IBM helped Hitler -- a lot.

Not sure if that's a Poe, but there's some truth in there. It's just not about how good Hitler was, but how he was PERCEIVED. And this is not a Poe.

While Hitler wasn't a good guy viewed in retrospect, a lot of people in the West did quite like him and his ideology at the time. Ford was already mentioned, for example.

In fact, the sad part is that a lot wasn't Hitler's ideology in the first place, but good red-blooded American eugenics scare and such. No, seriously, while Hitler did take it to the logical conclusion of gassing the mentally handicapped and such, the idea didn't originate with him. It was quite popular in the USA long before he ever got to think about that part. (He originally was just into bad-mouthing Jews, not the retarded.) Arguably it still is, just it gives a wide berth these days to saying anyone should do something about it.

The racism? Well, not only that was still popular in the USA, it was on the RISE. States were busy giving NEW racist laws, e.g., against miscegenation with Asians and Filipinos. (Which incidentally is what helped turn Japan fascist.)

And yes, his sabre-rattling against the Soviets and generally commies also helped a lot too.

Etc.

As I keep saying, it wasn't the whole Nazi ideology that made the West think Adolf is an ass, but somewhat the other way around. It took seeing what it leads to, when he took it to its logical conclusion, before people collectively went, "you know, we don't like that stuff any more."
 
I'd also add another thing, though: while it's easy to say that a corporation shouldn't have done business with X or Y because they're not likable people, the sad fact is that they kinda have to, unless there is an official embargo or such.

Companies have a fiduciary obligation to shareholders to, basically, make them more money. And you're not off the hook even if you have 51% of the shares. You can't say, basically, "well, I have the majority shares, it's my choice who I sell to." Oh no, there are laws specifically protecting the MINORITY shareholders.

And share value dropping is probably the #1 way to get sued by shareholders. There are whole classes of contract clauses and agreements just to mitigate that, but even then not completely.

And if you don't have 51% of the shares, they don't even have to sue you, they can just replace the CEO.

You can get around it to various degrees if you're a small company whose image is built upon some ethical idea. If you can argue convincingly that tarnishing your company image would hurt share value more, you might be able to pull it off. But really the only guarantee is if you're a private company.

But yeah, at the end of the day it's why nowadays you don't see many companies going, "we'll stop selling to Saudi Arabia because they treat women like crap" or "we'll stop doing business with China because they make those gadgets with children in sweatshops".

There's no nice way to put it, but basically we made a set of rules that say corporations must behave like psychopaths. Not even like smart psychopaths, because those usually hide it. We want them to be quite overtly amoral and quite officially not give a flip about how many people have to die to make them an extra buck. So it should then come as no surprise if they do.

All I'm saying is that the same applied to IBM in the '30's. Whether they actually liked Hitler and anti-semitism or not, they would have gotten in legal trouble if they stopped selling him the means to count the Jews even if they knew what he's doing.
 
Don't forget the British Army.

When they mechanised in the 30s a lot of the horses made redundant by trucks and gun tractors were sold to the Germans. Many thousands of them.
 
HansMustermann said:
As I keep saying, it wasn't the whole Nazi ideology that made the West think Adolf is an ass, but somewhat the other way around. It took seeing what it leads to, when he took it to its logical conclusion, before people collectively went, "you know, we don't like that stuff any more."
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Sometimes the best way to convince people that they're wrong is not to show them arguments contrary to their beliefs, but to take their beliefs to such extremes that they rebuke them.
 
Belz... said:
Sometimes the best way to convince people that they're wrong is not to show them arguments contrary to their beliefs, but to take their beliefs to such extremes that they rebuke them.
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Yeah. I guess we could say that Adolf did one hell of an ad-absurdum proof :p
 
dudalb said:
Pat Buchanan is the guy who really mainstreamed the "Nazis were really the good guys" crap.
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Well, not so much "Nazis were really the good guys" as "Both Nazis and Communists were complete monsters". Buchanan's theory, as I recall it, was that it was a mistake for Britain and France to declare war on Germany when they did, that the smart move would have been to allow Hitler to attack the USSR first while building up their own forces, then deal with whichever ******** came out on top after both dictators exhausted each other's forces.

Of course, as with any alternate history, there's no way to know if things would have turned out better following that strategy. There's also that fact that the Allies didn't know for a fact that Hitler would break the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or when he would decide to invade the USSR. All indications were that he was looking east for Germany's "Lebensraum", but it's not like he was famous for telling the truth.
 
cmikes said:
Of course, as with any alternate history, there's no way to know if things would have turned out better following that strategy.
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Not for 'sure' but we can make some reasonable guesses. Even without fighting a war on several fronts, attacking the USSR would still have worn out both forces. With just enough help from us Germany could have won, but with her power sufficiently diminished that Hitler was no longer a threat.

Allies didn't know for a fact that Hitler would break the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or when he would decide to invade the USSR.
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Not for a fact, but the chances were pretty good - especially if we gave it a little 'help'.

All indications were that he was looking east for Germany's "Lebensraum", but it's not like he was famous for telling the truth.
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Or perhaps (like Trump) people just weren't listening to what he was really saying. All politicians lie - but if you listen closely you can usually determine their true agenda.

One of the reasons that alternative histories are 'alternative' is that in reality people are rarely capable of dispassionately taking the actions required to get the best outcome. But let's suppose that our leaders correctly figured that Hitler would move east and attack Russia. What should they have done about it? The obvious action would have been to remain neutral and let Germany and Russia slug it out. That would suck for those countries in Hitler's way of course, but we shouldn't let a little collateral damage get in the way of our goals. Most countries that remained neutral during WWII were better off for it, and even occupation was better than open warfare. We might have had more influence over Hitler by being supportive rather than confrontational, especially once his forces (inevitably) got bogged down in Russia.

"But the atrocities"? you cry, "Hitler was a Monster!". Well a lot of what Hitler did was forced on him by conditions that would have been different if we weren't fighting him. In war there are always atrocities - on both sides. So if you want fewer atrocities, make less war!

The casualty count for WWII was ~25 million soldiers and 30 million civilians, with another 25 million civilians dying of starvation and disease. Most of these deaths were caused by the war itself, not 'monstrous' actions by Hitler. We can only speculate what the death toll might been if we had just stood back and let Hitler follow the path eastward (or even helped him along the way) but it's a pretty safe bet that it would have been lower than starting another World war. So if keeping the body count down was your goal it didn't make sense to declare war on Germany.

However that's only half the equation. The other half was Japan - and there we only have ourselves to blame. If only we had let Japan expand into Indochina unopposed she wouldn't have attacked us - and two of the worst atrocities of WWII would have been averted. Furthermore we would not have had to fight in North Korea and Vietnam, and China probably wouldn't have fallen to Communism - averting even more deaths. What we should have done was help Japan stabilize the situation in China, but of course we couldn't do that because she threatened our economic and territorial interests in Asia (and you thought it was about the Rape of Nanking - hah! No, it was more about greed - our greed).

Without WWII the situation in 1945 would have been quite different. Peaceful periods of history have always been more productive and better for us than making war - even when the enemy was 'monstrous'. But the differences don't stop there. WWII taught us that oil was the most important energy source to be secured, and nuclear was better in bombs than power stations. The need to replace destroyed infrastructure led to a fossil-fueled manufacturing boom that accelerated global warming, which promises to kill vastly more people than any 'appeasement' policy ever did.

Emotionally, opposing Hitler was the right thing to do. But when the true cost of WWII is tallied up the shortsightedness of this response is impossible to deny. We will never know exactly how things might have turned out if we had acted more rationally, but the chances of it being worse is remote. Most likely the World would be a much better place than it is today.
 
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Err... you only have to look at, say, Generalplan Ost to see how ridiculous the idea is that being occupied by Hitler was better than open warfare. In the long run, actually more Slavs had to die according to the plans, than actually died fighting in WW2.
 
If we had acted rationally we would have stopped Hitler the year before...preventing the occupation of large swathes of Europe by first the Nazis and then the Soviets.
 
HansMustermann said:
Err... you only have to look at, say, Generalplan Ost to see how ridiculous the idea is that being occupied by Hitler was better than open warfare. In the long run, actually more Slavs had to die according to the plans, than actually died fighting in WW2.
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This.

The plan for the Poles was to eliminate:

a. The Polish Jews;
b. The military officers;
c. Anyone with higher than a high school equivalent education;
d. Former government workers; and
e. Anyone who showed that they weren't prepared to become subservient peasants.

Looking at how Germany actually acted in the Baltic States, and the occupied USSR does not leave one with any hope that their long term plans for those areas were any more gentle. Mainly because you could add former Soviet officials to the list above.

And lets not think that Soviet occupation would have been any gentler. Now their track record after and during WWII was skewed by their dealing with collaborators on their way to Germany, but their pre-war treatment of their own peoples does not let one think that it was sunshine, roses, black bread and vodka....
 
Even that is what was called the "small plan", or better described as the short term plan. The Big Plan, i.e., the long term one, for after the war had been won, involved exterminating 85% of Poles.
 
Tolls said:
If we had acted rationally we would have stopped Hitler the year before...preventing the occupation of large swathes of Europe by first the Nazis and then the Soviets.
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The problem with that is that only Hitler and Churchill and Eden were interested in going to war at the time. IBM and the Bush father were trading quite happily with Germany. You must have public support and be too strong to be attacked and understand the strategic situation, and Chamberlain understood this.

There is a bit about the situation then from a historical perspective in a book called Imperial Economic Unity published in 1930 by Lord Melchett:

When we turn to the continent of Europe we observe that, treated as a unit, it also is well balanced as between manufacture and agriculture, though as in the United States of America the manufacturing activities are somewhat concentrated. The bulk of the exports of the manufacturing countries of Europe is absorbed by the agricultural parts of Europe, and therefore it is not altogether surprising that Monsieur Briand, the French Foreign Minister, should be seeking to bringing about a United States of Europe in the economic sense, though very obviously the differences in language and race would make it a very remote possibility in the political sense. That we should ever see Europe a Free Trade area with a common external tariff is exceedingly improbable, but the development of inter-European preferential arrangements is a possibility that we must contemplate very seriously indeed.
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HansMustermann said:
Even that is what was called the "small plan", or better described as the short term plan. The Big Plan, i.e., the long term one, for after the war had been won, involved exterminating 85% of Poles.
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The Jews were only the first on Hitler and Himmler's "to do" list. After the Poles, the Russians were next in line.
The idea was to clear most of Europe of "Non Aryans" to make room for the growth of the Master Race. And Hitler predicted that in a generation or so, it would be America's turn to be Aryanized.
 
Well, not even as much "after the Poles", as on the same list. Russians, Czechs, Belorussians, Ukrainians, even the Baltic countries were scheduled for one hell of a genocide of apocalyptic proportions.

Which, as a side note, makes it kinda funny to see the resurgence of neo-nazis in some of those parts.
 
HansMustermann said:
Well, not even as much "after the Poles", as on the same list. Russians, Czechs, Belorussians, Ukrainians, even the Baltic countries were scheduled for one hell of a genocide of apocalyptic proportions.

Which, as a side note, makes it kinda funny to see the resurgence of neo-nazis in some of those parts.
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I recommend " Hitler's Empire" by Mark Mazower as a very good book on exactly what Hitler hand in mind for Eastern Europe. Covers General Plan East in great detail.
 
Border Reiver said:
And lets not think that Soviet occupation would have been any gentler.
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Exactly.

Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?
Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did... All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately 6 million and 9 million.
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However,

Of those who starved, the 3.3 million or so inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine who died in 1932 and 1933 were victims of a deliberate killing policy related to nationality. In early 1930, Stalin had announced his intention to “liquidate” prosperous peasants (“kulaks”)... Until World War II, Stalin’s regime was by far the more murderous of the two...

Somewhere near the Stalinist ledger must belong the 30 million or more Chinese starved during the Great Leap Forward, as Mao followed Stalin’s model of collectivization.
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In 1933 an American could be forgiven for thinking that Communism was a much greater threat than Fascism. And looking back we see that it was. 12 million is a horrendous figure, but it pales in comparison to 40 million. I guess the only thing we can be thankful for was that the Cold War didn't turn hot - another likely result of our WWII alliances. Doing business with Nazi Germany in peacetime vs. being responsible for Nuclear Holocaust? Which would you choose?
 
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