Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Forum administrators, Interface administrators, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
116,952
edits
The Wages of Destruction: Difference between revisions
m
typo fixes
No edit summary |
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) m (typo fixes) |
||
Line 13:
* [[Brutal Honesty]]: William Darre, as early as 1936, had this to say about how Germany (in his role as the German agricultural ministry leader) could solve it's agrarian issues, which was a pretty clear statement of intent prior to 1939:
{{quote|'''''The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people.'''''}}
** Hitler had a moment of doing this. While he generally avoided making concrete comments on the state of the war, in 1942, while discussing the need for coking coal for the steel industry with Paul Pleiger, he was uncharacteristically direct and to the point:
{{quote|'''''Herr Pleiger, if, due to the shortage of coking coal the output of the steel industry cannot be raised as planned, then the war is lost.'''''}}
* [[Can't Catch Up]]: Due to the backwards agricultural sector of the German economy, under their existing system and due to the limited amount of arable land available to German farmers, they were doomed to this trope. Hitler's war plans were intended explicitly to remedy this.
Line 46:
** Carl Goerdeler, who had been commissioned to evaluate the currency situation of Germany circa 1936 in regards to international markets, rather bravely wrote an honest report effectively pointing out the dangers of continued Nazi-led subsidy that dumped exports on the world market and even advocated reaching a modus vivendi on many issues the Nazis would have consider verboten, such as military rebuilding and anti-Semitic policies. Given he would become part of the later resistance that tried to kill Hitler in 1944, this was an early bold step that put him in grave danger even then.
** Schwerin von Krosigk and Ludwig Beck had a brief moment of success in their roles as Reich Finance Minister and Chief of Staff. In 1938, Germany was simply not ready for a war and both men knew it, and while Hitler only backed down reluctantly at the last minute, both manage to stall for enough time to get him to reconsider for military and economic reasons. By the next year neither was in a position to do the same again, [[Foregone Conclusion|and Hitler was not taking no for an answer then]].
** Hans Kehrl of the Armaments Ministry might have been a diehard Nazi, but even he realized Germany was screwed and tried to convince Albert Speer as much in 1943, only to have his pleas fall on deaf ears. As for Speer himself, it was more ambiguous. He was willing to admit things were bad post 1943, but ws also the lone optimist keeping Hitler's wishes going despite all pessimism otherwise from anyone else.
* [[Paper Tiger]]: In many ways, the Nazis had economic issues so vast they were downright laughable, which they only partially were able to conceal at best, but this concealment failed almost completely post-1943, revealing their economy to be even more pathetic than towards the end of WWI.
* [[Plausible Deniability]]: [[Discussed]] and ultimately mocked. While even back to the Weimar Republic Germany always wanted to rearm in direct defiance of the Versailles Treaty, the economic side was initially well hidden and the scale of the plans were fairly modest to invoke this trope. By the time of [[Nazi Germany]], they quit trying to even pretend this trope was in effect and by 1934 an imbecile could tell exactly what they were doing, pathetically weak denials to the contrary.
| |||