As it says in one of my links:
“Without bearings, most modern machinery would not exist. There would be no cars, no air conditioners, no washing machines, no blenders, no airplanes, no spreaders—nothing. Bearings are in almost every machine that has parts moving fast or under a heavy load.”
It’s not even clear that anyone working at a plant making ball bearings even knows what they are going to be used in.
Plus there’s the element that, even if they realize the job they’re doing is pointless, it’s still better than being on the front with the Russian army bearing down on you. I could see a lot of people staying at their post in such a case, even if they weren’t worried about being executed for desertion.
I’m late coming back to this. As some replies have pointed out, it is perfectly plausible that something like this may have happened but I was interested in its origins as a parable. It seems it is not as well known a parable as I had thought. The rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic analogy that Elmer J. Fudd supplied is close but I am not sure it captures the essence of “too busy being strategic to be tactical” or whatever you might call the point of my half-recalled parable! Thanks everyone for your input.
from Elmer_J.Fudd, post:18, topic:85375Sounds 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 Russians don’t need the clerk, though (they might need the guy who knows how to maintain the machine, but not the clerk)
If indeed it actually happened, I’m guessing that it was most likely one of those “What else are you going to do?” kind of situations.
I mean, in say… February of 1945, you might be sitting in say… Cottbus, doing your job and knowing that things are going to hell, and that the Russians are going to be there any day. But what are you going to do? Most people didn’t flee Germany proper, and at that point, they didn’t know about the impending partition of Germany either. So they probably just hunkered down and tried to ride it out. And I suspect if you were getting paychecks that were useful at that point, you’d still go in to work and do your thing, even if it was doing stuff that was patently absurd like calculating ball bearing requirements for 1947. Better a paycheck than not, right? And you didn’t have to worry too much about running afoul of SS squads and being shot either.
The movie Downfall, which from all I’ve read gets high marks for historical accuracy, showed government clerks in Berlin packing, destroying or refiling enormous quantities of paper even as Soviet guns could be heard in the distance. Low-level functionaries will typically keep doing what they’re supposed to be doing until told to stop, especially if they’re in fear of being killed by their bosses for stopping or abandoning their posts, as gdave noted.