Ghost Cities of the Reich
- Thread starter varyar
- Start date
Very well done! An excellent take on the long-term fate of the Reich's economy. I was also going to complement you on your journalistic writing style, but then I spoiled it by actually reading the article and realizing how much of it you'd based it off the original work.
Even more interesting, however, is that what you've described, and others have attributed to the insane economic policies of the Reich, is going on in China now. They're in for a bubble burst the likes of which the world has never seen.
Even more interesting, however, is that what you've described, and others have attributed to the insane economic policies of the Reich, is going on in China now. They're in for a bubble burst the likes of which the world has never seen.
Oh boy. Is it time to start buying gold?
Of course, if China's economy sours, it might lead to manufacturing jobs being re-established in other countries who'd lost them to China in the first place. Things might be *better* in other countries, not worse.
(For certain values of better. Consumer goods would be more expensive, but more people would have jobs.)
Just in case it's not clear, click the link in the OP. 75% (at least) is verbatim from the documentary transcript. I changed the names and added a few lines here and there to ground it in the Third Reich - the different effect is startling, isn't it?
Sorry if there's any confusion. Don't take away the kudos, I beg you!
Sorry if there's any confusion. Don't take away the kudos, I beg you!
That post the TL is based on is worrying. There's mounting evidence that the Chinese miracle is a colossal mirage, the only questions are when will it all collapse and what will be the trigger for it.
But that's another story!
But that's another story!
Just in case it's not clear, click the link in the OP. 75% (at least) is verbatim from the documentary transcript. I changed the names and added a few lines here and there to ground it in the Third Reich - the different effect is startling, isn't it?
Sorry if there's any confusion. Don't take away the kudos, I beg you!
In a way, that makes it even more creepy...if you think about it, Mao was responsible for several times more deaths than Hitler was, upwards of 25 million people. He virtually wiped out large sections of his country's intelligensia and what was left of its middle class, and destroyed countless cultural monuments...and now, we have fully normalized relations with China while they still have Mao's face everywhere.
As interesting as Hashima is, I think its a relatively poor example. Hasima exists sorely due to a japanese shortfall of coal, hence its logical that a city would emerge inorder to extract one of the few rich sources of coal within Japan's territorial borders.
A victorious Reich is faced with a very different set of circumstances. They are trying to reenact hitler's vision of a lebensraum, by creating a German frontier for future colonization. European Russia was to be depopulated for the sake of largely agrarian German settlers. The economic problems of this are obvious. Agricultural is already becoming far less labor intensive, most German's lack the knowledge for farming the Ukrainian steppe, and the costs of wiping out the Slavic population while colonizing it with repatriated Germans would be astronomical.
Rather than a series of Hashima's, you would be left with centrally planned ghost cities. Meant for settler populations far larger than what emerged, they would be saddled with idle apartment blocks, uncompetitive light industry, and overbuilt infrastructure. While there intention would be to permanently bind the "Aryan" race to eastern Europe, they would be inhabited by a skeletal crew of colonists, administrators, soldiers, and subject peoples while the countryside is left in ruins.
That being said, you work corresponds to this perfectly. I'm mostly nitpicking.
Just in case it's not clear, click the link in the OP. 75% (at least) is verbatim from the documentary transcript. I changed the names and added a few lines here and there to ground it in the Third Reich - the different effect is startling, isn't it?
Sorry if there's any confusion. Don't take away the kudos, I beg you!
Oh. I thought maybe you copied it from soc.history or whatever that other site was.
I'll need to go back and edit the post.
If you lump the casualties of Barbarossa in with the death-camps, that gets you to 38 million.
I've heard figures for Mao as high as 100 million, but I don't think those numbers are accurate.
Sorry for the confusion!
(As I remember it, the soc.history.what-if post was about the settlers themselves.)