@MrMalachiCrunch:
Kurt hit it right on. I would add Hitler hated slavs in general but actually was rather fond of the Brits. Hitler had hoped to commit genocide on the slavs in the USSR and resettle the land with brits and french whom were aryan enough for his likes. He didn’t want to crush the brits, merely have them lay down their arms.
I am no bleeding heart liberal by any stretch, but nazi germany was a right wing capitalist utopia but treated german labour much better than the brits and americans and others treated their own respective labour force. The nazi regime would have no problem living with an uber-right wing capitalist US and facist puppet governments in occupied aryanish europe.
Communism was supposed to take hold in Germany NOT russia. russia was pretty much for the most part a backwards peasant economy in 1917. Hardly a target for a workers paradise as was industrial germany.
This was a nice post; and I agree with over 90% of it. I’d like to expand on the point you raised about how German labor was treated. Hitler’s emergence into power was associated with an economic boom for Germany due to several factors; one of which was that Hitler’s regime managed to solve the foreign currency crisis inherited from the previous regime. In the '20s, Germany had borrowed large sums from the United States in order to make reparations payments to Britain and France. That borrowing reduced the short-term economic pressure on Germany, and there were times in the '20s when Germany was able to perform a passable job of feeding its own people. But Germany’s debt to the U.S. kept piling up due to all the reparations payments it had to make. Then nations such as Britain, France, and the United States closed themselves to German exports. The closing of those markets deprived Germany of the foreign currency it needed to make its debt payments, as well as to purchase imported food and raw materials for its factories. That foreign currency crisis caused economic collapse in Germany, thereby paving the way for Hitler to gain power. Upon assuming power, Hitler decided that Germany would repay its debt to nations which accepted German imports, while defaulting on debt to nations which refused German imports. In particular, he defaulted on Germany’s massive debt to the United States.
Short-term measures such as that one were the first step toward Germany’s climb out of the economic misery of the late '20s and early '30s. Initially, the lion’s share of those gains went to the German working class. Hitler also implemented improved workplace safety measures, and improved clean air and clean water standards. Several years into Germany’s economic program, the German working class had reached what would widely be considered a reasonable standard of living. At this point, Hitler diverted a very large share of additional German economic growth into corporate profits. He then placed stringent restrictions on the amount of those profits that could be paid out in the form of dividends. Because German companies didn’t have anything else to do with all that money coming in, they invested it in upgrading their manufacturing facilities. That effort created a long-term increase in German manufacturing capacity–an increase which reached its zenith in 1944.
As far as Hitler’s foreign policy–after Poland fell, he offered a peace treaty to Britain and France. Both nations turned him down. After France fell, he explored a peace treaty with Britain. The British refused. The British imposed a food blockade on Germany in WWII; just as they had in WWI. Hitler responded to Germany’s food crisis by choosing to provide an adequate diet for the Germans, and by starving the Jews outright. The fate of the people in most occupied territories was between these two extremes; with local populations having to hope for good harvests to avoid starvation. These problems were created by the fact that Germany itself was a food deficit nation, as were France, Poland, and most conquered Soviet territories (except the Ukraine). However, the Ukraine’s food surplus was not nearly enough to offset the food deficit of the other territories Hitler controlled.
During the war, German bureaucrats were in the process of making plans to relocate between 30 - 50 million Polish people eastward; with the vacated areas resettled by Germans. If Germany as as whole was still in a state of food crisis, then the death of a portion of these people along the way would have been seen as an acceptable way to have fewer mouths to feed. Conversely, if the food blockade had been ended, there is not (so far as I know) any indication that these resettled people would have been starved to death. Nor am I aware of any plans to impose genocide against the people of the Soviet Union in the postwar era.
While Hitler’s attitudes about ethnicity clearly played a role in how he allocated starvation, it is important to remember that the source of the starvation was the Anglo-American food blockade imposed on Germany. Stalin’s scorched earth policy contributed to the problem by causing the removal or destruction of local food stores, farming equipment, and other implements necessary for the creation and distribution of food.
