Neophyte posted:

Who would have been the most hated Nazi chief and would have been enthusiastically killed off first in alt-hist post-Hitler Reich, like Beria after the death of Stalin?

Neophyte posted:

Who would have been the most hated Nazi chief and would have been enthusiastically killed off first in alt-hist post-Hitler Reich, like Beria after the death of Stalin?

SeanBeansShako posted:

I'm going wild card on this theory, a certain Air Marshal decides to try uppers that week instead of opitates.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Nah he went out like either Belushi or Candy 10 years before der Fuhrer.

Mr. Grapes! posted:

Modern day cast:

Jonah Hill as Goering?
Bendersnatch Cumperdink as Goebbels?
Elijah Wood as Himmler?

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

wasn't goebbels short?

Cyrano4747 posted:

Elijah Woods isn't 3 feet tall and Tom Cruise isn't 6 feet, but Hollywood makes it work.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

there were very few western europeans that ended up working in Germany; totals around 2 million with over half of those being French.

feedmegin posted:

Mmm. More than you might think. A friend of the family was Belgian and was forced to work in Germany in WW2. He speaks German but refuses to, to this day.

Like, 2 million adult males of working age is not actually a small number of people.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

wasn't goebbels short?

Raenir Salazar posted:

That'd be an interesting idea for a game; plotting a coup in a generically authoritarian-militerist regime in a vague unspecified european country; like the end of Fullmetal Alchemist.

quote:

The book is the first research attempt to map the contribution of the occupied countries (and Sweden and Finland) to the German war economy. The contributions are all written by leading researchers within the period and topic.

The book focuses on how Germany managed to mobilize resources in occupied Europe. Many of these resources were critical to Germany's military success. Occupation meant great costs for the defeated nations, but in a number of cases it also opened up new opportunities as the Germans created new demand and the need for new products for replacement.

Likewise, this book addresses the question of the long-term effects of German exploitation on the European post-war economy. The book is the first and most ambitious attempt to make an analysis of the importance of the occupied countries' economies to Germany's ability to wage multi-front war. An exploitation that had an impact on how the Europe of the future was shaped.

There are very large regional differences. In 1943, for example, half of the French workforce worked for the German war industry. Labor was forcibly expelled from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, and Ukraine. But never in Denmark. Danish companies retained their freedom of action and Denmark's economic potential was never fully mobilized for the German war industry.

It was against all economic sense. Therefore, one of our points is that the economic historians have not had the full understanding of the extent to which ideology and race played a role in German politics. In an economic optics, German politics was deeply irrational and controlled ideology. The same German officials who formulated the plan that cost the starvation of millions of Soviet citizens negotiated with Danish agriculture and were willing to give them a high price for their products.

It was about securing supplies to Germany, but it was also about Denmark gaining a special status among the occupied countries, because the Danes in Nazi Germany's optics belonged to the Germanic race.

The book places itself in the middle of a hot international research discussion with a substantial contribution, which means that the story must be written about :

The publication also disagrees with the notion that until 1941 Germany would only wage a limited war, the so-called Blitzkrieg hypothesis. The contributors believe that Germany had mobilized far more resources and aimed at the big showdown right from the start.
It is also wrong that the German Minister of Armaments Albert Speer carried out an economic miracle. The recovery and increase in production of the German war economy, on the other hand, is a result of the exploitation of the economies of the occupied countries.

sporkstand posted:

I was cleaning out some old stuff last weekend, this fell out of a box and I figured it might be of some interest to people here.

Click to embiggen


Looks like a Tec4 named Arthur J. Woodcock brought a Walther pistol, a German knife and a French bayonet home with him from the war. A nice Cpt. named Lester E. O'Riley signed off on it and gave the thumbs up.

Fangz posted:

How did he get a French bayonet?

Fangz posted:

How did he get a French bayonet?

Cyrano4747 posted:

Note that the person who signed off on this dude's bringback pistol was a Captain, which gives an idea of how far down the chain that poo poo got pushed. I thought I remembered it being company commanders.

Phanatic posted:

On my grandfather's version of that form, the signer was a 1LT. And I use "signed" loosely, because it's clearly a rubber stamp.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Honestly I don't doubt it got pushed even lower. I suspect the whole thing was basically "get an officer to give it a quick OK"

FAUXTON posted:

I want to see one signed by something like a staff sergeant with some bizarre documentary lineage including accounts of all the officers getting salmonella and being wracked with the shits or something similarly zany whereby some cary elwes style scamp drives home in a stolen hetzer

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I'm reminded of something I read going in the other direction, where some weird series of circumstances lead to squad that was, like, a colonel, two captains, a lieutenant, and one poor private having to make their way across some dangerous terrain.

Arbite posted:

Polyakov posted:

Not really, the UK had more shipyards, better shipyards and access to american shipyards. Even if we add French shipyards into the mix they are capable on a raw capacity of outbuilding Nazi occupied Europe. They had the ability to starve nazi germany of resources while maintaining access to their own so the nazis would not have been able to get on a parity footing. The UK had centuries of basically impeccable credit in the international market to draw on so its extremely unlikely they would ever actually run out of borrowing capacity in a reasonable time frame.

Occupied europe will fall apart through hunger before that long, lack of fertiliser and feedstock imports hosed most of the occupied territories economies after 2-3 years of war. Germany becomes essentially fully reliant on imported soviet grain which isn't really a tenable situation, and which they have to pay for. And it doesn't obviate the German need to build land forces, they need to fight in Africa and be prepared for a fight in the east that they have to know is likely coming. If they don't then the UK is able to pour even more resources into the air and sea war.

The long war doesnt favour the germans.

White Coke posted:

What chemicals and feedstock were the Germans unable to import due to the blockade, for either world war?

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

just in the nick of time, about five years before the war, two german chemists named fritz haber and carl bosch figured out a cheap, efficient way to create ammonia out of thin air (literally, reacting atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen) and this was spun up just a year or two before the shooting started. the allies were able to blockade all ammonia imports from germany which should have crippled both the german armaments industry and german agriculture, if not for the haber-bosch process, which iirc is still used today

Alchenar posted:

There are quite a few mid-19thC/early-20thC chemists who made breakthroughs thinking 'this will make life so much better for everyone' and then someone discovered the military applications.

Vahakyla posted:

This does not preclude him being a company commander. 1st Lieutenants were often stepping up to be company commanders in rapid reorganizations of the military, or during times of manpower shortages.
Especially in the conclusion of war as units quickly absorbed others and men were transferred back and forth in preparation to transfers and demob, company commander would be any officer who was remaining.

I'm on mobile so I can't dig em but I think they've been posted in this thread, too. Assumption of command orders signed to the undersigned himself, basically "As the sole officer present I assume the command of this company until I find someone else" or "Due to being unable to reach anyone, I, 1LT so and so, assume the command of this 69th Transport Battalion until we meet another major formation".