For a start, Enigma wasn’t a Nazi-era idea. They were patented in 1928 and first introduced into the German military in 1929.
Nor was the basic design remotely secret. Anybody could read the patent and some of the commercial versions of the machines were sold abroad - William Friedman, the doyen of American cryptographers, even bought one at that stage.
I fear that “only after capturing one” likely betrays a reliance on the Hollywood version of events. In practice, Bletchley could read at least some Enigma traffic from April 1940. While there remained challenges and interruptions, the bottom line is that the German upgrades introduced at the start of the war mainly only really remained secure for little more than the duration of the Phoney War.
That acheivement did partially depend on the Poles getting their hands on a military Enigma, though their analytical progress was far more crucial to the British success than their physically obtaining an example of a machine. Even if nicking the machine had been more important, it would hardly have been a brilliant example of Nazi cleverness to have invested so heavily and widely in a system that was so vulnerable to one bit of kit going astray.
In the case of Enigma, the main decision that was taken by the Nazi regime was to continue to basically trust the technology they’d inhereted. And that was a mistake.
I never said the V-2 wasn’t more advanced than anything Goddard came up with. I said that it was basically next generation improvements on Goddard’s - and others mainly non-Nazi’s- design. I stand by that - and that is to the OP and why I make that point again now - not to point out where you misquote me.
Bluntly put, I’m reading your responses, including this one, and getting an impression of the point that you are wanting to make. Not making well, but trying to. It may be an unattractive point, but one you are free to express.
No, the Nazis were not morally equal to the Allies and just the victims of bad press because they lost the war. They are “seen as attempting genocide” because that is what they did. Jews and Romani were exterminated as a stated goal. Others, gays, the mentally ill and the handicapped, intellectuals, were murdered too. These are cold facts. The Nazi party was indeed very “clever” at exploiting the evil that we are all capable of, and was very accomplished at exploiting technological advances in pursuit of its goal. They killed off (often literally) most of the intellectual and artistic heritage that Germany had produced prior to its rise and managed to exploit some of the brilliant minds that were left to produce technology that included some very clever ideas. Other world cultures responded with very clever ideas too. They took an extant intellectual powerhouse of a culture and destroyed everything clever about it except for a few clever engineers. A few bright ideas for technologies created by those educated before the Nazis came into power hardly supports the claim of Nazi superiority in “cleverness.”
You want “cleverness” you do not go to a totalitarian fascist state. Any cleverness that was there was a product of the period that preceded it. Clever ideas generally result most when you have intellectual freedoms and exposure to a wide variety of ideas of various sorts.
Thanks for Dseid joining me in some form of debate, admittedly from a very sneery POV.
I didn’t say I was attracted to their cleverness, but Oh! the moral outrage that people jumped on when I moved towards any kind of vagueness about the holocaust. I can feel you all about to pounce should I enter any kind of denial.
I disagree entirely that a totalitarian state is not the place for cleverness. I would suggest that the Roman Empire was an incredibly inventive place. Ancient Greece was hardly a hotbed of democracy for the common people. I think you will also find that the British moments of brilliance were during the time when women couldn’t even vote - so don’t even try that one.
Take your blinkers off people, and realise that perhaps, just perhaps, we have been given a jaundiced view of the Nazi’s as a stupid goosestepping master race crushing all before them. I wonder how the recent US led wars will be seen in a few decades.
Germany was the technologically most advanced country in the world from at least 1890 to 1920. During most of the nineteenth century, it was already the most advanced country in scholarship in most academic fields. The U.K. had been the leader in the industrial revolution from the mid-eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. Interestingly, because Germany was the second country to join the industrial revolution, it was able to use slightly better technology, and because of that it would have probably been more technologically advanced by the late nineteenth century anyway.
There was something else going on though. The U.K. had a huge empire to rely on, and it got lazy. It didn’t make as many technological breakthroughs as Germany or the U.S. because it was so easy to ship all the raw products it needed from the colonies. By the beginning of the twentieth century, not only was Germany a more technologically advanced country than the U.K., the U.S. had also passed it. The U.S. began to advance on Germany, and in the 1920’s and 1930’s, it passed Germany in technology and scholarship in general. It seems odd to say that the Great Depression was the period when the U.S. first passed other countries in technology, but remember that the Great Depression was worldwide and was most noticeable in the most technologically advanced countries.
Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s was relying on its long history of technological advances (over at least the century before that) and was able to put up a good fight despite driving many of its top scientists out of the country and despite stupid policies that didn’t use its technology well.
Nobody’s “pouncing” on you. You asked a question: Were the Nazis the cleverest people ever? Several people have answered that question quite convincingly in the negative. The Nazis were not only not the cleverest people, they were pretty dumb. At most they capitalized on a German industrial/academic/engineering base that was already in place when they rose to power, and had been around since the 19th century if not earlier. You don’t seem to be reading those posts.
So you equate some portion of the population not having the vote to being a totalitarian state? That’s certainly one of the oddest definitions of totalitarianism I’ve ever heard. And of course, if you define it that way then virtually all innovation before the early twentieth century was accomplished by totalitarian societies.
If this is not your definition of totalitarianism, then perhaps you should state what it is exactly.
From Merriam-Webster:
By this definition, neither the British Empire, nor most of the ancient Greek city-states, were totalitarian, and hence are irrelevant to this discussion.
Yes, “vagueness about the holocaust” tends to be recieved poorly by most other than Mel Gibson’s Dad. There are BBs that would recieve you well though. Seek and ye shall find.
Well, as to the latter statement, yes, that does seem to be your point. That claim that the Nazis have just been given a bum rap. “Springtime for Hitler” anyone?
As to the first, well, that is an interesting subject. Those Greeks actually invented democracy you know. Was it democracy by today’s standards? No. But compared to other cultures of the time …
Romans? Created less than absorbed. That said, they often allowed conquered cultures a fair amount of cultural independence and freedom of thought, so long as they knew their place. And by that absorbtion they brought a wide variety of cultural ideas in contact with each other.
Maybe though you’d like to create a new thread based on your current premise that totalitarian states,like the Nazis, foster creative thought and “cleverness”?
Are you willing me to deny the holocaust? i have no kneel down and place my rump in the air in this forum thank you very much. All I have said so far is “attempted genocide” and you’re all foaming at the mouth.
Ok, I didn’t say anything about creative thought though.
Isn’t “stupid master race” some sort of contradiction in terms?
This claim that the Nazis would be regarded as brilliant if they hadn’t lost the war overlooks what happened with one of the victors - Soviet Russia. The Soviets, despite their totalitarian “organization” and massive propaganda machine were (and still are) seen today as not especially clever compared to the rest of the world, and has having squandered some of their creative and technological potential due to fear and political dogma. And even when the Communists were riding high, no one forgot their role in creating atrocious mass murder.
BY the way, one item you forgot in your initial list was German cleverness in utilizing technology to create synthetic gasoline. Although I don’t know that this innovation can be specially credited to Nazis, and it certainly wasn’t enough later in the war when gasoline shortages crippled the military effort. It isn’t very clever to attempt to conquer the world when you haven’t made allowances for your fuel tanks running dry.
You’ll find goose-stepping very hard in that position.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Well, the sanitation was a big deal, but the medicine and education and public order was more Greek. The roads and fresh water system certainly counts, as does the hypocaust… but really, what major inventions came out of the roman era?
I suppose quite a lot of organizational inventions… the Roman Army was a brilliant thing.
