Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly because the Allies took over and invested a bunch of money into them developing in ways that didn't involve fascism.
That's not even remotely what happened
Give us your truth on it then I genuinely interested.
They Thought They Were Free (1955)
81–90 of 545 posts
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hitler didn’t do well by the people. Real wages declined throughout Nazi reign. Their lands were destroyed. They were responsible for allowing genocide. Source: Rise and Fall of the Third Reich The article shows how he lulled them step by step and diverted them from knowing this was worse than before. Sound familiar USA?
They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different. We can hate the guy but he was not going to conquer Europe with the Germans and then sit at it empty.
No, not just. There were pre-war downsides and hardships for the people. read the book above, it’s clear the common German had a worse life before the war came, to say nothing of being drafted, being killed, losing a family member, or being incinerated.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#83Posted here multiple times before: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 (02/2025, 473 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315 (11/2020, 382 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042304 (04/2022, 239 comments)
It becomes more important with each repost
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
First they came for those who thought the sky was pulsating green, but I did not speak out for I did not dare to question the blue sky narrative. Then they came for those who thought the earth was flat, but I did not speak out for I did not dare to question the round earth narrative. Then they came for those who thought the internet was carried by little elves, but I did not speak out for I did not dare to question t…
But, key difference, the people pushing green sky or flat earth narrative don't get deplatformed, fired, yelled at or called Nazis. I still haven't seen anyone attempt to do a cost-benefit on whether the COVID lockdowns were a net good. I do note we had a big social and economic disjunction and since then it has been pretty much nothing but war and trouble. The part where they were shutting up people with PhDs on You…
> But, key difference, the people pushing green sky or flat earth narrative don't get deplatformed, fired, yelled at or called Nazis.
... You know that people show insane behaviour regularly get shadow-banned, right? And don't get called on by every piece of media for their position? That people wearing tinfoil have been regularly shouted at and harassed since it became a thing?
If you really want to not be called a Nazi... Don't make friends with people who call themselves that, don't attend the same parties as them, and don't make the same false claims as them.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#85Free societies are not ruled by decree.
Free societies are not ruled through masses.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Allies defeated Germany, not the British.
It turns out that the British were one of the allies and about 380,000 of them died fighting the Nazis, so they have a good claim to having defeated Germany, with help from their friends.
Reassuring to hear that the british consider soviets their friends. Not joking.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#87"…it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." Well, that resonated just a bit. Oh well, back to doomscrolling.
Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attem…
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Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different. We can hate the guy but he was not going to conquer Europe with the Germans and then sit at it empty.
One of the reasons they specifically lost the war was because Hitler was such a fuck up that he was decimating the German economy. When you look at how the war was progressing, the only outcome for the Nazis at the time was either defeat or collapse. Combined with the endemic usage of Pervitin and other drugs at this time both to fuel soldiers and keep the citizens relatively placated they were burning up everything…
Bingo: the story of WW2 is that the Germans started with an effective army, and the Nazis ran it into the ground.
The saddest thing is subsequent decades of bizarre interpretations of this result because people got too excited about some effective German industry that they took Hitlers various wonder weapon attempts as planned engineering projects rather than engineers trying to put form to a mad man's rantings.
Hitler loved the idea of super heavy tanks, so the Germans kept trying to build them even though they were unreliable, ineffective and vulnerable.
Meanwhile the Sherman got a reputation for breaking down a lot...mostly because it kept surviving and being fixed in the field and continuing to provide effective armor support, whereas German tanks just died.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
History disagrees with your bold statement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
No it doesn't. They didn't "invest", they took everything that wasn't bolted to the ground, and then they took that too. A third of the country was taken away and millions of Germans displaced.
My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.
The Marshall Plan was a real thing.
My father also told me that before the Americans decided on the Marshall Plan, they considered other plans (also named for American generals IIRC) one of which involved sterilizing all German men.
Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasnt Germany better off in the decades following WW2 than the British that defeated them?
That is largely irrelevant, they weren't in control of their own destiny at that point. What we learned in the 50s/60s was that the US leadership in the 40s/50s had a really good idea of how to build a country up and score diplomatic wins. They did amazing things in Japan and Germany. Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.
Afg/Iraq became places to funnel money to friends in security contracting.