this is a little bit vague but I recall reading a story, very possibly apocryphal, regarding World War II. I’ve seen it used as a parable but all my googling I can’t find reference to the actual story nor its source. It goes something like this.
“In 1945, when the Red Army was about to overrun [city in East Prussia or Berlin] a clerk in a local factory was busy calculating the ball bearing requirement for the Reich for 1947.”
Again, I’ve no idea if there’s a kernel of truth in the story, but if there is I’d love to know it and if there isn’t I’d like to source the original version of the story and perhaps where it was first published. I hope this makes sense.
Thanks Andy for the swift reply. I should have made clear in the OP, though in my mind it was ball bearing allowance or whatever, I think the point of the parable aspect was that it was something mundane/administrative, so that the story might as well have had it be “widget production”.
Fair enough - I was just startled to learn that ball bearings were a critical strategic resource (it does make sense). The point of the story is that planners can be heads-down in the details while the house is in flames, right?
There’s an episode of Hogan’s Heroes about the prisoners getting a job at the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt. The first link below talks about the episode. The second link below is the IMDb entry on the episode (“Swing Shift”, which is season 2, episode 21). It says that the plant makes cannons. The third link is to a YouTube clip from that episode. There may be other such clips on YouTube:
It wouldn’t have been surprising for Nazis to combine delusion and following orders. Maybe someone made up that story to illustrate it. If infantrymen and tank repairmen kept doing their jobs even when it was obvious Germany was going to lose, why not factory workers and planners?
As the Red Army was advancing onto German territory, anyone who could was fleeing. Especially anyone involved with manufacturing and the likely use of slave labor.
In the spirit of the OP and using mundane and pointless behavior to hide from the real life horror surrounding, Hitler would retreat into going over his plans for the construction of a Greater Berlin even as the Soviets were closing in on his bunker.
I don’t see what’s remarkable about it. There had to be factories making ball bearings, and there had to be clerks involved in running those factories, and the people running a factory have to be able to anticipated and plan around demand in the near future. That guy was worrying about 1947 ball bearing demand because that was his job.
There’s an episode of Hogan’s Heroes about the prisoners getting a job at the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt. The first link below talks about the episode. The second link below is the IMDb entry on the episode (“Swing Shift”, which is season 2, episode 21). It says that the plant makes cannons. The third link is to a YouTube clip from that episode. There may be other such clips on YouTube:
I’m working on planning for cars that will not go into production for two years. Even though my company hasn’t produced a car in almost two months and the ones on the lot are not moving. I am hopeful that the tide will turn and the industry will get back on it’s feet.
I’m sure the German ball bearing guy was probably thinking the same thing. I don’t have control of big pictures future, but I do have control of my little part of it. Just in case I should be prepared with my part or my suppliers might decide to shoot me.
And what happens if a Nazi counterattack drives the Allies away? Or a superweapon? You can’t say, “Oh, we didn’t figure we’d still be fighting, so we didn’t calculate it” (especially to Nazis).
It’s the same reason the military had plans to invade Canada (in that case, it’s also good for training). If the president says, “We’re invading Canada, what are our plans?” you can’t say, “They don’t exist.”
A lot of Germans fled the advancing Red Army. But not everyone who could, did. A lot of Germans remained at their posts until the very end. In fact, a whole country full of them - the former People’s Democratic Republic of Germany was populated pretty much entirely by Germans who didn’t flee the Red Army.
People absolutely were hanged for “being absent from an office”. One of the reasons a lot of Germans remained at their posts until the bitter end was that there were roving SS and Gestapo squads that were hanging and shooting “deserters” and “defeatists” left and right.
As other posters have pointed out, if you have a job in country ruled by a capricious, violent, fascist dictatorship, they most rational course of action is to keep your head down and do your job, even if you rationally think the job itself is pointless.
Sounds like a far less evocative version of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” Prior to being called to their lifeboat stations, I’m sure there were people doing that too. Eventually, when the Red Army was actually in the city, that clerk would have been summarily drafted into the Volkssturm and erecting barricades instead of counting ball bearings. Most people under authority (like on a ship or in a dictatorship) do what they were last told they should be doing until someone tells them to do otherwise.
The thing is, the wheels started to come off the Wehrmacht in the summer/fall of 1944, but didn’t really start coming off the German economy until a little later- probably January/February 1945. At the start of that period, the Russians were in the middle of Poland, and the Western Allies were lined up along the German border, but hadn’t actually crossed into Germany in any significant fashion.
But… starting in mid-January, the Russians attacked and came within about 50 miles of Berlin by the end of February, where they sat until their final push in the latter half of April and early May to capture Berlin. Meanwhile, the Western Allies crossed the Rhine and attacked eastward starting in early April. Meanwhile the Combined Bomber Offensive started prioritizing coal and other transportation-related targets in about November 1944, with even stronger emphasis in about January 1945.
So the wheels really started coming off within Germany starting in late January/early February I suspect, with the real collapsing starting in about mid-February.
So it’s conceivable that some minor bureaucrat in some city that wasn’t actually occupied until mid April might have actually been calculating such things as late as maybe February or so of 1945, assuming that somehow, Germany would pull through.
That would be the easiest job ever if he was keeping up with the daily news. Just write “0” for the number of ball bearings the Reich would need in 1947. Probably could update the 1946 projection as well.
