How did Hitler build his war machine?
From Russia to the United States, the propaganda that one person can bring in fascism is self destructive and leads to a military - industrial state. Like fascism.
Photo: Laying of the foundation stone for the new Reichsbank building in Berlin. Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler attends the laying of the foundation stone with Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and the directors of the Reichsbank, May 5, 1934
The world was so traumatized by the deaths of 70 million people in World War 2 that in the 21st century using the “Hitler word” could still cause people to rally against leaders. around the globe.
At the end of WW 2, it was decided to place the blame of the war on Hitler as if one mad man had hypnotized his country. A halfhearted attempt at de-Nazification happened but the German people were absolved of their part in the war. Stalinists added capitalist companies to the mix (while they hid their own collaboration with Hitler) but the mad man concept became the way to welcome Germany into the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
The one mad man concept would be used in Vietnam against Ho Chi Minh, the first Gulf War against Saddam, in Haiti to overthrow the government, across Latin America. In Latin America, it was decided a military government was preferable to leaders elected in fair elections. Think about that for a moment. To stop fascism, bring in a military government and then ban elections and political parties.
If our leaders had kept track of the truth instead of the two prevailing propaganda beliefs- American business backed Hitler who was a mad man or Hitler was a mad man would we have been so eager to go to war everywhere? From universities to think tanks, no one asked, how did Hitler build his war machine? The treaty of Versailles had made it so Germany could not rebuild its military. The economy was in shambles as Germany was forced to pay all nations that had been involved in the war. Industry had shut down. Before any company could invest in Germany, which was not illegal in the 1930’s, before any bank could invest, there had to be an industry to invest in. When Hitler came to power, there wasn’t. The only people outside of the Nazi’s who backed Hitler, were the socialists who believed Hitler’s form of socialism was preferable to the reformist Social Democrats.
Even Stalin would support the National Socialists German Workers Party:
The faith in the nation is a matter for everyone, never a group, a class or an economic clique. The eternal must be distinguished from the temporal. Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must. Only the annihilation of a system of exploitation carries with it the core of the rebirth of our people.
We are nationalists because as Germans, we love Germany. Because we love Germany, we want to preserve it and fight against those who would destroy it. If a Communist shouts "Down with nationalism!", he means the hypocritical bourgeois patriotism that sees the economy only as a system of slavery. If we make clear to the man of the left that nationalism and capitalism, that is the affirmation of the Fatherland and the misuse of its resources, have nothing to do with each other, indeed that they go together like fire and water, then even as a socialist he will come to affirm the nation, which he will want to conquer.
That is our real task as National Socialists. We were the first to recognize the connections, and the first to begin the struggle. Because we are socialists we have felt the deepest blessings of the nation, and because we are nationalists we want to promote socialist justice in a new Germany.
A young fatherland will rise when the socialist front is firm.
Socialism will become reality when the Fatherland is free.
Why Are We Socialists?
We are socialists because we see in socialism, that is the union of all citizens, the only chance to maintain our racial inheritance and to regain our political freedom and renew our German state.
Socialism is the doctrine of liberation for the working class. It promotes the rise of the fourth class and its incorporation in the political organism of our Fatherland, and is inextricably bound to breaking the present slavery and regaining German freedom. Socialism, therefore, is not merely a matter of the oppressed class, but a matter for everyone, for freeing the German people from slavery is the goal of contemporary policy. Socialism gains its true form only through a total fighting brotherhood with the forward-striving energies of a newly awakened nationalism. Without nationalism it is nothing, a phantom, a mere theory, a castle in the sky, a book. With it it is everything, the future, freedom, the fatherland!
The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism's nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism was to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence. An understanding of both these facts leads us to a new sense of socialism, which sees its nature as nationalistic, state-building, liberating and constructive.
The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission
NATIONAL SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY
The rhetoric, which many leftists and progressives would still support, scared the military and made industrialists nervous. Hitler was not getting help from them. So how was he able to do it? To get around the costs of World War 1? To re-build industry?
He created a fake currency. Think bitcoin but backed by the government, in secret. With nothing to back it up, he used these IOU’s to rebuild Germany. It was the biggest ponzi scheme of all time. As this fake currency rebuilt industry it also filled the coffers of the military. Workers could be German or slave labor from conquered nations. Those nations could be plundered for food, natural resources and Germany would become a war based country. The National Socialist dream, of eternal war, was built on a fake economy blended into industrialism and slave labor. And death.
These are the real conditions for fascism. No mad man needed.
There is only one documentary I know of about this subject. It is superb. Here are the 2 parts:
June 1940: Hitler launches tanks and troops across Europe yet Germany is impoverished, has few raw materials, and no oil or currency. How did the Nazis manage to set off the cataclysm of WWII with little money and a weak economy? Following World War I, Germany faces a period of poverty. With industrial production at its lowest since their industrial revolution, the Nazi party dreams of setting the country back on a path to greatness through total war. Their first mission is to fund this goal.
The resounding German victories of 1940 hid a beleaguered economy. Everything was in short supply: petrol, weapons, raw materials, food, and foreign currencies. They organised wide-scale looting in the countries they invaded. The Nazi war economy was dependent on theft and spoliation. It would progressively become an economy that relied on plunder. The assassination of Jewish populations, the horrifying project central to National Socialism, remained a priority, but that had to be adjusted to take food and labour shortages into account. The Nazis managed to organise their deadly ideological obsessions around their need to produce weapons. The Nazis calculated, planned, and transformed human beings into objects they could exploit at will. Industrial production was adapted. Death became part of the equation. This strong alliance between the regime's worst elements and the weapons industry's engineers shaped a fearsome economic system that allowed the Nazi regime to go on fighting until the country's collapse.
Behind the paywall: The Hidden Story of Nazi Drug Abuse | Blitzed: Nazis On Drugs
In 1938 a drug called Pervitin was created in Nazi Germany. This drug was distributed to German soldiers during the course of WW2 and Hitler was no exception to these drug highs receiving drug cocktails from his personal physical Theodor Morell. This film explores the use of drugs in WW2 and looks at the potential effects that drugs could have had on Hitler, soldiers and the war itself.
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