"Also"? Don't you think the economic "expansion" was sort of integrally related with the conquering-Europe thing?

Volkswagen is a perfectly good car company.

If you make your living repairing car electrical systems, it's the best.

Don't you think the economic "expansion" was sort of integrally related with the conquering-Europe thing?

And even more integrally related with the whole slave-labor camp thing.

Also, they 'solved' unemployment by making it virtually impossible for women to work--by legislating the whole Kinder-Kirche-Küche thing--thus opening up lots of jobs for men.

But yeah, your point is well-taken; any given idea should be evaluated on its own merits, apart from whether it was adopted by people who also came up with some of the worst ideas in the history of humanity.

If you make your living repairing car electrical systems, it's the best.

Don't they have to buy all of their parts from Ford thanks to some consent decree?

Yeah, they made good ovens.

Stupid post.

Hitler was NOT a vegetarian.

Preternaturally idiotic post.

One, Hitler was no vegetarian, and this presumes vegetarianism is some sort of unalloyed good, which I think may still be in dispute.

Two, Volkswagen was not a car company, it was yet another way for the Nazi state to fleece the poor and working class. Have you not read Shirer, or did you just forget it all?

Three, aggressive Keynesians (i.e., not FDR hemmed in on all sides by his right wing) know how to get out of depressions. Big fucking whoop; what this has to do with the Nazis, I have no idea.

So, one pure counterfactual, one mere lie and one utter misinterpretation.

Perhaps your worst post ever.

A hint: when you agree with Galt, check your facts twice before posting, then check again, then hit delete anyway.

Oh, and full disclosure: both my grandfathers lost their jobs when the Nazis took over. Perhaps I get too personal. Luckily, one was fired for having been a monarchist who actually enforced the anti-Nazi laws as an Austrian policeman in the thirtied, and the other was a mere, subhuman slav medical doctor outside of Poland, so neither was gassed.

Great, huh? Neither of my grandfathers was gassed, just both fired and prevented from working in their fields of expertise. Up Nazism! Up Jane Galt!

Um...I think Ezra's point was not so much 'the Nazis did some good stuff, too' as 'the simple fact that an idea was implemented by the Nazis does not in itself make it a bad idea'. (E.g., how many times have we all heard arguments against gun control using Nazi Germany?) I think Ezra was a little sloppy in incorporating the former in order to make the latter point, but I think the latter point is entirely reasonable.

That was Galt's post. Her post was stupid, too, but given her oeuvre, pretty solid.

Ezra's was as batshit insane as anything he has ever written. I let slide his insistence the Nazis were for universal healthcare (because, compared to the US, I guess it looks like that). But the rest ranged from incoherent to simply untrue, and he needs to be called on it.

Ezra's was a bad, throwaway post. A post about the Nazis can never be a throwaway post, much less a bad one. I feel completely justified in calling him out. If anything, I feel bad for not using words like "fuckwit" and "jerk".

Now, I know the history pretty fucking well, for reasons I delineate above. Go on, bring the reasons Nazis weren't all bad.

I'm waiting.

I'd sheathe your extraordinary level of outrage here, WCW. No one is calling the nazis good (and if you imply otherwise, you're way, way, out of line). My point is simple, and I'm surprised it's in dispute. Like Jane says, it's totally, batshit insane to try and discredit policies because they are somehow connected to the nazis. This goes for everything from privatization to appeasement. The Nazis committed some horrific atrocities, but we've turned them into evil versions of King Midas: able to turn everything they touched noxious.

There's a specificity to their crimes and the historical moment in which they were created, and when we lose sight of that for momentary partisan advantage, we make a massive mistake. So you're welcome to brag about your historical knowledge some more (I, by the way, had plenty of family in the Holocaust, so I guess we can get into some ghoulish contest over it if you really want), but it's missing the point. The problem with the Nazis was that they were genocidal conquerors with a white supremacist vision. It was not that they privatized public services.

As for the Hitler/vegetarian thing, you guys sure?

I have a cousin who did some research on Nazi economic policies. From my understanding (though I've never talked about it more than casually with him), while the Nazis did, indeed, restore full employment, for workers who did have jobs, compensation often fell, as unions were suppressed and such.

Of course, in a country in which vast swathes of the population are actually unemployed, I think there's a reasonable case for economic policies that reduce compensation to already-employed workers to get the unemployed ones jobs, if getting the jobless jobs can't be done without cutting already-employed worker compensation, but I don't think Nazi economics lead to the unalloyed prosperity some believe.

Like Jane says, it's totally, batshit insane to try and discredit policies because they are somehow connected to the nazis.

Yeah, that's wrong. If something seems to be a core principle of Nazism, people might want to give it a more thofough analysis than they might otherwise do. That seems like a pretty obvious step to take: people with horrific judgment are more likely to make horrific choices. Most of our policy choices are best-guesses about a world we don't understand very well; if the person guessing is a Nazi, and is guessing the way he is guessing because he's a Nazi, look hard at what he's doing.

Of course Jane wants to redeem the Nazis' judgment. Once we grant that, we'll more or less have to redeem everyone else's judgment, including the Southern Republicans. There's a hard plan to see.

I am sorry for your family's losses, Ezra. As I said, mine was lucky: some were imprisoned, some lost their jobs, but none was killed.

Anyhow, one, yes, Shicklgruber ate meat. You have to read through the whole thing, as with Shirer. "Hitler was indeed, for the most part, a vegetarian — though he did occasionally allow himself a dish of meat." You also elide the critique that vegetarianism is some unalloyed good, but let's ignore that.

Two, I am gratified you drop my criticisms of your "points" on VW, growth and healthcare. I'll leave them lay if you will.

Three, phrase it that way in the first place and I don't flip out. Which is to say -- phrase it that way in the first place.

Where the hell did VW come from, anyway? Have you not read Shirer? It's a great, great book if you haven't.

Don't forget the autobahn and Leni Riefenstahl too.

-----

"I guess we can get into some ghoulish contest over it if you really want"

I'd buy a ticket to watch...

-----

I think this is all missing the point. It's quite true that it's wrong to say everything associated with the Nazis is bad due to the association.

But I am sympathetic to the argument that anything Jane Galt is in favor of must be wrong.

-----

And along these lines, I highly recommend folks check out The Architecture of Doom over at Netflix. It makes a convincing argument that the true problem of Hitler and the Nazis comes down to really poor aesthetic taste.

On the vegetarian thing, I hardly know a vegetarian who doesn't occasionally slip. As for Shirer, I have no idea who s/he is, or what book you're referencing. As for the rest, I clarified the post.

Obviously, Hitler is bad. One would hope we could have these discussions without constantly reaffirming that. Growing up in Hebrew School, we used to say Hitler Nemach Shama (spelling may be off, of course). The rough translation, as I remember, was "may his name be erased from history." That seemed incorrect to me. Rather, we need to extract the right lessons. When we overuse the Nazi card, we cheapen it. When it's deployed opportunistically, it's weakened. That's how Nazis are central to the debate in Iraq but the world stands by as Africa perishes from AIDS, and Darfur rips itself apart. It's heartbreaking, grotesque, stuff, and I think part of the reason is that Nazi analogies have become the purview of warmongers and antistatists.

there is a good metaphor i heard used once, about looking for good things in horrific circumstances...would be like abraham lincoln's wife at the booth theater, saying, "well, the play was very good."
....adolph hitler apparently liked dogs and was kind to eva braun...charles manson probably was nice to leslie van houten. small acts of kindness for people who spread evil and suffering like a bottle of spilled ink in the universe.
the best thing adolph hitler did was to awaken us to the dangers of unchecked and unbridled evil.

I'm with you on this being a stupid debate tactic that we see way too much. There are plenty of X's that reveal the dumbness of the "The Nazis did X, therefore we shouldn't do X" inference. (X=breathing, for instance.)

"As for Shirer, I have no idea who s/he is, or what book you're referencing."

Here ya go...

Ezra, nothing, in my mind, is sacred, and of course not everything the Nazis touched was evil, but you make it sound as if there was no connection between their economic policies and its totalitarianism; your phrasing suggests that if only they hadn't set out to conquer the world and kill Jews, they would have been not too bad. Look at what you wrote: "the Nazis actually did a pretty good job increasing economic growth and improving standards of living, rocketing Germany out of a depression and back into expansion. Unfortunately, they also set out to conquer Europe and exterminate the Jews."

Standards of living? Talk about a reductive, clinical use of that term.

In any case, on the anniversary of 9-11, we should discuss the good things about Al Qaeda:

1. opposition to Saddam Hussein

Hmm. Can't think of anything else.

"There are plenty of X's that reveal the dumbness of the "The Nazis did X, therefore we shouldn't do X" inference. (X=breathing, for instance.)"

You're pro-breathing, Neil? Appeaser!

http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Third-Reich-William-Shirer/dp/06717286 You can get it used for two or three dollars. Do, if you haven't, and read carefully. It is fabulous journalism and great documentary history. If I were a journalist, William Shirer would be a hero. Hell, he's a hero period.

I wish you had phrased your post this way in the first place, instead of with throwaway comments. I think the one about VW pushed me over the top. Investment analysis is my business, and the idea that the '30s VW was a "car company" is simply laughable. I am pretty unsure that the appropriate opprobrium heaped on Nazi Germany gets us to Darfur, but I am willing to listen.

Maybe in something other than a throwaway post next time, though, huh?

David: Isn't that precisely the point? If the Nazis hadn't done evil things, they wouldn't have been evil? And so we should have a clear-eyed conception of when they were monsters, but not pollute the rest of our discourse with references that don't make any sense?

And by the way, I spent 9/11 talking about he we've lost the war in Afghanistan, so I'm not that far off from your joke...

"the best thing adolph hitler did was to awaken us to the dangers of unchecked and unbridled evil."

I'd argue that Hitler's gift to the world was discrediting racism in the Anglosphere. De-colonialism and civil rights would have been much more difficult to accomplish had not WWII forced the Allies to grapple with the logical extreme of racism.

Yeah, I guess I'll be more careful. On the other hand, I sort of figured my readership would simply assume I wasn't a neonazi...

"Investment analysis is my business, and the idea that the '30s VW was a "car company" is simply laughable."

Were they actually a "plush toy" company?

"On the other hand, I sort of figured my readership would simply assume I wasn't a neonazi..."

Don't conflate a single unreasonable commenter with your entire readership...

There are plenty of X's that reveal the dumbness of the "The Nazis did X, therefore we shouldn't do X" inference."

Which is why you rarely see people making that specific argument. Or at least I rarely do.

Petey, in the '30s, VW absorbed cash, but never produced autos for retail pruchase. I don't know what you want to call it, but it sure doesn't spell "car company" to me.

Under other circumstances, Ezra, I'd feel apologetic. Under these, given what you wrote, I don't.

"David: Isn't that precisely the point? If the Nazis hadn't done evil things, they wouldn't have been evil?"

No one thinks you're an Nazi apologist, and the overheated reaction to your post partly proves your point. My point is that their economic success was due in part to their Nazi-ness. Theirs was a war-preparing economy. In fact, Hilter knew he needed to improve the economy in order to forfill his dreams of conquering the world. Now, it's true that Germany's economy was in some measure a Keynesian success, built on public works intitiatives that gave jobs to people (but not to Jews), it's also true that part of the reason for low employment was consription: hundreds of thousands of young men were forced to go into the armed services to prepare for war, so we can learn some things about the impact of state spending (by the way, Hitler ran up a huge deficit) and economic self-reliance (Hitler by necessity couldn't rely on imports)but we shouldn't overlearn the lessons, because Germany was a war machine. It's genocidal war and its economy were connected.

No, its success was pretty purely Keynesian. As I allude above, the problem FDR faced was mostly external (post-Hoover US conservatives still wanted to liquidate everyone) and partly internal, insofar as he simply didn't go far enough. Indeed, US growth in the late '30s tells the tale: wartime deficit spending did the trick.

You don't think bombs have some special facility for spurring GDP, do you? If they don't, then the only question is, whence production? In both Nazi Germany and late-'30s America, it came from deficit spending -- pure Keynes.

Read the General Theory.

Hey, nice update. It's half the post you should have made. In re appeasement, like many I linked to the same Strategic Studies Institute paper all the kids love.

If you click through to the actual paper (PDF), you even get bonus Shirer quotes.

I told you he was a hero.

"You don't think bombs have some special facility for spurring GDP, do you?"

Not as matter of economics, of course not, although there's the political question; armed forces are government programs that are easy to sell. Germany's economic success, in any case, should not be overstated: wages went down. We know from today that an economy is more than unemployment numbers and growth. An economy should be judged by its impact on peoples' lives. And there's the union question, which someone mentioned above; the crackodwn on organized labor surely was related to Nazism.

I really don't know what you were thinking of with this post Ezra. Universal Health Care? Is that really what Hitler was all about? The problem with the Nazi's wasn't that "everything they touched was bad" its that they had the best of the best and used it to wreck havoc on the world.

Germany had the top engineers, scientists and military strategists of their time. They built the best army, the best tanks, the best airplanes of their time. (You're talking about Volkswagens?) Their rocket scientists went on to build the American and Russian space programs of the 1960's that sent us to the Moon. They used it all to slaughter millions.

But for all of that, Hitler would have been another little-dictator, like Saddam, pushed aside and ultimately forgotten by history.

wcw,

you'll note that Ezra wrote:
Volkswagen is a perfectly good car company...

Tense is pretty important.

Hence my description of his reference as a "mere lie," since he made an implicitly untrue statement with intent to deceive. His statement was not the explicit denotation of that present-tense assertion, but the implication that the National Socialist state had anything whatever to do with any "car company" under any name that in any way provided functioning automobiles to its inhabitants.

Ezra probably just didn't know the history of VW and made an assumption as he typed his throwaway post. I don't want to speak for him, but he certainly hasn't defended that particular point since. Perhaps he looked it up.

You, however, clearly neither know the history nor looked it up nor bothered to consider that Ezra's statement had to have something to do with the Nazis, or make no sense. Take your pick, then: either you're defending a statement which is facially true but in context makes no sense, or after a vituperative comments thread never bothered to look up the actual history.

Either way, Ezra's looking better -- by comparison -- every minute.

Wow, wcw,
you've lost control of your faculties or something. It was perfectly clear to me what Ezra was getting at-- even before his update. By continuing to harp, you're making it clear that the point was lost completely on you. It continues to be.

wcw Hope you are never misunderstood when making your point. ( not so much )
And I've had the dubious privilege of a detailed first person account of the liberating of one of the - what - internment site would be a nice innocuous term. Sick making would be more descriptive.
Way I heard it, Adolph the Austrian painter commissioned Ferdinand Porsche to design a "People's Car" - hence the name - and I expect you realize Porsche didn't exactly drop off the face of the earth either.
The thing about Nazi economics was they were extremely popular - until the currency devalued so fast from unsustainable econmic policies you might as well take a wheelbarrow to the store to carry the cash you'd need to buy a lettuce.

Ezra, my apologies for getting worked up and hijacking this thread. No apology for my fundamental critique of your pre-update post, though. It deserved my opporbrium, and more.

As for the rest of you, thanks for the underinformed lectures. You may start your reading with the aforementioned twelve-hundred pages of Shirer's popular work and move out to academic histories. Get back to me when you've made it to "Kraft durch Freude" and we can begin to discuss actual events.

"Wow, wcw, you've lost control of your faculties or something."

No doubt.

Well, it happens to most everyone. At least wcw got himself back together within the same thread. I've seen worse.

I don't get it. Everybody seems to be validating what I found most offensive about Galt's post. That no historical comparisons can ever be made, that all political/economic systems are sui generis, and that therefore political science and political economics are a joke.

"This time, different than all other times, we can cut taxes and go to war. Because history is bunk."

"Our xenophobic rhetoric, eviscerating of oversight, and arrogation of power have nothing to do with any other such practices. Fear not;the world and humanity ia born brand new every day."

Volkswagen is a perfectly good car company.

If you make your living repairing car electrical systems, it's the best.

On my Dad's last tour in Germany he bought a Jetta for $10K new. His next door neighbor was a Volkswagen master mechanic who tuned it for the cost of the parts. Three years later he sold it for $10.5K I would consider that perfectly good.

"I've seen worse."

I feel slighted and ignored. Surely I have done worse than that. If not, I will try harder.

I have read Shirer, long ago. I am not sure it is essential canon anymore There are few other more recent books;just a couple. Shirer is not Gibbon.

I have Keynes scaring me to death over there on the shelf. There has be something easier then the Theory, like maybe the recent biography, to recommend to the less committed.

Ezra,

Certainly, the central Nazi social policy you are supporting is the "choice" agenda. Isn't it true that by picking and choosing which Nazi policies were good and which weren't, you are setting up to argue the merits of eugenics?

http://abortionno.org/AbortionNO/genocide_fl.html

Let's be clear: Hitler was a strict vegetarian who ate ham, pigeon, sausages, liver dumplings, and caviar.
http://www.vegsource.com/berry/hitler.html

partyofdeath makes a very adulterous point.

Well the first Jeeps werent sold commercially until 1945 though they were clearly made before then. They were a perfectly good company during the war years even without commercial sales.

The nazis caused to be produced a perfectly good car, and through that VW was eventually born. whether it was a company or a government program is imbecilic nitpicking. Nazi germany did not ascribe to our economic policies or beliefs so it is inane to hold the definition of company to a modern US capitalistic definition when they held none of those value systems.

Ezra I think the ranting on this thread is a perfect example of the very truth that you wrote, and that is both pre and post update.

There were good things that came from nazi germany, many that we were happy to take on as our own once the dust settled. (examples such as rocketry, jet engines, and a good chunk of physics) If you go to germany with an open non-accusatory mind some people there will even talk to you about many of these things and fill in the holes in the history books.

There were also bad things, the holocaust being the most obvious and unforgivable. But there are also horrible things that were done by the romans, the soviets, the serbs and countless others. The Nazis have taken almost a mythical position in our society as the one set with that 'evil midas touch' as you so eloquently put it.

Holy hannah. I try to stay away from this thread, and the stupid keeps me coming back.

Willys-Overland history as a car company dates back to the early teens of the 20th century, if not earlier. It was car company before WWI.

I can't argue with people this ignorant.

"I can't argue with people this ignorant."

So, let me see if I understand correctly.

According to you, VW wasn't a "car company" because they had no products for sale to consumers. But when someone points out to you that Willys-Overland was in a similar position, you call them ignorant.

Perhaps it's because I'm deficient in reading my Shirer, but as far as I can tell, you, sir, are a whackjob.

Similar, my shiny metal ass. Google "Willys-Overland" and get back to me when you have a clue.

Ezra, many apologies, but do you see this crap?

"Google "Willys-Overland" and get back to me when you have a clue."

I didn't do that, but I did read the Volkswagon entry in Wikipedia.

The first beetle was manufactured by VW in 1936.

When the war began in 1939, VW began manufacturing military vehicles.

Sounds like a "car company" to me.

My assessment of your whackjob-ness remains.

They built a damn good highway system.

The problem with finding readable work by Keynes that explains the GT is that while he was capable of writing in a style to be more accessible to the general public ... for example, Essays in Biography or The Economic Consequences of the Peace ...

... he was still engaged in the academic debate up until the time he started working full time on the problems of war time finance for a country whose wartime finance was a major headache, and basically wrecked his health in the process, so he never got the chance to write that book about the theories of effective demand and liquidity in the GT.

And of course the postwar US mainstream reconstructed Keynesian economics for the shot-gun marriage with neoclassical microeconomic theory, which ended up squeezing out uncertainty and real world money. That makes it hard to find works that actually explained Keynes' GT, instead of the Cambridge MA bastardized Keynesian economics.

“Economics Explained” by Heilbroner and Thurow, for example, is an overall excellent introduction, but its chapter on Savings/Investment is hopelessly confused by Cambridge MA bastardized-Keynesian ideas.

The economic benefits brought on by the Nazis are overblown in this arguement. Its true that the Nazis did increase economic production, however the amount of resources that were committed to building the military between 1933-1939 and the high cost of fighting the war between 1939-1945 made the German standard of living stagnate badly (at times at a pre-1933 level).

A better example perhaps might be to say, Franco's Spain was not all bad in that he allowed the Church to counteract (or forstall) some of the most alienating and dehumanising effects of laissez-faire industrial capitalism.

Some Russians even argue that Stalin was not all bad because the Soviets had high educational standards -- but what is the point?

All of these guys were really really bad.

On further thought -- Euthanizing the mentally ill and retarded = Universal Health Care?!!?

Bruce, Ethan, John, many thanks for the rational comments.

I think the General Theory is plenty readable. If anything, I wish it were less readable and had more math.

Ethan, strong point, which goes back to mine that bombmaking has no special facility for spurring GDP. Indeed, bombs are negative goods, since their economic utility in actual use is always negative. Deficit spending that produces roads and dams may eventually ignite a virtuous economic cycle. That which produces guns, uniforms and corpses cannot.

John, as I wrote, I let healthcare slide, since compared to the US, if you squint hard, the Nazis had it. On Franco and Stalin, I think you echo the point that you simply can't make throwaway comments about leadership whose salient characteristic is malevolent oppression.

Petey, I have a special link for you.

You also mentioned health care. Apparently the Nazis also prioritized anticancer research and promoted some real advances in public health, including the world's first serious antismoking campaign. All, of course, for the sake of cleansing the German body politic and bringing about an "exclusionist sanitary utopia." (See "The Nazi War on Cancer," by Robert N. Proctor.)

Maybe some policies can be like Wernher von Braun's advances in rocketry, which could just as easily be put to good use. Certainly invoking the Nazis doesn't amount to a real argument against smoking restrictions, or make smoking any less deadly. But I think a certain amount of unease may still be appropriate. Proctor says the whole episode shows us something important about Nazism--how resourceful and seductive it could be, aligned as it supposedly was with science in the public interest.

So, it's still lame to say you're against some economic policy just because the Nazis did it, and thumbs up for VWs too. But it remains true that in Nazi health care, as in economic policy, even things that seem relatively enlightened--or surprisingly advanced--inevitably trace back to some set of twisted ideological purposes. So what do you do with them?

Norman Bates was a skilled taxidermist and loved his mother.

"the Soviets had high educational standards -- but what is the point?"

The point of the original post at Thoma's, or the article he cited, was the attempt to determine precursor policies or early signs and symptoms of fascism/authoritarianism/totalitarianism. Dave Neiwert makes a living at it, citing scholars who make a study it, and is very very careful about the categorization of useful evidence. One wonders what the point of reading Shirer is at all.

"the problem is that they herded 11 million people into camps and gassed them" ...Jane Galt

This may be rhe defining fact about the Nazis, but I do not think it is really a useful fact. By the time country X is herding millions of people, they are not going to be stopped from inside. And the costs of stopping them from outside are much higher.

Now perhaps privatization/nationalisation (I wonder if the US started nationalizing industries would Galt be so sanguine) are not indicators of anything else, but should only be judged on their merits. But it is of my nature to say that these are political acts, not economic decisions, and therefore might sometimes indicate political trends. If the evidence, historical data, and I myself can remember a lot, shows no trends, I will accept it.

Ya know, wcw made his book club recommendations, I will make one.

"The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt

"I think the General Theory is plenty readable. If anything, I wish it were less readable and had more math."

Well, that is a little of what worries me. The juggling of twelve abstract concepts can be tiring for an old man. Like learning economics from Marshall.

"The problem with the Nazis was that they were genocidal white supremacists with an appetite for continental hegemony."

This statement, and the whole thread really pisses me off. The Aryan Nations were white supremacists with ambitions, and we do not worry about them.

The fucking problem with the Nazis is that they gained power, and the important question is not their ideology but their methods.

my critique of this site remains t he same after reading this diary: overly intellectual bs devoid of emotions or common sense. Most have already covered the flaws in the analysis- namely how does one divorce the one policy without understanding the context?

What about the stifling government opression, the lack of any basic freedoms, the secret detentions of political enemies, and the creation of a police state don't require genocide. The Nazi's would be evil even without the slaughter of groups they believed inferior to themselves.

Please keep this thread going. I think you will all learn exactly where the US is going.

Just to respond abot the willy VW comparison..

It is true that Willys was a company before any jeeps were produced, but that goes on to prove my point. Willys was not the originator of the Jeep. In fact the basis came from Charles Payne of the Bantam company, and the Army Chief on Infantry of the Quartermaster Corps.

Bantam made the only successful pilo model for the original bid. Willys submitted drawings, and underbid Bantam but didnt produce a working model. The first model was given to Bantam.

At this time the design was considered the property of the Quartermaster. (Source: Truman Committee Hearings, Testimony of Francis H. Fenn, President, American Bantam, August 6, 1941; Substantiated by: Testimony of Lt. Col. Edwin S. Van Duesen, Chief, Procurement Branch, Motor Transport Division, QMC, August 6, 1941)
making it government property.

After testing Bantam, Willys, and Ford all produced models based on the design of the first improved from the results. In 1941 the War Department adopted a single model and chose Willys since they were the lowest bidder.

This oddly parallels the history of the VW beetle. Which went from german government control, to the British government at the end of the war. The british then unsuccessfully tried to sell VWs assets to several companies including Ford, all of whom refused.

..so you're right WCW you can't argue with me. ..at least very well.

Eventually VW was given back to the german government. From there until sometime in the early 60s VW actually produced the majority of the German GDP.

Back to the point... VWs have a heritage stemming from specifications created in Nazi Germany, Helicopters come from specifications created in Stalinist Russia, just as concrete comes from romans who persecuted christians. Good things can come from bad people.. learn from and punish for the bad actions, and benefit from the more enlightened ideas. Otherwise we'll all have to go back to the stone age.

Hey, you have a bit of a clue after all, unlike our Petey. Too bad you didn't see the problem with Ezra's initial post.

Had he half the inkling you have of the history, he could have made a really effective throwaway comment. "Hitler encouraged fuel efficiency," would have been fine. Propaganda or no, Schicklgruber probably did. Instead, "VW is a perfectly good car company" is just plain dumb.

Selling automobiles to the masses is hardly an NSDAP original. I think that home-grown fascist Hank Ford may just have beat them to it. The postwar VW may have produced actual cars for actual people (cough, Wagen, cough, Volk), but total pre-'45 nonmilitary production was in the hundreds -- hundreds! -- as vanity pieces for apparatchiks. Hell, it isn't even a Nazi design even if you think Porsche was a Nazi: he ripped it off from Barenyi and Ledwinka.

I love Willys and postwar-VW trivia as much as you, but you have to see they're distractions. That Willys and Wolfsburg both produced military vehicles for WWII hardly absolves Ezra of ahistorical bloviation.

On-topic, as I wrote way, way up in the thread, if Ezra had phrased his post more carefully and left out the throwaway fictions, I'd never have uttered a peep. Of course bad people do good things sometimes. Breathing has been mentioned. Makes for a pretty dull post that way, though.

I agree with you completely. Idea of combining nationalism and socialism is perfect in it's basic (avoiding genocide that happened under that name). Ideal sociaty with everything on it's place is a basic for country growth. Too much liberalism and democracy leeds to chaos!