Postwar Nazi Germany

Why do most people assume that the postwar Nazi economy will be super-efficient with the Nazi scinetists being ahead of the Americans with Von Braun Stations by the 50s?
 
Nazi Germany was a looter state. Presuming it somehow survives - difficult to see, actually - I think it would drain whatever conquests it had been able to keep of wealth, and then turn Soviet-style.

Its economy was never anything like efficient, even in OTL, so I fail to see how it could be post-war.

Nazi super-science, super effeciency and super-weapons are old Alt-hist fanboy myths.

Mike Turcotte
 
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Nazi Germany was a looter state. Presuming it somehow survives - difficult to see, actually - I think it would drain whatever conquests it had been able to keep of wealth, and then turn Soviet-style.

Its economy was never anything like efficient, even in OTL, so I fail to see how it could be post-war.

Nazi super-science, super effeciency and super-weapons are old Alt-hist fanboy myths.

Mike Turcotte

Okay, but let me raise the counterargument. The Nazi economy of OTL worked, as a looter economy. It let a state with a per capita income below that of Britain punch way out of its weight. And it had a distorted free market, but it was still a freer market than the USSR's.
 
Nazi science sneers at economics!

MikeTurcotte sums it up - the Nazi economy was suited to looting and short-term war gains. Pre-WWII Germany was banking on victory to pay for the war... guess how that turned out.

What would happen in a "Nazis survive WWII" is anyone's guess, but an ideology overtly committed to world domination and a Thousand Year Reich!!!1111!! isn't going to be too hot at reverting its freshly-cleansed country into a goods-and-services based economy.
 
"The Reich failed to achieve the production levels of the German Empire of 1917, even by 1944 despite the incorperation of Austria and Czechoslovakia" - Albert Speer
 
Okay, but let me raise the counterargument. The Nazi economy of OTL worked, as a looter economy. It let a state with a per capita income below that of Britain punch way out of its weight. And it had a distorted free market, but it was still a freer market than the USSR's.

The problem with a looter economy is that by definition it's outlook is short term. Therefore, it is productive only as long as the conquered areas have something to steal.

The OP never specified how Nazi Germany survives. Let's go with the old 'Britain sues for peace and Hitler dies in May of 1941' as the least implausible scenario. Barbarossa never happens, and the Nazis own Europe. America and Japan comes to blows, and Japan gets squished, so we have a three-way Cold War going on in 1945 - USA/UK, Nazi Germany, and USSR.

Germany has a higher total population, but most of it is occupied. The Germans were never much for administrating conquered areas, and the savage nuttiness of the regime is allowed to prosper under the Goering/Himmler/OKW trioka that replaces Hitler.

Regardless of the larger Geopolitical issues of a three-way Cold War, the Nazi face signficant issues. German companies will have a captive (literally) audience to sell to, but those goods will be increasingly shoddy as German corporations and managemen ossify and stagnate under the joys of slave labor. Production may be high (you can work French/Polish/Balkan slaves literally to death), but there will be no efficiency - especially if slave factories replace prisons.

German leadership was always bewitched by mysticism, so that without a war to distract them, they will give themselves over to their dissapations. Additionally, Sweden, Switzerland will have access to western goods, and some of those will find their way into the Reich. As time goes by, the Reich falls more and more behind, they will have to clamp down to keep those goods out. That will fail, and the Reich will soon face similar issues to that of the USSR.

Mike
What happens now is hard to say.
 
Why do most people assume that the postwar Nazi economy will be super-efficient with the Nazi scinetists being ahead of the Americans with Von Braun Stations by the 50s?
"most people" such as...?

People who get all their ideas on a victorious Nazi Germany from Fatherland, maybe.
 
Germany has a higher total population, but most of it is occupied. The Germans were never much for administrating conquered areas, and the savage nuttiness of the regime is allowed to prosper under the Goering/Himmler/OKW trioka that replaces Hitler.

What do you mean never much for administering? They ran Western Europe just fine.

"The Reich failed to achieve the production levels of the German Empire of 1917, even by 1944 despite the incorperation of Austria and Czechoslovakia" - Albert Speer

This isn't true, though. Wages of Destruction is only one of numerous books which discuss the running of occupied Europe; for another, see Does Conquest Pay.
 
a peacetime Nazi Germany? Impossible!(at least for any significant time period) Hitler had the belief that the moment a race stops expanding is the moment that race's decent begins. Basically Nazi Germany under the grip of Adolf Hitler was doomed to fight a perpetual war, and Nazi Germany was not exactly in the position to fight a prolonged war. So Germany would have to be in a constant state of war until Hitler's death(my guess would be some time in the 50s).
 
Why do most people assume that the postwar Nazi economy will be super-efficient with the Nazi scinetists being ahead of the Americans with Von Braun Stations by the 50s?


That is because in the pre-war the economy worked pretty well. When Hitler took power, Germany was in the bottom of the sewer, seen as a truly hopeless case.
In 6 years not only was Germany a great power again but it also had also one of the most powerfull military in the world, unemployement fell by 6 millions, that without any marshall plan or vaste colonial empire.
When the war started, the average Germans had it better than the French and Britons.

In fact, one of the reasons Hitler lost was precisely because he had Germany retained a civilian economy when there should have been full war effort from the start.
Evidently, if he hadn´t seen Slavs as asiatics(A view that wasn´t unusual in France and Britain too) and had such a high opinion on britain, things would have been somewhat different.
 
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