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Is anyone on here somewhat knowledgeable of the German re-armament scheme? Would it be possible for a country to undertake a scheme like that today with the way information and intelligence can be obtained? It just seems like something that could only have been done before the war, not after. If the Nazis had in some miraculous way "won" the war, wouldn't the German economy have instantly collapsed from all the money that was due from the MEFO scheme? Was the looting done in conquered territories enough to cover the amount owed? RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 17:16 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 17:08
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:Hitler's particular strain of anti-Semitism was a unique combination of traditional European/German religious anti-Semitism and scientific racism, and was part of the transformation of the idea of "Jewishness" as a religion to an immutable racial character. Scientific racism was still a big thing in the 1930's. It was becoming more and more discredited but it was still on the edges of mainstream societal thought. It was a big driving force in Japanese colonial policy for instance, even before bureaucrats and intellectuals started championing "blood and soil" rhetoric.
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May 11, 2014 06:55
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Pornographic Memory posted:You should probably pick up Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction, which is about the Nazi economy generally, so it covers the war years, but it also covers the prewar rearmaments program pretty extensively as well. Granted it doesn't really cover specifics of procurement so much as political maneuvering, budgeting, the resource and manpower situations, and things of that nature. It was a pretty fascinating book and it asserts that several popular conceptions of the Nazi German economy were essentially myths, like the idea that somehow their economy was on peace time footing well into the war, or that Speer was some sort of wizard who magically increased production through his incredible rationalizations of production (for Speer specifically, the short of it is that he came into the driver's seat just as Germany's slave labor programs were starting to bear fruit, and much of the increased productivity under his Armaments Ministry was through importing more and more slave labor). Thanks for posting this. This book should pretty much answer my questions about the Mefo scheme that I asked pages back when the thread exploded into sectarian whining. JaucheCharly posted:Hunger Plan It's even crazier too when you consider that part of the plan for Eastern Europe was for the SS to divide part of it up into feudal fiefdoms modeled after Medieval communities. In a system that operated on violence, chaos, and Social Darwinism, I can easily see it backfiring. The whole point of taking over Eastern Europe was to make larger, more efficient farms that could out produce the smaller farms of Germany as well. The whole plan seems counter productive and is another example of Himmler's obsession with finding "true" Germanic culture. If anyone is looking for a fantastic tl;dr version of the the Nazis' history, the BBC's Nazis: A Warning from History is great. I use it in my high school history class when I teach about WWII and it really shatters many of the myths about the Nazis. Ian Kershaw was a consultant on it and they have a number of preeminent historians like Robert Gellately. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 14:03 on May 16, 2014 |
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May 16, 2014 13:12
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moths posted:edit: More on-topic, how legit is the stuff I've seen about IBM helping manage the logistics of the holocaust? A German IBM subsidiary used IBM punch cards and simple computers to do census data for the Nazis. This technology was later used after the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union to implement and carry out the Holocaust. The claim that IBM knowingly helped the Nazis carry out the Holocaust can't be easily made, the evidence isn't there, but they were helping the Nazis in a general sense. No one outside of Germany and occupied Europe really knew about the Holocaust as we imagine it today at that time. People in Germany and the occupied territories spread rumors about genocidal activities but even then the mass shootings in the East were what was mostly talked about. The Holocaust was a pretty well kept secret, the Nazis were very careful about it and used codewords for everything related to it. The high ranking officers and officials involved in day to day operations were forbidden to talk about it over telephone or radio in case their conversations were intercepted as well. All Holocaust information was conveyed by SS messengers and destroyed soon after receiving them. It's only after the Allies liberated the camps and captured documents before they were destroyed that the world learned about the full extent of what the Germans were doing. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 14:09 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 13:52
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I think it's important to remember that the Nazis had no consistent, overarching plots for Eastern Europe other than mass murder. There were plans thrown about and very nebulous decrees like, "depopulate" or "Germanize" an area but nothing more than that until the Holocaust. You have to stop and ask yourself, "What the gently caress does that even mean or entail?" Most the Nazi leaders in those areas had the same question on their minds and didn't want to ask more questions than they had to because that weakness would leave them open to political attacks. They also probably knew that the people above them didn't know either and were just reciting Nazi jargon. In the Reichsgau Wartheland as previously mentioned, "Germanization" of suitable candidates occurred and others were usually deported. The Gauleiter, Greiser, saw used that method because he believed it would achieve the best results. In Reichgau Danzig-West Prussia, Gauleiter Albert Forster used mass extermination of non-Germans as a means of meeting the mission goals given to them. All the Gauleiters had different plans because no one above them was giving them clear or anything close to a plan. If they didn't achieve results, they would probably lose their jobs or worse. Konstantin posted:I don't think it would have mattered, since within a decade or so you would have had a nuclear Nazi Germany and a nuclear US. I see that ending only one way, and it would make WWII look like a minor skirmish in comparison. The Nazis were pretty far from developing a bomb in 1945. At that time, scientists couldn't even agree on how much fissionable material was needed or if it was even possible to bring about the reaction with what they had. I can't find the source right now, hopefully another goon can, but I also remember reading that some scientists involved in the project later claimed they lied and purposely made mistakes to keep Germany from getting the bomb. The other Axis powers were much farther from developing an atom bomb as well. Japan pretty much neglected their program in favor of biological and chemical warfare because it gave a faster return on their investments.
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Sep 12, 2014 06:36
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I'm mostly going off of Kershaw but if there was a central organizing committee that was controlling everything, why were the Gau's so different in terms of policy execution? How effective was this organization in directing policy in the Gaus because the Gaus were pretty much feudal fiefdoms from what I've read? Greiser for instance almost went out of his way to deem certain people "German" so they wouldn't have to deal with relocating them or murdering them. This isn't to say he was a saint, the man was involved in the Holocaust but he wasn't Forster. Forster on the other hand went with mass murder. Cyrano4747 posted:I strongly disagree with the "or worse" part of that, and what it implies. Was the Night of Long Knives that far gone from the consciousness of Nazi party members after that short of time?
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Sep 12, 2014 16:07
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American Fascism is pretty crazy when you get into groups like the Silver Legion of America, the "Silver Shirts", because they're from the Himmler occult side of fascism. William Dudley Pelley, their leader, was big into theosophy and the existence of ascended masters which eventually becomes the bedrock of UFO conspiracy theories of the 50's. The seven degrees of Kevin Bacon for most Western conspiracy theories is the later writings of a Pelley.
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Apr 21, 2015 17:40
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GlyphGryph posted:Can you provide any sources for the reasons for the lack of bombing the camps I could share with friends who are interested? It's the 1940's. There isn't really a such thing as guided munitions for long range bombers and they would have destroyed the camp, with everyone in it, if they bombed it. This is the era of taking out a whole city block to bomb something as large as a factory. Even then, how would they know what buildings to bomb and which ones not to? What makes the barracks overcrowded with prisoners any different looking than the guard barracks or the admin buildings from the sky? Most camps were in wooded areas, designed to be dismantled and covered in trees to erase and hints at their existence. Even then, no one until the end of the war knows about the concentration camps or believes in them until they liberate them. The Nazis were bad but no one really believed they were that bad because the Final Solution was insanity at that point in the war. It defied conventional logic, like most things the Nazis did, so not even the Soviets believed such a thing could happen until they saw it themselves.
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Apr 21, 2015 21:08
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On the subject of the Nazi occult, the Nazis weren't so much neo-pagans as they were an organization that had and tolerated neo-pagans because of internal politics. The Nazis used the Thule Society in the very early days to gain power but they did everything they could to distance themselves from the society in 1933 because they thought it was a mark against them. As has been stated, most the overt paganism comes from Himmler and his pet projects. It's also less magical rituals and more trying to reclaim an imagined völkisch past because Himmler really hated Christianity. Hitler depended a great deal on Himmler and since Himmler was into all the crazy occult stuff, Hitler let it slide even though he by all accounts thought it was stupid. You have instances as well like The Myth of the 20th Century by Alfred Rosenberg which is steeped in völkisch occultism but all of the upper echelon except Himmler thought was ridiculous. Himmler also had the Ahnenerbe but he was kept on a short leash when it came to the organization and most of its pseudo occult activities were ended during the war. Even then they were more crank anthropologists and archaeologists until the war started and then they became involved in resettlement and medical experimentation in the concentration camps. The Nazis weren't so much an occult and neo-pagan friendly political party but a Himmler friendly political party. EDIT: The völkisch movement was a movement in Germany that began in the mid 19th century that was focused on reclaiming an imagined past that Germany supposedly had. With the Nazis it usually involved the competing schools of Armanism and Irminism which were all about runes and unlocking their secrets. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 15:45 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 14:41
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Didn't Finland have the best record? They even apologized for the Jews they accidentally handed over to the Nazis.
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May 8, 2015 00:09
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