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Unluckyimmortal posted:It's difficult to predict what would have happened if Germany managed to hang onto those 12,000 intellectuals, but the number is deceiving in that so many of those driven out were truly at the pinnacle of their careers and at the tops of their respective fields. It's just my opinion, but I've always thought that, had the Nazis managed to get those big names to stay, a Nazi nuclear bomb would have been alarmingly likely; and that just goes to show how early the Nazis started working on their own defeat. I find a Nazi nuke extremely unlikely in any case. Yes, nuclear technology including nuclear bombs was coming, but getting a working device by 1945 essentially required an epic goal-directed project which no power other than the USA had the resources and ability to undertake. You needed to have not just enough top brains but also competent laboratory grunts, space, industrial capability, money etc. so that you could afford throw any amount of effort at the task without taking anything away from your conventional warfighting ability. Whenever a particular problem had two or more apparent approaches, duplicate all laboratory setups and processes and try every approach at once! And keep going down every path unless and until it is obviously no longer viable. This method, and only this method, proved able to provide a working nuclear bomb design before the war was over, and even then it only barely made it in time (but then again, it provided not one but two quite different bomb designs which both worked). By, say, the early 1950s, sure, Nazi Germany could have managed to build a working bomb. And it would have cost a fraction of what the Manhattan Project cost. But Nazi Germany would not likely have survived that long (it would lose its conventional war against the Soviet Union long before then even if the Western Allies stood by and did squat; if that war never started, the regime would likely have collapsed due to its various instabilities and completely rotten economic policy), and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be the first and only power to get a bomb by then in any case (the most promising project previous to Manhattan was the British/Canadian "Tube Alloys" project, which was also incorporated into Manhattan). As it was, while contemporary fears of Nazi superweapon projects were not unjustified, with hindsight we also know that what they did have in the way of a nuclear project was absolutely barking up the wrong tree and they were basically wasting their time.
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Apr 2, 2013 07:05
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It's not as if Rudolf Hess would be the only oddball among the Nazi leadership, anyway.
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Apr 3, 2013 09:42
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Kemper Boyd posted:The paradox to him is that he was clearly a forceful personality, capable of outmaneuvering Himmler despite Himmler taking over the internal security functions of Nazi Germany, yet he lost his touch during the war and was a terrible leader for the Luftwaffe and incapable of standing up to Hitler. He also was apparently the only Nazi who was early on in doubt regarding the outcome of the war. I get the impression he spent at least the latter part of the war basically going "gently caress it, I'm just going to party while I can".
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Apr 11, 2013 11:43
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Kopijeger posted:Some super-battleships were considered: A pity they didn't sink even more resources into expensive projects that wouldn't have helped their war effort at all.
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Sep 20, 2013 12:39
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The more I've read up on the Third Reich, the more amazed I become that it made it as far as it did, and had to be put down so very hard, rather than metaphorically choking on its own vomit on the bathroom floor. I guess a large part of the blame has to go to widespread incompetence among their opponents, as well.
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Sep 20, 2013 22:45
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PittTheElder posted:Well it was some time ago, but if I'm not mistaken, the gist of it is that Britain continues to fight it out in North Africa, and with naval superiority, generally ekes out a win there. Then it sort of settles into a stalemate where the Germans are unable to force Britain to the bargaining table while the British continue to build up for a naval invasion that never really comes. Then it's just a race to see which implodes first, the German economy or the British colonial empire. Authors bet was on Britain being able to hold out, being floated by American assistance. Also the UK/Canadian atomic weapons research project was by far the best show going before the Manhattan project (into which it was absorbed), while (as we know with modern hindsight) the Germans were barking up the wrong tree, so if the Americans had spent the 1940s sitting around picking lint out of their navels or something, the first working nukes would have been British. Surely not by 1945 (that was only possible for the Americans because they had effectively unlimited resources to throw at the project so they could attack every problem that showed up in multiple ways at the same time) but probably 1948 or 1949. So if Germany hadn't collapsed already by then I guess we'd be looking at mushroom clouds over continental Europe.
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Sep 23, 2013 11:18
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InspectorBloor posted:I'm not exactly sure, but I think around mid 1942 H. starts to take over more and more competences in warfare, putting enormous workload on him. He wanted to micromanage alot of things at the front, so it's likely that the stress and the pressure of the failures that started then excacerbated his symptoms. Yah, it's not as if being an evil fucker necessarily makes you immune to stress and his job must certainly have been one of the more stressful ones around.
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Oct 1, 2013 05:28
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