Miscellaneous >1900 (Alternate) History Thread
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Where did this idea come from, which I have begun to see repeated everywhere for some time now, according to which the entire historical biography of Speer is a lie and in reality he was more Nazi than Himmler? No one who claims this as a fact so proven beyond dispute cites any sources at all (except one who cited TNO). But I don't think that so many people use a video game mod as a documentary source. Nor do they give any reason why so many historians would have spent so much time repeating this lie for no clear reason. Google only referred me to a movie called Speer Goes To Hollywood but that's about it. I can't understand this.
'More Nazi than Himmler' might be a slight exaggeration, but that's splitting hairs - Speer was most definitely a devout Nazi. The myth of him as the 'good Nazi' has been known to be just that - a myth - for some time now. He claimed at Nuremberg that he didn't know about the Holocaust, only admitting under pressure that his factories ran on slave labour*, but he later admitted in a letter** that he did know about it, writing, "I was present as Himmler announced on October 6 1943 that all Jews would be killed."
* including slaves on the 'performance feeding' system (Leistunsernährung) which cut the rations of workers who
under-performed, leading to their malnutrition and hence more under-performance: a lethal vicious circle.
** See here for a news article about the letter: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/13/secondworldwar.kateconnolly
and here for the details of the letter from the auction site which sold it: https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/15230/lot/621/
The idea of Speer as the 'good Nazi' comes largely from what he said at Nuremberg and what he himself subsequently wrote whilst in prison in Spandau - stating in his books, including Inside the Third Reich, effectively that he was just an architect who didn't know about all the evil.under-performed, leading to their malnutrition and hence more under-performance: a lethal vicious circle.
** See here for a news article about the letter: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/13/secondworldwar.kateconnolly
and here for the details of the letter from the auction site which sold it: https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/15230/lot/621/
In The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Adam Tooze covers Speer in some detail and quite comprehensively debunks Speer's claims both to have engineered the production 'miracle' of 1942/43 and to have been ignorant of the evils of the Nazi regime. In particular, Chapter 17, titled 'Albert Speer - 'Miracle' Man,' deals with the production miracle and the end of part II of Chapter 18 gives details of Speer's attendance at the Posen meeting on 6 Oct 1943 where Himmler gave details of the 'Final Solution' - including a declaration that he and Speer would work together to 'clean out' the Jews from war production.
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There are another aditional source? For know. I mean, a letter by Speer's hand is very condemnatory, but I supposed there are more sources because I doubt the letter could be publicly accesible for consulting.
The physical letter may not be available, but the contents are described on the auction house's page.
For a much more detailed consideration of Speer's knowledge of the Holocaust, there's Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny, which includes details of conversations with Speer himself, interviews with others who knew him and investigations into documentation which sometimes can be read as supporting his version of events but more often does not. It's clear that he knew about the Nazi regime's 'Final Solution,' but it's also clear that he, perhaps unconsciously, chose to ignore that this meant the attempted extermination of whole peoples, particularly the Jews; it was only when he was confronted with the undeniable truth of genocide, at Nuremberg, that he admitted to himself what had happened.
The conclusion of Sereny's book is that Speer (like most humans) was much more nuanced that the 'wholly innocent' or 'pure evil' characters which often appear in fiction (including TLs on here).
From the end of the book:
Coming back to your first question (Where did this idea come from, which I have begun to see repeated everywhere for some time now, according to which the entire historical biography of Speer is a lie and in reality he was more Nazi than Himmler?):
I don't think we can say that any Nazi leader was more or less Nazi than another. All of those who were at the centre of the Nazi regime were guilty of its evil. Speer was one of Hitler's closest allies, having joined the Nazi party even before Hitler came to power, and he remained loyal to him right to the end of the war. The difference between Speer and other Nazis is that it seems that he came to genuinely regret that he, as a member of Hitler's inner circle, had been complicit in the evil. His writings in prison were certainly an attempt to exonerate himself from guilt but also a request for forgiveness, it seems - which implies that he knew there was something to forgive.
Posted this elsewhere too:
Anytime I’ve seen a fic/TL where the US is more successful in Vietnam is where JFK is a two-term president. But I’d be fascinated seeing someone do a fic/TL where Vietnam is more successful under the LBJ administration and how his second term from 68-72 would look like
Anytime I’ve seen a fic/TL where the US is more successful in Vietnam is where JFK is a two-term president. But I’d be fascinated seeing someone do a fic/TL where Vietnam is more successful under the LBJ administration and how his second term from 68-72 would look like
I know it's an older post, but since I've been doing research on airlines, I can answer this question.
With a POD either before 1938 (early unregulated air travel) or after 1978 (post-deregulation), the sky is the limit (pun intended). The airline industry outside of the CAB cartel years is one of the most volatile (and least profitable) ones in existence. Yet it also has low barriers to entry (with leases and the availability of WWII-surplus planes before that) and the romance that attracts vanity investors in a way that other low-margin industries don't.
So just with a few butterfly flaps-have a high profile crash at one upstart airline that drives it out of business, remove another, have some big event at a bad time different from OTL, etc, the map will look totally different. If there's any real general divergence and you want to change the airline business in one way outside of that period, most everything will work.
Since it's a weather event, would a "No Dust Bowl" thread go here or in the ASB thread?
Probably in ASB because is a climatic POD, not an human POD.
Is it me or there aren't that many great generals in the 1980s onwards? 1980s-2000 = Still >1900, not current politics?
Is there a reason why, or is this just recency bias/anti-recency bias and there isn't enough time for a great general to happen? Maybe changing nature of war?
Is there a reason why, or is this just recency bias/anti-recency bias and there isn't enough time for a great general to happen? Maybe changing nature of war?
I know Hoi4 is the last place you want to look for for actual historical insights, but there's a guy that regularly streams Hoi4 games with his community of friends, and one of the "meta" things for Japan is to either try to never engage the US fleet in order to be able to continue to have the benefits of a large fleet, or to only consider fighting the US fleet with assured air superiority, which means being near islands with air bases they control. This got me thinking; would it have changed much if Japan had a similar strategy for their fleets? In our timeline, from what I understand at least, they were always hunting for that perfect scenario to conduct their decisive fleet battle (the famed Kantai Kessen of course) in order to either destroy or at least severely damage the US fleet in a single big engagement, so I was wondering if a different strategic mindset would change much. I know of course that there are a myriad of reasons why Japan was in a bad spot in WW2, but I was simply curious about this one aspect.
Pretty sure the US Armed Forces would have learned from this and adapted accordingly. "Cheese" strategies/"Meta" strategies (unless you're the Mongols or colonial Europeans) rarely work against foes of similar tech level?
Conventional war which brings flashy generals to the headlines have become increasingly less common over the past forty years in the global north. Anti-insurgency conflicts are decidedly unsexy and doe snot foster the kind of great man/woman general which I think you're hinting at. However, you do have prominent military folks still floating around - Petraeus comes to mind.
One BIG superpower that dwarfs all the other smaller powers to the point that they cant be challenged, but also large enough that they have no real desire to expand further on their own. Or else two still massive but far apart powers which dominate their own regions. Maybe a more successful (hard but doable) British empire or USA dominant earlier, and then a China which successfully modernizes?
posting this here before the main forum
there's this trope of after hitler death, germany fall into civil war, then the allies attack and defeats them, germany divided, bla bla bla.
my question is, how true it is ?
i can see the wallies try to take french,dutch, or belgium back. but occupy the entire germany ? broke it up entirely ?
and there's problem of the east, if the generalplan is successful at this point, the east would be a refugee for any kind of german groups you can think of.
there's this trope of after hitler death, germany fall into civil war, then the allies attack and defeats them, germany divided, bla bla bla.
my question is, how true it is ?
i can see the wallies try to take french,dutch, or belgium back. but occupy the entire germany ? broke it up entirely ?
and there's problem of the east, if the generalplan is successful at this point, the east would be a refugee for any kind of german groups you can think of.
This sounds like the Cold War. That definitively NOT lead to a 20th century "peacefull"
