World War II will long be remembered as one of the most destructive wars in history. It ravaged through a good portion of the world, leaving little more than charred ground and rubble in its wake. It effected millions of people, killing many of them and leaving many more quite destitute. Yet it is a commonly held notion that war generally causes a good amount damage, destroying property and investments alike, but there is a certain type of war that is the most destructive – total war. This form of warfare has no bounds or regulations, it targets anything and everything in its path. The Oxford dictionary defines it as a war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory of combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded. This method, practiced by both the Axis and the Allies in World War II, resulted in the horrific and widespread destruction of much of Europe and the loss of an entire generation of human beings. This brand of warfare targets non-combatants and combatants alike, it de-humanizes the enemy in its desire to succeed, and gives way to ever newer and brutal methods of aggression.
Among these harsh techniques was a new form of warfare the likes of which had never been seen before. This was the method of “area bombing”. At the time this sort of offensive was still experimental in nature, in that it had never been done before (the airplane was still a fairly recent invention). It usually involved hundreds of medium to heavy bombers that would arrive and release their bombs in coordinated waves, creating as dense of a blanket of bombs as they could – giving rise to the name “carpet bombing”. When used on towns and cities it caused massive amounts of damage, and even larger amounts of terror. It was not necessarily meant to damage industry, or even effect military production, nor was it used as a means to simply kill people. Its purpose was to literally uproot the civilization, to absolutely decimate, eradicate, and erase the targets on which it was used. This displacement had such a greatly destructive effect that some of those displaced by the bombing raids compared their plight to death itself. Deprived of most, if not all of their possessions, including their homes, the victims of these bombings had no choice but to rise out of the ruins and continue with their lives, for as noted by Joseph Goebbels in his article Das Leben geht weiter, life goes on.
This paper seeks to create an understanding of the effects of the Allied bombing raids, particularly area bombing, on the levels of poverty in Nazi Germany. Poverty, in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions, but this paper will delve a little deeper than simple access to money and materials. We will assess four elements of German civilian life: work opportunities, access to food, access to shelter, and the general quality of life throughout the war, in regard to Allied bombing raids. Together, these four assessments should form a fairly reasonable conclusion of the effectiveness of these bombings and of the effects of them upon the general poverty levels of Germany.
The ability to work and sustain a viable income is a crucial factor in society. Even more so in a modernized and industrial society such as Germany in the 20th century. Many of those who lived in German cities at the time were simple unskilled workers, scraping a meager existence at a factory or shoppe, none of them self-sufficient but rather entirely dependent upon their paltry income. In this way one can see the need to be able to work and earn an income when other skills that one might find in a rural farmer are unavailable. At the outbreak of the war in 1939, Germany was already suffering from a shortage in labor due to a number of reasons. A few years before the war, but after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Germany had implemented various programs in its quest of rearmament and preparation. Organizing their labor services, they directed workers to jobs where their skills would be put to the best use. They also began conscription into the military and the massive rearmament program meant any available hands left were working in the rearmament factories. The mass expulsion of Jewish civilians also resulted in a loss of available labor within the Fatherland, although they were still being used outside the country in forced labor. This meant that most German city-dwellers had a job, they were making money, and they were supporting themselves and their families each in their own manner when the war began.
When the war began, Germany, from an economic standpoint, was already prepared for at least a good bit of it. Wage and price controls had been set in place, raw materials had been allocated, investments had become state-directed, rationing was imposed, and despite a mild shortage of fats and fodder, there was a fairly enormous supply of food due to an excellent harvest in the two pre-war years.
Due to these provisions, Germany did not experience any life-threatening shortages of raw materials or food until 1944. Most able-bodied men had been conscripted into the military and due to a lack of German labor, the Nazis instead used masses of foreign and slave workers to fuel their industry. Any Germans not serving in the military still helped the cause in one way or another, from working in factories, running small businesses, or even simply being stay-at-home mothers. At first the Allied bombing raids proved ineffective, an RAF photographic survey taken in 1941 showed that “of the crews that claimed to have bombed their targets, only one in five had hit within five miles of the aiming point, the spot where a bombardier began releasing the bombs.” In addition to the noticeable stiffening of German defenses, Bomber Command ordered a temporary pause in the raids. Thus German life proceeded fairly untouched for a bit longer, only to be shaken again when the raids resumed in early 1942 under the new leadership of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. Harris had a new idea in mind, he believed that strategic bombing had not proven effective enough, the bombs were apt to miss their targets entirely, and the small clusters of aircraft sent in were nothing short of cannon fodder for the Luftwaffe fighters.
He proposed a new tactic – unrestricted civilian bombing. Targets would no longer be particular facilities but rather entire sections of cities, “so that every bomb that fell would cause damage”. While before, the RAF had been bombing specific targets in loose aggregations, this new tactic called for a large concentrated force of bombers with a general aiming point. They would fly together in formation, approach from the same direction, and release their bombs at the same time. This had the effect of not only landing tremendous amounts of ordinance on the general target, but also swamping the German Luftwaffe through sheer quantity of aircraft.
As the war dragged on and Allied bombing raids on cities became more prevalent, businesses were destroyed and factories were damaged, leaving many people jobless the next day. Yet there was always something for them to do, from clearing rubble and putting out fires, to providing medical care to the injured, somebody or something was always in need of attention. The bombings had a far greater effect on small businesses than on industry, with the civilians bearing the brunt of the bombing campaign. One statistic states that “of the more than one million tons of bombs that the Allies dropped, only 12 percent hit war-related industries”. However, up until 1944, the Germans hardly ever lacked for work, receiving some form of payment or allowance through the government-run programs. Despite the increasing bombing raids, German production of armaments increased 230 percent between the years of 1941 and 1944, serving as a symbol of their ability to mobilize under intense pressure.
However, as war progressed and more men were needed for the front, the trade and commerce industries were thus affected. Deemed to be nonessential at the time, men working in these factories were conscripted into the military, dwindling the amount of labor available for these “nonessential” businesses. Allied bombing raids did not take full effect on either German morale or German industry until the later days of the war in 1944-1945. By that time the amount of German money in circulation had gone from 29 thousand million marks in 1943 to 67 thousand million by the end of the war, making the German mark once again useless. The black market thrived, Germany had degraded into a cigarette economy, and no amount of further bombing could worsen their situation.
Having access to food is always an important matter. This importance is magnified exponentially when one is at war with another. As mentioned earlier, at the beginning of the war, Germany had done a decent job of stockpiling food and supplies. Even before the outbreak of war, Germany had instituted a clever system of rationing, as well as advocating a change in eating habits to consume less fats and meats. Throughout the war there was a marked increase in the consumption of meats, fish, dairy products, coffee, alcohol and tobacco, which was offset by a reduction in the consumption of fruit, eggs, fats, poultry, and rice (Grunberger, pg 209). A year into the war, the Germans began to notice a minor shortage of supplies, mainly food, fuel, and shoes. Nazi thrift programs were implemented to offset these shortages, and citizens were urged to make use of everything and to waste nothing. The shortages were fairly obvious to the Germans, as their weekly food rationing got ever slimmer. In 1939, meat rationing was set at weekly 700 grams per person. By 1941 it had been reduced to 400 grams, and by 1942 it was reduced to just 300 grams per person.
Under this stress the Nazis began urging people to eat unsavory things such as lungs, brains, pigs tail and entrails, pushing strange recipes with uncommon ingredients. In fact, a station called the German Women's Guild (Deutsche Frauenwerk) produced many of these recipes, “recipes were handed out for such delicacies as baked udder with herbs and stuffed calf's heart. Soon even more bizarre dishes were proposed such as ersatz brains made of porridge, suggesting that even these less desirable meats were in short supply” (Martin, pg 81). The Germans even invented a little creature called the Kohlenklau, which comparable to England's Squander-bug, symbolized waste among the citizens.
By 1942, any available parks and gardens found in a city had been crudely converted into vegetable gardens to supplement the food shortages, and as time went on more inventive methods of thrift were endorsed by the Germans. They began to breed rabbits which they referred to as “balcony pigs” for consumption, and later on in the war people even began to eat domestic cats, which they wittily referred to as “roof rabbits”. There was an incident in the winter of 1943 where the Berlin zoo was destroyed by a bombing raid, killing, maiming, and letting loose the animals kept inside. The Berliners made clever use of the event described by Martin Kitchen in his book Nazi Germany at War:
“In the winter of 1943 some Berliners enjoyed a more exotic menu. Most of the zoo was destroyed in a bombing raid and many animals were killed. Housewives found that crocodile tail, if cooked long enough, tasted remarkably like chicken. Hundreds of people were fed on buffalo and antelope. Bear hams and bear sausages were much-prized delicacies. The elephants were converted into animal fodder and soap. An escaped panther raced in panic through the flames and was shot in the Lützowplatz. Poisonous snakes wriggled through the rubble. There were rumours of crocodiles in the sewers and of a driverless train full of dead passengers endlessly circling the ring railway.” (pg 83)
These stories shed a little light on the plight of the German in regards to food. Although they experienced some shortages, in never reached levels of widespread malnutrition. Rather, the draining resources initiated a drive towards economic self-sufficiency, which in turn gradually lessened the quality of the food available. Partly in due to Allied bombing of railroads, supplies became less easy to obtain. As a result substitutes and poor quality foodstuffs became rampant. Butter rations became margarine rations, eggs became powdered eggs, and fruit seemed nonexistent – at least since the fall of Italy to the Allies. Even beer became poor in quality. To cope with the poor conditions, Germans often turned to humour, inventing clever jokes about their situation.
“The poor quality of wartime beer which, as we have already see, was defined as 'bladder irrigation à la Conti' after the head of the Nazi Doctors' Association, occasioned the story of the dissatisfied drinker who sends a sample of beer he had been offered to a laboratory for testing; after a few days, he receives the diagnosis, 'Your horse suffers from diabetes.'” (Grunberger, pg 336)
Oddly enough, the Allied bombing raids did not seem to seriously effect people's ability to sustain themselves until the last year of the war; until then, relief parties were usually dispatched soon after the attacks and assisted in handing out food to the bomb victims among other things. When the Germans were not being bombed, they seem to have been able to procure food either through their own labor or through a government program. Despite the reduction in quality, the nutrition level remained fairly static throughout the war – mainly due to the German's thrifty methods and supplements.
Among the factors of poverty is one's access to shelter. One of the purposes of carpet bombing is to destroy shelter. Besides the obvious death toll, the obscene destruction of property and place is the biggest effect of this sort of tactic, and it was employed with great vigor by the Allies. As stated earlier, the main goal of area bombing is to literally uproot its intended target, to completely decimate and to obliterate what once stood and leave nothing to use behind. At first it was discovered that merely using high explosive bombs did not do enough damage as intended, and phosphorous incendiary bombs began to take their place. These bombs were designed for one task and that was to set things alight. The ensuing blaze would then hopefully create an uncontrollable fire which would then proceed to spread and destroy more buildings than any amount of explosives could do.
At the beginning of the war, before the bombing raids, most Germans had a dwelling of some sort, there were low rates of homelessness, as most people had been forced into some sort of government work or the military. Whereas the initial RAF air raids did little more than damage official reputation, when the bombings resumed again in 1942, under the lead of “Bomber” Harris, things quickly changed. The new tactic destroyed countless homes. By 1943, about 4.5 million people would be homeless, 2.5 of which would lose virtually everything they owned due to the bombings. Over the course of the war thirty-two percent of all dwellings within the Reich would be destroyed by allied bombs, another estimate puts it at thirty-nine percent of the national housing stock.
A major consequence of these bombings was the evacuation of millions of civilians out of the target cities. This displacement cause anxiety and unrest more than actual hardship, as most people were keen on returning to their own homes. Women and children were mass evacuated to the rural countryside, where villagers were then obliged to house them. These rural communities generally resented the new burden while the refugees resented the sufficiency of their new hosts. Women refugees were occasionally referred to as “bomb wenches” by the locals. The evacuation, although seemingly efficient, “amounted to an inter-continental exodus” (Grunberger, pg 34), and there were complaints of class discrimination. Some Berliners claimed that there was a disproportionate amount of official concern for the middle class over the lower class, evacuating offices before factories. Others claimed that the transfer of children from the bourgeois Western districts seemed far more thorough than the proletarian northern ones. However, even so, many Germans chose to stay behind in the cities, refusing to leave the only homes they knew. This passionate desire of the Germans to stay at their homes, despite daily bombing raids, can be seen in the writings of one Berliner: “If they destroy our living room, we move into the kitchen. If they knock the kitchen apart, we move over into the hallway. If only we can stay at home.” Later on in the war it became too risky to flee the cities, as the Allies closed in and kept constant vigilance in the air; the roving fighters usually shot at anything that moved.
As cities and towns were continually bombarded, housing became an ever increasing issue. At first the Nazis provided their German refugees with seized housing that they had taken from Jewish owners and other “enemies of the state”, but as those too began to get destroyed there was a push for temporary housing. Many of these temporary units ended up being simple huts, modeled after the mud huts built by Russian peasants. A nazi official by the name of Bormann convinced Hitler the need of building new housing rather than evacuating Berlin in the year of 1942, however the intended number of 3 million shelters was never met. Due to a lack of materials, inadequate funding, and a scarcity of labor, only about 54,000 were ever completed. Most chose to remain in their cellars or homemade huts that they had built on their destroyed property, usually due to the fact that they had easier access to running water and other utilities when they stayed put. In some crisis areas, private corporations attempted to take charge of the housing problem. Companies such as Deutsche Werft AG, a ship building company, built a series of shelters giving priority to their employees, but even this eventually failed due to a lack of supplies.
tl;dr
The most disturbing air raids occurred in the cities of Hamburg, Kassal, Darmstadt, and Dresden. While accounting for only a small part of the total damage to urban locations, these four events are responsible for about half of the civilian bomb casualties in Germany, the victims of an all new tool of destruction – the firestorm. The growing use of incendiaries in area bombing resulted in the occasional firestorm. When weather conditions were right, and it was dry enough, the conflagration caused by the bombs could get so fantastic that it quite literally became uncontrollable. The most famous firestorm occurred in the city of Hamburg in 1943. In an attack, ironically dubbed “Operation Gomorrah” by the Allied Command, bombers were sent to attack Hamburg for nearly ten consecutive days, resulting in such a firestorm that temperatures reached one thousand degrees centigrade causing winds of up to 150 miles per hour that uprooted trees and sucked victims into the fire. A vortex of flames formed in the center of the inferno that reached an altitude of one thousand feet in the sky and incinerated over 8 square miles of the city. This famous destruction of the great city of Hamburg was so great and demoralizing that Hitler himself refused to visit the city afterwards. An estimated 50,000 people died, and another 40,000 were injured. Refugees fleeing from the disaster refused to stop at nearby villages even when offered food and water, one villager remarked, “All they wanted to do was get away.” The conflagration destroyed over sixty percent of all dwellings in Hamburg but only about ten to twenty percent of it's industrial capacity (Kitchen, pg 91). These bombings produced destruction on a scale so great that postwar strategic bombing surveys described the worst-bombed cities as “lunar landscapes” (Hewitt, pg 260).
>>71141825
How drunk are you?
Daily life gradually became a living hell for the average German citizen during the war. Those who lived in cities lived with the constant dread of an impending bombing raid, while those who had been evacuated had to anxiously stand by as their homes were blown to pieces and their loved ones killed. Some measures were taken to protect against raids. After the initial bombing of Berlin, the Nazis began building up 82 major German cities with defenses, and some of them payed off. In 1942 the allies launched “Operation Millennium” on the city of Cologne, but the city had prepared itself by spending 39 million marks on a system of 500 shelters and 50 bunkers. The investment proved worthwhile: only 460 civilians were killed, and industrial production was back to normal within two weeks of the raid.
A strange phenomenon occurred within the Germans during the raids. The constant assault of Allied bombs and the daily life of struggle had instilled a sort of grim determination within the masses. Particularly pleasing to the Nazis, this change was highly praised by Joseph Goebbels in his article Life Goes On:
“Do not think we are making things better than they are, or turning it into a kind of poetry. Things are much too serious for that. Still, we deeply admire the indestructible rhythm of life and the unbreakable will to live of our big city population. They are not as rootless as well-meaning but purely theoretical books used to say. Look at the workers from the Ruhr, the Rhineland, Hamburg, Berlin, and everywhere else. They are an example of patriotism and national pride. Their sense of duty, their courage, their cheerful coarseness that helps them overcome even the worst, the hard work they do in the armaments factories even while their homes are still burning!” (Das Reich, 1944)
Another work goes on to say that the bombings seemed to “undermine morale and yet cemented it” (Grunberger, pg 34). Yet people can only take so much, and by 1944 most German non-combatants had had enough of it all. Before 1943, bomb victims could reasonably expect to get a good portion of what they had lost replaced, but after that year most received only empty promises. The needs of the victims soon outgrew the supply, and by 1943 only every second refugee family received a cooker or frying pan, and every fifth a washtub. Furniture was all but impossible to procure, and by mid 1944, nearly 90 percent of all consumer goods had been provisioned for the needs of the homeless, leaving nothing left to buy. Refugees resorted to looting and many were caught and punished harshly, usually receiving the death penalty. Nazi supplementary services soon ran dry of materials and were no longer able to help, and people were left to fend for themselves amidst the chaos. The regular bombing raids often destroyed the city's utilities and sewage systems, leaving entire sections of cities without gas or water, and refugees were soon leading a troglodyte existence in the darkness of their cellars, basements, shelters, and bunkers, all infested with rats and various other unmentionables. The continued bombings, although seemingly ineffective in the beginning, quickly began to become a massive issue for the Germans towards the end of the war. They could not maintain either their military or support their people as they steadily lost land to invaders and their cities continued to get destroyed.
The quality of life in Germany remained fairly static up until the final year. Although their homes had been destroyed and they had been stripped of many of their possessions, they still bore through it all, maintained by personal thriftiness and government programs. Despite the improved technology and tactics of the German air force, the relentlessness of the Allies eventually wore the Luftwaffe forces so thin that by 1944 the Americans were sending as many as one thousand fighters at a time, while Germany could barely scramble 300 of their own in response. This inability to defend their airspace left the Allies with air superiority over Germany, giving way for even more air raids. The psychological effects of the bombing raids could not be staved off forever, and by early 1945, bombing raids were so frequent that many towns experienced up to three raids in a single day. The regularity of raids became a part of every day life, a passage in the book Fortress Europe describes a scene where a woman visiting Berlin in 1944, “While riding on an elevated train, she wondered why the passing platforms were becoming increasingly deserted, until a man who was seated across from her looked up form his paper, glanced at his watch and then the sky, and remarked that a raid seemed imminent: 'Twelve o'clock, punctual as usual.'” (pg 138). By the end of the war, there had been 428 air-raid warning lasting a total of 500 hours, with an additional 472 small warnings lasting a total of 400 hours. Of these, 744 occurred between the years of 1944 and 1945 and mostly at night – hardly a night would pass where there was not some sort of siren.
The Allies dropped over one million tons of bombs on Germany during the war, killing about 500,000 non-combatants. Nearly five million habitations were destroyed and over a third of the German population had been displaced elsewhere. Many war victims were left with virtually no possessions – those who fled to the countryside could not take much with them, and those who stayed behind had much destroyed. From the regularity of the raids, the lack of food and supplies, and the mounting military failures, German civilian morale, through all it's resilience, eventually fell to an all time low in the latter days. Losing any and all faith they had in their leadership, they calmly awaited the end in the darkness of their caves.
The tremendously destructive bombing raids performed by the Allied powers did not necessarily accomplish its goal of civilian moral and industrial decimation. Due to the Nazi's clever provisioning before the war and the thrift programs pushed by them, Germany managed to stave off life-threatening shortages for an impressive amount of time. The characteristic of grim determination displayed by the bombed out Germans served to keep the Nazi machine going up until the very final days, when Hitler had exhausted all his options, and defeat was imminent. There always seemed to be work for the Germans to do, and the government provided them with enough to survive. Food may have been meager, but it never reached the point of starvation. The general quality of life seems to have been most effected by these raids. The displacement of millions, the destruction of countless homes and habitations, the loss of loved ones, and the ferocity of war forced the German civilians to live a strange and bleak existence among the ruins. The tactic of area bombing proved to be an effective new tool of psychological warfare, but in terms of industrial destruction it scores very low, as it was predominantly used against non-combatants and civilian targets. In some cases, these bombings only served to solidify German unity even more. The main and most destructive result of the bombings was the indiscriminate destruction of civilian habitats, leaving millions homeless. By the end of the war, the German economy was in such disrepair that the Germans would soon become completely dependent upon the liberating nations.
The obscene destruction and bombings of the countless historical cities in the years leading up to the end were nothing short of a cultural catastrophe. The goal of destroying the German economy through the bombings was only realized at the very end of the war, long after the land armies had already captured much of the Nazi held territories. Although they temporarily interrupted some industrial production, it can not even compare to the amount of non-combatant lives and families interrupted by the bombs. However necessary the daily air raids appeared to be at the time, they did not pan out to be as effective as the Allies had hoped. The Nazis managed to resist the effects for nearly five years before they eventually succumbed from sheer lack of manpower and supplies, partly due to the increased Allied bombing raids on facilities and railroads towards the end, but mostly due to proximity of the invading land forces. Germany was finished, they could no longer hold their own. The terrible bombings incurred by the Allies only proved how destructive and evil human beings could be.
whew. Thats it folks..... I hope at least one of you found this somewhat interesting...
>>71143255
oh we have one!
>>71142870
just figured, since /pol/ is always going on about how the Jews railed out Germany, you guys might be interested in the effects of their bombings on the Germans.
The kikes have no souls.
>>71143648
Read all of it, thanks for sharing
I have a new found respect for the German spirit
I was expecting some sort of redpill or something but it was still interesting
>>71144122
yeah, not so much a redpill paper, more like an in depth research to just what we did to their cities.
It brings the feels for the Germans
>>71144368
Yeah
It's a shame
Well that's history for you
A bunch of "what if" moments
RIP nazis
>>71144093
Where are you getting this from? Please give link!
>>71144815
I wrote it, I can post the bibliography if you want.
It was a paper I wrote for one of my courses.
>>71144926
Nice, good work.
I would like to save it as a full text and it would be easier to copy it all at once rather than copy all your posts!
>>71144995
Uhh I don't know how I could post the whole doc for you lol. Wish I could.
The allied bombing campaign did have a very significant impact on the German industry from about the spring of 1944 and onward. Mainly this would result in oil and fuel shortages and also effected the overall quality of products. Further the allied bombing served as a powerful distraction to the German Luftwaffe , many of the top German aces on the Eastern Front were eventually sent back to German to fend off the Western Allies.
>>71145085
Alright fair enough. Ill just copy it all.
>>71145204
This is true, but I focused more on the effects of the bombings on the German poverty level on the whole, not so much the strategic repercussions of them.
The class was about poverty throughout history so I had to gear it in that fashion.
>>71144926
Your style doesn't please my academic aesthetics.
>>living hell
>>71145338
Read the whole thing! Fantastic, very well written!
>>71145204
I wouldn't necessarily say that, German Industrial Output was at its highest in 1944.
Are you a nazi sympathizer btw?
>>71145597
I know the Jews were behind it all. The Germans just wanted to be strong again, but the kikes refused to allow it. That doesn't necessarily go to say that I am a Nazi sympathizer though, everyone did terrible things, but I am educated enough to understand that Germany was not the aggressor nation. They simply got overpowered in the end. I am a German sympathizer, not a Nazi sympithizer.
>>71145597
He would be tried in Germany as a antisemite if he even mentioned the nazis or hitler without at the very Least comparing them to the policies of the right and calliing them all nazis
>>71145962
I had to tread the line very carefully in this regaurd, I wanted a good grade and I would probably not have gotten one if I had made it sound "pro-nazi". Specially in our liberal education system today.
>>71145842
Yeah your hogwash paper sounded like you're a kook.
>>71145581
That is because by 1944 they had to change production to producing smaller goods (artillery, fire arms, ammunition) that could be built quickly and moved away from the factory and easily hidden.
Mike Huckabee: The Purpose of Military is 'to Kill People and Break Things'
>>71146506
Having fun under shariah law over there? How many times per day do you watch your gf get railed out by some sand nigger? Hog wash paper my ass.
>>71146302
You better hope your teacher isn't Jewish
>>71146733
Your higher education really is worthless, isn't it.
>>'history major'
>>writes subjectively as fuck
>>blubbers about shariah law
>>posts shit paper in antisemitic corner of waifu board
>>has mental illness in regards to Jews
You are a sad case.
>>71146834
I did this shit last year, got an A+. The professor loved so much he had me make a PowerPoint of it and present it to his other classes as an example of a good research paper.
>>71146992
How horrible.
>>71146634
This post literally doesn't make any sense, throughout the whole war Germany produced ~70000 artillery pieces. That's less than the whole of the British empire through the war. Germans didn't switch production, they were just efficient at recovering from allied raids and allocating production of certain pieces to different Factories all over Germany, and assembling them all at one central location. This spares German industry, for the most part, from suffering the full effects of allied raids, which were at their height in 43/44
>>71146970
lol
>>71147022
you need to go back
> Reddit Cucks
>>71146992
You mean we're getting an official A+ shitpost?
>>71147891
I guess.
You don't have to like it if you don't want to. It's just simple history. Lots of people hate history. It's a free country after all.
>>71148078
I was really just taking the piss out of your comment :P
g8 paper m8
>>71147489
I included mortars which brings the total to over 800,000
>>71146970
Go back to the shed
>>71148198
The Germans were certainly very clever with this matter. They had lots of contingency plans but they didn't last forever unfortunately for them.
>>71148198
Mortars arent artillery, they are an infantry weapon.
They are a category within themselves. Saving that totally artillery production was over 800k including mortars is inaccurate. When they only produced under 100k guns.
Saved, interesting stuff OP, and really well written.
I'm interested in how this compares to the German bombing tactics. I know they hit London quite a bit but were they trying to achieve the same total destruction?
>>71148867
I am also interested in this
My guess is no though
>>71141825
Can you recommend a good, neutral book on WW2? The most popular ones I've seen tend to have a heavy pro-Allies slant (or even pro-American).
They declared war on us. You declare war on America, and we kill your women and children. Germany, and the world, learned an invaluable lesson. They should be thankful, frankly.
>>71145085
Pastebin
>>71148867
The Germans never produced large strategic bombers to the extent of the Allies, who were capable of organizing large waves of planes to repeatedly hit targets in Germany with the purpose of destroying German industry.
While the Germans had bomber capabilities, they were never expecting a long war and thus never strategized to destroy enemy industry, there bombings of major cities were for terror alone, they believed they could destroy the morale of the enemy. This turned out not to be true.
Besides this, Germany often organzied raids on ports and airfields.
>>71149137
Hitlers War, by David Irving is an interesting read.
Also look for the book "Empire beneath the ice, how the nazis won WWII". It's incredibly interesting.
>>71149137
This
>>71149137
Any battle/ area in particular, I can name a few.
>>71149141
You are highly uneducated in this regaurd my friend. Hitler declared war on nobody, rather, the Allied powers declared war on them. Hitler wanted peace for his people.
>>71149652
Anything involving Germany - not too interested in the Pacific at this time. I don't know much at all, so I'm interested in a good summary to get the basics. Not too long, perhaps around 700 pages?
>>71149796
If you want something about the inner workings of the third Reich, read Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Europe.
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A classic.
>>71149141
Pic related would like you.
>>71148867
The Germans did not engage in the same level of destructive bombing that the Allies did. Hitler had no desire to destroy the foundations and culture of the European peoples - most of whose he considered cultural and racial brothers. He even gave strict instruction to his soldiers to keep Paris as pristine as possible when they conquered the city. He had great respect for most all European culture and their cities.
>>71149534
>Empire beneath the ice, how the nazis won WWII
I looked it up -- seems to be a bit... fringe? UFOs and shit? US space is fake? We can see the shit left on the moon.
And if core Nazis did escape and had all this space for tech, why haven't they developed nuclear capabilities that even poo-in-loos have?
>>71149753
Yeah that's bullshit. And I don't give a fuck about dead Germans.
>>71150147
Yeah wasn't it Britain that first started bombing indiscriminately but blamed it on bad radar or visibility or something?
>>71150161
The world is far more crazier than you may want to believe. I didn't say you had to take it with 100% faith, but it does bring up some very interesting arguments - all of which are cited and drawn from legitimate historical documentation.
>>71150056
Thanks
Many historians often point to just German industrial output before and after the start of the bombing campaign on Germany to say that the bombing campaign accomplished nothing, since German output actually rose slightly.
And while German output did indeed increase, this is not in spite of the allied bombings, but because it wasn't until 1942 that the Germans shifted to a full wartime production economy.
Had the allied bombing campaign not occurred, the Germans would have had even greater industrial output. So the bombing campaign did indeed disrupt the German industry.
There is a lot of talk that factories were back and running 2 weeks after a bombing. And while they were running, it wasn't at 100% capacity. And those 2 weeks of delays could have a massive knock on effect for things in production further down the line if the factory was just a part manufacturer rather than an assembly facility.
Finally the other effect the bombing campaign had to diminish the strength of the German military was in tying up countless resources in defending against it. Over a million men were employed by the flak defences. Hundreds of thousands of guns and millions if not billions of shells too. All defending against bombers rather than fighting armies.
Remember when studying history that events do not happen in a vacuum.
>>71150228
The UK declared war on Germany, not the other way around.
>>71150302
You may be thinking of when the Germans first bombed London.
Orders were given that London was not to be bombed.
Bombers got lost on a sortie and unloaded on London accidentally. The British responded with a raid on Berlin. This prompted Hitler's retaliatory attacks on English cities
>>71150161
You are certainly supposed to question everything, but for that same reason should you not question the history that you are told to believe ? This book offers a different insight and it is very well documented. Give it a chance I say, like I did. I was skeptical just like you but there comes a point where you have to humour a seemingly outrageous argument, when it is backed by plenty of apparent (and well hidden) proof.
>>71150161
OPs a full blown kook, what did you expect?
>>71150562
And Germany declared war on us. After a bunch of slanty eyed yellow skinned subhumans killed 3, 000 white men for no good reason. Real pro-white nation there, huh?
And so they got their shit pushed in. It was justice.
Cry about it some more.
>>71149753
You 'history major' are full of shit. Then again, you recommend ufo and hollow earth garbage.
So this must be how those more known kooks are. Full of themself, which is being full of shit.
Sad.
>>71150161
Also in regaurds to the nuclear weapons, our entire Manhattan project was ripped from the nazis who were the first to split an atom in their underground facilities. This is all proven history. Almost all of our technology was stolen from German scientists. look up operation paperclip.
>>71150562
And Germany never declared war on Norway.
>>71151087
It's okay. You have just been cucked by the liberal Jewish media/propaganda and have eaten it all up. Continue being an ignorant arrogant dumbass, it's no skin off my back.
>>71151179
Ever heard of the Griefswald Atomic test in October 1944?
>>71150893
Trust me brother I get you. I am an American first before anything else. But should you not question the stories that they tell you in school? There is a saying that the victor writes the history books. You have to study history objectively, rearing from primary sources, not the history books you are assigned to read by the institution. Your eyes may be opened.
America is not the America that you or I want to believe in, it is far more sinister than you think.
>>71151645
Yea I have
The Germans bombed indiscriminately in WW1 by using Zeppelins or Gothas. And then during the Spanish Civil War the Condor Legion attacked civilians (See Guernica) as a way to try to shock the population into surrendering.
In WW2 the bombings of Coventry and London were indeed aimed to destroy infrastructure and industry, kill civilians, tie up resources in attempts at defense, and to lower morale. The same goals that men like Harris and LeMay had in their campaigns. But do not make the mistake and think the Germans didn't entirely level cities because of some moral or idea of 'we're more civilized than this'. They didn't level cities because they couldn't. Germany had no long-range heavy bomber and relied on medium bombers like the He-111 or divebombers like the Ju-87. Things that could deliver accurate strikes but not in large force.
Germany's attempt at a heavy bomber, the He-177, was a disaster because Goering said it had to be a four engine aircraft capable of divebombing. This resulted in an odd layout of four engines and two propellers, which lead to overheating and frequent fires during flight.
If Germany had the heavy bombers they would have used them just as devastatingly. But since they did not they tried to achieve the same effects through the V-1 and V-2 which proved to be more of a nuisance than an actual threat.
>>71152605
What do you make of it, plus the 2 other tests
And the theory that the US atomic bombs were actually captured German bombs.
>>71152817
To be frank I have not thoroughly researched that area enough to present a legitimate opinion to you. However I do know the nazis had built "prototype" atomic bombs, whether they worked or not I am unsure of. They were certainly the first to split an atom, and we certainly did steal that tech from them. I would not put it past America to have taken their prototype bombs as well, although I'm sure they at least disassembled them to see how they worked. Perhaps our atomic bombs possessed original German parts, it is certainly likely. The Germans had many projects, they even dabbled heavily in occult magicks, there are many things they have done that have been stolen and hidden from our sight.
>>71152817
Look into German Wunderwaffe weapons, such as the die glocken and the haunebu. Very interesting stuff.
>>71153590
I have, I don't offer much validity to them however.
>>71154566
I understand. When I research stuff like that, rather than immediately discrediting it because of its seemingly oddness, I always like to tell myself "who knows?" . Like I said in an earlier post, the world is much crazier than we may want to believe.
>>71141825
Read Albert Spears' book on the Reich. He was there. He was in charge of the war manufacturing.
>>71154993
I understand I've researched a lot of black sun projects many of which I believe in however the Nazi UFO theories, and Antarctic submarine bases have too little evidence to believe.
>>71155955
even myths are at some level based on actual happenings, so it makes me wonder "where did the whole idea even come from?" I can't imagine some random dude just decide to declare that the Nazis had UFOs and shit.
Look up admiral Byrd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzWHqooAJtM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI9gSyFHcbw
>>71156363
I've read extensively about Adm. Byrd and his flight log and journal of the center earth journey.
It is strange that they would send a large task force to the Antarctic for "reaserch". They were definitely looking for traces of a German base, I believe this was run on rumour and nothing was found.
I understand completely! Like you, I like to question history and think anyone settling for the text book explanation is settling for less than the whole story. I believe much of it and I don't believe some of it.
I can believe, Germany tested alternative propulsion methods and aircraft designs. Did they create a functioning Saucer? Probably not.
I cannot believe, Hitler was an Illuminati agent who was tasked with destroying German identity and exposing it to NEO subjugation.
I think what puts a bad taste in people's mouths when you offer a fringe history theory is the fact that there ARE people who are lunatics blow it out of proportion.
>>71152146
God bless that man, but we should have followed up the firebombs with poison gas to get the krauts in their shelters.
There's no difference between the man who makes the rifle, who carries it by truck and the man who pulls the trigger.
Vae victis, "master race" faggots.
Op cum back
