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Parallels with Nazi Germany Part 1 [1]
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Date: 2025-01-22
I have recently. been reading and re-reading some sources on Nazi Germany and some really remarkable parallels between it and Putin’s Russia jumped out at me. Yes, I understand the dangers of this exercise but just take a minute to read what follows and I think you will agree that it is a worthwhile exercise. I do want to be clear from the beginning that I am not calling Putin a Nazi. I am just using the Nazi regime as a possible analog to Putin’s Russia. Comparison is a powerful learning tool and we should never shy away from using it.
By the way, the books I mentioned are below if you want to read them. The work on Speer is especially good and I think does a great deal to put him in his proper perspective.
Kitchen, Martin. Speer: Hitler’s Architect. Yale University Press, 2017. Gellately, Robert. Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis. Oxford University Press, 2022. Longerich, Peter, et al. Goebbels. Vintage Books, 2016.
The book on Goebbels and the book on Speer combined make it clear that Germany put itself in a disadvantageous situation economically from the outset of World War II. Furthermore, Hitler and all of the leading Nazis knew this but they gambled anyway.
One would do well to remember the events that shaped the thinking of Hitler and the leading Nazis in this particular area happened in the closing days of World War I and throughout 1919 and into the 1920s. The Allied blockade of Germany was brutally effective in reducing the influx of resources and food to Germany and starvation took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Germans. The famine along with defeat in the war created a revolutionary atmosphere and, in fact the instability caused the fall of the German government and the establishment of a liberal republic. This time period made a deep impression on Hitler and his close group of followers.
By the time the Nazis came to power, they had incorporated the lessons of World War I into their ideology in the idea of lebensraum. Yes there were other historical forces at work like the idea that Germany should naturally expand to the east. In fact, it had been in the process of doing so under various smaller kingdoms like Prussia for centuries. The point here is that, from an economic point of view, German revanchism, in order to be successful, had to either control the seas, an unlikely state of affairs given the naval power of Britain or it had to have a continental source of resources. Hitler’s unpublished second book on foreign affairs speaks to this explicitly.
Weinberg, Gerhard L. (editor), Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, Enigma Books: New York, 2003.
At the same time, the German people had flocked to the Nazi party because of the promise of economic prosperity and the explicit Anti-Semitism of the party. And, by the way, it does not take much digging to see the deep connections of these two issues in the very strange ideology of the Nazis. The legitimacy of the party and later the regime rested, in no small measure on the ability of the party to provide stability and prosperity. One might actually term this the German dream.
To top all of this off, the Nazi leadership, at the outset of World War II was perfectly aware that it needed quick victories that brought in resources to the Reich without negatively impacting the large masses of the professional and working classes that brought them to power. Hence, the type of warfare styled blitzkrieg by some historians. The last thing Hitler, in particular wanted to do was to be forced into putting the country on a war footing. He also wanted to avoid mass mobilization as it would necessitate conscription on a mass scale and even the conscription of women into war industries. In fact, the Speer book makes it clear that Germany had not fully committed to a total war economy until very late in the war. Britain and the Soviet Union, and the United States were much quicker to convert their economies to support a maximal war effort.
By the way, that is one reason Speer, who was not a genius, looks so good in the annals of history concerning the economic output of Germany during the war. Because there was so much left undone by his predecessors and because of Hitler’s was reluctant to take really hard decisions until events forced him to do so that all Speer had to do was the obvious things. He only looks like a genius in comparison to the others who did not do those things. For example, he standardized and simplified production wherever possible and eliminated items that served duplicate roles. ( He was, like many other Nazis, a student and admirer of that grand old Antisemite, Henry Ford.)
As a result, the German economy grew during the war but was never able to close the gap between itself and the Allies in any meaningful way and the loss of the war was just a matter of time after the disasters in front of Moscow in 1941 and Stalingrad in 1942-3.
Now, take a look at Putin’s economic situation. He was also deeply influenced by events that ended the Cold War and the economic catastrophes and chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. He understands the consequences of social and economic chaos and he wants to avoid them at all costs. After all, Putin sold himself as the leader who could provide stability, security and prosperity after the disastrous leadership of post-Soviet Russia failed to deliver any of these things and arguably created the chaos of the nineties. (Of course he fed the chaos in some ways to gain power. The way he used the apartment bombings to gain public support is a prime example. See below.)
Satter, David. The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin. Yale University Press, 2017. Satter, David. Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. Yale University Press, 2008.
The Russian leadership has avoided full mobilization for war so far. The enormous pool of manpower in Moscow and Leningrad has not been fully tapped through conscription. State control has not been fully exerted to focus all efforts on victory in Ukraine. The war currently looks like just an extension of the initial effort of attempting to subjugate Ukraine with the minimum force that might conceivable accomplish the job when, in fact the force being applied has proven wholly insufficient for the task.
The result looks inevitable with a couple of caveats. If the Ukrainians can just hold on long enough and the will of the western powers doesn’t fail, the Russians do not seem to be willing to take decisions to enable them to overwhelm their enemy. The other question is whether the allies will ramp up production of needed weapons and ammunition enough to allow Ukraine to continue to inflict the kind of damage that will eventually grind down the Russian military to dust.
Take this for what it is worth but it looks to me like Ukraine has a really good chance to win unless the Orange Shitgibbon hands victory to the Russians.
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