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Tulip posted:Broke: Germany could have won WW2 with better equipment/maneuvers In every generation an Italian man looks across the Isonzo and wonders...
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Dec 29, 2022 19:44
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MikeCrotch posted:In every generation an Italian man looks across the Isonzo and wonders... extremely good post/avatar combo.
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Dec 29, 2022 20:09
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Tulip posted:Broke: Germany could have won WW2 with better equipment/maneuvers Joke: Germany could have lost even faster if spain had joined the axis.
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Dec 29, 2022 20:23
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Fish of hemp posted:So Mussolini is the greatest anti fascist? He invented Fascism, so the Nazis in their known form are caused by him. So, ha ha no
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Dec 29, 2022 20:35
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Nenonen posted:They also get to start Barbarossa earlier because they don't have to bother with Greece and Crete. But on the flipside Britain recovers from their material losses of 1940 quicker when they don't have the Mediterranean front to feed, and so can also provide more support to Soviets. German logistics is still going to be hosed, the more so the further they advance in 1941. Barbarossa was delayed for the weather. The German planners made this very clear. The forces they sent to Greece simply trickled into Army Group South without much fanfare, as the focus of the attack was Army Group Central anyways. Dance Officer posted:I don't think the Nazis would have won the war against the Soviet Union even without the resource drain of the Afrika Corps. The Afrika Corps in 1941 was like two small divisions. It wasn't going to make a difference for Barbarossa, even though they were armoured formations. Especially if you consider that the German armoured forces in Barbarossa were taking like 60% operational losses just from the advance.
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Dec 29, 2022 22:44
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Libluini posted:He invented Fascism, so the Nazis in their known form are caused by him. So, ha ha no To be fair to him he does provide an amazing example of the fate of fascists.
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Dec 29, 2022 22:55
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Tulip posted:
Italy Sides with the Allies in 41, and immediately start getting their asses kicked down their own peninsula. This causes a major drain on allied resources trying to bail them out. North African campaigns never happen, with the Med theater being mostly focused on northern Italy, Greece, and Albania. The Germans benefit from the logistical proximity and not having to haul poo poo all the way across the med, while also basing aircraft and subs from Vichy France, which significantly impacts the amount of material that actually reaches the Italians, with several convoys getting sunk in their entirety. Tensions rise between Soviet and Western allies over the amount of resources spent on the Italians, leading to the conference in Tehran, which Mussolini himself crashes. The Italian delegation gets in a literal fistfight with the Soviets, and the rift is never healed. Stalin returns to Moscow and Sues the Germans for peace, splitting Poland between them. The Soviets then reach out to Japan and secretly begins sending them supplies and information from his wide intelligence networks in the western allies. This failure of diplomacy weighs heavily on both Roosevelt and Churchill, with the former succumbing to health issues from the stress, and the latter almost drinking himself to death. President Henry A. Wallace and PM Anthony Eden lack the charisma of FDR and Churchill, and after the disaster that was the landings at Antwerp and Samar, the American public loses faith in both European and Pacific campaigns, eventually leading to their withdrawal from both.
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Dec 30, 2022 02:28
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I've been reading The Wages of Destruction, after it was recommended by this thread. I'm 25% through so far. A few things that have stood out to me, which I hadn't realized previously: 1. The Nazis had a thorough grip on the economy in Germany well before war broke out. Like, pretty much the first thing they did was start putting price and import/export controls on everything imaginable, locking down the agricultural sector (while also giving it a ton of protection from market forces), and trying to come up with synthetic or local sources for fuel, rubber, and steel. 2. There was a lot of infighting, backstabbing, and petty politics played at the personal level throughout. Like, Goebbels was grabbing every source of power and authority he could, economists were privately agreeing to present a united front which would immediately be sabotaged when they met with Hitler, etc. I should have realized this, since crony politics tends towards this way of running things, but I didn't. 3. Germany was significantly economically weaker than its "competitors" at the time (UK, France, and USA). Agricultural productivity was awful, and the general standard of living was mediocre. WW1 assuredly did not help, but I get the impression that the origin has more to do with relatively recent disunity and a failure to pillage other lands via colonialism. Which ties neatly into Hitler's insistence on Lebensraum. Also, on a grimly amusing side note: Germany in the 1930s had a foreign currency crisis, which prevented it from buying imported goods at the desired rate. This was exacerbated by efforts to encourage Jews to emigrate, because they would exchange their Reichsmarks for foreign currency as part of that process. Even if they left a substantial portion of their wealth behind, it was still a significant burden on the state banks. Of course, pretty soon Germany got a lot less "nice" about Jewish-owned property.
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Dec 30, 2022 02:29
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Re. Point 2, this is something that was explicitly encouraged by the Nazis, both because of the idea that competition was good for having the "best" people come out on top, and because having your underlings constantly at each others throats is good practice to make sure none of them get too big for their boots and upstage you. Of course, this then makes things horribly inefficient if you want to actually a country effectively.
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Dec 30, 2022 13:30
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Point 2 is even deeper than cronyism tbh. Nazis were very into a kind of weird natural selection notion, a belief that competition profoundly elevated the survivors. Note that this is not really the same as Darwinian selection - Darwinian selection proposes that selective pressure merely favors those most suited to surviving whatever circumstances, not that the survivors will be better at anything other than surviving a given source of pressure. The main place this takes place was obviously the competition between 'races,' that a constant state of international warfare would inevitably leave only the 'best' 'race' to rule the world (presumably Aryans). Jews have a special place in this...I guess eschatology? in that they are roadblocks that prevent natural competition between other races. People with even crude critical thinking skills will notice that a state of global industrial war of all against all will not likely select for traits that most of us would consider noble or desirable.
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Dec 30, 2022 15:07
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Ran into this statement elsewhere lately and this seemed...kinda off, as far as I know. Can anybody more familiar with US military doctrine over time weigh in on how accurate this is? The first half seems fair enough, but the claims about how the US historically operated and how effective it was at that seemed suspect.quote:I think it is to do with training as a group to be a team rather than training individual skills. Train as a team, fight as a team, win as a team. Taking out a key component and replacing it with someone unfamiliar to the team degrades the whole unit greater than the lost veteran experience of the individual replaced solider.
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Dec 30, 2022 15:14
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quote:Maybe planners and senior officers stayed for the duration of a campaign, but a lot of front-line units were rotated out after 25 missions, a year in combat, etc. In effect the US fights with green troops as a greater proportion of their forces than any of their opponents by design. Bluntly, no, because whoever wrote this is looking at "front line units" as a single thing, when in reality they most emphatically were not. These things varied by service, by unit, by historical era, you name it. Just looking at what he mentions here: "Rotated out after 25 missions" is true for USAAF Bomber crews in the early years of the air campaign against Germany (1943), yes. But even that changed - as things got "easier" and bombers faced less opposition the number of missions was raised - heavy bomber crews had to do 50 missions or more. Also, this was determined by the theater command, so crews in the Mediterranean, Pacific, etc, had different numbers. Also, this isn't unique to the USAAF. RAF bombers crews would fly 30 missions, then be rotated back to be instructors. US Navy plots didn't have a fixed number of missions but also would return to be instructors after long deployments, etc, etc, etc. So in WWII this is sorta true for one set of bomber crews at one time, but it isn't true for others, especially the soldiers on the ground. They were in "for the duration" and they knew it. Yes, there were some exceptions; some lucky few might get sent into a rear-echelon job, some might even go back to the States. But for the majority there were there until the war was over. quote:Interestingly, the Europeans would take whole units out of the line to retrain as an entire unit when attritted through combat whereas the US say, Just wrong. The USA pulled units out of the line to rebuild them too. Some were on the line longer than others, but every unit got some time off the front to rebuilt at one point or another. quote:in Vietnam would replace losses of a unit with fresh troops flown in from the US as they took losses. Not - really? Every unit in Vietnam received replacements in order to keep it up to as close to its authorized strength as possible. To replace losses, sure, but also just to replace soldiers whose time was up. In tl;dr terms your average grunt did a year in Vietnam. He went over as an individual and went home as an individual. In the thinking of the time this was good, at least they weren't there "for the duration" like WW2 soldiers. In practice, though, this wasn't as good because it made it impossible for soldiers to train as a unit before deployment, work as a total team when in-country, etc. quote:I am not sure the US is still set up with the same system but I think it relies upon only a small amount of attrition. It most assuredly is not. Units train together as a unit before a deployment, deploy as a unit, and return as a unit. Whoever wrote this is confusing a lot of different things and making some basic errors, and getting to some very odd conclusions as a result.
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Dec 30, 2022 16:25
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Repple depples
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Dec 30, 2022 17:19
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Also the "the reason the US wins battles" bit at the start. When are we talking, where? Is the suggestion that the US doesn't lose battles? Or that US doctrine hasn't changed since WWII? Longer? Strikes me as someone who has played too much Hearts of Iron and is trying to identify the USA's real life national characteristic
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Dec 30, 2022 17:25
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Tulip posted:Point 2 is even deeper than cronyism tbh. Nazis were very into a kind of weird natural selection notion, a belief that competition profoundly elevated the survivors. Note that this is not really the same as Darwinian selection - Darwinian selection proposes that selective pressure merely favors those most suited to surviving whatever circumstances, not that the survivors will be better at anything other than surviving a given source of pressure. The main place this takes place was obviously the competition between 'races,' that a constant state of international warfare would inevitably leave only the 'best' 'race' to rule the world (presumably Aryans). Jews have a special place in this...I guess eschatology? in that they are roadblocks that prevent natural competition between other races. This is over-salting it a bit to be honest. I mean, I'm sure there was some element of that and for all I know there's a quote from "Hitler's Tabletalk" where he says "yeah, letting these guys duke it out makes the cream rise to the top the same as races battling for supremacy blah blah fart" but it also implies a degree of organization and intention that just isn't there. Basically, the NSDAP started out as a very, very small club of losers. I'm talking the idiots in the 20s who were getting arrested for starting revolutions in beer halls. Later on they got their poo poo together and became a real political party (and the insights that they expressed about why things didn't work in the 20s and what they had to change to be successful are really interesting - at the very lest they could learn from failure). Once they started getting some real influence that old guard - the Alte Kampfer - leveraged their sonority in a huge way to build personal empires. Why? Because these were the sorts of people who sign up with a revolutionary organization when it's a bunch of weirdos grumbling in beer halls, and for most of them this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to enrich themselves, whether literally or in the form of influence and importance. It's a small in-group that all of a sudden has access to things like ministerial seats and it becomes a free-for-all of people trying to get their slice of the pie. To give an example, Goebbels got poo poo from other party bigwigs (Goering in particular iirc) because of his unseemly "high" membership number. See, he got interested in Nazism about the time of the Putsch and signed up after Hitler got arrested. I think right after he got out of jail. Which means his membership number was "only" in the 8000-range. IIRC Goering's was sub-2000. (This was also a point of weird poo poo with Hitler himself - he claimed to be member #7, but there's evidence that this was faked and he was really more like 500-something). Lots of shade thrown at Goebbels for not being a true member of the old guard, since he hadn't been around to get arrested at Munich. But yeah, either way the end result of competing mini-empires has more to do with how what amounts to a lovely club took over the government rather than some grand scheme cooked up to make the governing structure better align with racial theory.
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Dec 30, 2022 17:56
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quote:There is a reason the US wins battles most of the time historically This in and of itself is super suss. The US has not had a single historical doctrine over a quarter of a millennium that contrasts with 'Europe' (which is a whole bunch of countries) over that same quarter of a millennium, and if it had and it was better, European countries would have adopted it. Also, um. *coughs* your entire national capital got burned to the ground *coughs* General Custer* *coughs* Vietnam *coughs* Afghanistan just recently. The US loses battles/wars just like anyone else, it just doesn't like to talk about it. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 18:25
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Cross posting a take from the authors in the US Army on replacements from the Ukraine thread that originated this discussion. Additional links provided in the pdf. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2020/Haider-Replacements/
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Dec 30, 2022 18:57
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is over-salting it a bit to be honest. I mean, I'm sure there was some element of that and for all I know there's a quote from "Hitler's Tabletalk" where he says "yeah, letting these guys duke it out makes the cream rise to the top the same as races battling for supremacy blah blah fart" but it also implies a degree of organization and intention that just isn't there. Did you mean “seniority” not “sonority”? Cause the typo also works ; loving loud-rear end whining Nazis lol.
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Dec 30, 2022 19:18
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Xiahou Dun posted:Did you mean “seniority” not “sonority”? Cause the typo also works ; loving loud-rear end whining Nazis lol. Lol yes but also lmao yes.
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Dec 30, 2022 19:26
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feedmegin posted:This in and of itself is super suss. The US has not had a single historical doctrine over a quarter of a millennium that contrasts with 'Europe' (which is a whole bunch of countries) over that same quarter of a millennium, and if it had and it was better, European countries would have adopted it. The US hasn't had an existential war since 1865 - ie, one that threatens the territorial integrity of the country as a whole or the sovereignty of the central government. It can afford to memoryhole losses in a way other states can't because of the whole 'dominate a continent surrounded by oceans' factor.
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Dec 30, 2022 19:31
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Enh, actual existential conflicts are few and far between. I don't think the US is significantly more or less commonly victorious than any one else, nor is it that special in terms of not wanting to talk much about their defeats. It's just a matter of people talking about US history from an US perspective.
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Dec 30, 2022 19:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:(and the insights that they expressed about why things didn't work in the 20s and what they had to change to be successful are really interesting - at the very lest they could learn from failure). Is this something you'd be able to link to further reading on?
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Dec 30, 2022 19:53
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feedmegin posted:This in and of itself is super suss. The US has not had a single historical doctrine over a quarter of a millennium that contrasts with 'Europe' (which is a whole bunch of countries) over that same quarter of a millennium, and if it had and it was better, European countries would have adopted it. A handful of irish people burned the White House before it was painted, the capitol, and many other partially-constructed bits of the swamp to become Washington, as just desserts for the USA burning York which would go on to become a rich suburb of Toronto, before it was named Toronto. None of it was consequential, but it sure gets brought up a lot when americans and brits want to own each other. It's almost as funny as how New Orleans doesn't matter because that was just a failed massacre of a campaign as a joke. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 20:25
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Whats the SOP for reintegrating naval dudes who get their boat blown up? Like say the carrier uss john goatse gets torpedoed and a large amount of the crew are saved and end back up in friendly hands what happens to dudes who could physically return to duty? Do they get a physocal and a bunch of time off? Do you get "survived an explosion" bonus? Does everyone get spread among the fleet or do they keep the crew, fill in the blanks, and give them a new ship?
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Dec 30, 2022 20:37
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You can look at what became of the three Hood survivors after the battle: http://www.hmshood.org.uk/crew/database/databaseindividual.php?myrec=316 http://www.hmshood.org.uk/crew/database/databaseindividual.php?myrec=800 http://www.hmshood.org.uk/crew/database/databaseindividual.php?myrec=2888
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Dec 30, 2022 21:05
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And on the flip side what happens if only a few sailors are casualties? What if it's not even in combat but just Steve from the boiler room having a heart attack? Do they fly out a new Steve?
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Dec 30, 2022 21:15
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Flappy Bert posted:Is this something you'd be able to link to further reading on? Nothing specific off the top of my head, it's the sort of thing you see in a bunch of other books on the general period. If you've got a copy, iirc Rise and Fall of the Third Reich actually covers it pretty well. Shirer was a correspondent in Berlin during the period and while the book certainly has flaws in a more modern light, the stuff specifically on the years that he was there still holds up pretty well. fake edit: yeah, I just dusted off my copy and he quotes something Hitler said in prison:  The citation points to p.217-18 of Karl Ludecke I knew Hitler. Sorry to be so fuzzy about it, this is one of those things that crops up pretty much anywhere you read about the way the Nazis gear-shifted between 1924 and 1932. Basically it tl;dr's down to "don't freak out the normies." The whole point was to cut back on the really overt thuggery so that they could get Johann and Maria Mittlestand to vote for them on more traditionally political points (the government is ineffective, the economy sucks, communists are scary, we were humiliated in WW1 and need to rebuild stronger, Germany for True Germans etc). A lot of that culminates in the Night of the Long Knives purging the more socially disreputable elements - it was more or less necessary to get the Army on his side during the crucial summer of 1934*. I mean, a lot of weird, dumb Nazi grudges get played out too. Goering in particular used the excuse to squash a bunch of fellow Nazis who he had long standing beef with, and the whole thing in general was in parallel a power grab on Himmler's part since it basically neutered the S.A. and entrenched the S.S. as the militant wing of the party. But the kernel of it was socially conservative Prussians who made up the general staff - and their political allies - being uncomfortable with some of the wilder excesses of the Party and needing to see that trimmed back. *short version of this is that Franz von Papen, an utter knob of a Conservative Party politician who was dumb enough to essentially enable Hitler to come to power as Chancellor because he assumed he could control the Nazis and use them towards his own end,** eventually got freaked out enough at the Nazis hoovering up all the power they could and generally loving things up that he grew a pair of balls and started vocally criticizing some of their more violent extremes. In particular he gave a speech known as the "Marburg Speech" where he called for the restoration of a number of civil freedoms and the curtailing of some of the crazier poo poo the SA was doing on the streets, and he prooobably did this with the backing of the Army, or at least key figures in it. This was something like two months after the passage of the Enabling Act. He also had the ear of Hindenburg, who was at this point one of the few people who could pull the plug on Hitelr's Chancellorship. So he actually starts speaking out, and some serious words are going on behind the scenes among the Conservative set about how all these calls for revolution and SA thugs in the streets etc. are getting out of control. At this point if Hindenburg decides Hitler has to go and the Army backs him the Nazis are probably up poo poo creek. You might get a little bit of a civil war, but nothing too bad in the grand scheme of things. So Roehm and the rest of the SA leadership get thrown under the bus to placate the Army, a bunch of Nazi bigwigs settle some grudges to boot, and in the mix a few key, Nazi-critical generals also got their skulls ventilated. This smooths things over with the Conservatives and elements of the Army long enough for Hindenburg to decline and, right before his death, get the President's powers transferred to Hitler, at which point the last real constitutional basis to remove him was gone. **Let me put it this way: I call Mitch McConnell "Franz" around the house.
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Dec 30, 2022 22:23
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MikeC posted:Cross posting a take from the authors in the US Army on replacements from the Ukraine thread that originated this discussion. Additional links provided in the pdf. Has anyone read the cited Rush paper about the Hurtgen Forest? Rush's positive remarks about integrating replacements during combat are pretty much the only positive remarks I've ever read about integrating replacements during combat. I wonder if he's comparing them to a practice of just not bothering to try to replace casualties at all, as opposed to, you know, a good doctrine.
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Dec 30, 2022 22:32
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Sometimes you just don't have a choice.
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Dec 30, 2022 22:55
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VostokProgram posted:And on the flip side what happens if only a few sailors are casualties? What if it's not even in combat but just Steve from the boiler room having a heart attack? Do they fly out a new Steve? "It depends," but generally they'll pick up new sailors the next time they make it to a port.
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Dec 30, 2022 23:15
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Cyrano4747 posted:a good post O good. Now I feel better about my own nested foot-notes.
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Dec 30, 2022 23:32
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MikeCrotch posted:Re. Point 2, this is something that was explicitly encouraged by the Nazis, both because of the idea that competition was good for having the "best" people come out on top, and because having your underlings constantly at each others throats is good practice to make sure none of them get too big for their boots and upstage you. Of course, this then makes things horribly inefficient if you want to actually a country effectively. That reminds of Stephen Kotkin's second part of Stalin's biography where he touches a little bit on Hitler and how he was straight up lazy, as a contrast to Stalin I guess. He liked to look at maps, imagine military moves and the territories of Greater Germany, design and build models of grand buildings for the new capitol. He didn't like mundane governance or reading memos so his ministers and underlings often interpreted his rants and deduced what policy Hitler would like implemented, or they did what they wanted and convinced Hitler afterwards that they were just following his instructions. So unless that characterisation is wrong, I'd say the whole "Nazi inter-government competition and overlap was a Darwinist scheme", stupid as even that would be, is giving them too much credit.
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Dec 31, 2022 00:18
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is over-salting it a bit to be honest. I mean, I'm sure there was some element of that and for all I know there's a quote from "Hitler's Tabletalk" where he says "yeah, letting these guys duke it out makes the cream rise to the top the same as races battling for supremacy blah blah fart" but it also implies a degree of organization and intention that just isn't there. So I'll grant I may not have written that the most explicitly but I do want to be clear that I don't think Nazi leadership ever all sat down and drafted a document saying "we believe this is how the world works and we are going to make sure all of our decisions align with it," in no small part because I don't believe this is how large organizations work in general. An example from (of?) my own life may make my thoughts on this a little more clear and I'll be more explicit about what I think about the Nazi angle at the end. I work for NYC government, which is to say I work for the mayor of NYC, which is to say I work for Eric Adams. Eric Adams bills himself very much as the "cop mayor," and even though I haven't heard him literally use the phrase out loud, he seems to fairly clearly believe the wolf, sheep, sheepdog theory. Or put another way, he thinks that cops are simply better than the rest of us. An early act in Adams' mayoralty was the firing of Sarena Townsend. Townsend had been investigating corruption in our local department of corrections; by all accounts the department of corrections is absolutely rife with corruption and abuse, I haven't even really heard anybody contest the substance of such claims. The question is not whether or not there is corruption and abuse but whether or not we want to do anything about that corruption and abuse. Her firing was widely interpreted and accepted as a message from the administration: prison guards are not to be punished for what they do on the job. Now, note that, strictly speaking, Adams did not fire Townsend - she was fired by Louis Molina, who was a political appointee of Adams. And more to the point we do not have an explicit, central document from Adams or his inner circle saying "those who enforce the law are above the law, and as such investigations into their behavior are to be suppressed." We instead have a tone-at-the-top set by the administration, and a series of decisions that fit into that philosophy, and those who have devolved authority understand how to make further decisions that advance that agenda. To go back to Nazi Germany, I don't think that there was an explicit documentation of "intraparty competition is synecdoche for racial competition down to the level of individual bureaucrats, and as such we must incentivize and protect such a practice." I don't think such a thing is necessary at all. Nazi Germany's defining policy decision, the Holocaust, also wasn't done like that. Unless somebody found something very exciting recently, we do not have a piece of paper that goes "Whereas we do not tolerate Jews to live, be it implemented that we shall use all means at our disposal to murder every last one of them, signed by Me, Adolf Hitler." We still feel very confident that we can say that the Holocaust was a deliberate implementation of Hitler's vision, because we have a series of decisions and actions that align with the known goals and desires of Nazi leadership. Which is all to say that the reason the questions about having a whole theory of competition matters not because we have any centrally planned policy-philosophy document (these are generally quite rare), but because it set a tone-at-the-top that allowed all levels of the bureaucracy to make sense of a given way of running things. Less a "well if you refer to document xyz" than "well I guess that is the way we run things" kind of thing. And of course this kind of thing is always a matter of degree, because the competition-cooperation impulses that humans have and that define our political worlds cannot ever go 100% one way or the other. Rather famously we do have edicts from China, many many many of them, that ban factions/political parties, under the logic that bureaucrats are to have only loyalty to the Emperor and that they are to be at perfect 100% cooperation in the Emperor's interest (disagreeing with the Emperor is fine, doing so as part of an organized opposition is not). The simple fact that they had to say this more than once tells you that this was not actually able to do so. But nevertheless it was not wholly ineffective, substantive political factions are the exception rather than the rule in Chinese imperial history.
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Dec 31, 2022 00:27
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Tulip posted:So I'll grant I may not have written that the most explicitly but I do want to be clear that I don't think Nazi leadership ever all sat down and drafted a document saying "we believe this is how the world works and we are going to make sure all of our decisions align with it," in no small part because I don't believe this is how large organizations work in general. What you're describing is a phenomenon known as "working towards the Fuhrer," with that description of it being coined by Ian Kershaw. Start thumbing through his books if you want more on that. That said, I still think you're putting the cart before the horse. I'd argue that this kind of competition and relationship to power is a result of the way the hard core of the party was formed in the early days. It doesn't HAVE to be this way, but the way that the Nazis came into power meant that it was. Also: quote:We still feel very confident that we can say that the Holocaust was a deliberate implementation of Hitler's vision, because we have a series of decisions and actions that align with the known goals and desires of Nazi leadership. That is very much not a thing we can confidently say. In fact, it's a thing that was really strongly contested in the 80s-90s, and became known as the functionalist-intentionalist debate. Tl;dr, functionalists believe that the holocaust came about because of how events unfolded without a long-term plan, intentionalisms believe that it was the plan from day one. These days the general scholarly consensus is mostly a mid-point between the two. It's obvious that Hitler wanted a Germany free of Jews, but how, exactly, that was to happen was always a bit of a question mark. There is every indication in the 30s that it was mostly intended to be harassing them until they left (with the understanding that "harassment" has a very significant body count - but isn't complete annihilation). The most common argument you'll see today is that WW2 itself pushed the issue, and created both the means and motive for full extermination. A lot of the previously expelled Jews came back into German hands in 39 and 40 - a lot of German Jews in particular fled to the Netherlands and France - and they also came to hold extremely large Jewish populations in Poland. At the same time all of the other avenues for getting rid of them were closed off due to the realities of the war - it's hard to force people to emigrate when you're under a continental blockade. At the same time you have escalating violence and brutality as a result of the war in the east, with the Commissar Order in particular being an important step along the path of deciding that subversive (and explicitly Jewish - they had a whole thing about the relationship between Jews and Red Army political officers) elements needed to be exterminated out of hand. At the same time you have a big swath of land where you can murder the gently caress out of everyone without having to answer awkward questions from civilians back home. Basically Nazi policy towards the Jews was consistent in so far as they wanted them gone from Germany ,but the means to that end is a element of that policy that shifts over time and looks very different in 1938, 1940, and 1942.
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Dec 31, 2022 03:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Isn't what you quoted kind of a summation of Kershaw's position, which came at the tail end of the functionalist/intentionalist debate?
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Dec 31, 2022 09:20
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I'm familiar with the broad strokes of the intentionalist-functionalist debate, the impression I had was that since the 00's the intentionalists had a pretty clear upper hand. At some level I suppose we're getting philosophical. The objections you're raising read to me like an extremely high bar, such that only societies created in laboratory settings can be said to have any organizing principles. We've seen other organizations emerge in high competition between personalities like that without it becoming baked into multiple layers of the organization in a durable fashion. I think particularly of the CCP - the period from 1927 to 1935 was defined by extreme competition between big, big personalities, and it arguably only resolved during the Cultural Revolution. But as vicious as the fights between various factions got, it never really trickled down in the way that it did with the Nazis, save during the Cultural Revolution which was...well Mao explicitly encouraging administrative chaos, complete with manifestos and rallies. No small part of this is that bureaucratic norms have to be continually reiterated, because a bureaucracy exists inside of a wider culture which will always be dynamically pushing its own sorts of norms. To TL;DR it, the Nazis could have reversed course on a lot of this stuff (and a lot of people think they did! Milgram's experiment was based on a belief that Nazi Germany was a place of exceptional organization, centralization, and obedience). They didn't. They had a pretty consistent culture of infighting and competition, at all levels, that was consonant with Nazi philosophy, and...that's enough for me.
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Dec 31, 2022 09:31
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Dad Hominem posted:Isn't what you quoted kind of a summation of Kershaw's position, which came at the tail end of the functionalist/intentionalist debate? Don’t know whether browning or Kershaw got their first but pretty sure that yeah, both of them hew to it. Most of the historians my age do as well.
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Dec 31, 2022 16:09
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Tulip posted:I'm familiar with the broad strokes of the intentionalist-functionalist debate, the impression I had was that since the 00's the intentionalists had a pretty clear upper hand. I mean, at some point you’re putting this poo poo on a spectrum and then introducing terms like “radical functionalist” etc but on the whole intentionalism is the much older approach. If you read Shirer, for example, he lays out an early form of a very intentionalist argument. It’s kind of hand-in-glove with the Sonderweg as far as being something that was very much the accepted orthodoxy in the 50s-60s and fell out in the 90s. That said internationalism didn’t fall from grace nearly ad hard as the sonderweg.
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Dec 31, 2022 16:14
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Tulip posted:I'm familiar with the broad strokes of the intentionalist-functionalist debate, the impression I had was that since the 00's the intentionalists had a pretty clear upper hand. The Nazi Dictatorship by Ian Kershaw gives a very nice overview of all the debates in the historiography of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. But the TL;DR is that most historians these day fall on the functionalist side of things but with an emphasis as Hitler's meddling as an accelerant:  Cyrano4747 posted:It’s kind of hand-in-glove with the Sonderweg as far as being something that was very much the accepted orthodoxy in the 50s-60s and fell out in the 90s. That said internationalism didn’t fall from grace nearly ad hard as the sonderweg.
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Jan 1, 2023 04:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:At this point if Hindenburg decides Hitler has to go and the Army backs him the Nazis are probably up poo poo creek. You might get a little bit of a civil war, but nothing too bad in the grand scheme of things. Well, you say that. The SA had something like 10 times the authorised strength of the Reichswehr at the time? Which is where Roehm's coming from. If it weren't for the Night of the Long Knives things might have gotten Spicy.
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Jan 3, 2023 15:21
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