deal the Soviets originally offered them was garbage ("I want huge amounts of land that also happens to contain certain industries, resources, and a fair chunk of your population, and I'm willing to give you a completely undeveloped wilderness in exchange"), but it was a far better deal than the one they finally ended up with. It was only the British and American respect for their plucky little nation fending off the Soviets for a few months that they didn't end up becoming a Soviet puppet state. But the idea that the Finns would've fought the Soviets before the Winter War for some of that sweet,sweet desolate nowhere is comical in its own right.
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Oct 1, 2016 07:48
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Eh, Finland wasn't occupied like the Baltic nations or Germany so calling them one of the biggest losers is weird.
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Oct 1, 2016 07:57
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King Possum III posted:I see your point about design, but don't you think the Me 262 would've entered service earlier (as a fighter) if Hitler hadn't ordered it to be adapted into a fighter/bomber? Paraphrasing from the biography of Galland written by David Baker, Galland wrote a memo to Göring and Milch in May 1943 recommending the adoption of the Me 262 as a fighter, along with ditching the Bf 109 in favor of the Focke-Wulff 190. Milch backed Galland so production was set to produce 60 planes per month, starting from May 1944. Göring was unenthusiastic about the new jets tho. Degel and Althoff, lead engineers for Messerschmitt, planned eight different models of the Me 262, including a fighter-bomber version. In October 1943 Göring made the call to produce the 262 as a fighter bomber after the lead designers told him that fitting hardpoints for bombs would take only a couple of weeks and in November the plane was presented to Hitler and Hitler was enthusiastic about the plane in the fighter bomber role. However, production issues remained a major hurdle (the Me 262 was built in new de-centralized underground production facilities), and instead of the planned 1360 planes planned for the latter half of 1944, only 513 were built. The main issues were that the superstructure of the plane itself and the Jumo engines were found faulty and had to be redesigned, and there were never enough Jumo engines to keep up with demand. So, Hitler's involvement really didn't have much to do with the whole thing. A different issue is that Galland kept pestering Hitler about production of Focke-Wulf Fw-190A's constantly being diverted into constructing Fw-190F/G fighter-bombers at a time when the A model was needed for air defense purposes.
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Oct 1, 2016 09:39
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A White Guy posted:The Finns were some of the biggest losers of WW2. The deal the Soviets originally offered them was garbage ("I want huge amounts of land that also happens to contain certain industries, resources, and a fair chunk of your population, and I'm willing to give you a completely undeveloped wilderness in exchange"), but it was a far better deal than the one they finally ended up with. It was only the British and American respect for their plucky little nation fending off the Soviets for a few months that they didn't end up becoming a Soviet puppet state. Somewhat agree with your assesment of February 1940 situation though, though the idea that French-English voices forced Stalin to stand down are sometimes disputed [often for nationalistic reasons, too]. quote:But the idea that the Finns would've fought the Soviets before the Winter War for some of that sweet,sweet desolate nowhere is comical in its own right. Finland sort of did though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimosodat Obviously this was during Russian civil war and not against unified, militarily strong Soviet Union of 1930s. Still, delusional ideas of aggressive expansion into that sweet desolate nowhere were not rare, and featured explicitly in national ethos of 1920s and 1930s. They were also key elements in several prominent, aggressive para-NGOs and propaganda in 1941-1943. Govorov put an end to that.
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Oct 1, 2016 11:37
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El Perkele posted:Not being absolutely vassalized and retaining at least some measure of sovereignity post-1944 was an undeniable success when compared to entire rest of Eastern and Central Europe. With only 95k casualties for a nation 3 million and no significant and wide infrastructure destruction, Finland survived WW2 pretty well for an Axis country. Its pretty noteworthy that the deal offered in the negotiations of 1939 was something Mannerheim recommended that the govt should accept. The southwestern border salient towards Leningrad was impossible to defend, contained no significant resources and had no strategic significance to Finland, but it did have a strategic significance for the Soviets in case Finland would allow an attack through on Leningrad through Finnish territory. The Perfidious Stalin narrative is standard in Finnish historiography, even if there's not much to actually substantiate it, considering pre-Molotov the Soviet Union constantly tried to improve it's own strategical security through outreach to Eastern European nations bordering it, but that's another deal entirely and so on and so on.
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Oct 1, 2016 13:35
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BattleMoose posted:There is this documentary series, also done by the BBC, all on the youtubes too! I think World at War is of a better quality but for WWI this is probably one of the better and more detailed ones. Don't know specifically about Canada being mentioned though. Looks like something else to chew on now that I finished World at War. Would questions be okay here, or better served in a special WW1 thread(I don't know if that would fit better in A/T than D&D)?
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Oct 1, 2016 19:40
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Dali Parton posted:Looks like something else to chew on now that I finished World at War. Would questions be okay here, or better served in a special WW1 thread(I don't know if that would fit better in A/T than D&D)? I like the idea of a WW1 thread; if someone was to start one, I'd follow it.
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Oct 1, 2016 20:01
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Dali Parton posted:Looks like something else to chew on now that I finished World at War. Would questions be okay here, or better served in a special WW1 thread(I don't know if that would fit better in A/T than D&D)? I've always put The Great War and World At War together as bookends, kinda. Both are incredibly excellent. Seizure Meat fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Oct 1, 2016 |
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Oct 1, 2016 22:16
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King Possum III posted:Germany came closer to being nuked than most people know. A fair amount of U-235 was lost at the Oak Ridge facility due to mishandling sometime in early 1945. Had this not happened, the first atomic bombs would've fallen on Berlin and Hamburg, ending the war in Europe. Do you have any sources you could provide? I haven't been able to find anything. Kemper Boyd posted:Its pretty noteworthy that the deal offered in the negotiations of 1939 was something Mannerheim recommended that the govt should accept. The southwestern border salient towards Leningrad was impossible to defend, contained no significant resources and had no strategic significance to Finland, but it did have a strategic significance for the Soviets in case Finland would allow an attack through on Leningrad through Finnish territory. The Perfidious Stalin narrative is standard in Finnish historiography, even if there's not much to actually substantiate it, considering pre-Molotov the Soviet Union constantly tried to improve it's own strategical security through outreach to Eastern European nations bordering it, but that's another deal entirely and so on and so on. Supposing Finland did accept Stalin's offer, would he have still tried to conquer Finland? And if the Winter War hadn't happened how would that have affected Operation Barbarossa? I've read that the Red Army's poor performance was one of the factors in Hitler's decision to invade since it confirmed his racial views on slavic incompetence. And how would the Red Army's organization be affected, would they still have tried to reform the issues made apparent by their failure or would they have continued on in ignorance?
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Oct 1, 2016 22:32
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White Coke posted:Do you have any sources you could provide? I haven't been able to find anything. Unknown, but Finnish government had little reason to trust Soviet Union's offers after the "negotiations" with other Baltic states and due to then-relevant geopolical situation. However, post hoc somewhat supports the point of Soviet Union being willing to settle the matter peacefully. Stalin was ruthless but logical and above all practical - it isn't completely unlikely that he would have accepted a neutral/"neutral" Finland with Soviet presence in strategic Gulf of Finland bases. However, whether Sweden and Germany would have accepted such a deal without military action will be unknown. Even more, the swiftness of Red Army in attacking even remote areas of Finland only a few weeks after Soviet Union's offer somewhat supports the point that Soviet Union was not negotiating in completely good faith, but was determined to secure what they considered a vital area for Leningrad's protection. Overall: Finland considered the situation relevant by then and declined, which was not wholly unreasonable by late 1939 standards. Support for Soviet Union's intentions is mostly based on their actions in 1940 and 1944 onwards - both theoretical or unknown to Finnish leadership in 1939. From Soviet Union's perspective, securing the northern coast of Gulf of Finland was absolutely understandable goal, the methods were of secondary importance. Had Finnish leadership had a complete faith in Soviet Union's good faith, I believe they would have accepted. They did not. quote:And if the Winter War hadn't happened how would that have affected Operation Barbarossa? quote:I've read that the Red Army's poor performance was one of the factors in Hitler's decision to invade since it confirmed his racial views on slavic incompetence. And how would the Red Army's organization be affected, would they still have tried to reform the issues made apparent by their failure or would they have continued on in ignorance? Pass. Even though "if not X, then maybe not Z" is one of the only even remotely sensible alt-hist scenarios, this is quite complex.
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Oct 2, 2016 00:03
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Is there a nice illustration of the various Soviet offers/demands, Finnish counter-offers and final settlement compared somewhere?
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Oct 2, 2016 00:11
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So after watching the Parshall Lecture (and others), I read through Tooze's Wages of Destruction, which I found fascinating. Does anyone have any recommendations for further reading on the economics/economic history of WW2, and/or the buildup to it? Basically I'm interested in whether there are any similar works looking at the economies of the other individual major powers, or one that takes a broad overview of all the powers.
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Oct 2, 2016 17:07
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^^^ "Why the Allies won" by Richard Overy looks at the overall economies and resource situations of all the WWII powers.Cyrano4747 posted:If you really want to find funny examples of Hitler loving around with procurement directly you need to look at small arms. He essentially ordered the StG44 killed in its infancy because he thought the idea was stupid, and then the designers did an end run by classifying it as a next-gen SMG to replace the MP40. Quite a few were made as the "MP43" or "MP44". I don't know how true it was, but I've read a paper somewhere about Hitler strongly discouraging the use of HEAT ammo.
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Oct 2, 2016 17:50
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So what's the deal with Hitler declaring war on America? Apart from it being a really bad idea the Japanese don't appear to be the sort of people Nazis generally approve of. With my 20/20 hindsight I could imagine two much better options: 1. Not my problem, let the Japanese deal with what they have started 2. Gasp!! Those dirty Japanese! We are right here with you USA!
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Oct 6, 2016 20:57
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504 posted:So what's the deal with Hitler declaring war on America? The US was effectively already at war with Germany in the Atlantic, and declaring war allowed Germany to engage in completely unrestricted submarine warfare, which had spectacular success in the first half of '42. Japan declaring war on the US just gave Germany a convenient excuse.
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Oct 6, 2016 21:08
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It sounds like the Germans really had everything their own way with submarines for quite a while, despite (from what I understand) having bugger all resources and complete disinterest from Hitler.
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Oct 6, 2016 21:10
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The US was effectively already at war with Germany in the Atlantic, and declaring war allowed Germany to engage in completely unrestricted submarine warfare, which had spectacular success in the first half of '42. Japan declaring war on the US just gave Germany a convenient excuse. Also it would be very weird and awkward for the US to fight alongside Britain in the Pacific and not help them at all in Europe. Like you would need to have American troops being sent to India/Burma while Indians are sent to North Africa instead of the US just doing operation torch.
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Oct 6, 2016 21:19
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504 posted:It sounds like the Germans really had everything their own way with submarines for quite a while, despite (from what I understand) having bugger all resources and complete disinterest from Hitler. It helped that German Naval Intelligence had broken the British merchantman codes and could count on knowing where the convoys would be, and when, during the early years of the war. Also helped that particularly among the u-boat service, cipher discipline was actually a thing (unlike in the Luftwaffe, for instance, where Enigma operators were routinely lazy about, well, just about everything), and that introduction of the 40-rotor "triton" Enigma in early 1942 robbed the Allies of what they'd gotten from earlier codebreaking. 504 posted:So what's the deal with Hitler declaring war on America? In addition to what others have said, also remember that Hitler was an idiot who believed any problem could be overcome via sufficient will to action, and had noted in his unpublished second book that the Reich would inevitably come into conflict with the US some day so hell why not now, it's not like we're about to get our asses handed to us in the East or anything. As to the racial angle, oddly enough the Japanese were among those Asians peoples that the Nazis actually thought were all right. Himmler at one point went so far as to classify them as "Aryans of the East" (along with the Chinese).
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Oct 6, 2016 21:23
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This is such a great thread for "Id like to know this but don't have 3 weeks to dig thru google" questions! Here's my next one, apart from Hitler knowing that there would be even more war in the future, are there any surviving records of plans for post war Europe? Not so much the whole "Kil everyone and move in Germans" plan but along the lines of "Well now, South America could be taken over with the help of XX in 1950, here's some framework" Disclaimer: I'm aware this is a bit "Command and conquer"
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Oct 6, 2016 21:34
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504 posted:This is such a great thread for "Id like to know this but don't have 3 weeks to dig thru google" questions! Well the kill everyone and move in Germans thing is pretty big: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost You could look here for some ideas though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Order_(Nazism)#Plans_for_other_parts_of_the_world_outside_Europe
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Oct 6, 2016 21:40
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504 posted:This is such a great thread for "Id like to know this but don't have 3 weeks to dig thru google" questions! You may want to sit down since this may come as a bit of a shock, but Hitler wasn't really that great at long-term, concrete plans. In so far as he had an idea of what to do next, it focused on the latter stages of Generalplan Ost which involved the consolidation and colonization of the vast territories he figured they'd have by then conquered in the East. The easternmost-border was intended to be about at the Urals, with the idea that it would serve as a latter-days limes where young Aryans would get their war on against the Asiatic slavs from time to time. As I mentioned before he thought there'd need to be war with the US at some point, but I don't recall him going into great detail about how exactly, nor if it was to be another war of annihilation and conquest, or something more like what he expected to do to Britain (ie: defeat and chastisement, but being left at least quasi-sovereign and in possession of most of their overseas possessions). Knowing him, he probably didn't have anything specific in mind, and planned to just sorta make it up as he went along. He didn't think a lot of Americans as a people, of course, what with us being a multi-racial nation and more than a little debauched by Nazi standards, so he might've intended it to be a repeat of the war in the East, but I just don't remember enough to say. Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Oct 6, 2016 |
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Oct 6, 2016 21:41
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BattleMoose posted:There is this documentary series, also done by the BBC, all on the youtubes too! I think World at War is of a better quality but for WWI this is probably one of the better and more detailed ones. Don't know specifically about Canada being mentioned though. Really minor point. World at War was an ITV release.
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Oct 6, 2016 22:28
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Captain_Maclaine posted:It helped that German Naval Intelligence had broken the British merchantman codes and could count on knowing where the convoys would be, and when, during the early years of the war... See now this is genuinely interesting, and something I've never heard before. Googling suggest that German Naval Intelligence also tapped the undersea cables between London and Washington, and were even listening in to conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill. This sort of success is especially surprising given what a hilarious shitshow the Abwehr was. Is this not a well known thing just because how neither side would have been in a rush to publicise about it after the war?
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Oct 6, 2016 23:32
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Captain_Maclaine posted:It helped that German Naval Intelligence had broken the British merchantman codes and could count on knowing where the convoys would be, and when, during the early years of the war. This comes from the world at war series. They knew German intelligence on where their convoys were, was really good, too good. But they put it down to the Germans having really good underwater microphones. With enough subs and good detection range, it would be theoretically possible to detect every convoy. This is what the brits thought was happening.
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Oct 7, 2016 02:27
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PittTheElder posted:See now this is genuinely interesting, and something I've never heard before. Googling suggest that German Naval Intelligence also tapped the undersea cables between London and Washington, and were even listening in to conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill. It usually gets lost in the larger telling of the war's cryptography, ie: the breaking of Enigma and Purple, and just how badly Germany and Japan failed to realize their mail was being read. German code breaking/making wasn't centralized, so you see varying results from the various services, with the Abwehr generally getting rings run around it, which Naval Intelligence (Marinenachrichtendienst) being much more clued-in and willing to adapt to the glaringly obvious (see also my comments on their much cannier handling of Engima). This too owes itself to the "just a big clusterfuck" system of organization predominate in the Nazi state, where the Abwehr controlled the intelligence services of OKW, but the OKM had its own, parallel services. Within those, the B-Dienst in particular were the ones that busted the British codes open early on and had remarkable success well into the war. As to why this isn't so widely known, I put it down to a few things. First, the German navy was comparatively a junior branch of the military, both due to the old Imperial Fleet all but vanishing after WWI and also Germany historically favoring armies over fleets for centuries. Second, the publication of the full* cryptographic history of the war is a comparatively recent thing; if you watch, for instance, the episodes of World at War dealing with the Battle of the Atlantic, they talk a lot about how aircraft and radar beat the wolfpacks, but never once (if memory serves) mention breaking Enigma. From what else I've read, this is in part due to the things learned from breaking machine codes in WWII flowing directly into the spy games of the Cold War, some legacies of which no doubt are ongoing to this day. Third, I have to think that since such a huge percentage of the Germany navy ended up in the u-boat service, at one point or another, and suffered such horrendous losses (even higher than the Kamikazes, if I remember right), that there just were fewer people left alive after the war to even talk about it. *As far as we know. BattleMoose posted:This comes from the world at war series. They knew German intelligence on where their convoys were, was really good, too good. But they put it down to the Germans having really good underwater microphones. With enough subs and good detection range, it would be theoretically possible to detect every convoy. This is what the brits thought was happening. There was also a lot of leftover intelligence sources from WWI that, incredibly, never got completely dealt with, like insurance companies publishing sailing dates of ships they covered, which German agents could easily read in the newspapers, which deflected attention away from what was actually happening ie: Germany was reading convoy transmissions.
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Oct 7, 2016 02:37
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Disinterested posted:Well the kill everyone and move in Germans thing is pretty big: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost I was glancing at this section, and dimly recalled some apocryphal line about Canada that I don't see mentioned there. Am I just mis-recalling something else, or is there some famous alleged pithy and quotable line of Hitler's about how pointless Canada is? EDIT: not just the "country without a culture" thing, but something snappy that's somewhere between the ~2003 American "going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion" and Bismarck's "the whole of the Balkans isn't worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 07:05
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504 posted:So what's the deal with Hitler declaring war on America? Well, you have to consider that Nazi Germany's relationship was pretty friendly, though the relationship had been shaken by the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact and the Soviet Japanese truce in 1939. More importantly ofcourse are the factors already mentioned, such as Nazi views regarding race and nationality sometimes being a bit more complicated when it came to areas and peoples they did not intend to rule, and that the United States already were in pretty deep when it came to aiding Britain in terms of shipping and other aid. Then there is the ideological factor. For many nazis and others who shared Hitler's worldview, the United States and Soviet Union were really two sides of the same coin, both representing what they saw as a Jewish world conspiracy that was behind both bolshevism and international finance capitalism on the other. In fact much of the talk of "the Jews" having started this war and escalated it and such really reaches in zenith in late 1941 and early 1942 when Germany was at war with both the Soviet Union and the United States, this is not insignificant I think. In Hitler's view America was a decadent, mongrelized society beholden to financial interests that in many ways represented the great future adversary once Germany had secured her empire in the East. In many ways the idea of Lebensraum (though the idea had also come about in the last years of WW1 when grain shipments from occupied Ukraine were used to relieve Germany as it was still strangled by the British blockade, concscripting occupied populations and POWs for forced labor had also been done first in WW1) and conquests in the east represents an alternative to what was happening in the 1920s. Weimar Germany was recovering economically and prospering, fuelled by American loans, however the future this represented, though it included Germany as an economic power would also see a less independent Germany, even one dependent on the United States for trade, finance and security, which was a concept that horrified and disgusted German nationalists and even more old school militarists.
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Oct 7, 2016 10:41
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PittTheElder posted:See now this is genuinely interesting, and something I've never heard before. Googling suggest that German Naval Intelligence also tapped the undersea cables between London and Washington, and were even listening in to conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill. I mean the head of the Abwehr was an anti-Hitler conspirator since like maybe 1939, so the "hilarious shitshow" was probably deliberate to some extent.
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Oct 7, 2016 12:52
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