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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

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"Hitler did well by the Germans" is a weird way to describe taking over a state by violence and propaganda and then leading it into a humiliating military defeat and committing some of the most morally repugnant acts in recent history in its name, but ok, I guess.

And only from reading Chinese history and how the Chinese inteligencia see's it can you get the full wieght that what to them is an inevitable and unstopable cycle. They go so far as to describe the stages and symptoms of each stage, along with specific societal conditions that we continue to replicate with a mechanical precision they gave the name "The turning of the dynastic wheel" The chinese with there long history, and pragmatic introspection have codified things like this in there pictographic written language, where the symbol for disaster is derived from combining the two symbols for danger, and oportunity.

Are they wrong though? On our side, people like Spengler also model societies as pseudo-organisms with lives that go through birth, adolescence, adulthood, senescence, and death. There's a lot of merit to viewing history as cyclic and decay inevitable even if the details change from iteration to iteration.

Similar conditions produce similar outputs. Perhaps the linkage isn't quite as direct and repeatable as the Chinese think, but they have a point.

I have a chinese friend who said something similar to this, she believes much of the culture in the modern west is influenced by some shady chinese government attempt at controlling the speed at which said wheel turns, through Tiktok and stuff. While Id normally dismiss her as a nut, we do have rioting in the street arguing over a miniscule group of people wearing clothes dsigned for the opposite sex.

We also had rioting in the street over this in Berlin, 1933-05-06 (four days before the famous bonfire). Occam's Razor says that shady Chinese government intervention is not needed.

> It is western propaganda. Germans were simply supportive of Hitler and, for the most part, Hitler did well by the Germans.

It's not like they had much of a choice after ~1933:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

And Adam Tooze, who wrote an entire book examining Nazi economic policy, would disagree on the 'doing well by' part:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

Hitler didn’t do well by the people. Real wages declined throughout Nazi reign. Their lands were destroyed. They were responsible for allowing genocide.

Source: Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The article shows how he lulled them step by step and diverted them from knowing this was worse than before. Sound familiar USA?

They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different. We can hate the guy but he was not going to conquer Europe with the Germans and then sit at it empty.

One of the reasons they specifically lost the war was because Hitler was such a fuck up that he was decimating the German economy. When you look at how the war was progressing, the only outcome for the Nazis at the time was either defeat or collapse. Combined with the endemic usage of Pervitin and other drugs at this time both to fuel soldiers and keep the citizens relatively placated they were burning up everything both at the frontline and at home.

Bingo: the story of WW2 is that the Germans started with an effective army, and the Nazis ran it into the ground.

The saddest thing is subsequent decades of bizarre interpretations of this result because people got too excited about some effective German industry that they took Hitlers various wonder weapon attempts as planned engineering projects rather than engineers trying to put form to a mad man's rantings.

Hitler loved the idea of super heavy tanks, so the Germans kept trying to build them even though they were unreliable, ineffective and vulnerable.

Meanwhile the Sherman got a reputation for breaking down a lot...mostly because it kept surviving and being fixed in the field and continuing to provide effective armor support, whereas German tanks just died.

No, not just. There were pre-war downsides and hardships for the people. read the book above, it’s clear the common German had a worse life before the war came, to say nothing of being drafted, being killed, losing a family member, or being incinerated.

> They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different.

"Just". LOL. Is that all?

They lost the war in part because of bad economic policy:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

The UK was out producing Germany in planes and many other sectors—and that was before the US even got involved.

> Hitler did well by the Germans

This could only possibly be true if, like the Nazis, you exclude Jews, Gypsies, gays, disabled people, women who value their sexual and reproductive freedom, etc. etc. from the category ‘German’.

And even then it’s still not true, as others in the thread have pointed out.

It’s disturbingly frequently that I see this weird nudge nudge wink wink kinda-sorta Nazi apologism from high karma accounts here. I’m willing to believe that there aren’t fundamentally bad intentions behind it and that it stems mainly from some kind of reflexive contrarianism, but boy is it weird and disturbing.

> Hitler did well by the Germans.

That's an insanely stupid claim. Jews were systematically stigmatized and eventually sent to extermination camps. What we now call LGBT people and political opponents got the same treatment. Syndicalists too: one of the first thing Hitler did was make unions illegal. And even the "aryans" that supported him, saw their work hours get longer and longer and the pay smaller and smaller.

And let's not speak of the millions dying in a pointless war that ruined Europe.

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