Common estimates are that WWII killed 50
million to 100 million people. So, wanted
to get some understanding of how it
happened, how to avoid such, and looked at
many descriptions of that history.
I'm just a US citizen, not a professional
historian, and here have only rough
explanations, maybe not 100% wrong.
A really short description: Hitler became
a dictator and then went nuts.
For a little more:
(1) Foundation. The German culture
didn't have much in resistance, walls,
defenses, etc. against a dictatorship.
Hopefully our US Constitution and three
branches of government will have the US do
better.
(2) Provocation. Germany suffered in WWI,
the provisions of the Treaty of
Versailles, some massive monetary
inflation, and, then, the Great
Depression.
(3) Unification. Early on, say, starting
near 1933, Hitler was an effective speaker
and able to exploit the culture and
the provication politically to unify
Germany.
(4) Success. Soon Hitler was a dictator
and had something of a 4 year plan to get
the economy going again. In simple terms,
the plan worked.
Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there
and likely been okay.
(5) Empire. Long in Europe, the idea of
an empire was common, and Hitler wanted
one and started grabbing land.
There was the reaction of the conference
and treaty at Munich, 9/30/1938.
Hitler could'a stopped there, but, nope,
he was only beginning. He had an excuse
he could use -- his master race wanted
living space.
(6) Poland. He attacked Poland and
quickly occupied about half of it. An
excuse was that he wanted the piece of
Poland that separated Germany and East
Prussia. France and England responded
with war on Germany, but it didn't do
much. Hitler could'a stopped there.
By then Hitler had done lots of ugly
things and got away with them, e.g., the
Holocaust.
(7) Military. Hitler's military did well
in fast attacks against opponents not yet
taking war seriously.
For longer, larger battles, his military
was not good: His airplanes didn't have
enough range to do well bombing England.
England's defense -- radar, Spitfires --
was good; Hitler's losses were high; and
he gave up.
He could'a stopped there.
Instead, he attacked Russia; his front and
supply lines were both too long; and
Russia was too much for his "fast attack
military".
(8) Two Fronts. While Hitler was losing
in Russia, the US and England did the
D-Day attack at Normandy and quickly ran
to Germany. He was in a "two front" war
with both fronts long lasting and too
much for his "fast attack military".
(9) Nuts. He had lots of chances to stop
in place, declare victory, sign some
papers, and live in peace. Instead, as
his attack on Russia was failing he went
nuts and went even more nuts after D-Day.
Lesson: Too commonly, if make a human a
dictator, they will be short on
constraints and do nutty things, e.g.,
want to take over the world. So, have a
constitution and a democracy that keeps
out dictators.
> Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay.
If Hitler had been Franco or Mussolini, then maybe. But racism and especially anti-semitism were integral parts of Nazi ideology. It wasn't principally about wealth or strategic objectives as we might recognise them. They really believed that the races of the earth were in a big struggle for resources and that if the "Aryan race" didn't exterminate or subjugate the others, it would risk extinction.
Your analysis seems to rest on the idea that Hitler was some brilliant politician that went nuts because he had too much power, but he was "nuts" way before he ever came into power.
> but he was "nuts" way before he ever came into power.
I agree, sure, but strictly, literally that doesn't conflict with what I wrote -- i.e., I didn't claim he was not nuts before 1933 or before he became a dictator! I considered being clear and explicit on this point but omitted such to make the main points shorter and simpler. And I part way addressed this issue by noting that with constraints a nut might not look like one but look nuts if the constraints are off.
> was some brilliant politician
Well, it seems accepted that on his way to being a dictator he was an effective speaker. Maybe he had some industrial backers who were brilliant.
On the Nazi ideology, Aryan, master race stuff, you know more than I do and might be right, but I omitted mention of those out of not being sure they were more than just a party line, a way to get political support, etc.
"Master Race"? Let's see: Math, science, music. Hmm .... Germany, yes, but also Poland, France, Russia, Austria, Hungary, England, the US, ....
Ah, poor Hitler and his "master race": About then, the 1936 Olympics in Germany, Dad was at Ohio State and knew Jesse Owens -- 4 Gold Medals!!!! Hitler's athletes just needed better running shoes -- that was the problem????
Hitler was certainly brilliant in certain ways, e.g. as a public speaker he must have been very persuasive. I don't think that changes anything about how utterly insane his (and his fellow Nazis') ideology was, though.
There are "effective" dictators who manage to have a stable, if brutal reign, and then there's Nazi-ism which at its very core is such a destructive ideology that it can't really even sustain itself in the long run.
> By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust.
No, actually the Holocaust, meaning the actual mass killing of Jews, didn't start until 1941, about the time Hitler attacked Russia.
Not to say Hitler hadn't already gotten away with plenty of ugly things by the time he attacked Poland. But the Holocaust wasn't one of them at that time.
> No, actually the Holocaust, meaning the actual mass killing of Jews, didn't start until 1941, about the time Hitler attacked Russia.
Hitler attacking the Jews started before 1941, and I used Holocaust as a one-word description of all the Hitler attacks on the Jews. E.g., Google says that Kristallnacht was 11/9/1938.
- Hitler had rich German backers who specifically wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic[0], because democracy was starting to turn on the German capitalist class.
- Hitler was never popular enough to gain control through democratic means. The Weimar Republic was split in thirds between liberals, Nazis, and communists; the liberals thought letting Hitler be "vice-chancellor" (under a liberal chancellor) would be the least bad option. Hitler exploited this and demanded the chancellorship at the last minute. Once he was in position he was able to cause chaos and rip up the Weimar government.
- Very similar events played out in America.
America had its own very popular fascist parties. Furthermore, we had a very long history of people wanting to subvert or exit democracy in the name of white supremacy[1], and even a successful Presidential assassination to stop the fledgling Republican Party from stopping the South from reinventing slavery. Our constitutional guardrails are actually really thin and always have been.
1930s America also had very similar economic problems to Germany. We didn't have crippling war debt or hyperinflation, but the Great Depression was a globalized problem, so everyone had people demanding a strongman, which means fascists have a stall in the marketplace of ideas.
FDR was able to avert catastrophe, largely by subverting several of America's constitutional defenses against dictatorship. To be clear, capitalists had already coopted and corrupted classical liberalism, and they were able to successfully get the Supreme Court to shut down every moderately Progressive[2] policy because the one thing the Constitution was good at stopping was those policies. FDR threatened to pack the courts, and then suddenly the Supreme Court shut up.
But before that, the American capitalists tried doing exactly the same thing Hitler's backers tried - hiring a strongman to go and take over the US government[3]. Except they hired Smedley Butler, who was already getting tired of being Wall Street's hitman, so he immediately blabbed about it to the government. I'm under no illusion that America had plenty of competent men who would sell their country out in order to sit on a comfy chair and let the capitalists loot America. We're just lucky the capitalists picked the wrong guy.
Ultimately the thing that got America out of the Great Depression was WWII - and not because wars are inherently good, but because it gave FDR a blank check to rebuild the economy with government money. And yes, FDR had to engineer this too, by embargoing Japan and daring them to attack us. And yes, even with a not-shitheaded liberal running the show there were still dramatic overreaches of government power[4] that our constitutional guardrails did jack shit against[5].
Not to mention the whole "running for four terms" thing. Yeah, that's right, Presidential term limits were a norm - not a rule - until FDR decided he was just going to keep going until his body stopped him.
America did not come out of WWII with its democracy intact because it has superior structures. Nor because its people are inherently more trustworthy or we had more experience with democracy. (I mean, we did, but barely.) It was largely dumb luck:
- Luck that America's fascist movements didn't shoot first.
- Luck that the Progressive movement backed a liberal, not an authoritarian. FDR absolutely had all the power and could have destroyed American democracy instead of rebuilding it.
- Luck that the capitalist reaction stumbled at the starting line. The Business Plot could have taken him like the South took Lincoln.
The only thing mostly determined at the outset was that we were going to win the war, because we owned the oil. That's why America is still obsessed with oil to this day.
also
>Hitler's military did well in fast attacks against opponents not yet taking war seriously.
This is an echo of how authoritarians take power: do something so batshit insane so quickly that nobody has time to notice you palming everyone's phones. Think like January 6th: had Trump actually been coordinated rather than just angrily lashing out, he could have actually stopped the election before it was certified, gotten his 6-3 Supreme Court to look the other way, and then seized power.
[0] There are historical echoes to the French aristocracy's attempts to choke fledgling democracy out, though in that case the fledgling democracy went paranoid and made its own dictators first.
[1] To be clear, "White" was far narrower then than it is today. It excluded the Irish, Mormons, Italians, and so on. But for the purpose of this discussion we can use the modern colorist definition rather than the far more racist definition they used back then.
[2] As in the political movement, not the extremely genki insurance salesperson character
Yup, I've wondered how many barriers, constraints, etc. the US REALLY has to ensure that we are safe from being like 1930s Germany. My guesses are our Constitution and three branches, but that's guessing and hoping. Uh, my doubts, worries are the main reason I looked into what happened in Germany.
I'm just a US citizen, not a professional historian, and here have only rough explanations, maybe not 100% wrong.
A really short description: Hitler became a dictator and then went nuts.
For a little more:
(1) Foundation. The German culture didn't have much in resistance, walls, defenses, etc. against a dictatorship. Hopefully our US Constitution and three branches of government will have the US do better.
(2) Provocation. Germany suffered in WWI, the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, some massive monetary inflation, and, then, the Great Depression.
(3) Unification. Early on, say, starting near 1933, Hitler was an effective speaker and able to exploit the culture and the provication politically to unify Germany.
(4) Success. Soon Hitler was a dictator and had something of a 4 year plan to get the economy going again. In simple terms, the plan worked.
Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay.
(5) Empire. Long in Europe, the idea of an empire was common, and Hitler wanted one and started grabbing land.
There was the reaction of the conference and treaty at Munich, 9/30/1938.
Hitler could'a stopped there, but, nope, he was only beginning. He had an excuse he could use -- his master race wanted living space.
(6) Poland. He attacked Poland and quickly occupied about half of it. An excuse was that he wanted the piece of Poland that separated Germany and East Prussia. France and England responded with war on Germany, but it didn't do much. Hitler could'a stopped there.
By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust.
(7) Military. Hitler's military did well in fast attacks against opponents not yet taking war seriously.
For longer, larger battles, his military was not good: His airplanes didn't have enough range to do well bombing England. England's defense -- radar, Spitfires -- was good; Hitler's losses were high; and he gave up.
He could'a stopped there.
Instead, he attacked Russia; his front and supply lines were both too long; and Russia was too much for his "fast attack military".
(8) Two Fronts. While Hitler was losing in Russia, the US and England did the D-Day attack at Normandy and quickly ran to Germany. He was in a "two front" war with both fronts long lasting and too much for his "fast attack military".
(9) Nuts. He had lots of chances to stop in place, declare victory, sign some papers, and live in peace. Instead, as his attack on Russia was failing he went nuts and went even more nuts after D-Day.
Lesson: Too commonly, if make a human a dictator, they will be short on constraints and do nutty things, e.g., want to take over the world. So, have a constitution and a democracy that keeps out dictators.