Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Waffen-SS: Elite or Mass-Army?" video.
-
27
-
13
-
8
-
The army was under-sized for a country like Germany to begin with, and it was also always secretly planned that the army would expand one day - which it did. Germany had large amounts of men in paramilitary formations before the army began its expansion in 1935.
But the fast expansion was not easy, not even in peace time. The industry could not deliver all tanks the führer wanted so many of the new divisions lacked equipment. The theft of Czech weapons did help a little bit, but much problems remained.
And while the leadership and doctrine of the new army was excellent, so was there still much to wish for in other aspects. A large part of the German army's soldiers had no more than 2 months training when the war on Poland began.
This fast growth of an army would normally be unsustainable. Hitler wanted to grow his army and he was prepared to throw the German economy under the bus to do so. The costs were rising at unsustainable rates. All foreign currency reserves was being used up as Hitler used all dollars, pounds, krona, zlotys and what have you to pay for importing rare raw materials from other countries.... and when he would run out of money he would be unable to import anything.. not even oil to fuel tractors and machines, so of course was economists very worried.
And the industry wanted to increase exports to other countries, but Hitler said no to that, because he wanted all steel to be made for German tanks and battleships instead. So German trade balance was put on an unsustainable course.
Hitlers rapid expansion of the army created resource shortages everywhere, which caused prices to go up, so inflation became more and more of a problem. And meanwhile did Germany produce less things of economic value - so more money chased fewer goods - which is the definition of inflation.
But Hitler managed to conquer Europe before his country got high inflation and went bankrupt.
And he could steal oil supplies from other countries.
Hitler was also in an unique position when he got into power that allowed him to do his crazy military expansionism without pissing off the public opinion with his wasteful military spending.
When he took power in 1933, had Germany suffered hard from the hyperinflation in 1924 and the economic crash of the Great Depression 1930. So unemployment was high and people were starving and standard of living was low.
So there was large amounts of people that were unemployed and now could become soldiers or industrial workers for the industry. The German government did have it easy. If the German government would try to make the same huge expansion of its army today, then people would protest.
People would not want to leave their well paid jobs in the private sector to work for the military, and if you would want people to do so voluntarily, then you have to increase wages. And that means higher costs for the government and higher taxes - which would be unpopular.
The German population in 1933 did not have any jobs, so they were happy for every kind of job they could get, so they did instead become very happy when the army grew and needed manpower.
And the starving German people became happy that Hitler gave them a job with a wage that could allow them to feed themselves and their family, even if it wasn't the best well paid job in the world - People did not have high standards after all economic crashes.
But if Germany in year 2021 would try to expand its army and raise taxes, cut standards of living to allow an expansion of the army then it would make many persons very unhappy instead. And rationing would not be met with the same understanding by a people who is used to living a life in plenty.
So without the Great depression would Hitlers expansion of the army had been impossible. And without Hitlers conquests he would not have been able to expand his army so fast and keep it as large as he did.
4
-
3
-
3
-
2
-
2
-
I think that the nazi leadership wanted anyone who could do the job of killing innocent civilians with a smile on his face was perfect for the SS camp duty. Killing women and children is hard to do for most people, so many Einsatzgruppen men hated their job and fell victim to alcoholism or mental illness after all deeds they had done.
So to motivate people of taking the job as a death camp guard, they offered higher wages and a life without the dangers of dying at the Russian front. And the men in the Einsatzgruppen got lots of alcohol to make their job of shooting civilians easier. And criminals and thieves were preferred for this job. They lack of morals made it easier for them to kill people, and their lust for plunder could work as a motivation for doing this shitty job so they could steal clothes and jewelry from murdered victims. Criminals did also often get the job of dropping the buckets with poison gas into the gas chambers.
The problem of course was that criminals had a problem with discipline and many of them became mad after all painful memories of killing innocent people they had piled up. So they could no longer do their job. So the nazi leadership did send them to the front - where they hopefully would die. Their death would solve many problems for the nazi leadership - eye witnesses who had seen and knew too much about the holocaust would die and take all their secrets with them into their graves. So the punishment of suicidal front line duty for the guard crew that failed to stop the Sobibor prisoner uprising/escape, was basically just another example of killing two birds with one stone.
Eye witnesses were killed, while punishment also acted as an deterrent example for other death camp commanders for what would happen if they too failed to stop prisoners from fleeing.
The system of killing people did become more efficient as time passed. Gas was cheaper than bullets, and letting slaves empty the gas chambers and burn the bodies into ashes almost entirely dump all the workload on the prisoners, so that the nazi guards did rarely ever have to do any dirty work themselves.
So while the first nazi camps were guarded by fanatical nazis in the early years of Hitlers regime, would they later on become more guarded by teenagers and elderly men that often lacked fanatical political beliefs. The elderly grey haired guards gassed people too, but they were often kinder to the prisoners than nazi guards of the old kind. And the teenagers had a varied temperament, a few were kind, while others could be extremely cruel and they felt like it was cool to wear a military uniform so they tried to make a militaristic posture and trying to impress on their superiors by mistreating the jews.
Another thing that comes to mind about the holocaust is that much of it was done by men in their 30s. Reinhard Heydrich was only 38 when he died. Odilo Globocnik was also born the same year, and he organized "operation Reinhard" that killed of 98% of Poland's jewish population. Adolf Eichmann was only 35 years when he planned all railway transports that would transport millions of people to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Amon Göth (the monster in "Schindlers list")
was only 35 years old when he became commandant of a concentration camp.
To me this seems like those men were too old to be fighting at the front, and therefore took this job of committing crimes behind the front lines instead. Useless men who wished to be soldiers, but stayed behind the front line instead.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1