# If Hitler had won WWII, would the Nazi economic system have worked in the long run? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 23, 2007, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508 "2007-11-23T16:03:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2007, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/21 "2007-11-24T18:42:09Z")
> [@](#): > > A Fascist economy would fail in direct proportion to how much centralized control the government chose to exert on the economy. Centralized planning doesn’t work when it’s implemented by a Fascist government any more than it does when implemented by a Communist government. > > Because some private ownership exists in a fascist society, I would expect it to outperform an equivalent Communist society, but underperform compared to an economy that allows the market to make its own decisions. Centralized planning is a bad idea overall but it’s not a complete failure. For argument’s sake, let’s say centrally planned economies run from 0 to 7 and free market economies run from 3 to 10. A top notch centrally planned economy in the 6-7 range would outperform a terrible free market economy in the 3-4 range. The centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union outperformed the mixed economy of Nazi Germany during WWII. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2007, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/22 "2007-11-24T19:53:44Z")
[QUOTE=sqweels] Well, the hippie movement was a _response_ to the stifling conformity of the 1950’s. The economic prosperity helped make it possible, but it was the civil rights struggle that kicked the door in, making it OK to be different and to question authority. I don’t see that happeneing in Nazi Germay for a while. [/QUOTE] I think that’s a false explanation. 1950s were as ‘conformist’ as much as any other period in history. 1950s came to be called conformist because there was suddenly a new generation that didn’t like the 50s. Likewise, the civil rights movement didn’t create hippies. The liberal, left-wing sentiments that created hippies created civil rights. What created hippies was not a cultural mechanism, but an instinctual. Whenever people are happy and fortunate, they become left-wing. When they are worried and full of remorse, they turn right-wing. E.g., what explains the difference between red states and blue states? Blue states have thriving tech-fueled economies, red states are stagnating, especially in comparison to blues. Don’t forget that hippies weren’t the repressed kids of strict conformists. They were the privilidged children of the middle/upper-middle class. It’s ironic that they came to denounce the system that gave them their carefree childhoods, but it makes sense if you think of it as human nature. P.S. primates and many other animals change their behavior, instincts, and emotions depending on overall conditions. It’s almost common sense. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2007, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/23 "2007-11-24T19:56:30Z")
[QUOTE=Alex\_Dubinsky] Nazi Germany in 1964… that’s a thought. Here’s this one… what were the influences that gave rise to hippies of the 60s? I think they were victory in war and economic prosperity following reconstruction. If Germany won, wouldn’t it have experienced the same stimuli? I think what produced hippies is a fundamental instinct for people to become liberal in response to good fortune (same as it’s an instinct, exemplified by 1920s Germany, to turn barbaric when fortune is bad). [/QUOTE] In Harris’ _Fatherland,_ such “counterculture” as there is is extremely furtive and mild. In one scene, as Hitler’s birthday celebration approaches, some police are scrubbing a grafitto off a marble wall in central Berlin: “Anyone not having a good time will be arrested!” And some kids listen to the Beatles – as unobtrusively as possible. This is still a society where the Gestapo has the entirely legal authority to abduct and kill anyone secretly, without trial or charges. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2007, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/24 "2007-11-24T20:01:31Z")
[QUOTE=xtisme] Simply put there weren’t enough Germans to KILL all the Russians. [/QUOTE] Of course there were, so long as the Russians were defeated, disarmed and disorganized, and the Germans had more bullets than there were Russians. They would simply send killing-squads to each village, one after another, and issue a decree that any non-German spotted on “pacified” territory should be shot on sight. Partisans and refugees hiding in the woods would find themselves doomed, in the long run, if they could rely on no support from local civilians because German settlers were the only such remaining. Making a subject people submit and work and obey is complicated. Killing them is simple. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/25 "2007-11-25T04:10:58Z")
First, I’d like to know if “rich men all over the world” really tended to sympathize with the Nazi economic system. If this is true, I’d really like to know why. Who exactly was “rich” in Nazi Germany? I was under the impression that it was for all intents and purposes a socialist system, and that Nazi leadership were the only rich people in Germany. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/26 "2007-11-25T04:24:39Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] Of course there were, so long as the Russians were defeated, disarmed and disorganized, and the Germans had more bullets than there were Russians. [/QUOTE] Well, you know, in real life they weren’t able to do this. Why do you suppose they would have been able to do it had they managed to take Moscow and ‘defeat’ the Soviets? How would they disarm the population…especially if they were wacking large numbers of them? Why would they remain disorganized indefinitely in the face of that kind of policy? And the Germans only had more bullets than there were Russians if the Russians lined up to be wacked nice and neat. In real life of course they wouldn’t. Hell, even if the Germans did the smart thing and managed to win over a large portion of the Russian population (something they COULD have done, but didn’t actually do in that pesky real life thing), they STILL would have had problems with revolts by the displaced communists. And this was just in Russia. Without a massive buy in by the local populations their empire would have imploded long before it economically collapsed. Your assertion that they would simply kill a lot of people just doesn’t work in real life…because by and large majority populations don’t willingly and meekly walk to the slaughter. [QUOTE=BrainGlutton] They would simply send killing-squads to each village, one after another, and issue a decree that any non-German spotted on “pacified” territory should be shot on sight. [/QUOTE] Even if the population would just wait patiently for the Germans to get around to wacking them, even if there was no communications between villages to warn of impending wackage ( :dubious: ), there weren’t enough Germans in the world to go to every village, town and city to do this…even if we are talking about just in Russia and not in the wider world. Your assertion is unrealistic…not least because the Russians wouldn’t have been sitting on their butts waiting for the Germans to wander in and shoot them. In real life they fought back as partisan groups and made the Germans life hell. Why do you suppose this would stop? [QUOTE=BrainGlutton] Killing them is simple. [/QUOTE] Not on the scales we are talking about. Do you have any idea how many Russians there were? Stalin had the all time record for wacking folks and IIRC he only managed to kill 40-50 million over the course of decades of trying…and in pretty much complete control of a more or less willing population (i.e. he had a buy in for the majority of Russians). Seriously…your speculations bear no relation to reality on this. -XT ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/27 "2007-11-25T04:27:43Z")
> [@](#): > > First, I’d like to know if “rich men all over the world” really tended to sympathize with the Nazi economic system. If this is true, I’d really like to know why. Who exactly was “rich” in Nazi Germany? I was under the impression that it was for all intents and purposes a socialist system, and that Nazi leadership were the only rich people in Germany. The Nazis were never really socialists. They just put it in their party’s name because socialism was a popular idea with voters back in the twenties and thirties. Hitler and the Nazis cut deals early on with German business interests - the Nazis would keep the factory workers in line and the factory owners would support the Nazi party. ---
**Author:** ![kellner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c2a13f/32.png) [@kellner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kellner)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/28 "2007-11-25T04:51:07Z")
[QUOTE=Mosier] If this is true, I’d really like to know why. [/QUOTE] There has never been a time in German history when the gap between the rich and the poor grew more than during the Third Reich. At least economically those were very good times for German industrialists. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/29 "2007-11-25T05:01:47Z")
[QUOTE=xtisme] Well, you know, in real life they weren’t able to do this. Why do you suppose they would have been able to do it had they managed to take Moscow and ‘defeat’ the Soviets? How would they disarm the population…especially if they were wacking large numbers of them? Why would they remain disorganized indefinitely in the face of that kind of policy? [/QUOTE] I can’t agree with you on this. The Soviets held out because they were still being supported from the rear, and still had an organized chain of command. Had the Germans managed to break that, they could have scattered the population and slaughtered them had they chose to. There are plenty of examples of this kind of genocide in history. Once the coordinated fighting capability of one side breaks down, it’s at mercy of the other. Now, if you’d said the Soviet people couldn’t be conquered and pacified, that’s another matter. But slaughtered outright? I don’t see why not. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/30 "2007-11-25T05:08:06Z")
[QUOTE=kellner] There has never been a time in German history when the gap between the rich and the poor grew more than during the Third Reich. At least economically those were very good times for German industrialists. [/QUOTE] The same can be said of communist Russia though, right? There were plenty of superrich people in Russia, but they were all high ranking party leadership (which I assume was the same in Nazi Germany). Nobody is claiming that the rich tended to sympathize with communists, though. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/31 "2007-11-25T05:42:56Z")
XT, I also have to disagree with your last post. The Nazis demonstrated that they weren’t just talking about eliminating populations they didn’t like - they were seriously planning to do it. They set up and carried out a program to kill over twelve million people. Once you’ve killed that many people, killing off a hundred million or two hundred million is just an expansion of an existing program. It might have taken the Nazis fifty years or so but they probably would have killed off all of the targetted people in whatever area they controlled. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 5:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/32 "2007-11-25T05:48:57Z")
> [@](#): > > The same can be said of communist Russia though, right? There were plenty of superrich people in Russia, but they were all high ranking party leadership (which I assume was the same in Nazi Germany). Nobody is claiming that the rich tended to sympathize with communists, though. They were no “superrich” people in the Soviet Union. High ranking government officials certainly had more privileges then the average Soviet citizen but the property they owned would be more comparable to successful American banker or lawyer not to a billionaire. ---
**Author:** ![treis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bc79bd/32.png) [@treis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/treis)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/33 "2007-11-25T07:19:51Z")
[QUOTE=kellner] There has never been a time in German history when the gap between the rich and the poor grew more than during the Third Reich. At least economically those were very good times for German industrialists. [/QUOTE] Do you have a cite for this? ---
**Author:** ![Frank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Frank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frank)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/34 "2007-11-25T14:22:41Z")
[QUOTE=Little Nemo] The Nazis were never really socialists. They just put it in their party’s name because socialism was a popular idea with voters back in the twenties and thirties. [/QUOTE] No, it started as a socialist party. Your points about Hitler’s moves are correct, but even then there was a very influential wing of the party wondering when the socialist stuff was going to start. After the Rohm purge, that wing of the party was suddenly of no influence any more. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/35 "2007-11-25T15:04:05Z")
I think Germany would have collapsed with hyperinflation. The Nazis paid for the war by issuing bonds, which the people HAD to buy. Meanwhile, consumption was kept down because everthing was rationed. Despite their efficiency, the nazi war economy was mismanaged, and only the theft of materiel from conquered nations kept the show going. ---
**Author:** ![Jinx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c6cbf5/32.png) [@Jinx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jinx)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/36 "2007-11-25T16:12:56Z")
It vill vork, or ve have vays ov making it vork. Either dat, or ve vill shoot voo! ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/37 "2007-11-25T16:57:45Z")
[QUOTE=Frank] No, it started as a socialist party. Your points about Hitler’s moves are correct, but even then there was a very influential wing of the party wondering when the socialist stuff was going to start. After the Rohm purge, that wing of the party was suddenly of no influence any more. [/QUOTE] That wing was (and is now, among neo-Nazis) known as [Strasserism.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism) ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/38 "2007-11-25T18:23:07Z")
> [@](#): > > No, it started as a socialist party. Your points about Hitler’s moves are correct, but even then there was a very influential wing of the party wondering when the socialist stuff was going to start. After the Rohm purge, that wing of the party was suddenly of no influence any more. Even back in the very beginning, before Hitler joined and Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer were still running the party, the socialism was mostly a front. Bavarian businessmen slipped Nazi leaders money so they’d talk more about Jews and foreigners rather than strikes and unions. The socialists were in the party but they weren’t allowed to set the agenda. The businessmen figured they could use the Nazi party to control the workers. But after Hitler took over, he figured he could use the Nazi party to control the workers and the businessmen. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/39 "2007-11-25T19:35:34Z")
[QUOTE=Little Nemo] The Nazis were never really socialists. [/QUOTE] Well, no, they were **National Socialists** , which makes sense if you’re a Nazi. National Socialism is all about the survival of the race; it’s collectivist in a sense, since it emphasizes race-survival, which is an inherently collective effort. However, it rejects the underlying class-based view of communism, which is by definition not restricted to a particular race. Nazis were neither capitalist nor socialist in the sense we generally mean those terms today; it’s a fallacy of the false dillemma to try to categorize Nazis along that particular one-dimensional continuum. Hitler and his followers despised both Communism and capitalism as it existed in 1932 because both were obstacles to the central purpose of Nazism; survival and supremacy of the German race. The fact that the Nazis received support from businessmen is simply a product of circumstance - at the time, a fascist party looked like a better option than a communist party, and anyway big businesses giving money to powerful politicians has been a common protection racket pretty much since the invention of civilization. There’s nothing about Nazism that was particularly protective of big business in general or any big business in particular, or that put any stock (ha!) into protecting private ownership or commerce rights. Such things could be, and were, put aside whenever it was convenient to the Nazis to do so. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2007, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508/40 "2007-11-25T23:47:52Z")
[QUOTE=Mosier] First, I’d like to know if “rich men all over the world” really tended to sympathize with the Nazi economic system. [/QUOTE] Orwell was speaking of Fascism in general, and had some grounds for his perception. Also from “The Lion and the Unicorn”: > [@](#): > > It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and looking at them merely from a liberal, NEGATIVE standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists. But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from the outside. > > They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns—by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they MUST be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the ‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties. > > The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come to an agreement with Hitler. But—and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense of national solidarity, comes in—they could only do so by breaking up the Empire and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing speeches about ‘the duty of loyalty to our conquerors’ are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do anything but make the worst of both worlds. It is well known, by the way, that Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer, at least until Hitler went to war with the U.S. (To be fair, he did not fully understand the nature of Nazism. [At age 80, shown a film about the concentration camps, he reportedly had a heard attack.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_ford#Dearborn_Independent)) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hitler-had-won-wwii-would-the-nazi-economic-system-have-worked-in-the-long-run/427508.md?page=3)