Hitler's Profits

The Slate Explainer undertakes to tell us who gets the swag from the artwork produced by the late A. Hitler, which raises an issue I've been speculating on for quite a while. That is: Hitler before he was Hitler made his living (inter alia) as an extremely marginal smalltime Vienna watercolorist. What did he paint? I assume anything that would pay--which means for a moral certainty that at some point, Hitler must have painted some porn.

Gimme a call when you hear about the discovery of watercolors of some apple-cheeked buffs with "Hitler" inscribed in the corner. No, don't bother to call; I'll hear about it anyway, it will be bigger than Susan Boyle.

Hitler Economics

I wrote the other day about how Genghis Khan didn't understand the economics of subject peoples. Turns out he has some distinguished compoany:

Alfred Rosenberg, later hanged at Nuremberg as one of Nazism's prinncipal war criminals, ... saw that the German empire needed goodwill from at least some of its subject peoples, so that they might function economically in the Reich's interests. ... 7.5 million men were aabsent at the front, so to sustain Germany's economy, replacement labor was needed for mines and factories. Hitler's captives and subject races provided the only plausible manpower pool. Yet Himmler's SS, with robust assistance from the Wehrmacht, was killing millions of prospective slaves. ... Having no interest in or understanding of the complex relationships of international trade, [Hitler] sought merely to loot the occupied nations for the advantage of Germany. He was oblivious of the consequences not only for subject populations, but ultimately for the entire continent. Germany continued to ship food from Greece, heedless of the fact that the Greeks themselves were dependent on imports to live. ...

That's Max Hastings, reviewing a couple of promising new books on the internal operation of the Nazi Empire ("The Most Evil Emperor,"New York Review of Books, October 23, 2008, 46-9, 47-8). One big difference between Genghis Khan and Hitler: Genghis showed a spectacular capacity to learn from his mistakes. His empire lasted--well, not for a thousand years but for many generations, and changed the face of the continent forever. Hitler's--well, you know about that.

Act Quickly, Only One in Stock!

Underbelly's Teutonic Frontier bureau spots a buying opportunity (link):

NAZI ALBATROSS

What to Do with Hitler's Submarine Bunker?

By Michael Fröhlingsdorf

The submarine bunker is gigantic -- and expensive. A World War II-era military facility is slowly succumbing to the elements, and nobody seems willing to pay for its upkeep. In fact, the German armed forces has offered it up for sale.

By far the largest object in the rather odd real estate catalogue carries the number 220039 on the Web site of Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr. It is nestled about midway down the long list of property bargains, part of the Bundeswehr's project of shutting down hundreds of unneeded facilities. One can make offers on storage tanks, training camps, barracks and former weapons depots.

But number 220039 is different. The "Materiel Depot Wilhelmshaven -- TE Bremen" is a dark gray cement colossus -- 426 meters (1,398 feet) long, 97 meters wide and 25 meters high. The ceilings are up to 7 meters thick. Indeed, the structure is so cavernous that even an institution as large as the German armed forces is only able to occupy a third of it. The rest lies empty -- as it has since the end of World War II. The structure is left over from one of the most megalomaniacal projects of Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship: the submarine bunker named "Valentin."

More Overy on Hitler, Stalin

After a break (link), I’ve gone back and finished Richard Overy’s absorbing The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004). Overy certainly has an eye for the telling detail:

• The October Revolution and the attendant Civil War left the Red Army almost devoid of resources—so devoide that “on May Days in the 1920s Red Army men paraded through Red Square on bicycles.” (446)
  

• On their drive to Moscow in 1941, the Nazis moved so fast that “they entered the city of Orel with the streetcars still running.” (493)

• By 1927, the Soviets had recognized 172 ethnic minorities, and 192 distinct languages. The goal of linguistic modernization drove the campaign to extend Latin script to Arab linguages—sometimes faster than the growth of cultural comprehension. “One Kyrgyz instructor, having successfully instilled the letters of the alphabet into her class by rote, sent off to Moscow for another set.” (554)

• Prisoners packed off in boxcars en route to the Gulag found they could escape by chopping through the floor and dropping onto the railroad tracks below, “but after a time the guards fitted an improvised steel scythe beneath the last freight car to cut escapees in half as they lay on the tracks.” (563)

• Guards at Auschwitz carried “a notorious whip nicknamed ‘Interpreter’ because it could speak to the multinational workshop in any language.” (622-3)

I should add that Overy’s book is far more than mere anecdote. It is a rich, dense, detailed comparative study, resisting easy summary—unless to say that “resists easy summary” is itself a kind of summary. I’ll forgive my self for pillaging the cherries out of this cake, but the whole product deserves far more respectful and extensive attention than it is going to get here. It does remind me to go back and take a second look at one of Overy’s earlier efforts, Why the Allies Won, which I skimmed with interest but perhaps insufficient care a few years back—and which, happily, I seem not to have given away.

Life Imitates Mel Brooks

Life imitates Mel Brooks: more cullings from Richard Overy, The Dictators (2004)

• “So anxious were [planners] to match [Stalin’s] vision … that the huge Moskva Hotel, built with the same over-high classical portico found on the designs for Berlin, was constructed with two wings of completely different styles because Stalin had mistakenly approved as a single design tweo separate submissions placed on a table in front of him.” (223)

• Stalin’s “favorite film was said to be the 1938 production of V olga! Volga! a musical comedy that ends with the triumphant completion of the Moscow-Volga canal by regiments of prisoner-labourers …” (238)

• There were 34 assassination attempts against Hitler, none against Stalin (though plenty of people wanted to). “Lenin was the victim of two attempts on his life. Many years later, a man was caught in the Lenin mausoleum trying to shoot the embalmed corpse.” (326)

• Those émigré Russians who try to be Nazis? Evidently the mustache was part of the rigging: “each [was] comically adorned with Hitler’s familiar toothbrush mustache and a uniform like that of a railway guard…” (336)

• Builders of a superblock at Magnitogorsk, the “new industrial city” forgot to include a sewer system (228). [I seem to recall reading about the same problem with a new barracks built by the Austrian Empire in the 1890s…]

Overy on State Terror

Is the United States a fascist dictatorship? Of course not. But it may be small consolation; think of those bumper stickers that say “George Bush—Not as Bad as Saddam.” But reading Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004) is enough to give you the chills, particularly his chapter on “States of Terror”—the development and maintenance of terror mechanisms in each of his two subject states.

For starters, Overy makes the point that for the insiders, it wasn’t really terror at all:

For much of the life of both dictatorships the public war against terror won widespread approval and even co-operation from the two populations. Though fear might now seem the most rational of responses to what were, by any standards, fearful regimes, that fear was projected onto the victims of discrimination and state reporession. ‘Terrorists’ were excluded and persecuted not only by the organs of state security, but by a population made anxious thorugh orchestrated programs of public vilification.

—Richard Overy, The Dictators 177 (2004)

Overy goes on to show how neither Hitler’s Germany nor Stalin’s Russia began as a fully-developed police state. In an unsettling parallel, he shows how each dictator advanced down the road state terrorism by deploying a vivid, dramatic, but in the end entirely fortuitous disruption—in Germany, the Reichstag Fire of 1933, in Russia, the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934. In each case, the emerging dictator used a dramatic challenge as a hook on which to climb towards absolute power, unanswerable and outside the law.

More generally, Overy shows how state terror grows by the frog-in-a-pot approach—slowly turning up the heat so the subject doesn’t quite realize what has happened to it until it is all over and done.

Overy also shows how, particularly in German, the forces of state terror ultimately become a law unto themselves, and how (if it is any consolation) the terror forces to some extent come to devour their own. For what it is worth, he also shows how conventional estimates of deaths from internal terror (but excluded the holocaust) are perhaps exaggerated—the number more likely in thousands or tens of thousands than millions or tens of millions. Small consolation: it’s still not a road down which any citizen or polity would willingly want to go.

Roughage

Women wrote to Hitler asking him to father their children. One woman wrote that her marriage had broken down because of her commitment to the leader: 'From the first moment when I heard of Adolf Hitler, he gave me a new faith, he brought me strength and power and love. He is my idol, and I will devote my life to him.' Women, so it was claimed, were to be seen at Hitler's Bavarian retreat at Berchtesgaden eating handfuls of the gravel that the Führer had just walked across.

--Richard Overy, The Dictators 131 (2004)