A "Napoleanic" Third Reich

They already had an empire before WWI. They _lost_ an empire in WWI. Surely there might be a lesson there?

Sure; don't lose.

Somebody looking at the basic economic figures of 1935 with a cold eye should be able to see what was evident: that Germany was faring quite as well as France, _without_ an empire. Once you add Austria, which admittedly a sane-imperialistic Germany might well consider within its own grasp, that becomes even more evident.

But Germany was larger and had a larger industrial base; it should be doing better than them. Meanwhile, when the Depression hit, France, Britain, and America jacked up tariffs, shutting Germany out of markets. Clearly it needs an empire as well.
 
Sure; don't lose.
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The classic solution, you don't get ham and eggs, you go and demand double ham and eggs. It's human nature the end of the day.

But Germany was larger and had a larger industrial base; it should be doing better than them. Meanwhile, when the Depression hit, France, Britain, and America jacked up tariffs, shutting Germany out of markets. Clearly it needs an empire as well.

You both have a point, but German grand strategy in the first half of the twentieth century is very circular - like the way their main way of avoiding two front wars seems to be to start them.

Fundamentally though Germany has a grand strategy that, whilst it has a logic, serves the needs of an aristocratic military caste and, through protectionism, economic vested interests.
 
German grand strategy in the first half of the twentieth century is very circular

Circular, that's what I said. We need to embark in wars of aggression because we need not to import food from overseas, and we need not to import food because our enemies' navies will block the imports, and those navies will be our enemies because we will embark in wars of aggression.

Fundamentally though Germany has a grand strategy that, whilst it has a logic, serves the needs of an aristocratic military caste and, through protectionism, economic vested interests.

Yeah.
 
Sure; don't lose.



But Germany was larger and had a larger industrial base; it should be doing better than them. Meanwhile, when the Depression hit, France, Britain, and America jacked up tariffs, shutting Germany out of markets. Clearly it needs an empire as well.

What about: don't start?

As to doing better than France and Britain, Germany was indeed going to do better at least than France. Not throwing money down the gun barrels would have helped.

Britain is another kettle of fish because, very interestingly, at the time when Germany (and Italy) decided they needed an empire, Britain decided it did not need one. While there are those who claim and complain that it was WWII that lost Britain its Empire, actually by the 1930 it was no longer the "British Empire". It was the "British Commonwealth and Empire". Places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa were no longer provinces of an empire. The India Act was passed and it provided for independence, with Commonwealth-member status, for India too. This process had started and there would be no turning back.

Both in the German and the Italian examples, the actual case for the need of an empire is difficult to support by cold-eyed economic reasoning. They both wanted an empire because they wanted an empire, not because it would make sense from the economic POV. National prestige (and personal prestige especially in the case of Mussolini), vindication after the WWI defeat, nationalistic motives, racist madness. Those were the reasons.
 
Depends on the colony. If they have valuable resources, like oil, diamonds or uranium, they can pay off, if it's just a patch of dirt and jungle, then no.
 
True enough, colonies actually don't pay off. You have them for the prestige.

I said "difficult" in the actual cases at hand. Not impossible in all cases, as Adm. Canaris pointed out. Valuable raw materials are what he mentioned. I could add luxury consumer goods (Do you happen to drink coffee, tea? Do you smoke? Do you use spices? All of those mostly came from colonies for most of history). There's also a nice trade possibility: the natives send you cotton, you work it, and sell them cotton shirts. IOW, they also provide you with a controlled market.
The Italian case I made stands on the basis of what the Italians knew at the time. If you use hindsight, then they should have clung to Libya for dear life, considering that under the sand there was oil.
 
I said "difficult" in the actual cases at hand. Not impossible in all cases, as Adm. Canaris pointed out. Valuable raw materials are what he mentioned. I could add luxury consumer goods (Do you happen to drink coffee, tea? Do you smoke? Do you use spices? All of those mostly came from colonies for most of history). There's also a nice trade possibility: the natives send you cotton, you work it, and sell them cotton shirts. IOW, they also provide you with a controlled market.
The Italian case I made stands on the basis of what the Italians knew at the time. If you use hindsight, then they should have clung to Libya for dear life, considering that under the sand there was oil.

For the most part they didn't, there are usually exceptions in most things.
 
The importance of the foreign volunteers serving the Germans is often greatly overestimated.

For starters, many of the ethnic SS "Divisions" were divisions only in name, they never exceeded regimental strength, and some of them were even smaller.

Secondly, they were nowhere near comparable to the average German infantry units, let alone the lower-numbered large SS units (which by late war were even better equipped than the average Heer Panzer or Panzergrenadier Division). Many of them were poorly equipped and poorly trained, second or third rate units actually. They did come in handy for anti-partisan duties, though that might well become a chicken-egg question; these units were useless as true frontline combat units against regular enemy troops. There were exceptions; a few ethnic SS units had actual regular-combat value. But this was the rule.

Had the Germans recruited more of these men, of course they would have incurred in the obvious difficulty: they were already short on equipment for their own Heer units. Additionally, the foreign manpower pools that had given mid-numbered SS Divisions of some actual frontline combat usefulness had been used; further recruitment drives would have had to rely on those manpower pools that provided the questionable units. So the Germans would have had more second or third rate foot regiments, and they would have still needed to feed, pay, train, arm, clothe and equip them – out of an ever-decreasing resource pool.

Which brings up the usual issue about recruitment drives in the Ukraine and other conquered territories of the USSR. The Germans could have been nicer to Ukrainan city-dwellers. That would have meant, for starters, feeding them. But the regular German Heer units, after 1941, were largely expected to live off the land; the war in the East should have been, ideally, a self-sustaining effort when it came to foodstuffs. Had the Germans chosen to feed the Ukrainan cities, they would have been short on grains (for both men and horses), local transportation means (read horses, wagons and carts) and even strategic transportation means (read rail capacity and rolling stock) which they historically largely sucked up and used to keep their army going. Simultaneously, the German civilian population also was not facing the rationing hardships it would have faced, had food not been stolen from somebody else's farmlands and dinner tables.

The Germans did not choose to largely starve the "superfluous eaters" in Ukraine, and Poland, and Russia etc. simply because they were led by evil racists. One can imagine their leaders being simply mad conquest-seeking imperialists, the problem remains that if they treat their conquered territories nicer, then the pace of their further conquests will not be the one we saw in OTL. And stomachs will grumble back in Berlin too.


With the locals being much more friendly the Germans could quickly and easily change the gauge on the railroads and thus far less food gets spoiled. You also are going to have more agricultural production in the former USSR which can be either sold to the Germans or taken in as taxes by them without the mass starvation you envision.
 
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