Nazi military apparatus faking statistics on casualties they took and inflicted in order to essentially please the fuhrer and get promoted. In the long run that lead to their war machine rotting from the inside and lead to poor decision making.
This was a pretty well-understood phenomenon even at the time, especially on the Eastern Front. You had Soviet partisan groups of less than 50 people (sometimes including child soldiers because they were fighting against a genocide) running circles around overextended German supply lines. They’d attack a convoy in the middle, wipe out a platoon of Germans, then the officer in charge would report an entire Red Army battalion in the area is why they lost the fight. How else could they possibly lose to der untermensch? It must be human wave attacks! German high command would then send several battalions of their own to reinforce the area. The partisans could just disappear into the forest and move to another weak spot.
So now you have a front where there are thousands of troops looking for a few dozen people. Meanwhile, other parts of the line are undermanned, allowing the main force of the Red Army to easily counterattack. It’s how the Germans got encircled by two tank divisions at Stalingrad or the famous scene in Downfall where Hitler was under the assumption Steiner would launch a new offensive in Berlin (only to find out later Steiner’s forces had been wiped out even before Hitler gave him orders).
Exactly. Folks, it’s not just the racism and rampant militarism that makes fascism bad- it turns out its also a terrible and inefficient way to run a society!
I should make an effort post later about a lecture given by a WWII historian on how ideology shaped tank design and production among different nations. It’s amazing the Germans put up a fight at all, given how inefficient the Tiger was compared to the Sherman and T-34.
yeah, the more you find out about how the nazi state was actually run, the more you realize that there’s absolutely no basis for the german efficiency myth here. it was a bunch of squabbling fucks in a trench coat.
This was a pretty well-understood phenomenon even at the time, especially on the Eastern Front. You had Soviet partisan groups of less than 50 people (sometimes including child soldiers because they were fighting against a genocide) running circles around overextended German supply lines. They’d attack a convoy in the middle, wipe out a platoon of Germans, then the officer in charge would report an entire Red Army battalion in the area is why they lost the fight. How else could they possibly lose to der untermensch? It must be human wave attacks! German high command would then send several battalions of their own to reinforce the area. The partisans could just disappear into the forest and move to another weak spot.
So now you have a front where there are thousands of troops looking for a few dozen people. Meanwhile, other parts of the line are undermanned, allowing the main force of the Red Army to easily counterattack. It’s how the Germans got encircled by two tank divisions at Stalingrad or the famous scene in Downfall where Hitler was under the assumption Steiner would launch a new offensive in Berlin (only to find out later Steiner’s forces had been wiped out even before Hitler gave him orders).
Exactly. Folks, it’s not just the racism and rampant militarism that makes fascism bad- it turns out its also a terrible and inefficient way to run a society!
I should make an effort post later about a lecture given by a WWII historian on how ideology shaped tank design and production among different nations. It’s amazing the Germans put up a fight at all, given how inefficient the Tiger was compared to the Sherman and T-34.
that would be great!
yeah, the more you find out about how the nazi state was actually run, the more you realize that there’s absolutely no basis for the german efficiency myth here. it was a bunch of squabbling fucks in a trench coat.