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gradenko_2000 posted:Were there ever any cases, large or small scale, of German forces giving way to the Western Allies in the hopes of speeding up the war's conclusion before the Soviets ended it from their end? According to most accounts I've read, German resistance in the west collapsed almost totally after the Rhine got crossed. In Aachen post-Bulge, the german commander once realizing that the battle of the city was lost, hosed off with a recon battalion and holed up in a manor house for the rest of the war and this was before the Rhein got crossed. Local resistance happened, some SS units kept fighting even in the west but especially in Southern Germany and Austria, the Allied forces advanced without practically any resistance whatsoever.
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Apr 4, 2013 09:40
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Göring is an interesting case, since despite him being a fat druggie (tho the jury might be out on if he actually had kicked his morphine habit before 1939), he was also a guy who had shown great personal courage and competence in WW1 and he had been a capable planner before the war and able to get the Nazis the contacts they needed inside the industrial elite of Germany. 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.
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Apr 11, 2013 10:52
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Richard J. Evans summarizes the relevant Weimar elections pretty well. Basically the Nazis gamed the proportional representation system, beat the poo poo out of everyone who called foul or wouldn't vote for them, then retroactively declared their actions legal after seizing power. Then they beat the poo poo out of everyone who called foul over their play for ex post facto legality. This approach is somewhat problematic because as I see it, the NSDAP didn't really game the proportional representation system. Instead, the other right-wing parties of Germany were more than willing to embrace the Nazis to counter the left wing. (Somewhat related to current affairs, this is exactly what's going on right now in Hungary)
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Apr 19, 2013 07:22
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Namarrgon posted:Was a German-Russian war that inevitable? Some, like Admiral Raeder, wanted a focus on a southern strategy and concentrating on North Africa and the Middle East. However, Hitler wasn't really going to listen to anyone once he set his mind to something.
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May 2, 2013 12:02
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Namarrgon posted:I was thinking more about it from the Russian side. Stalin wasn't really into the idea of taking risks, he learned his lesson in the Polish-Soviet war. That's why he was willing to make peace with Finland twice in WW2. Starting a war against Germany would have been a serious risk even if the western allies would have supported him even then.
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May 2, 2013 12:17
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One pattern that repeats itself a lot in the history of wartime Nazi Germany was the unwillingness of the guys below Hitler to cooperate, even when it would have been beneficial to the war effort. If you read memoirs of people like Speer, Galland, Guderian and Manstein, a pattern emerges where people were unable to convince Hitler of making changes to policies because they never got backed by other people. Especially Göring and Keitel were really adept at avoiding responsibility by never backing anyone, until it was too late. This led to things like the self-defeating occupation policy in the East and serious prioritization issues in the aircraft industry.
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May 3, 2013 11:13
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One thing I've always found amusing is that the things the Nazis often get praise for are fake. The German economy pretty much worked as a massive confidence scheme, only kept afloat by the wizardry of Schacht and later stolen hard currency and Soviet aid. The Germans never managed to field a new generation of any weapon in any amounts that would have ever made a difference. All the jet planes, assault rifles, fancy tanks, air-to-surface missiles, night-vision equipment, surface-to-air missiles, ballistic missiles and rocket planes didn't amount to poo poo. They didn't even manage to build a real replacement for their rapidly aging bomber fleet. Which leads to another point. The Nazis were great at organizing stuff. Yeah, when it came to genocide, they were, but their entire war industry was a joke. Guderian and Speer really tried but didn't manage to ever reform the industrial sector to achieve sufficient output and new gear was never built to sufficient numbers. Blitzkrieg was a military superdoctrine. Except, everything points towards Blitzkrieg being kind of a fluke, where the successes hinged on a few generals in the field having more initiative than the supreme command had. Also, Rommel the Desert Fox. He was kind of a lovely general in Africa and a total suckup to Hitler until the war went sour.
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Jun 28, 2013 11:42
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ArchangeI posted:Fair enough. I guess he just looks good in comparison to the generals he was facing, and until Monty they weren't anything special. I still hold that Monty is only seen as a great general because he shortened the usual allied strategy of Attack->Defeat->Attack->Defeat->Attack with overwhelming support->Victory to just the last step. The answer you got was pretty much what I was thinking about, but I might add that Rommel is one of the figures who always gets remembered as the brave not-at-all nazi general who died tragically murdered (coaxed into suicide, but who's counting?) by the SS. Rommel was very much pro-Nazi early on in his career and only turned against the Nazis when the going wasn't good anymore. Which is pretty much the whole story on the Wehrmacht. You don't get to run Hitler's personal bodyguard unit if you're not a Nazi.
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Jul 1, 2013 10:45
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I recently read Reinhard Gehlen's autobiography and he goes in depth into the effort of some official to create a true Russian liberation movement. Rosenberg was especially dead set against this, and he blocked the efforts that the intelligence services and local Wehrmacht commanders had been doing to that end. Here, too, the case was pretty much that no one managed or had the courage to frame the initiative in a way that would have appealed to Hitler, until Himmler decided to back Vlasov.
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Jul 10, 2013 22:18
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NihilCredo posted:Now you're right of course about the Soviets' suffering and desire for revenge, but it's one thing to see soldiers repay atrocities with atrocities on the battlefield, and another to see high-ranking officials dropping any pretense of fairness in a setting like an international court of law. The interesting part to me is that it was Stalin who pushed hard for trials: the Western Allies would have been fine just putting any surviving higher official against a wall and shooting them without trial. Think both Churchill actually signed an order stipulating this (basically "unit commanders above major are entitled to decide if they execute capture Nazi govt officials") and FDR had drafted an order that was similar (except it applied to the German military too, everyone above Colonel would have been shot straight away as war criminals).
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Sep 22, 2013 07:19
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PittTheElder posted:Holy hell. Do you have a source for that? Because that's firmly in the "totally OK with ordering war crimes" department that of course should change our (folks in countries that were the Allies) perception of the war, but of course won't, because we must have been the good guys. Last I read of it, Roger Spiller mentions it in his essay "The Führer in the Dock" that was published in the counterfactual history book What If? 2. Worth a read, since it lays out a good narrative of how the Nürnberg Trials came to be. Before someone asks, this particular tidbit wasn't in the counterfactual part of the essay, but the background part.
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Sep 23, 2013 06:27
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A friend had a small collection of Nazi swag, including the Mutterkreuz, that he had inherited from his grandmother. He donated them to Lemmy Kilmister and got a nice letter as a thank you from Lemmy.
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Sep 24, 2013 07:21
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platedlizard posted:I'd be surprised if any of them killed themselves or even really felt bad about it, generally people develop narratives that justify their actions in their own mind. They usually believe that "those" people deserved it, or, in the case of children, that they'll just grow up to be like the rest of "those" people and that killing them before they can do bad things is good. Since there's a bunch of records we don't have, it's possible that a whole lot of people just got transferred out of the camps after not being able to cope. It was mentioned earlier on in either this thread or the military history thread that the Nazis were concerned with the ability of the soldiers to keep functioning while carrying out mass killings.
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Sep 29, 2013 09:53
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Off the top of my head, I think Irving got some praise because he wasn't half bad at digging through archives. For instance I think Hitler's War is one of the first books that deal with stuff like Göring's extensive wiretapping program. However, the more books he wrote, the more irregularities appeared and it wasn't just about Holocaust revisionism, it was also his habit of using really iffy sources and hearsay in his writing.
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Jan 30, 2014 18:45
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Raskolnikov38 posted:As the mil history thread says, then he's basically black gay hitler. As an aside, I think that one of the core issues with the whole "lets put off the genocide until later"-thing is that the Nazis were up until 1944 or so incredibly concerned with public opinion. The Holocaust kicked off during the war since there was a strong consensus in the Wannsee krew that all things that would be unpalatable (or even stuff that would raise unpleasant questions) to the average German should get done using the war situation as a cover. For the same reason, Germany didn't really go into a war economy at the start of the war.
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Feb 9, 2014 08:32
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:So how did they think they would keep public opinion after the war if they won? That doesn't make sense. Because post-fact, everything can be obsfuscated and explained.
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Feb 10, 2014 11:55
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A book worth taking a look at is Heather Pringle's The Master Plan. It's about a specific strain of esoteric nazism, namely the "scientific" parts of it. The SS-Ahnenerbe spent a lot of money outfitting expeditions into Sweden, Finland, Tibet and France for various pseudoscientific studies. Pringle is pretty great because she doesn't overstate the importance of nazi esotericism unlike many shittier writers. It was mostly unimportant and the only one at the top who was really into that poo poo was Himmler and people made fun of Himmler because of that.
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Feb 12, 2014 22:03
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Enigma89 posted:Are you familiar with anything regarding copper/nickel production in wartime Germany. Off the top of my head, Germany imported most of its copper. During the war, Sweden, Finland, Turkey and Spain were important trading partners for Germany in this regard (since they had no access to overseas imports anymore) by 1944, these sources had dried up. Nickel was a similar material that the Germans needed to import and when Finland peaced out in 1944, the Finnish nickel mines at Petsamo ended up on the Soviet side of the border.
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May 8, 2014 06:34
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Kuiperdolin posted:Also Vichy initially controlled Noumea, which is the nickel capital of the world, and the Americans made a point to get there ASAP. But whether they just wanted the thing for the Allies or Vichy actually managed to ship nickel to Europe and the Third Reich I don't know. Noumea occupies a pretty important strategic location, so it was used as the South Pacific HQ for the Allies.
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May 8, 2014 08:24
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I finally put some work into actually writing my candidate's thesis about bishop Clemens von Galen and the whole catholic resistance to the nazis thing. The T4 program is a fairly interesting case study into how the Nazi administration worked and how the Nazis were concerned with public perception. Its very clear that there wasn't widespread violent anti-semitism in Germany at the time, since stuff like Kristallnacht was seen as terrible and embarrassing by the Nazis themeselves. Even the T4 program to kill off patients in hospitals and asylums had to be clandestine because the general population would not approve. Heck, even the Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner wasn't convinced that the program had sanction before he saw a letter from Hitler which approved the program. And despite various efforts to do so, the Catholic Church had enough public support to remain a political actor which protected people like Galen from reprisals at times. As soon as my master's thesis is finished I'll switch away from writing about Nazis because this is some depressing poo poo.
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May 10, 2014 09:17
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Cyrano4747 posted:any idea about what time period you're moing to? Early Modern, probably.
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May 10, 2014 18:51
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the JJ posted:I dunno if it's super relevant but there's been some work done on the Italian colonies in Libya w/r/t this. Basically they've found that the North African Jews were persecuted and/or handed off to the Germans at a much higher rate than European Jews. The reasons you gave would line up rather well with what I remember from the courses in holocaust studies I took about 8 years ago. Essentially, Italy passed a bunch of antisemitic laws in 1938 as a handout to Hitler, but the laws were written in a way to exclude the majority of Italy's Jewish population from any effects they had. So it makes sense that North African Jews would get the short end of the stick on account of not being a part of the mainstream Italian society.
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May 11, 2014 12:27
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meat sweats posted:Anything that *looked* extreme or lawless to people *outside* the country was a liability. They already had total control over Germany; neither the internal political reaction, nor anything that happened after the invasion of France, mattered. This doesn't line up well with the fact that the Nazis were extremely concerned about public perception, which led to things like Germany not being put on a wartime economical basis and Catholic opposition to the Nazis didn't get a draconic reaction.
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May 11, 2014 22:18
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The tragic part of resistance in Germany is that pretty much every time there was public noise against whatever measure the Nazis were up to, the Nazis gave in almost immediately. Public outcry forced them to shelve the T4 program (officially) and demonstrations against jewish family members of Berliners being sent to Auschwitz actually saw people returned from Auschwitz to their families. But actual resistance is still a drop in a bucket.
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Jun 11, 2014 21:18
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Oh yeah I just finished writing my candidates thesis about August Clemens von Galen, the bishop of Münster who gave a famous sermon against the T4 program. Well technically I finished on monday but Libreoffice ate my entire thesis so i had to reconstitute it.
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Jun 11, 2014 21:22
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JaucheCharly posted:Lately, I've seen people often quote things about how chaotic this or that part of nazi Germany was, economy, warfare, etc. and it makes me wonder if this isn't another historiographical trend that makes us a bit too dismissive about the whole construct of this state or what it wanted to archieve and the effort put behind certain things. In my own thesis, I put forward the idea that the anticlerical tendencies inside the nazi state never really came to fruition because those in the regime that were the most anticlerical ones, namely Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler, didn't really get along so there was never a unified effort and because Hitler himself was divided on the anticlerical thing, nothing really came out of it. For instance the Evangelische Deutche Kirche was a huge failure and Hitler considered bishop Müller a fuckup. But since antisemitism was sort of a unifying force and even those that were more or less ambivalent or uninterested in that part (like Göring) never opposed the antisemitism, the chaotic structure could sort of lurch forwards towards the Final Solution and then carry it out with utter enthusiasm.
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Jun 12, 2014 13:02
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JaucheCharly posted:Maybe it's just the way that you wrote it, but it sounds like a research question like "Could a political alliance between Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann change the orbit of the moon?". It's not something that you will be able to answer in any meaningful way, either because it didn't happen (would it correlate?), you could never argue that it would have happened (eh, you know, you don't make prophecies), or because the question doesn't make sense in the first place. My actual research question was "how could a guy like Clemens von Galen do public resistance and get away with it", and the fact that the anticlerical faction of the nazi regime wasn't unified at all is no more than a partial answer. You're right of course that the chances of successful persecution of catholics aren't any good and there's good reasons why Hitler himself seemed to consider that the time wasn't right for that. Persecution of course did happen, but it was mostly in a reactive and haphazard fashion, because there was never anything like the Wannsee Conference or a Generalplan Ost for what should happen on the religious field.
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Jun 12, 2014 14:22
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JaucheCharly posted:Which is odd? Maybe it's an interesting question if there was at least some kind of a concept in the making, or what the plan for the church was? There's sort of a plan there which fell flat. Hitler apparently had some vague ideas of unifying the protestant and the catholic churches, but the whole nazi theology thing didn't really pan out well and the Evangelische Deutsche Kirche splintered as soon as it got founded. Later on (around 1942) he was talking about how measures regarding religious life would have to wait until the end of the war, probably because of those internal stability concerns.
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Jun 12, 2014 16:28
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Cyrano's absolutely right, you could be a gigantic fuckup in Nazi Germany and they wouldn't send you to a camp or shoot you over that.
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Sep 12, 2014 20:06
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One thing that remains a mystery about Hess is how some Nazis today worship him. I don't get it.
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Sep 13, 2014 07:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:He was trying to make peace with ~~fellow Aryan brothers~~. If he had been successful you don't get England as a permanent threat from 41-44, no easy invasion route, no western front, and ideally get a victorious Germany in the east. That's delusional, but whatever we aren't exactly talking about Rhodes Scholars here. I was thinking more along the lines of the current "intellectual" Nazis, you know, guys who dress fairly normal and listen to neofolk.
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Sep 13, 2014 17:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:Either way, nazi dipshits who idealize Hess tend to do so because he was trying to make peace with England, who they slot in as "fellow Aryans we should have been allied with rather than fighting." Nah, I think you're probably right. One thing that I remember seeing now is neo-nazis making a big deal out of how ~poor Hess~ was locked up in Spandau for so long despite the "fact" that he was all ~innocent~. And good call on ignoring neo-nazis, because reading poo poo by those guys will rot your brain. That's why I decided to not write my master's about nazis.
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Sep 13, 2014 22:21
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Ofaloaf posted:I went to a used book sale earlier today and snagged an English translation of some 1937 book titled Germany's New Religion. It's some real obtuse stuff, and seems to mumble about True Germanic Faith while never completely denying Christianity. Did this stuff ever catch on outside of certain fanatical cliques, or was this something even most party members just kind of muttered "mm-hmm" to and then carried on with whatever else they were doing? Not really. Bishop Müller was considered even by Hitler to be kind of a fuckup. The Protestant Church also splintered, with the Confessing Church leaving the nazified church.
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Dec 8, 2014 12:47
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It's worth noting that Finland did collaborate with the RSHA and a significant part of those POW's turned over to the Germans were in fact jewish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzkommando_Finnland Edit: I had lunch with Silvennoinen about four years back, most of the documentation relating to Finnish collaboration with Einsatzkommando Finnland have been destroyed either during the war or after the war.
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May 9, 2015 10:57
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Most of the time, if you read something that's bad in some way (refuted or patently untrue) you might still learn something about the historiography. That's why I slogged through David Irving's Hitler's War at some point.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:32
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