
The myth of Nazi efficiency - antman
http://coffeecuphistory.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/the-myth-of-nazi-efficiency/
======
bdesimone
Probably the best primary account of the inefficiencies of the National
Socialists was by Albert Speer, Hitler's foremost technocrat. In "Inside the
Third Reich" Speer gives an account of just how much the Germans struggled to
mobilize during the war. Though Speer was able to introduce streamlined
methods of mass production and remove some excessive bureaucracy, what strikes
me most was the admission that Germany never hit production levels seen during
WWI.

The Second World War, by John Keegan

Inside the Third Reich, by Albert Speer

~~~
hga
Speer was hardly a disinterested commentator on this, and I seem to remember
his book has more than a few problems, and isn't Keegan's book rather general
in its scope?

My current source is the relatively new economic history of Nazi Germany, _The
Wages of Destruction_ by Adam Tooze ([http://www.amazon.com/The-Wages-
Destruction-Breaking-Economy...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Wages-Destruction-
Breaking-Economy/dp/0143113208/)). It's very good, and shows how economics
were vitally important from beginning to end.

E.g. part of the motivation in invading the Soviet Union was to address the
crippling loss of productivity in their "Greater Western European Co-
Prosperity Sphere" from the end of British coal imports. They needed to get
enough food to the miners of the Lowlands etc., and the scheme was to starve
the USSR cities and redirect the agricultural surplus east. Of course it
didn't work out, but they did have a plan that wasn't entirely irrational.

~~~
bdesimone
No, certainly not. The context of who Speer was -- despite escaping the
hangman at Nuremberg -- should absolutely be kept in mind. I felt his memoirs
were written, at least in part, to improve his own legacy, at one point
remarking: “one seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on
your shoulder.” I'm not sure I buy that but his unique view of the moving
parts and gears of the economy were probably mostly accurate.

Yes, I recommend Keegan's book as my favorite "big picture" book regarding the
second world war. For an inside look at the third reich in general, I enjoyed
Richard J Evan's trilogy.

I have not read The Wages of Destruction, thank you for the recommendation.

------
venomsnake
The formidable industrial and military power of Nazi Germany had little to do
with the Nazi Party and more with the brilliant politics of Otto von Bismarck
and the skilled balancing politics of Gustav Stresemann.

Hitler just (prematurely) cashed on historical inertia.

~~~
NameNickHN
Sources?

~~~
mseebach
I downvoted you. I'm really tired of the single-word, zero-effort "sources" or
"citation" meme. It's not wikipedia here, and it creates a hostile environment
to demand every two-line comment to be sourced like an academic paper.

Please engage with the comment and ask for clarification if there's something
you think is unclear. If you find something hard to believe, say so, and
_why_. If you're just genuinely interested, ask for a book recommendation. But
please write a full sentence.

~~~
kleiba
I downvoted you. I think the request for a full sentence is unnecessary
because the one-word comment "sources?" effectively communicates an
understandable message in a compact form. A full sentence would be a more
standard (and, some would say, perhaps a more polite?) form of doing the same,
for sure. But I don't think more syntax automatically adds more value in this
particular case.

What is being asked for is a source for the parent comment. You say you're
tired of the single-word, zero-effort "sources" or "citation" meme. I can't
follow that reasoning. Minimally, as I work in academia, I find the request
for a citation normal. But also, I cannot agree with your opinion that only
those comments can be valid that require from the author an effort that is
greater than what you define as zero. I would think that your parent is
actually interested in engaging in a discussion, but would like to do some
background checks first - hence the request for sources.

I don't find that asking for a source is creating a hostile environment,
either. You've summed up possible reasons why someone might ask for sources in
your second paragraph, so I have no doubts you understood the motivations of
your parent.

It's not quite clear to me, whether you're complaining about the content of
your parent's post (that they are asking for sources) or the form of the post
(that it's just a one-word post). In any event, I don't think it's fair to
downvote someone because they ask for sources, just because that request was
not written in a way that pleases you.

EDIT: On second thought, I feel my comment is a bit wanky. I wish I could re-
upvote you, I think I acted prematurely. I'm sorry. :-/

~~~
mseebach
Don't worry. My comment got more upvotes than it deserves.

First point, HN is not academia, it's (mostly) intelligent people discussing
interesting subjects. In such discussions, it's perfectly fine to make
contributions that you can't immediately source. It's, of course, also fine to
contest those, and if someone says you're wrong, and has sources, well, you
should be prepared to concede the point. But even in academia, I strongly
doubt that you've ever received a request for sources from a perfect stranger
that didn't explain exactly which point they were interested in.

Second point, form and style _is_ important. Politeness is important. They are
cornerstones of civil discourse. If we don't maintain a civil environment,
intelligent people leave, and HN turns into the regular echo chamber that are
par for the course on the Internet. Intelligent people interested in real
discourse can and should explain their request when asking someone else to
elaborate.

Third point - yes, I could guess at a range of possible motivations, but I
don't actually know which one it is. The range goes from "I think you're wrong
and probably an idiot, but I'm not going to bother explaining why" to "wow,
that's a fascinating thought, where I can learn more". Those are vastly
different responses - one obviously has no place in civil discourse. My gut
feeling is that one word requests for sources are more often towards the
former than the latter, but obviously I can't know. Even if my gut feeling is
wrong, it still creates grating uncertainly: Is this person a troll who's out
to undermine my credibility on the cheap, or is it a genuinely interested
person who just want to learn more.

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firebrand39
Kudos to this very, very good article. Let me add a couple of facets.

\- Walter Euckens 'ordoliberalism' which laid the foundation for the postwar
German 'economic miracle' was a direct response to the chaos and ineptitude of
Hitler's bureaucracy. I believe Eucken worked within Hitlers economic planning
bureaucracy.

\- Albert Speer, Hitler's 'Minister of Armaments', removed the tangle of
agencies and ministries by centralizing power over economic planning and by
giving factories 'self responsiblity' allowing the german war economy to reach
peak output in 1944. (see wikipedia)

\- The production of the V2 'wunderwaffe' actually cost more lives of forced
labor (see Speer) than its deployment.

\- After the end of the war, german productivity leapfroged with the
introduction of american machinery, like producing a Beatle car got faster by
the order of ten times (I believe, if readers have precises figures, please
share them).

What is the moral of all this? Ethics and hard-nosed productivity are really
not separate at all.

------
pinaceae
smart person, writing a long article full of facts completely missing the
point.

the nazi efficiency is _defined_ by the holocaust and is measured against the
performance of the nazis against other organizations attempting the same. the
article points out that it is inefficient to kill all these skilled workers -
as if the author came from an alien planet not understanding that the
extermination of the jewish race (and later the complete untermensch) was at
the core of the nazi ideology. as for their other actions - any country can go
to war, nothing special there.

other nations have killed more, more quickly (in percentage to overall
inhabitants), but mostly within their own borders. nazi germany annexed
territories and then went on to systematically exterminate a race. figuring
out family trees, measuring pureness (ariernachweis) then either sending you
off to the camps or the ostfront (my granddad was a beutedeutscher aka loot
german, enough german to be sent to stalingrad).

visit some of the camps, mauthausen, treblinka, whatever - the fact that they
went from shooting to exhaust fumes to zyklon B. the fact that they
systematically went trough the possessions of the arriving victims, even
harvesting gold teeth and hair from corpses. the fact that they wiped out
approx. 25% of poland, uprooting a large population from europe, forever.

this and other facts make the nazis the most efficient genocide machine so far
and hopefully forever. could they been more efficient? of course, modern nerds
with no social consciousness could come up with even better ways, or to put it
that way, imagine the nerd-energy behind google/facebook/amazon/HN moved from
ad-click generation to a peoples extermination.

"Fellow students remembered him as studious, and awkward in social
situations." - a quote about Heinrich Himmler. "We know that these clashes
with Asia and Jewry are necessary for evolution." and that is Himmler laying
it out, scientifically, clear.

~~~
arrrg
Eh. You are the one missing the point.

“That Holocaust’s real awful, but the Nazi economic policies kicked ass!” is a
common refrain you can hear from many, many people. Those people are not
talking about the Holocaust, they are talking about the economy and jobs. It’s
an argument that, I would argue, even made it into the mainstream. You won’t
just hear Nazis regurgitating it. I would even argue that this, more than any
other thing they could say, is the number one argument Nazis use to reel
people in.

It isn’t true, of course. The linked article retells some fairly standard
stuff which everyone who visited a (a bit more in-depth) class or seminar
about German history during the Third Reich will know. Of course, only very
few people visit those classes. (I know all this because during my last two
years of school I was in a advanced history class in Germany – five hours a
week – but even in Germany very few people will go that much into depth and
considering how little I learned about, say, US history in school, the rest of
the world has probably even less hope of ever learning this.)

~~~
wisty
There's reasons to think that a Keynesian program (even one which focused on
war, not building useful infrastructure) could have ended up fixing a truly
out-of-kilter economy.

But it only fixes medium term (~10 year horizon) problems. Once the monetary /
investment system is fixed, Germany would have stalled. It suffered from
massive brain drain (if you literally have Einstein, making him flee isn't a
great idea). And totalitarianism isn't great for creating an innovative
workforce, even if you can keep your population from fleeing.

~~~
cpleppert
If you are embarking on such a Keynesian program in a climate of general
depression and lack of investment in other countries then you will enjoy
generally low interest rates but you lose the ability to make short term
investments and must make longer term ones.

In the case of Nazi Germany Hitler purposely took on massive amounts of debt
to rearm the country. Any economic success was temporary and entirely
dependent on the massive arms program. Not only was the Nazi state inefficient
arms investment couldn't possibly have ever paid back the investment in
borrowed money that created the Nazi military.

------
MichaelAza
I won't go into the war in general since I'm no expert on world war 2 but I
can tell you that I've heard enough stories of Nazi brutality in the camps to
know that, at least in exterminating undesirables, they were good. Real good.
The gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz worked like clockwork. There
was, at all times, a line, a group in preparation for entry, a group in the
gas chambers themselves and the crematoriums were working 24/7. It was, for
all intents and purposes, a death factory. That's the real point to make about
Nazi efficiency - they weren't more efficient than, say, the average factory
but what they were doing (murdering people) was never done in such a factory-
like manner, hence the semblance of efficiency.

~~~
eru
> [...] but what they were doing (murdering people) was never done in such a
> factory-like manner, [...]

I'd like to believe that, but I am afraid you are underestimating human
brutality in general.

~~~
MichaelAza
I have yet to see another example. Can you provide one?

~~~
eru
I had mostly the Soviet Union, Communist China and North Korea in mind. Of
these, the Soviet Union started there atrocities earlier than Nazi Germany.
Some quick web searching gave e.g. this somewhat tasteless list
([http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-horrific-genocides-in-
his...](http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-horrific-genocides-in-
history.php)). (The treatment itself is bearable, but just the idea of a top
ten of genocides makes me cringe.)

Wikipedia has an article as well:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history> The USA was pretty
determined in killing off the natives. Even though they never seemed to have
industrialized the process.

~~~
bayesianhorse
It's actually hard to get humans to kill other humans with intent and close-
up, as can be seen in various examples over history. To kill a few million
Humans in short time, shooting was no option. The gas chambers were not much
more efficient, but the murderers didn't have to look their victims in the
eyes. They were not forced to recognize them as Humans.

The story about US and native Americans was completely different. Most deaths
occurred from disease and circumstances brought on by settlers and colonists.
Many other native Americans were killed while raiding white settlers, or in
retribution for raids. It's easier to kill a human being when he is trying to
kill you.

A lot of harm has been done to native Americans, but the scale, motives and
methods were completely different.

~~~
gurkendoktor
> The gas chambers were not much more efficient, but the murderers didn't have
> to look their victims in the eyes. They were not forced to recognize them as
> Humans.

But couldn't they still hear them scream, and had to clean up the corpses? I
am German and I have never understood why they used Cyclon B. Maybe I just
suck at understanding chemical weapons, but it took up to 20 minutes to kill a
room full of people, is that even faster then letting them suffocate?

Not safe for sanity, but source -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B#Use_on_humans>

~~~
MichaelAza
Could they hear them scream? Depends on the gas chamber in question. In
Majdanek, the gas chamber had a viewing port for the operators. In Auschwitz,
it was an underground bunker.

Did they have to clean up the corpses? Nope, that's what the Sonderkommando
were for. Jewish prisoners who cleaned up the corpses and operated the
crematoriums.

Why they used Zyklon B - god only knows, but they didn't use just Zyklon B.
They also used carbon monoxide and car exhaust gas quite frequently (mainly on
the eastern front and early on in the war)

------
pbiggar
Whatever about WW2, Germany's performance in WW1 was incredibly efficient.
They had a complete plan for the western front, along with the logistics to
back it up, including up-to-the-minute train schedules.

It's been a while since I read the Guns of August, but Tuchman contrasts
France and Germany's preparedness, and Germany seems the absolute pinnacle of
efficiency.

------
larrys
"At the height of the Autobahn building phase, in 1935, for every sixty people
in Germany there was just one automobile, compared to one for every twenty in
France, or one for every twenty-five in Denmark; in the United States, one
person out of every five owned a car of their own."

Impossible to believe. If you simply factor in age and sex it seems near
impossible that in 1935 1 out of every 5 people owned a car at that time.

------
bayesianhorse
A common thought I hear from fellow Germans is the Autobahn is an outstanding
achievement of Hitler's. I can manage to curb my anger at this, barely. It's
like saying "He started a war with more than 30 million deaths, but hey, at
least he built some Motorways!

~~~
skinnymuch
> He started a war with more than 30 million deaths, but hey, at least he
> built some Motorways!

That isn't the same thing as merely pointing out he built motorways.
Specifically the "but hey, at least" is making the intent of most Germans to
be awful when it probably isn't.

