NAZI Globalism v. Democratic Globalism

From video starting @ 28:54:

From 1938 to 1946 the Allies made serious and fundamental mistakes in their assessment of Germany's ability to resist huge amounts of punishment, and an equally a complete failure to understand where their bombing offensive might be having a real impact. They were wrong, albeit in different ways pre-war, confounded during it, and confused after it. And part of the problem was a constant failure throughout the whole of the war to understand how Germany's economy worked. Applying an activity index, as the RAF was trying to do which used the British economy as its starting point, was never going to work. They didn't know that they were fighting a country which, until the string of disasters at the end of 1942 and then through 1943, simply hadn't really considered the possibility of losing the war and therefore didn't give overriding political priority to economic production.

Inside of Germany until the start of 1943, it was virtually impossible to know that there was a war on. In Britain though at the same time, everybody's lives have been turned utterly upside down, almost from the first days of the conflict. The reality, certainly for this period that the video covers today of 1941 to early 1943, was civilians in Nazi Germany only had a very limited amount of rationing. Production of Civilian Goods really hadn't slowed down very much, and most women, in fact the vast vast majority of women, never went to go and work inside the German economy.

Whereas in Britain, something like half of all women were involved. Indeed, once the invasion of Britain was abandoned in November of German Manufacturing 1940 until about June of 1941, many men were demobilized from the Army and returned to manufacturing jobs and jobs in the Civil sector, basically to build up for Barbarosa. When Albert Speer took over as Armament Minister in February of 1942, the Vermacht was being supplied with all manner of useless dross, from piano cords, to electricity meters, to hundreds of kilometers of spare belts, to Jungle uniforms for the step of Russia, and so on. All whilst Pierce was convinced that his bombers had reduced German production capacity by at least 30%.

For many observers, and frankly until quite recently including me, this was one of the trickiest bits of trying to understand the war. Or, if you are of a certain bench, you might say this was just down to the Germans will to resist. You might cite examples used by, for example, Goebels and his diary of factory workers moving their workbenches into the Frozen streets of a German winter and carrying on working. In 1944, fighter production rocketed up with over a thousand machines a month being built. At its' peak German women, as we mentioned a minute ago, never made up a significant percentage of factory workers for fear of impacting the troops morale if it happened. German civilians were never hungry until the very last days of the war. German troops had sufficient amounts of small arms ammunition right up until May 1945.

There are some obvious things that one can point to: Innovation definitely played a part, the extensive use of easily moved machine tools also had an impact, which if they weren't destroyed during an initial bombing, were fairly easy to set up in a new Factory. A good Railway Network within Germany proper helped a great deal too, because it was relatively simple to tear down factories and move them further East and South if you needed to. But none of these factors are sufficiently comprehensive in an explanation.

There were some clever little tricks which were used by the German state which helped as well. Things like, for example if you were a German worker who was bombed out, if you returned back to your shift within 48 Hours you got more help than if you didn't. In fact actually, you got help if you didn't go back, you didn't get helped at all. And production targets, and prizes, and holidays, and all manner of other things were offered too. But this was really ultimately marginal stuff.

And the question remains, how did this economy survive, and indeed Thrive under the biblical levels of Destruction coming from the air in 1942 - 43 - 44? Were the Nazis somehow better? Did they believe their ideology more strongly? Were they somehow superhuman, were they gods of old reborn?

Um, no no, not really. The answer to these questions is actually quite simple: short-term economic fixes combined with the industrialization of human suffering among subject peoples. In the West, the economies of France, and Holland, and Belgium, and Denmark, and Norway, and many other places were stripped bare. Italy was bled White, even as an ally. When it had surrendered to the Allies, it was considered a turn coat, and it was absolutely exploited to the maximum. In the East the approach was purely genocidal, working starving men and women and children to death to support the living standards and war production within the Reich itself. The systematic leeching of occupied territories was as much political as anything else. The Reich must be maintained now. The war will be short, thus we do not need to take a long-term view. Resistance can be crushed without fear of retribution, because after all, we are the master race and we will be here for a thousand years.

Manufacturing capability that could have contributed far more to the Nazi war effort if it had been left in place, was instead broken up and shipped back to Germany. Workforces were turned into forced labor. Russians were slashed for civilians outside of the Reich. Agricultural products were taken directly to Germany, whilst the locals teeter on the edge of starvation. France, for example, had three times as many cars on its roads as Germany did. In 1939 something like one and a half million, but by 1942, it had less than 100,000. The rest having been taken to Germany. In 1939, France had the French Manufacturing capacity to build a vast amount of stuff, something like 250,000 Vehicles, something like 3,000 aircraft, 10,000 Arrow engines, 2,000 tanks, and so on, and so on, and so on. By 1942, almost all of this capacity, with the exception of the huge Renault plant at Buon Bellacor, which was basically largely intact. That's a whole other story, but during the whole War, it produced something like 38,000 vehicles for the Reich, which was a drop in the ocean at potential capacity. Anyway, the Renault Factory, and a couple of others were basically left behind, but the vast majority had gone.

And these moves were highly inefficient and disruptive, but they benefited Germany, and Germany alone in the short term. Even where the Nazis didn't move equipment, they became the primary customer by force. And for all production, they paid with script and promisory notes and not with currency, which preserved the Reich's limited reserves of hard currency. In total France exported something like 990,000 vehicles to the third Reich during the whole of the war, and got paid almost nothing in exchange. This was a recipe for disaster for the French economy as the war dragged, on but shortterm ensured that Berlin Housewives didn't go hungry, ME-109's got made, and the bombed out in Germany got looked after, if they were German and Aryan, of course.

Elements of the Holocaust also helped. For example, during the course of the war, 85,000 fully loaded trains carried confiscated items from Jews back into Germany from across Europe and the Soviet Union, their possessions from table lamps, to Pianos, to garden furniture were distributed to those who been bombed out. The mass use of slave labor meant that there was no need to bring German women into the workforce, when women from the occupied territories mostly Ukrainian and Polish could do the work, and Jews from across Europe could be worked to death on production lines. I can't do the Holocaust contribution to the German economy justice here, but I may try to tackle another another time. It was not insignificant before the final solution became the final solution. Putting aside the Holocaust and the death camps, the composition of the labor force itself was completely extraordinary and beyond the wildest imaginings of the Allies. For most of the war, laborers were sought from within the occupied territories, initially voluntarily, but when less than 1% of workers stepped forward, the Germans immediately reverted to force drafts and mass arrests to make up the shortfall. After the war Speer claimed that he had no idea where the SS was getting its 400,000 workers that he demanded to boost production in 1944 from, a claim that beggars belief, but we'll come back to Speer another day. In reality, in 1942 Poles, Albanians, Greeks, Czechs, Slovenians, Yugoslavs, Ukrainians, Romanians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Hungarians, Dutch, French, Norwegians, Danes, Italians, and other nationalities besides, were shipped in, worked for 10 to 12 hours a day, fed just enough to keep them alive, and treated like cattle with the threat of being shot or imprisoned in a concentration camp if they bucked the system. In all, some 6 and a half million Forced workers worked in Germany during the war, and perhaps as many as 1.3 million of them died as a result.

And all of this is before we start to consider the situation with the prisoners of War. There was something like 2.2 million Soviet Prisoners inside of Germany, just 30% of them would survive to go home. 10% of the male French population, some 1.8 million men became prisons of war in June 1940, and most were pressed into service whilst being held as hostages, as guarantees of the Vichy Regime's good behavior the sordid and sorry details of the deals done by the Vichy Regime to get their men back are worthy of a video in its own right. Deals for expelling Jews, for volunteering their own workers to go to Germany, the establishment of free worker schemes from amongst the powers themselves, are just some of the low lights of the system of blackmail that the Nazis established over Vichy France. And it was all for naught, because the Germans occupied France in 1942 anyway, and held the remaining prisoners for the rest of the war as forced labor. And there is an irony in the Nazi State here, one which prided itself, after all, on racial Purity but became involuntarily incredibly Multicultural as the war went on. When it surrendered, some 11 million people scattered from its borders across Europe and the Soviet Union in the largest migration ever seen in human history. And unfortunately, tens of thousands of them died in the process of trying to get home.

In short then, the combined United States and RF bomber commands were, and would be trying to bomb not Germany, but the entire Continental European means of production, enhanced by slave labor on an unimaginable scale. Little Wonder it didn't work. In London, politically speaking, the idea was fairly simple, they had seen how the blockade of Germany in 1914-18 in the first world war, combined with Battlefield defeat, had led to a revolution within Germany's border and a swift surrender. To assume that the same results might be possible through bombing, especially given the pre-war predictions of people like Trenchard, is understandable. They failed to realize not just the economic factors, but also the political ones. Practical political resistance within Germany had been, Political Resistance, rendered next to Impossible, almost from the moment that Hitler took power. Certainly from about 1936, it was impractical to conduct large scale resistance of any kind. A combination of Gestapo surveillance, the effective subversion of Law and due process, the use of fear as a weapon which crushed all but the weakest of Uprising during the war, and even had people wanted to resist, the reality of being bombed out, as so many millions have were, is that you became entirely dependent on the State to survive. The process of bombing people, bound those people to the government in a way that had been completely unforeseen by London, or Washington, and it's a fact worth bearing mind today.