That’s a myth - apart from some token housing projects, flashy public works projects inherited from the Weimar period and some PR stuff such as Kraft durch Freude cruises for carefully chosen the Nazis haven’t provided anything tangible to the Germans in terms of living standards.
Hitler pretty much immediately started a massive rearmament program financed through massive deficits and there wasn’t anything to spare for civilian needs - Hitler bet on a successful war in five years time whose spoils were supposed to recoup all military spending in the preceding years.
Is that D’Annunzio’s quote? It sounds as something he would have written.
The Democrat’s haven’t provided anything tangible to the people of America’s urban areas in terms of livings standards, either, but it doesn’t mean that they haven’t spent massive amounts of treasure trying to do so.
Did the Nazis not nationalize the entire rail industry? Did the Nazis not nationalize the healthcare insurance industry? Did they not do the same to the entire education system, placing it under total state control? Did the Nazis not have Genetic Health Courts, where government bureaucrats decided the fate of citizens? Did the Nazis not put hundreds of thousands of people to work on a Seigfried Line that was never used and later dismantled to create the Atlantic Wall, along with many, many other “put people to work” projects on a massive scale?
What are these, if not massive government boondoggles appropriating private wealth, ostensibly to be spent for the public good?
Everyone in my wife’s family and most of mine have complete health coverage paid for by someone else. Most also have SNAP and a few have decent disability checks coming in.
My aunt in laws cancer remission feels super tangible in the living standards category. As does how they’re all able to eat despite not working more than 4 months out of the year, with that number being 0 for about a third of em
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying all government-sponsored social policies are failures on all levels by which they can be measured. I’m just saying that most of them are, especially when you don’t have anyone around to take a stand against bad ideas. I’m also not impugning the intentions of people who advocate for them.
I grew up right outside of Chicago and it is hard to see how anyone can cast that poor city as a big-government social program success story. It is really quite sad how one-party rule has driven a once-great city to the brink of collapse, and the mass exodus of productive people from the entire state of Illinois doesn’t make me optimistic for it’s future. My uncle is one of those people, currently in the process of moving from St. Charles, IL to Union Mills, IN.
Meanwhile, the people who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of all of this massive spending live in communities plagued by poverty, crime and misery, with little hope of improving their lives.
You’re mixing apples and oranges - prewar German economy and WW2 slave labor.
During the prewar years of Nazi rule (1933-39) the German economy was geared up for rearmament - apart from the examples listed above, Hitler wasn’t interested in increasing the living standards of the future master race - in Hitler’s mind there was a war to be waged in few years’ time and what was the point in building new houses?
So the Nazis most certainly didn’t spend “massive amounts of treasure” on anything else than weapons and infrastructure needed to wage war (autobahns). German railroads were traditionally viewed as an instrument of war and since their beginnings in the 19th century were subjected to military and not commercial priorities set by the government.
The Nazi economy was charging into an abyss before the war and only the unexpected success on the battlefield fortuitously (for them) opened new sources of raw materials and (forced and slave) labor to the Germans.
When French civilians were press ganged into working on the Atlantic Wall, it wasn’t to spread socialism, but to hammer the point that they viewed themselves as racially superior.
Also, German nationalization of healthcare and insurance was driven by the desire to cut costs and only grudgingly did they institute some form of coverage for “racially pure Aryans”
You want smaller government? Great. So do I. But you simply cannot use “Nazis are socialists” argument because it’s simply factually inaccurate.
There’s a great book detailing the nuts and bolts behinds the Nazi economy:
Here’s something many Americans don’t know: the US had eugenics programs before the Nazis had them. Does this make the state governments that sponsored them Nazis?
So the Nazis had public works projects, what was the Hoover Dam?
I realize there’s many distinctions between the Nazi economic policy and that of the Soviets, the Cubans or any of the other failed states that operated under the mantle of “socialism”.
None could be called conservative. Not by any stretch. They were all massively powerful states that had tremendous control over the economy, along with the power to intrude on people’s lives in a way that I’ve been fortunate enough to not have experienced. They were all, not coincidentally, massive failures that produce death, destruction and suffering on an unimaginable scale.
I suppose you could call it a national socialist program. If not that, a regional socialist program.
You can choose to call the Nazis not conservative, and be justified, however that doesn’t make them liberals. Fascism and Nazism were reactions against liberalism. They both saw liberalism as the enemy.
Classical liberalism or modern liberalism? As I said above, modern liberals are the folks who want more state control of [you name it], re-branding many of the same old socialist arguments or doing something silly like putting “democratic” in front of it. That’s why I described many Nazi policies as a “laundry list” of things being presently demanded by the students of Evergreen State College.
Modern conservatives guard against that and, in some rare cases, actually manage to roll that government power back. If we’re lucky, that just means that the federal budget increases at a slower rate than it did in previous years, because it sure as hell hasn’t decreased in living memory.
At this point we are playing semantic games. My position is one of erring on the side of less government power, but I’m not an anarchist. Government has it’s place and part of it involves a social safety net.
Can you name any great expansions of government power, domestic or abroad, in the last 100 years that have not taken place under the premise of social progress?
Going back to my original choice of thread title, I find it deeply ironic that the so-called anti-fascists are in favor of these dramatic increases in state power. Get Bernie in there, he’ll do it right this time.
My post was in response to Zecarlo saying that fascism is nothing like socialism, which is not true at all. Is it not obvious that both involve massive amounts of state power, both economically and socially?
I realize you can look beyond that and find many distinctions between them, not to mention many similarities with how the good 'ol US of A is run.
If the highest level of government had power akin to you local DMV, which I’m not saying it should, gas chambers and armies belonging to political parties waging war across the continent would not be the outcome.
Eh… it’s a nice soundbite but the picture is way more complex. For example, from the onset of WW2 the UK behaved more like a communist state than Nazi Germany, with government control of all crucial industrial enterprises, central allocation of raw materials and massive encroachment into daily life - strict rationing of food being the prime example. All these exigencies were seen as crucial to winning the war.
The Nazis enjoyed support of German industrialists and until the Total War strategy announced in February 1943 (four years into the war), German privately owned enterprises behaved in many instances according to market principles - privately owned enterprises still produced luxury goods for the civilian market, often refused defense contracts deemed harmful to long term profitability of their respective companies and enjoyed massive profits (by using cheap slave and concentration labor) while choking the German war economy by not producing enough of literally everything, even with conquered Europe at their disposal.
Albert Speer changed this in 1943, ironically by turning Germany into a centrally planned economy, something the British did four years earlier. So the German weakness was that in economic terms, they simply weren’t socialist enough as the Brits?
Fun fact: descendants of Josef Goebbels’ stepson (left) still own the majority stake in BMW.
Of course it is, and I’m not going to dispute anything you wrote in your post. My point was more or less a soundbite-level thought, pointing out the irony of so-called anti-fascists/nazi-punchers advocating for policies that, more often than not, were adopted in societies whose massive levels of government power allowed for the great tragedies of the 20th century to take place.
I realize that’s not the most profound statement, but it is a true one.
That’s silly and you know it.
I’m not a scholar, but WWII and Nazi Germany has always been a subject of fascination with me.
I even took four years of German, aber meine Deutch ist nicht so gut. Ich vergessen alles.
If I were the Fuhrer with full powers of hindsight, I would have dumped the Segfried Line and pumped more money into developing and deploying the ME-262 in vast numbers. I would have not pursued impractical weaponry like the Schwerer Gustav, the V-1, V-2 or any tanks larger than the Tiger. I would have made many more Tiger tanks, and made them sooner to counter the Soviet’s T-34. I would have developed a strategic bomber force. Perhaps most importantly, I would have listened to my generals.
Then we’d all have cool uniforms, plenty of lebensraum and the untermensch wouldn’t be causing any more problems.
I understand your point better after reading it again, and I think there’s an argument to be made for it if your measure of success is victory in war as opposed to producing good outcomes for everyone under your governance.
There’s enough logical arguments to demolish their position without invoking the Nazis incorrectly.
No it’s not. it’s an argument that has been supported by numerous historians, from Kershaw to Overy, see for example the excellent book in my post above.
The Tiger/T-34 comparison is the personification of Soviet and German war efforts. The former was overly complex and expensive, taking long to build, while the latter’s design was simple and could be mass produced relatively cheaply in mind-boggling numbers. In a protracted fight, numbers always win. Communism sucks in literally everything, expect when it come to single-mindedly producing large quantities of military hardware.
Not enough raw materials. The Germans had to choose two from the following list - U boats, fighter and dive bomber planes, tanks, strategic bombers (FW200 and the planned Amerika bombers). Only two.
Those that advocated the repeat of the WW1 invasion of France through Belgium?
Agreed, but keep in mind, this is a thread started about a bunch of people who call conservatives “Nazis” and then use that brain-dead argument to justify violence.
See my last post. Already conceded to you upon reading it a second time.
Absolutely. My point being was that the Tiger was the not the best tank the Germans could have designed, which would have been a lot more like the T-34 in terms of manufacturing and maintenance simplicity, but it was the best tank the Germans did design. Their culture of engineering simply wouldn’t allow for something like the T-34 to be developed, so the Tiger was their best shot. Go bigger sooner. The Tiger was the single best tank of the war. Could they have made 5000 of them by 1943? Probably, if they saw the need sooner and prioritized it.
I’m not sure I can quantify the amount of material that went into all of Hitler’s various big-government Sander’s-esque Socialist boondoggles that didn’t achieve anything, but surely some of it could have gone to a strategic bomber force. Think of all of the engineering, production and raw materials that went into things like bunker complexes, super-cannons, rocketry and even their above-water navy.
I was thinking more along the lines of the guys he ignored on the Eastern Front.
Again, there wasn’t anything to spare and there was no spending spree. Everything was used for military needs. One of the reasons while the younger generations were fanatical Nazis was that they couldn’t remember the prosperity before WW1 and were therefore accustomed to living lean.
What is truer to your assertion is East Germany, because they and several other Eastern Bloc countries did try a desperate last ditch “subsidize everything” effort in the dying two years of communism to make people forget about their longing for freedom. Prices in the last year of East Germany were ridiculously low for available consumer goods as all prices were subsidized.
Again, they were juggling with finite resources - for the grandly named Atlantic Wall there was a massive shortage of concrete and even wonder weapons faced acute shortages of pretty much everything. Not enough tungsten, rubber…
