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by paganel
2639 days ago
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> Did any of the benefit from those rosy figures help any one in any way I guess we'd need to define what the end-game was for different regimes/governments back then. For the Nazi regime their end-game/target (or one of their main ones, in any way) was to reverse the post-WW1 Versailles humiliation against France and its allies, to gain some extra territorial space further East and to wipe out an entire populace based on its religion alone. I'd say they were quite successful in all of that up to a point, and given the limited economic resources Germany had at its disposal up to the late '20s studying how its leaders in the '30s and early '40s managed to do it can be quite interesting. We, the people living in liberal/democratic regimes, need to be aware that the endgames/targets of different other regimes around the globe is not always aligned with our way of seeing things, i.e. they don't care all that match about the domestic consumer market the much as we do, for example (and the Nazis were pretty much in favor of physically eliminating a great part of their domestic consumer market). |
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IMHO,
A) Too much credit is given to the leadership when it comes to economic decisions. For instance, the plan to build Autobahns comes out of the drawer of the monarchy oriented authorities of Prussia, and was adapted to the economic situation by the NSDAP after they took power.
B) The goals for territorial gains (not "some", but substantial) and extermination and enslavement of Jewish and Slavic populace were rooted in an inhuman ideology. Of course, the restoration of Germany's power was their goal - but the communists, monarchists etc wanted the same, just in another manner.
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Looking at the results, the NSDAP leadership, it's party followers, and the majority population that went along took a leading tier-1 state by scientific advances, technologic level and infrastructure, and by industrial potential, with a more or less intact culture from the historic perspective, and transformed it into a pile of rubble, and Europe along it. I think that is not really good long term leadership, but the result of a mass phenomenon that had roots in imperialism, obedience of authority, revanchism of prior wars, racism, change from an agricultural to an industrial society, poverty and misery.
I always wonder how an EU might have looked like at the time, and how much more prosperity it might have brought (partly at the cost of it's exploited colonies) - but then again, this is not a historic question.