While we're on the topic of the Third Reich, I recently finally got around to reading Wages of Destruction, by Adam Tooze, which is chilling in a way the author may not have intended.
Traditionally, I've always thought the Third Reich was basically batshit insane. But the author makes a fairly interesting argument, that much of what Hitler was trying to do was basically a last-ditch effort to allow Germany the economic and demographic base to compete in a world of empires and continent-sized economies, like the United States and the British Empire.
Indeed, at one point Tooze explicitly compares Hitler's ideology to the "Weimar consensus" of raising the German standard of living through free trade, foreign investment, and gradual economic development, which frankly hadn't worked, as the Depression indicated.
I'm not saying that what Germany did was justified in any way. But it suggests that the Nazi ideology was in a sense more rational than I'd previously thought.
Not sure if this makes any sense, but the book was frankly disturbing to me.
Understand completely. Its worth remembering that the "ideal Nazi" was concerned far more with the relative power and influence of Germany in a few hundred years, what's a hundred million people in the short term?
I don't think Nazism was that rational, I've always viewed it as German Romanticism taken to the ultimate extreme.
Quote from: Sheilbh on April 11, 2009, 01:26:40 PM
I don't think Nazism was that rational, I've always viewed it as German Romanticism taken to the ultimate extreme.
I agree. And I also blame Hegel. For everything.
Quote from: Sheilbh on April 11, 2009, 01:26:40 PM
I don't think Nazism was that rational, I've always viewed it as German Romanticism taken to the ultimate extreme.
It certainly had a strong Romanticist trend. But if you look at what they tried to do, it makes a disturbing amount of sense if you start from certain premises.
For instance, Versailles was all about national-determination, and showed how centuries of German rule could be undone based on it. But if you get rid of the Poles, well...
Another interesting look was how Germany's policy of extermination grew out of the simple shortages brought on by the war. The Central government lacked the resources to feed everyone during wartime, especially with German demands. The solution? Set of a ration system based on nationality, with Jews given the least. Once you're already okay with starving them to death, it's a small step to try to make more active steps to get rid of them.
If you want more third Reich book stuff, I recommend Richard Evan's Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power.
Haven't read the third book, the Third Reich at War.
Quote from: Sheilbh on April 11, 2009, 01:26:40 PM
I don't think Nazism was that rational, I've always viewed it as German Romanticism taken to the ultimate extreme.
There's some truth in that. Many head nazis were big fans of the Romanticists, esp. the more nationalist ones like Ernst Moritz Arndt. It's a reason why romanticism has a bit difficult standing in German literary studies as it's now associated to some degree with the Nazis (with some exceptions, like Adorno, Hoffmann, Novalis and a few others).
Rational Evil : The lost tenth alignment?
The problem with attempting to understand Nazism is the assumption of insanity on the part of all the actors both great and small. Reason did not play a great role in the assumptions made, the desire to met out racial penetential-killings, or the prioritization of such a solution...however the chilling fact is that it was reasonable people who were able to distance themselves from the effects of their actions that allowed the whole process to occurr. The socialization of evil acts, the abnormal becoming the norm, is a scary process.
The French Philosopher Vincent Descombes tried to revisit the Rational Nazi paradox as a means to ask the question if political philosophy can help us in the decision-making process: I'll try to post it later when I return home.
A country can build a vibrant economy almost completely on skilled labor, as modern Japan illustrates. Hitler's catch 22 was that he wanted to conquer militarily and that elminates foreign sources of raw materials, so he had to conquer raw materials.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 11, 2009, 03:02:44 PM
A country can build a vibrant economy almost completely on skilled labor, as modern Japan illustrates. Hitler's catch 22 was that he wanted to conquer militarily and that elminates foreign sources of raw materials, so he had to conquer raw materials.
No, it can build a vibrant economy on skilled labor in an atmosphere of liberalism and free trade. In the 1920s and early 1930s, America was protectionist; Britain ran towards protectionism in 1931, etc. In this situation, Germany was left with... what?
Economic Policy: Really dumb.
Military Policy: Really really dumb.
Social Policy: Completely batshit.
The Nazis were the type of government you might anticipate if undereducated and racist right wing thugs took control of a western government. Maybe their ideas were rational within their worldview, but there worldview was still dumb.
Quote from: Faeelin on April 11, 2009, 03:03:54 PM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 11, 2009, 03:02:44 PM
A country can build a vibrant economy almost completely on skilled labor, as modern Japan illustrates. Hitler's catch 22 was that he wanted to conquer militarily and that elminates foreign sources of raw materials, so he had to conquer raw materials.
No, it can build a vibrant economy on skilled labor in an atmosphere of liberalism and free trade. In the 1920s and early 1930s, America was protectionist; Britain ran towards protectionism in 1931, etc. In this situation, Germany was left with... what?
It didn't help their economy to go to war with the world.
"Rational Evil" was Stalin.
Quote from: Faeelin on April 11, 2009, 01:22:13 PM
Traditionally, I've always thought the Third Reich was basically batshit insane. But the author makes a fairly interesting argument, that much of what Hitler was trying to do was basically a last-ditch effort to allow Germany the economic and demographic base to compete in a world of empires and continent-sized economies, like the United States and the British Empire.
No, you were right the first time: they were batshit insane.
Now, they possessed certain cultural aspects that contributed to the "Germanness" of Nazism, like a penchant for accounting and their soldiering, but really, they were nuttier than squirrel shit.
Quote from: alfred russel on April 11, 2009, 03:10:35 PM
Economic Policy: Really dumb.
Military Policy: Really really dumb.
Social Policy: Completely batshit.
The Nazis were the type of government you might anticipate if undereducated and racist right wing thugs took control of a western government. Maybe their ideas were rational within their worldview, but there worldview was still dumb.
Agree. They were rational only in their own distorted world view.
QuoteIndeed, at one point Tooze explicitly compares Hitler's ideology to the "Weimar consensus" of raising the German standard of living through free trade, foreign investment, and gradual economic development, which frankly hadn't worked, as the Depression indicated.
Free trade? Foreign investment? In the 1920s?
Unfortunately the iron claw of protectionism and autarky was quite strong.
Tooze proves he is a moron by blaming the depression on "free trade, foreign investment, and gradual economic development". I mean what rational person would hold that position? I am afraid even countries who did not value those things still had to experience the depression.
Quote from: Faeelin on April 11, 2009, 01:30:57 PM
Quote from: Sheilbh on April 11, 2009, 01:26:40 PM
I don't think Nazism was that rational, I've always viewed it as German Romanticism taken to the ultimate extreme.
It certainly had a strong Romanticist trend. But if you look at what they tried to do, it makes a disturbing amount of sense if you start from certain premises.
For instance, Versailles was all about national-determination, and showed how centuries of German rule could be undone based on it. But if you get rid of the Poles, well...
Another interesting look was how Germany's policy of extermination grew out of the simple shortages brought on by the war. The Central government lacked the resources to feed everyone during wartime, especially with German demands. The solution? Set of a ration system based on nationality, with Jews given the least. Once you're already okay with starving them to death, it's a small step to try to make more active steps to get rid of them.
Wow that seems to be patently untrue - the "final solutions" have been widely criticised (including by German military of the time) because it consumed resources that were needed elsewhere. Certainly, it wasn't caused by food shortages and resources dedicated to Holocaust exceeded any "savings" by a magnitude.
What kind of book is that? It looks like a load of crap
Quote from: Valmy on April 11, 2009, 05:51:26 PM
QuoteIndeed, at one point Tooze explicitly compares Hitler's ideology to the "Weimar consensus" of raising the German standard of living through free trade, foreign investment, and gradual economic development, which frankly hadn't worked, as the Depression indicated.
Free trade? Foreign investment? In the 1920s?
Unfortunately the iron claw of protectionism and autarky was quite strong.
Tooze proves he is a moron by blaming the depression on "free trade, foreign investment, and gradual economic development". I mean what rational person would hold that position? I am afraid even countries who did not value those things still had to experience the depression.
Well, Tooze's argument is more that because Germany was dependent on those things, and could at best aspire to be in the shadow of America and perhaps Britain, the Third Reich was a last ditch effort to boostrap Germany to superpower status.
It's not so much that he blames the Depression on free trade; rather, he blames the Third Reich's rise on the way free trade and liberalism were discreditted in the Weimar years.
Quote from: alfred russel on April 11, 2009, 03:10:35 PM
Economic Policy: Really dumb.
Agree, but with one caveat: They sure knew how to plunder their conquests. Aside from outright theft/enslavement, the Nazis paid the occupation troops in the local currency of the conquered country in question, which caused massive inflation in the countries and areas which the Nazis occupied. They were very efficient in exporting the inflation which would have been felt at home in the Reich onto the conquered nations.
Weimar was working though sort of. Just before the depression it was finally getting its act together and beginning to become a decent country...The depression was a nasty unforseen event that ruined that though. No depression=no nazis,
I really don't think the nazis were very rational. That they only came to power in such irrational times shows this. They were more about faith than logic.
Quote from: alfred russel on April 11, 2009, 03:10:35 PMundereducated and racist right wing thugs
Actually, quite a few of the top Nazis weren't undereducated thugs. Goebbels, Frick, Ley, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Speer, Frank, Seyss-Inquart, Funk etc. were university educated. That's actually more scary than if they really had all been undereducated thugs.
Quote from: Zanza2 on April 12, 2009, 04:50:13 PMActually, quite a few of the top Nazis weren't undereducated thugs. Goebbels, Frick, Ley, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Speer, Frank, Seyss-Inquart, Funk etc. were university educated. That's actually more scary than if they really had all been undereducated thugs.
Big deal, most of us are college-educated, too. What's your point.
Quote from: CountDeMoney on April 12, 2009, 04:53:20 PMBig deal, most of us are college-educated, too. What's your point.
You should have taken logic in college.
Quote from: Zanza2 on April 12, 2009, 05:24:07 PM
Quote from: CountDeMoney on April 12, 2009, 04:53:20 PMBig deal, most of us are college-educated, too. What's your point.
You should have taken logic in college.
Meh, I got an A. I've forgotten it all, as there is no use for logic in life.
Quote from: Faeelin on April 11, 2009, 03:03:54 PM
No, it can build a vibrant economy on skilled labor in an atmosphere of liberalism and free trade. In the 1920s and early 1930s, America was protectionist; Britain ran towards protectionism in 1931, etc. In this situation, Germany was left with... what?
Germany was left with eastern and southern Europe, South America, portions of Asia, and some of the Middle East. Quite a bit, really.
Also the myth of British free trade is one that deserves punctuating. Britain operated free trade within the Empire, but there was always an element of protectionism without. I don't know about the world but in Britain the collapse of internation trade happened after WW1. I think it was only in the 1990s that, as a proportion of our economy, imported goods reached the same level they were at in 1914.
Quote from: Tyr on April 12, 2009, 04:34:28 PM
No depression=no nazis
That's a rather bold statement, given that the Nazis predate the depression.
So long as communism was allowed to exist, the Nazis were inevitable.
Quote from: CountDeMoney on April 12, 2009, 04:53:20 PM
Big deal, most of us are college-educated, too. What's your point.
You'd be a scary Nazi.
Rational only in the sense they engaged in actions which they saw as benefiting them, but then, as CdM so delicately puts it, so what? That's not very special. Almost everyone does that. It couldn't be described as "Rationalism" in the philolosophical context.
Quote from: Neil on April 12, 2009, 07:11:06 PM
That's a rather bold statement, given that the Nazis predate the depression.
So long as communism was allowed to exist, the Nazis were inevitable.
Not as anything more worrying than the BNP.
Quote from: derspiess on April 12, 2009, 11:21:45 PM
Quote from: CountDeMoney on April 12, 2009, 04:53:20 PM
Big deal, most of us are college-educated, too. What's your point.
You'd be a scary Nazi.
I would've been a fantastic Nazi.
Quote from: CountDeMoney on April 12, 2009, 04:53:20 PM
Quote from: Zanza2 on April 12, 2009, 04:50:13 PMActually, quite a few of the top Nazis weren't undereducated thugs. Goebbels, Frick, Ley, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Speer, Frank, Seyss-Inquart, Funk etc. were university educated. That's actually more scary than if they really had all been undereducated thugs.
Big deal, most of us are college-educated, too. What's your point.
Game, set, match :XD:
Quote from: Tyr on April 13, 2009, 04:19:09 AM
Quote from: Neil on April 12, 2009, 07:11:06 PM
That's a rather bold statement, given that the Nazis predate the depression.
So long as communism was allowed to exist, the Nazis were inevitable.
Not as anything more worrying than the BNP.
You are of course incorrect. Still, I could see how you would like to think so.
Quote from: Neil on April 13, 2009, 06:54:42 AM
You are of course incorrect. Still, I could see how you would like to think so.
% of vote in 1928: 2.6
% of vote in 1930: 18.3
% of vote in 1932: 37.4
Even being an important party was a reasonably far off aspiration for them pre-depression. They certainly didn't seem to have any hope of becoming rulers of a one party state.
Quote from: Martinus on April 11, 2009, 06:02:39 PM
Wow that seems to be patently untrue - the "final solutions" have been widely criticised (including by German military of the time) because it consumed resources that were needed elsewhere. Certainly, it wasn't caused by food shortages and resources dedicated to Holocaust exceeded any "savings" by a magnitude.
What kind of book is that? It looks like a load of crap
Gotta agree. The Nazi death machine was a user of valuable resources, not a saver. The attempt to use prisioners for slave labour was hardly an economy, shipping prisioners all over Europe to the camps used precious rail resources when they were at a premium, etc.
The death camps were only "rational" insofar as their very existence more or less scared everone in Europe not targed for extermination shitless (with good reason).
More to the point, they created in minature the ideal Nazi society - one in which the Nazis could actually rule like amoral teutonic gods over a sort of ant-utopia. The details of what went on in those camps defy any sort of purely rational explaination, I suspect that the reason for it has more to do with deep seated need for
total dominance over others - the ultimate proof of superiority being to reduce others to total inferiority, to the lowest slavery and brutishness, use them for pointless "experiments" of the Jeffery Dahlmer variety, and then even after death to a mere commodity - piles of hair, gold teeth, soap.
Quote from: Tyr on April 13, 2009, 07:45:33 AM
Quote from: Neil on April 13, 2009, 06:54:42 AM
You are of course incorrect. Still, I could see how you would like to think so.
% of vote in 1928: 2.6
% of vote in 1930: 18.3
% of vote in 1932: 37.4
Thank you for proving my point. So long as communism was a threat, the Nazis were bound to get stronger and stronger.
I don't think tooze's argument was that Nazism was rational, only that given its presuppositions and objectives, its foreign and economic policy was a rational (if horrificly immoral) means of achieving those ends. I think Tooze's broader point was that the whole Hitlerian project of creating an economically indepedent German world empire to compete with the US and British empires was a fool's errand from the start, and hence was irrational.
Another major argument of Tooze's book was that most of the vaunted proto-keynsian "job creation" schemes of the Third Reich were in fact inherited from the late Weimar regime and that Hitler eventually wound these programs down to focus on military production, which had significant negative medium term implications for German economic development in the 30s. So I don't think one can draw from his book the conclusion that Weimar economic policy was doomed to failure. In fact, Tooze makes a point that the "green shoots" of growth began to show in late 1932 under von Krosigk (leading to ill-fated optimism of von Schleicher about the prospects of his government).
Ultimatley, of course, the policy of open trade, foreign investment, and internal economic development would bring unprecedented prosperity to Germany in the postwar period.
Quote from: Neil on April 13, 2009, 09:24:01 AM
Thank you for proving my point. So long as communism was a threat, the Nazis were bound to get stronger and stronger.
No...that proves my point. 1929 is the key year.
Pre wall street crash and all that they're going nowhere. Checking up again 1924 had two elections, the first with 6.5% and the second with 3. They could even be seen to be going backwards in the late 20s if you go purely off election numbers.
The Russian revolution was moving into the past and as Germany stabilised the fear of communism had even lessened to a degree. I could well see the nazis becoming a significant political party perhaps but that's the best they're going to get, they're not going to completely take over.
Quote from: CountDeMoney on April 12, 2009, 04:53:20 PM
Big deal, most of us are college-educated, too. What's your point.
Not all colleges are created equal.
I'd go with Lawful Evil. :)