Hitler's Problem

Brad DeLong says he's not sure "if this is a very good or very bad end-of-lecture sentence":

Next time, I'll talk about Adolf Hitler, whose big problem--besides being a bloodthirsty persuasive paranoid genocidal psychopath, that is--is that he pays to much attention to (a) Malthus, (b) social darwinists, and (c) cowboy novels.

Seems good to me. The answer, I think, is (a). Hitler suffered from, among other things, a Malthus-esque belief that "the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man" for sharply limited and that the acquisition of land -- lebensraum -- was crucial to national prosperity. Thus, he decided to invest a massive proportion of the German economy in a fruitless effort to greatly expand Germany's land area. But instead of a larger land area, Hitler's policies wound up making Germany smaller. And in destroying a huge proportion of Germany's capital infrastructure. And in subjecting a substantial portion of Germany to decades of Communist rule. And at the end of the process, Germany does, indeed, have a higher population density than Italy or France or Spain.

And yet: Germany is a really rich country in the scheme of things, especially the Western part. Because Hitler was wrong. German prosperity doesn't depend on acquiring more land and never did.

Comments

I don't think Hitler seized land for utilitarian reasons. I think he simply wanted Germans to rule the world. But who knows?

Posted by Paul | September 25, 2007 7:58 PM

Brad: Hitler, whose big problem ... is that he pays to much attention to (a) Malthus, (b) social darwinists, and (c) cowboy novels.

Matthew: The answer, I think, is (a).

I'm not sure Matthew understood the word "and" in Brad's sentence.

Posted by Al | September 25, 2007 8:04 PM

Thinking Malthus was only and all about land is a bad misunderstanding of Malthus, who explicitly recognized the importance of other production factors and resources including the importance of technology.

Hitler certainly, for instance, recognized the importance of "human capital" in his Aryanism and social engineering, but social darwinism, eugenics, and genocide is a really stupid method of maximizing the amount of productive people.

"Cowboy Novels?" Well, some days I read Mann's Doctor Faustus as saying the Nazis were the logical endpoint of the weird mix of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but saying so would get me into trouble.

Posted by bob mcmanus | September 25, 2007 8:39 PM

Did Hitler really like cowboy novels? I've never heard that, but it would be really interesting if it were true.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | September 25, 2007 8:45 PM

Of course, one could argue that Germany after the War actually got its lebensraum--in the form of the Common Market/EU, and an ever-liberalizing postwar global trade regime actively promoted by the US--a decidedly peaceful and much more effective strategy than the "beggar-they-neighbor" policies generally practiced in the interwar period. Or is it OK to actually say something nice about globalization?

Posted by David | September 25, 2007 8:47 PM

I was going to point out that it's not a multiple-choice question, but it looks like Al got there first.

Posted by teofilo | September 25, 2007 8:52 PM

Non-famous Matt,

Hitler was a big fan of a German writer of westerns named Karl May.

Posted by William Burns | September 25, 2007 8:55 PM

"I'm not sure Matthew understood the word "and" in Brad's sentence."

Oh, Al!, you got there first.. ('a la Peg from Married with Children)

"German prosperity doesn't depend on acquiring more land and never did."

The profundity is breathtaking... sorry, couldn't resist.

"but social darwinism, eugenics, and genocide is a really stupid method of maximizing the amount of productive people."

Kinda goes without saying... again, sorry, can't help myself.

Posted by Rihilism | September 25, 2007 9:08 PM

It seems to me that while there may not be a worldwide Malthusian catastrophe, it looks like Africa is headed for one. I see more Darfurs and Rwanda in the future due to competition for limited resources unless the rate of population growth changes soon. I don't understand why the people who can least afford to have children have more children than those who can afford them.

Posted by Tim | September 25, 2007 9:54 PM

Yes, Matt is completely right. Even within his own ideological framework, Hitler's policies were utterly disastrous.

He wanted to make Germany larger. Instead, Germany ended up much smaller. He wanted the German people to expand into the East. Instead, vast numbers of German civilians were massacred and driven from lands they'd peacefully occupied for around 500 years.

Much of his lack of success stems from his tendency to "bite off more than he could chew" and also assume that "boldness" and "clarity of vision" could overcome any practical obstacles, the warnings of "realist" naysayers notwithstanding.

I do not say this at all lightly, but there really do seem some extraordinarily close parallels in thinking between old Adolf and the crazy neocons currently running the American government under their half-witted puppet-king. And unfortunately for the world, they---that is, we---thereby control a vast supply of nuclear weapons. Hitler was enormously much less dangerous.

This situation really is not, not good...

Posted by RKU | September 25, 2007 10:00 PM

Part of the reason why Hitler wanted Germany to expand eastward was to re-absorb the millions of people of German descent living in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Posted by Peter | September 25, 2007 10:12 PM

Right, Hitler's grand strategy of land piracy was out of date -- Germany's economic capacity was growing faster than it's birthrate. It didn't need all that land in Eastern Europe.

On the other hand, Japan was up against a Malthusian trap in the 1930s -- they had done everything technologically possible at the time to grow more food per acre and expand the acres in cultivation, plus the Depression and protectionism had hammered their ability to trade manufactured goods for food, so their calorie intake per person was falling in the 1930s. Thus, the policy of land piracy on the Asian mainland.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 25, 2007 10:29 PM

Overpopulation and the threat of famine were still very big concerns well into the 1950's and early 1960's, i.e., before really effective contraception (the pill) became widespread, not to mention China's one child policy and safer, legal abortions.

Also during the 1950's agricultural science developed grain crops with better yields and "better living through chemistry" reduced the impact of a lot of plant pests and diseases, even though we later learned they brought with them other problems.

Malthus wasn't wrong. He was just looking at things from his point in history.

Posted by Emma Zahn | September 25, 2007 10:40 PM

FWIW, here is a thread on Karl May, focusing on the 60s German movies, which are considered fair representations of May's style.

As I guessed, hyper-Romantic & hyper-moralistic simultaneously, to the point of being laughably unrealistic by American standards. Think Hopalong Cassidy or the Lone Ranger. But the unrealism was exactly May's intention.

Posted by bob mcmanus | September 25, 2007 10:49 PM

Thanks, William- I hadn't known that.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | September 25, 2007 10:55 PM

"Overpopulation and the threat of famine were still very big concerns"

Still too much emphasis on food & population. Now maybe it should be considered Neo-Malthusian or something, but the 70s environmentalists expanded the Malthusian dilemma into a more general question as to whether consumption, desired or expected, will always outpace resources until reduced by recessions, wars, famines, etc. It is really about Say's Law and equilibrium.

IIRC, the 70s equation was something like (Population times Technology) divided by Resources = Environmental Impact. (Environment in a broader sense including politics etc) A world population can be relatively small, with reasonable food requirements, but if they all also want SUV's and 3000 sq ft air-conditioned houses, gonna be problems. A Malthusian pessimist presumes the population or parts of it will always want more than the maximum consistent with stability.

Posted by bob mcmanus | September 25, 2007 11:02 PM

And Malthus certainly understood technology, but understood it as a double-edged sword, that technology will certainly increase productivity, but will simultaneously increase the consumption of resources per capita.

I don't see a bunch of unclaimed surplus production out there, so I don't see Malthus as refuted.

Posted by bob mcmanus | September 25, 2007 11:08 PM

I think the word you were looking for, Matthew, is "Malthusian".

Posted by Jake | September 25, 2007 11:21 PM

Malthus is correct only in a closed system.

The universe in some sense is a "closed system" - but that's hardly relevant given its size relative to this planet.

Also, the advent of nanotechnology and the resulting advances in AI, and the re-engineering of the human body and brain, will eliminate all issues of resources on this planet.

A Transhuman entity requires only five things for continued existence: 1) An energy source; 2) material; 3) nanomass; 4) computing power; and 5) knowledgebases. With access to those five things, an entity can produce any resource required and then dispose of it when not required, re-using the material for other things. This eliminates the need for such an entity to "consume" resources in any conventional sense other than energy. And there is plenty of energy floating around the universe...

So Malthus was for all practical purposes wrong, even if technically correct.

Some critics of Transhumanism have suggested that even Transhuman entities would expand to the limits of the universe, thus proving Malthus correct. Unfortunately for their thesis, they provide no evidence that Transhuman entities would have any real reason to do so.

In any event, Hitler's policies were based on Karl Haushofer's geopolitical theories than anything else. Haushofer believed that whoever controlled the Eastern European "heart" of Europe could control the world.

Interestingly, Wikipedia says that "some of Haushofer's ideas stem from earlier American and British geostrategy". Hmmm...

Given the efforts of the US to penetrate that region since the fall of the Soviet empire, it would seem the concept is still given considerable weight. Although now the emphasis appears to be on oil rather than land per se.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 25, 2007 11:42 PM

A lot of thinking here outside of historical context. Germans after WWI were fixated with a sense of grievance of the way they had been treated by the victorious Allies. Much of the land that Hitler wanted to the East was land that had historically been considered German for centuries and wrongly and shamefully taken away. Hitler wasn't driven to national expansion for Malthusian reasons as much as his reasons were vengence and racial chauvanism. The Slavs to the East were inferior and didn't deserve German land, and were considered incapable of and undeserving of a modern industrialized economy. German land was to be returned to Germany, and the Slav lands further east were to be left for agriculture because the Slavs were to remain the peasants of Europe which is all they were suited for. Not so much Malthusian as Ricardian division of labor.

Posted by Ethel-to-Tilly | September 25, 2007 11:43 PM

And yet: Germany is a really rich country in the scheme of things,

And if you said that to Hitler, he would laugh; he would consider the lot as 'weaklings'. The Karl May stuff has an impact, because he essentially wanted to take (small) Germany and create a United States of German Europe, populated by lots and lots and lots of German babies. He wasn't after money, he was after power. And if he got it, then he would have the money and power neccessary to rebuild Berlin and Linz and Munich as vast monuments of architecture that would then become the absolute centers of world kulture. (He was at heart an ARTEESTE, ya know.)

Autarky was a secondary issue, necessitated by the first priority, since he was aiming his efforts at ensuring that Germany came out on top of the world struggle of 1980's and thereafter ruled the world for (you guessed it!) a thousand years.

He wanted to create a German version of the Roman Empire.

max
['Insert neo-con reference here.']

Posted by max | September 25, 2007 11:56 PM

Part of the reason why Hitler wanted Germany to expand eastward was to re-absorb the millions of people of German descent living in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Ding ding ding. Once you establish the principle of national self-determination, and redraw a map ostensibly under that principle, all sorts of shit goes down where the borders don't match. It's easy to forget that Danzig and Koenigsberg were German-speaking cities; that Prague, the city of Freud and Kafka, had a German-speaking upper-class; that German was spoken in Vilnius and St Petersburg.

That kind of Habsburgian heterogeneity could exist under the loose, baggy state structures that entered the Great War, but not afterwards.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | September 26, 2007 12:22 AM

German prosperity doesn't depend on acquiring more land and never did.

...says the citizen of the continental-scale power with no potential military rivals in its entire hemisphere. Your attitude toward acquiring more land might be different if you were squeezed into the center of a Europe where neighboring nations had been trading invasions for thousands of years. Part of conquest was subjugating your potential enemies permanently.

Not saying Hitler was, like, making good choices. But smugly saying that it was obvious how wrong he was is anachronistic.

Posted by mq | September 26, 2007 12:37 AM

Addendum: this isn't to deny that loose, baggy monarchical states in Europe weren't on borrowed time before the Great War -- and Bismarck had a role in that.

But it's important to appreciate just how disruptive it was to have a large, powerful state in place of the geographical jigsaw pre-1860, and how quickly the idea of a once and future German nation-state took hold.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | September 26, 2007 12:38 AM

Matt was wrong, and Hitler was right.

One of the main causes for German defeat and their democide (3 million) in the 1918 Spanish flu was Germany's malnutrition and lack of critical resources caused by the Brit Naval Blockade - and cutoff of oil, N African grain, Turk grain - by Brit dictate on affected lands.

Matt has a child-like faith in the existence of free markets being a fact of life that never go away.

They are not.

They are subject to going away completely in war. That is why when Hitler said "we need more land so we never have a "turnip year" like 1917 when 600,000 Germans died of malnutrition and babies who could not digest turnips perished enmass" - 99% of Germans who remembered how the blockade wreaked such destruction in light of USA/Brit food & resources blockades said "Never Again!" and absolutely supported the acquisition of more land for security under "lebensraum".

Japan was similarly driven once the US/Brit/Dutch blockade resulted in no more free market for oil, metals, food. The whole land expansion strategy of the Co-East Asia Prosperity Sphere was to get resources in other lands under Japanese dominance.

After WWII, the only thing that leaves many wealthy, but land-poor nations to breath better is knowledge they are US allies and the US Navy will not destroy them by permitting food, energy, and critical raw material blockades. Only the faith that the US will stand up for open trade by sending its sons to die in places like Iraq keeps that faith alive.

And if we give up the Gulf to China-Iran and run to Okinawa, we will get a taste of how the Germans in WWI and then the Japs in WWII felt when every day you were hungry, motorless, without imports of any kind, kids dying.

Posted by Chris Ford | September 26, 2007 12:43 AM

Actually, ANY sentence that begins with "Next time" is an absolutely terrible end-of-lecture sentence. As soon as you say that, students tune out completely, hear nothing further, and start packing up. Hitler, Malthus, Germany, Social Darwinists, malnutrition, Spanish flu, blockades, and centuries of European warfare are utterly moot at that point.

This debate, however, is really informative and interesting.

Posted by planetpup | September 26, 2007 1:06 AM

I seem to recall that the "Ayran race" in the goofy early-20th century German theories included all speakers of Indo-European languages, all of Europe, Iran and India, all descended from a small originating stock in Germany. That's a lot of land. I haven't read enough about Hitler's thoughts in particular regarding this, but he certainly seems to have bought the "all of Europe" part?

Posted by artappraiser | September 26, 2007 1:38 AM

"That is why when Hitler said "we need more land so we never have a "turnip year" like 1917 when 600,000 Germans died of malnutrition..."

The Germans didn't think of this when they itched for war in 1914. When Rathenau, who opposed the war, first proposed a national department to coordinate raw materials for the war effort, he was told Germany wouldn't need it, since the war would be over in a few months. Germany wouldn't have lasted until 1918 if it hadn't finally agreed to Rathenau's proposal.

Anyhow, this is a pretty lame rationale for invading Poland in 1939. World War I Germany did its best to starve the Brits too, with its U-boats; the Brits just did a better job.

As for Hitler's extravagant territorial ambitions, some historians have speculated that he was essentially a compulsive gambler. He got lucky with his early conquests, including France, and then started a war with Russia -- a war he knew he had effectively lost at Stalingrad in 1942.

Posted by Juan | September 26, 2007 2:22 AM

"And if we give up the Gulf to China-Iran and run to Okinawa, we will get a taste of how the Germans in WWI and then the Japs in WWII felt when every day you were hungry, motorless, without imports of any kind, kids dying."

If you want to convincingly come to a conclusion as blatantly alarmist as this, you'll need a lot better evidence backing it up.

Posted by Hodgepodge | September 26, 2007 3:26 AM

Hitler was a big fan of a German writer of westerns named Karl May.

That's true, but then everybody was a big fan of Karl May, including (according to Wikipedia) Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Mann, Karl Liebknecht, Bertha von Suttner and Carl Zuckmayer, who even named his daughter "Winnetou". And while I don't know about the current generation of German kids, he was still widely read among youths 20 years ago.

Posted by novakant | September 26, 2007 3:57 AM

"On the other hand, Japan was up against a Malthusian trap in the 1930s..."

Ahem, ..."big problem--besides being a bloodthirsty persuasive paranoid genocidal psychopath, that is--is that he pays to much attention to (a) Malthus, (b) social darwinists, and (c) cowboy novels."

"A Malthusian pessimist presumes the population or parts of it will always want more than the maximum consistent with stability."

Go figure...

Posted by Rihilism | September 26, 2007 6:28 AM

Re Hitler

Everybody seems to ignore Mr. Hitlers' positive accomplishments. After all, he built the autobahn, did away with unemployment, and set up the Volkswagon company. What do you want, blood?

Posted by SLC | September 26, 2007 8:38 AM

I've always wondered to what extent Hitler wanted to eliminate the Slavs as a people and re-populate their land with Germans and to what extent he wanted to pretty much enslave the Slavs? Maybe he was planning on letting Slavic peoples with large fascist movements like the Croatians live.

"Matt was wrong, and Hitler was right."

Kind of sums up Chris Ford, doesn't it?

Posted by Reality Man | September 26, 2007 9:21 AM

So those are Hitler's big problems.

The thing I liked about Adolf Hitler is that he wouldn't take any shit from magicians.

Posted by David | September 26, 2007 10:15 AM

The problem for the expansionists was lack of self-sufficiency; both Japan and Germany were all about autarky.

Posted by d | September 26, 2007 10:21 AM

1. pseudonymous in nc - German was never a popular language in St Petersburg, despite the name. Even though the royal family had quite a lot of German blood, French and English had more prestige among the upper classes. The Baltic cities (Riga, Talinn, Vilnius) were all ruled by Germans though.

2. I am partial to Aly Goetz' argument that Nazi Germany was a "robber state" that was always running a huge deficit in order to buy support from ordinary Germans. I've read in a few places that one of Hitler's real motivation for attacking Russia was to ensure the continued loyalty of the military by bribing the generals with land grants. Hitler never had a lot of faith in the German people's ability to bear hardship, and probably thought that any sustained deprivation could lead to a repeat of 1918/19. The state was basically running a ponzi scheme to buy support, one that could only be financed by taking more and more land, resources and material possessions from its neighbors.

Despite the popular perception (in Star Trek for example) that the Nazis were brutal but very efficient, in fact the Nazis ran what was probably the most incompetent government Germany has ever seen, (the DDR excepted). Hitler and his cronies created a massive byzantine overlapping bureacracy with feuding officials constantly jockeying for power and sniping at each other. Not to mention the incredible economic damage caused by the idiotic racial policies excluding some of your best and brightest from participating in the economy at all. If you read contemporary accounts (Viktor Klemperer's diaries for instance) it seems clear that life for ordinary Germans in the 1930s was not a Leni Riefenstahl film. The real unemployment rate was probably far higher than the official figures stated, and prices on many consumer goods were often at levels that ordinary Germans had trouble affording.

Posted by vanya_6724 | September 26, 2007 11:35 AM

Hitler looked into the future, after the war, and saw Europe as a land of unlimited opportunity, like America in the nineteenth century, once the land had been cleared of its original inhabitants. (Maybe that´s the result of reading Karl May novels.) If Germany had won the war, all the land acquired certainly would have made the country more prosperous, and more powerful, than it would have been on its small land base. Hitler´s errors were in overestimating Germany´s chances for winning the war, and in coming up with a poor strategy for winning it.

Posted by Curt | September 26, 2007 1:08 PM

"Despite the popular perception (in Star Trek for example) that the Nazis were brutal but very efficient, in fact the Nazis ran what was probably the most incompetent government Germany has ever seen, (the DDR excepted)."

I don't think anyone would call Stalin's government efficient either, but, once the war with Germany started, Soviet factories were cranking out a better main battle tank than the German version, and they were producing 3-4 times as many per month than the Germans. Stalin recognized this as total war and the country mobilized accordingly, with women flying fighter planes, working in factories, etc. Hitler didn't.

Posted by Fred | September 26, 2007 1:29 PM

We have at least 2 different Fred commenters here. I'm the other one. I'll have to come up with a new name, or Fred will.

I think I'll be FredJ from here on. FredJ did not comment on Hitler's problem. Except for this comment.

My comments on Iraq are signed 'Fred', though.

Posted by FredJ | September 26, 2007 1:49 PM

Uh, my comments on Iran under lieberman-kyle are signed 'Fred'. Oh, who cares?

Posted by FredJ | September 26, 2007 1:55 PM

Just call yourself "The Non-Idiotic Fred".

For that matter, it will probably be obvious, so don't bother. Fred's statements are ALWAYS idiotic.

Uh, which Fred am I addressing here anyway?

Must not be the idiotic one...

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 26, 2007 4:58 PM