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There were tweaks to the builds of Nazi tanks on average every twenty vehicles. Most of these were minor, but it was a maintenance nightmare that all the tanks in the field differed in subtle ways. Good luck replacing that part that was only like that on tanks numbered two hundred and five through two hundred and seventy. And yes, they used sequential serial numbers, allowing the Allies to very accurately estimate how many tanks of each type had been produced. The German Tank Problem is one of the first things students learn about statistics.
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Jun 6, 2021 02:42
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I forget which tank it was (Tiger?) that had a transmission that was only rated for like 100 miles (leading to the joke that a 101-mile-long road is a "tank destroyer"). And if you needed to service it, you had to remove the entire engine as well as a bunch of other stuff to get at it. This one probably doesn't count as it never was built, but the Lippisch P.13a was a proposed delta-wing aircraft that supposedly would be able to achieve supersonic flight. It was to fly on coal dust (there being a shortage of liquid petrochemicals in Germany at the time) and was unarmed; instead, it would destroy its targets by ramming them. The pilot's safety would be assured by thorough reinforcement of the plane.
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Jun 6, 2021 02:44
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I just watched Der Untergang (/Hitler Reacts Movie/Downfall) and holy gently caress is it more depressing now that I'm old
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Jun 6, 2021 03:58
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I just watched Der Untergang (/Hitler Reacts Movie/Downfall) and holy gently caress is it more depressing now that I'm old
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Jun 6, 2021 04:03
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Fatty Crabcakes posted:Umm what about Nazis blowing their brains out depresses you The nazis had to exist first
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Jun 6, 2021 04:31
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Fatty Crabcakes posted:Umm what about Nazis blowing their brains out depresses you Murdering the dogs. (Hitler tested the cyanide on his dog, then took it himself, then swallowed his gun, and finally at least ten dogs were shot in the garden by Hitler’s dog handler, Fritz Tornow, five of them puppies less than four weeks old.)
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Jun 6, 2021 06:02
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Statistically half those puppies were going to get raped by Soviets anyway (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 6, 2021 06:07
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Jun 6, 2021 06:22
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Pook Good Mook posted:Statistically half those puppies were going to get raped by Soviets anyway Are you the guy that wrote Half Life Full Life Consequences or are you just using the same avatar?
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Jun 6, 2021 07:12
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That post about all the issues with Nazi uniforms was very interesting, thank you for crossposting it. It's kind of ironic that when considering that the design intent of the uniform was primarily to look aesthetically striking and intimidating, it was actually a resounding success, given how prevalent the Nazi military aesthetic has continued to be in media (e.g. all the Star Wars movies) and culture (e.g. uniform fetishism) in the post-war decades.
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Jun 6, 2021 08:44
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Red Bones posted:That post about all the issues with Nazi uniforms was very interesting, thank you for crossposting it. It's kind of ironic that when considering that the design intent of the uniform was primarily to look aesthetically striking and intimidating, it was actually a resounding success, given how prevalent the Nazi military aesthetic has continued to be in media (e.g. all the Star Wars movies) and culture (e.g. uniform fetishism) in the post-war decades. What's  is that they literally ignored the most important and practical characteristic of uniforms, to their own cost. (Hint: it's in the name.)
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Jun 6, 2021 08:47
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they were too slow at reshaping the german people into the uniform
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Jun 6, 2021 08:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I forget which tank it was (Tiger?) that had a transmission that was only rated for like 100 miles (leading to the joke that a 101-mile-long road is a "tank destroyer"). And if you needed to service it, you had to remove the entire engine as well as a bunch of other stuff to get at it. That would've been the Panther, where they took the idea of a decently sensible medium tank design and kept adding more armour to the front until the transmission just couldn't deal any more. And yeah, servicing the transmission meant opening up the hull roof and vertically lifting the whole thing out of there and back in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zguDtwk_Bs
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Jun 6, 2021 09:45
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3D Megadoodoo posted:What's You could not see them?
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Jun 6, 2021 10:39
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Milo and POTUS posted:You could not see them? one size fits all
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Jun 6, 2021 11:17
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Platystemon posted:There were tweaks to the builds of Nazi tanks on average every twenty vehicles.
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Jun 6, 2021 11:53
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zedprime posted:Jokes on the allies when they disable tanks 1-23 and 25 but 24 is still in the shop getting shims hammered in. war principal gonna be looking for tank 24 all weekend lmao
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Jun 6, 2021 12:06
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3D Megadoodoo posted:What's The only reason Finland wasn't fully kitted out in those uniforms was it was too poor to afford it
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Jun 6, 2021 15:53
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Milo and POTUS posted:You could not see them? They weren't uniform.
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Jun 6, 2021 15:56
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About serial numbers on German tanks, is serial number analysis still a matter of concern in warfare, and what measures have been taken to counter it?
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Jun 7, 2021 07:26
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Kevin DuBrow posted:About serial numbers on German tanks, is serial number analysis still a matter of concern in warfare, and what measures have been taken to counter it? Use Roman numerals so no American will understand them.
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Jun 7, 2021 07:38
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Kevin DuBrow posted:About serial numbers on German tanks, is serial number analysis still a matter of concern in warfare, and what measures have been taken to counter it? Just use random numbers. If you need to know when the tank came off the line, look it up in a file.
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Jun 7, 2021 08:09
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Kevin DuBrow posted:About serial numbers on German tanks, is serial number analysis still a matter of concern in warfare, and what measures have been taken to counter it? Standard practice is to denote the first three units of any vehicle model as 69, 420, and 80085 to prevent enemy armies from estimating the correct number
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Jun 7, 2021 08:10
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Kevin DuBrow posted:About serial numbers on German tanks, is serial number analysis still a matter of concern in warfare, and what measures have been taken to counter it? When I was doing my undergrad dissertation in industrial archaeology (on a railway-related topic) I worked with someone doing a PhD in railway studies. One aspect of their research was to do with trying to pin down the movements of rail wagons owned by a coal merchant in Suffolk - before WW2 it was common for even small businesses like coal merchants, farm suppliers, building contractors etc. to own their own railway wagons, in the same way they'd own a van or truck road vehicle today. Anyway, this PhD student had amassed loads of documentary evidence about how these wagons were used, right down to a surviving volume of the railway station's freight register (which logged every wagon and cargo taken in and out of the station). And yet he couldn't make sense of how this coal merchant was using his wagons. Long story short - it turned out that this coal merchant used non-sequential numbers to identify his wagons. He started at some arbitrary number (17, iirc) and then went up in skipped pairs of odd numbers. He only had three or four wagons but they were numbered something like 17, 21, 25 and 29. Further research showed that this sort of thing was common practice, since it made the business (the name of which was writ large on the side of the wagon) seem larger and more prosperous than it actually was, while letting your customers (and rivals) see wagon No.1 marked you out as, well, a one-wagon operation. It made no difference to the owner how random the numbering sequence was because they had the records, they didn't actually have that many wagons and all they needed to know was where wagon [number] was or what maintenance it needed. What I'm saying is that provincial coal merchants in 1890s Britain were smarter than the Nazis.
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Jun 7, 2021 09:00
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Makes a lot of sense considering fascism isn't a coherent method of governmance, it's a mindset of pursuing aesthetics above literally everything else. Trying to LARP your totalitarian ethnostate into existence.
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Jun 7, 2021 09:04
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BalloonFish posted:What I'm saying is that provincial coal merchants in 1890s Britain were smarter than the Nazis. On a related note, when the nazis were getting started they added something like 500 on to the start of all the membership card numbers. It does make you look more numerous, but on the other hand I feel people might wonder why the founders were #501 etc. I suppose that’s one of many reasons to purge the early party.
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Jun 7, 2021 09:51
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The commonly held image of Nazi Germany as some kind of brutally efficient fascist state really bothers me because it suggests that governments need to be competently run in order to exact immense suffering upon people.
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Jun 7, 2021 11:32
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exquisite tea posted:The commonly held image of Nazi Germany as some kind of brutally efficient fascist state really bothers me because it suggests that governments need to be competently run in order to exact immense suffering upon people. The myth of German efficiency is propagated by the Germans, for business reasons. The myth of Fascist efficiency is propagated by Fascists, because they're Fascists.
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Jun 7, 2021 11:38
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Adolf Hitler was Donald Trump with a snappier tailor and a better speech writer. The nazi leaders were the Bannons, Pences, Scaramuchis and Kushners of their era, with the occasional McMaster thrown in by pure chance.
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Jun 7, 2021 14:45
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Like, Göring was a decorated WWI fighter ace and got put in charge of all German aviation, while Speer was a nobody who was appointed armaments minister because Hitler liked his house designs. One turned out to be a fat, drugged-up moron who almost singlehandedly ran both civilian and military aviation into the ground, while the other turned out to be a genius of industrial organization. The idea of nazi Germany as this highly efficient meritocracy was a PR bluff propagated by the nazis themselves. The only quality necessary to attain a leadership position was that Hitler liked you. Whether you were good at your job or not was completely secondary.
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Jun 7, 2021 15:02
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Adolf Hitler was Donald Trump with a snappier tailor and a better speech writer. The nazi leaders were the Bannons, Pences, Scaramuchis and Kushners of their era, with the occasional McMaster thrown in by pure chance. Modern people will think this is hyperbole but it's really important people understand that the Nazis were incredibly dumb, self-serving, and without shame, and basically fell rear end backwards into a situation tailor made for their ideology. They were all backstabbing, self-dealing morons that undermined the interests of the State at every opportunity and basically relied upon a marginally competent civil service to make their terrible ideas possible. At nearly every point where good strategy or politics conflicted with ideology, they chose ideology, even when it completely hosed them down the road in completely predictable ways.
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Jun 7, 2021 15:05
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Basically if they hadn't completely lucked out and taken France in one insane gamble, they'd have gone down as incompetent as Mussolini's crew.
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Jun 7, 2021 15:10
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exquisite tea posted:The commonly held image of Nazi Germany as some kind of brutally efficient fascist state really bothers me because it suggests that governments need to be competently run in order to exact immense suffering upon people. The nazis were dysfunctional even in their cruelty. Like, the various misery-inflicting organs were constantly in conflict with each other. Speer: "Hey, I promised Herr Generalfabrikator Schmundt 15000 slaves for his corrosive acid factory, where the hell are they?" Department cheif Fritz: "Some SS Obergruppenführer showed up, said that they were his slaves now and shipped them all to Poland, and said that if I had a problem with that I should bring it up with Reichsführer SS." So then it turns into a poo poo slinging contest between Speer and Himmler over who had dibs on the train load of prisoners, all the while Hitler is like "I don't give a poo poo, sort it out yourselves" while he masturbates over his scale model of Welthauptstadt Germania.
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Jun 7, 2021 15:45
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Kevin DuBrow posted:About serial numbers on German tanks, is serial number analysis still a matter of concern in warfare, and what measures have been taken to counter it? Soviet factories used a different serial number range for every month of production, for instance.
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Jun 7, 2021 16:00
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The gas chambers themselves were the result of a series of trial and error to murder people more efficiently. The Wikipedia page on gas vans goes into this a little.
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Jun 7, 2021 16:01
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Mr. Sunshine posted:The nazis were dysfunctional even in their cruelty. Like, the various misery-inflicting organs were constantly in conflict with each other. Karl Otto Och is an example of this. He sold both people as slaves and their food rations on the black market. One of the thing he used slave labor for was to build a miniature zoo complete with bears and monkeys. In the end he was reported by jealous colleagues and was executed for dishonoring the SS (yes, really).
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Jun 7, 2021 16:18
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exquisite tea posted:The commonly held image of Nazi Germany as some kind of brutally efficient fascist state really bothers me because it suggests that governments need to be competently run in order to exact immense suffering upon people. It's been awhile since I took the class but I thought the Germans were early adopters in developing and utilizing bureaucratic methods, at least? With the obvious sinister implications later.
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Jun 7, 2021 16:55
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AvesPKS posted:It's been awhile since I took the class but I thought the Germans were early adopters in developing and utilizing bureaucratic methods, at least? With the obvious sinister implications later. I've heard the same rumor that the Nazi's had insane levels of hard copy back-ups for everything, to the point where when trying to destroy records of the concentration camps was impractical because there was multiple copies of the records stored in multiple places. I think data redundancy isn't the same as being efficient. I imagine a lot of that was done to head off being shot in the head over a missing survey or report when they send it to 8 people hoping the 1 person who needs it won't blame them if they lose it.
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Jun 7, 2021 17:57
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Mr. Sunshine posted:genius of industrial organization. Having endless slaves is kind of easy mode.
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Jun 7, 2021 18:37
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the question is always "if the nazis hadn't done x, y and z impractical things for ideological and propaganda purposes, they may have had better outcomes in actually relevant goals a, b, and c. why did they do x, y and z?" And the answer is always "they were never not going to do x, y and z because they're nazis with a nonsense ideology driving an inherently dysfunctional movement"AvesPKS posted:It's been awhile since I took the class but I thought the Germans were early adopters in developing and utilizing bureaucratic methods, at least? With the obvious sinister implications later. The French and British were probably the early adopters on the continent for those structures of ministries and career civil servants, all based on the Chinese model. The idea being that among the career civil servants, a meritocracy brings the competent people to higher levels of responsibility. The frequent method in the Nazi era was to "cap the pyramid", taking existing bureaucratic structures and appointing a party-approved administrator to be in charge of the whole thing.
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Jun 7, 2021 18:39
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