Did Hitler Have The Right Idea, But The Wrong Means?

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His implementation of economic reform and rebuilding was built on flawed methodology to say the least. He was able leverage a lot of the economic program through capital gained by seizing or nationalizing property or companies or assets owned by political/ethnic undesirables, or from enforcing monopolies on certain key industries like tobacco that only Party-affiliated companies were permitted to trade in. And incompetence in methodology aside, the system was riddled with corruption from top to bottom by the Party officials, the so-called "golden pheasants" of gauleiters and ministers and petty Party bureaucrats. The effect of all that corruption, which took the form of embezzlement, racketeering, bribery, and sometimes just outright theft, was compounded by the fierce interdepartment rivalry, which was arguably even worse in its effect than the corruption. All the big leaders in the Party ran their departments like their own personal fiefdoms, and they were perpetually trying to grab as much power, resources, and jurisdiction as they could for their department at the expense of the entire system. This resulted in resources being hoarded by those who didn't really need it, or cases where two different departments would waste double the resources in developing parallel/competing infrastructure or projects instead of combining their efforts under one program. In fact, the national industrial efficiency under Party administration was actually worse compared to industrial efficiency under the Kaiser's rule.

And responsibility for a lot of these bad outcomes, especially the corruption, should lie directly with Hitler. He pretty much turned a blind eye to what his chief ministers were doing in their fiefdoms after they gave him their personal fealty.
 
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millais said:
His implementation of economic reform and rebuilding was built on flawed methodology to say the least. He was able leverage a lot of the economic program through capital gained by seizing or nationalizing property or companies or assets owned by political/ethnic undesirables, or from enforcing monopolies on certain key industries like tobacco that only Party-affiliated companies were permitted to trade in. And incompetence in methodology aside, the system was riddled with corruption from top to bottom by the Party officials, the so-called "golden pheasants" of gauleiters and ministers and petty Party bureaucrats. The effect of all that corruption, which took the form of embezzlement, racketeering, bribery, and sometimes just outright theft, was compounded by the fierce interdepartment rivalry, which was arguably even worse in its effect than the corruption. All the big leaders in the Party ran their departments like their own personal fiefdoms, and they were perpetually trying to grab as much power, resources, and jurisdiction as they could for their department at the expense of the entire system. This resulted in resources being hoarded by those who didn't really need it, or cases where two different departments would waste double the resources in developing parallel/competing infrastructure or projects instead of combining their efforts under one program. In fact, the national industrial efficiency under Party administration was actually worse compared to industrial efficiency under the Kaiser's rule.

And responsibility for a lot of these bad outcomes, especially the corruption, should lie directly with Hitler. He pretty much turned a blind eye to what his chief ministers were doing in their fiefdoms after they gave him their personal fealty.
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He was not a gifted administrator by any means. He had drive and he had vision, but he didn't have administrative chops.
 
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...They were left in shambles and economic turmoil after WWI. A stronger government was needed for the country. He was ambitious and took the reigns and fixed Germany. Without him, Germany wouldn't have such good economic standing. The National Socialists served a purpose, to bring pride and power back to Germany...
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The problem with this narrative is that Germany achieved a good amount of prosperity in the 20s. The crash of 1929 was international in its effects, since major powers were already entwined in international trade, and when one market goes down that's obviously going to affect others. Weimar Germany was this period where Germans were spending money on pleasures like consumer goods and arts and entertainment due to recovering from a shitty postwar where commies tried to perform a violent revolution and having the money to do so. The 20s for Germany were known as the "Golden 20s" much in the same way the US's 20s were Roaring. There was both domestic and foreign investment in infrastructure development.

The trouble with the Weimar Republic was the international market crash, and conservative nobles/military officers thinking they could use Hitler as a puppet, thus giving him political support.
 
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ElAbominacion said:
He was not a gifted administrator by any means. He had drive and he had vision, but he didn't have administrative chops.
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He was a decent orator and an ok tactician. In pretty much everything else, from grand strategy to administrative organization to whatever, he ranged from gifted amateur to total incompetent.
Y2K Baby said:
Tale as old as time.
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I forget exactly why he didn't keep a closer eye and a tighter leash on his subordinates. IIRC it was some combination of a default assumption that everyone else in his inner circle was as ideologically driven and invested in "the cause" as him, and (for the more profligate ministers like Goering) Hitler allowing that some degree of corruption and indulgence was inevitable to human nature but being ignorant of the severity and scope of it.
 
??? said:
If he had focused on annihilating the RAF after Dresden instead of retaliatory bombing of civilians, he could have destroyed Britain's offensive air abilities and kept the moral high ground.

If he had consolidated his superweapons research he could have beat us to the atomic bomb.

If he had allowed actual mathematicians and engineers to design his cryptographic systems instead of dilettantes, he could have kept his codes unbreakable for the entire war.
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Dresden was far to late in the war to beat the British, by then america was fully in the war and its massed bomber fleets were pounding Germany to ash(ineffectively, mass bombing in WWII never achieved the results it promised) the only time the RAF could have been beaten was during the height of the battle of Britain, when for a time they were on the backfoot from the constant bombing of thier bases. Hitlers order to bomb cities was what gave them a chance to recover.

The german superweapon research was a dead end no matter what, particularly thier insistence on using the hard to produce "heavy water". It was constantly underfunded and manned by people who didn't know as much as they thought they did. Not to mention the site was raided and set back far too often, and most of the programs heavy water ended up sunk by commandos off the coast of Norway. Hence why the V2 scientists were some of the real prizes america snapped up.

And Enigma was, for the longest time, almost impossible to crack(reliably). The poles helped by bringing along a copy of what they cracked, and several codebooks were captured when a U-boat was captured and the captain failed to throw them in the water along with his machine. Certainly they fared much better than thier Japanese counterparts where we were reading thier messages before the war even started.
 
Y2K Baby said:
Fits with his nihilism and wicked sense of humor.
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I think there was some sense of tradeoff in his relationship with some of his chief lieutenants. He understood some people like Goering had a natural avarice and greed that was outwardly visible and had to be sated if he wanted him to do his job, but at the same time, Hitler was totally blindsided by Himmler's utterly self-serving ambition and aspirations, thinking of him as his "treue Heinrich" until the final betrayal. It seems like if they made at least some attempt to hide it, like Himmler, then Hitler just couldn't or wouldn't see it.
 
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millais said:
I think there was some sense of tradeoff in his relationship with some of his chief lieutenants. He understood some people like Goering had a natural avarice and greed that was outwardly visible and had to be sated if he wanted him to do his job, but at the same time, Hitler was totally blindsided by Himmler's utterly self-serving ambition and aspirations, thinking of him as his "treue Heinrich" until the final betrayal. It seems like if they made at least some attempt to hide it, like Himmler, then Hitler just couldn't or wouldn't see it.
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Poor Hitler...
 
In my opinion this was the greatest thing to come out of Germany in the 20th century:
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I've seen this thing cross a flooded street in a way that would have made most modern cars stall and shutdown with total engine failure/loss.
 
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kūhaku said:
Whine all you want about this clip being JP but I’m inclined to believe him here. Hitler likely didn’t have a lot of the extreme views to begin with, like ridding the world of Jews, it was the populous that wanted something to blame and latched onto the Jews resulting in him speaking more about Jews to please the crowds even more.

Inherently, at the start at least, he didn’t have a horrible idea. If anyone here knows about the Weimar Republic, pretty good redpill story, Hitler wasn’t just coming to a nation after a recession but after absurdity in the nation had been rampant for years. It makes total sense to try and make Germany great again, after the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic, but he got power drunk and the view was corrupted until WW2 happened where it was at its most corrupt.
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I'm also sure the attempted but failed coup by mostly jewish communists had nothing to do with why people randomly picked jews as a scapegoat.

If my country had a civil war lasting almost a year, perpetuated mostly by a single ethnic group, any negative feelings I would develop toward that group would be completely unjustified, and random scapegoat seeking.

en.wikipedia.org

German Revolution of 1918–1919 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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Wrong memes*
I've seen funnier jew memes this era.
 
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