You answered your own question. He wanted a strong Germany.
How did he survive the purge that came after the Bomb Plot? Who knows, but he did.
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You answered your own question. He wanted a strong Germany.
How did he survive the purge that came after the Bomb Plot? Who knows, but he did.
I also wonder how Nazis that run the worst intelligence agency (well agencies really...) of the whole war are suddenly transformed to these superhuman masterminds when it suits Andre's narrative...
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Were the intelligence services of the Third Reich frequently pitted against one another and battling over turf? Certainly. Famously so.
Did the FBI try to interfere directly with SOE and OSS operations in the United States until Hoover was quietly ordered to back off? Yes, and Hoover still didn't back down. He couldn't find the Mafia with a magnifying glass, he had no problem bothering British agents on the side of the Angels.
Were certain factions inside German intelligence brutally effective at getting certain tasks done by any means necessary operating on little more than verbal orders? History and a giant pile of corpses says yes.
Did the FBI try to interfere directly with SOE and OSS operations in the United States until Hoover was quietly ordered to back off? Yes, and Hoover still didn't back down. He couldn't find the Mafia with a magnifying glass, he had no problem bothering British agents on the side of the Angels.
Were certain factions inside German intelligence brutally effective at getting certain tasks done by any means necessary operating on little more than verbal orders? History and a giant pile of corpses says yes.
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I fail to see how murdering masses of innocents shows skills of any kind.
My opinion is known. But I invite you to diminish the process at your own risk:
Does it take a lot of skill to talk a man into walking up and putting a gun against the head of another man and pulling the trigger? No, Mafia 101. Gang inititations happen every day. One man, one dead.
Does it take a lot of skill to train a fanatic group of intelligent and righteous men to obey orders unquestionably and endow them with a sense of higher purpose to do the hard jobs today that must be done for the betterment of our nation tomorrow? To maintain loyalty in these men even when the war ends, knowing defeat is a setback and is not the final answer to our nation's destiny? Enhanced by processes that allow few men to kill many? Killed in ways, and for reasons, that made the entire earth sick to behold?
What word would you use for it?
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Not possession of skill but lack of morale. You do not need especially intelligent men, you certainly do not need righteous ones. You only need ambitious men. Once you are in a possession of authority, they will eagerly commit any sort of atrocity in their quest for their own personal power. Talking about how this of for the betterment of the nation/race/faeries is just an appreciated lie for others and themselves for keeping up appearances. And even if the face of looming defeat, it is simply easier to carry on then to change or even question what one has done before, for doing so would only lead to ugly answers and hard choices.
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Ambition and talent are not mutually exclusive, they usually walk hand in hand. Take Walter Schellenberg, fresh out of law school from a good family, who joined the Nazi Party and SS because it ensure employment in troubled times. Under Heydrich he amases a brilliant record in control of counter-intellegence branch of SD. This is a good man who takes pride in his accomplishments, and looks past the evil done and blames men like Mueller for making it so. Face to face with the Jewish Question, he quotes Heydrich saying he thought the solution too extreme, but that he followed orders and made it happen.
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Could we get off the topic of secret Cold War conspiracies and back to the OP's question?
The 20th century is too late for shaping America into a major power, because it was already a significant power in the 19th century. Even in 1851, when the Englishman Edmund Creasy was writing his book "The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World" (itself an interesting reflection of the Victorian worldview), he picked Saratoga as one of them, because it led to the formation of the US, which he identified as one of the 4 powers (UK, France, Russia and the US) that would dominate the world. It kept on a pretty stable upward trajectory the whole time (with various Panics interrupting economic growth, but that happened to everyone).
I'd argue that the main reasons were:
The 20th century is too late for shaping America into a major power, because it was already a significant power in the 19th century. Even in 1851, when the Englishman Edmund Creasy was writing his book "The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World" (itself an interesting reflection of the Victorian worldview), he picked Saratoga as one of them, because it led to the formation of the US, which he identified as one of the 4 powers (UK, France, Russia and the US) that would dominate the world. It kept on a pretty stable upward trajectory the whole time (with various Panics interrupting economic growth, but that happened to everyone).
I'd argue that the main reasons were:
- Wealth and literacy even in the colonial period. The colonies were major trading powers even before independence (there's a reason why the British felt the need to crack down with the Navigation Acts), and also had widespread literacy among the (white) population. The image of "Yankee traders" and "Yankee ingenuity" were already stereotypes by 1800, well before the Industrial Revolution really took off. It also meant that there was much less of a stigma among traditionalists about going into "trade" (at least in the North). This focus on trade only grew with time, as the newly independent nation needed to replace its lost access to British markets. There's a reason that the US was fighting in North Africa only a couple of decades after independence, why the British blockade of trade in 1812 almost led New England to secede, and why it was an American flotilla that opened Japan.
- Abundant, easily accessible resources. In addition to coal/iron/etc., they also had the South and its cash crops providing additional capital, and the river system made bringing those resources to market much easier.
- Lots of readily available land and employment opportunities (combined with a somewhat less formally stratified society than most of Europe) making it extremely attractive to immigrants (themselves a major driver of economic growth and innovation).
- As others have noted, the lack of major military threats meant that the US didn't have to spend nearly as much on the "guns" side of "guns and butter" until WW2. While the US Navy was generally kept at least decently-sized (if only to protect US traders all over the world), the army was tiny during peacetime until the 1940s, when the US was already a superpower.
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I have to take umbrage with the usual there. There are plenty of talented yet humble people, though due to their humility they are not so easily noticed as the ambitious but quite useless hacks who only claim to be talented at anything besides finding people who fall for this ridiculous claim.
Otherwise, I shall abort this discussion to heed @Rubidium's request regarding the OP. For some reason, his post made me think of "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. I guess one factor in the US rise was the lack of central authorities that could stifle innovation to protect their sinecure. This was the bane of many an empire where protecting the status-quo internally became more important than keeping up with the rest of the world. Europe suffered less from this due to the ruthlessly competing nation-states, the US got a similar effect though without having to burn tons of wealth on the military. Seriously, check out the amount of wealth, of production, of lives consumed by war.
You description of "good men" being corrupted by the oh so skilled Nazis, is garbage my dear Andre. The Nazi movement attracted a ton of skilled young men not because it succeeded in seducing them into evil but because the 1920s were a super shitty time to be a young man with good education in Germany. Having lost the war, having lost the most profitable export markets (all patents & trade marks & foreign subsidiary companies in all notable markets having been confiscated), having the huge employer that was the German army of 1914 be shut down, and having the public service be turned from a safe for-life employment into a high turnover, politically charged, hire-and-fire organization, and having not created any new jobs during the war years for those enormous classes of young men entering the job market (fertility was very high back then, like Niger or Afghanistan today), created unique circumstances in which all kinds of people found themselves, after demobilization, unable to start the kind of life they had been brought up to expect as adequate for their education and social background before the war. That's enough to make most "good" young people stop being "good" in itself.
The Nazi party just came along, pointed their anger and frustration into a specific direction (Jews, traitors, Social democrats) and hitched them before its cart, so to speak.
In troubled times, it's not that difficult to turn men whose faith in life and in cosmic justice has been shaken, into monsters. The Nazis were just the biggest carrion eater of the various groups that tried to channel that frustration into politics. There were also the communists, the anarchists, and some others. The Nazis just had the best pitch for the target demographic among all the chaos and murder sects.
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We have been asked not to discuss this point further in this thread. But since you have, I could not agree more.
You describe the recruitment process of the SA under Ernst Rohm beautifully. And you are talking about the SA, which was a group of thugs who were interested in beer, getting drunk and beating up Commie Jews or any combination thereof, and then going home and having sex with each other in their large campgrounds - in that order. We are in total lockstep at this point.
The SS is the elite and a completely different story that marches to a completely different tune. They make their bones by crucifying the SA in one fell swoop. I know how much you hate those two little initials; but the Kameradenwerk isn't a myth. And neither is the abattoir they will create. It cannot be done by thugs, only professionals.
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These are factors. The Europeans in this thread understand land, resources, education, and opportunity. I do not think you understand the driving force of belief and faith that drove the expansion. The overwhelming sense of possibility rising from an open frontier owned by no man with a clear sky above it. Gold in the ground for the digging. Massive silver mines. Water and timber, iron and coal. And endless fertile land. 'Go West, young man, and grow old with the country.'
Europe is a closed society rife with religious persecution and senseless petty wars at the beginning and middle of the Great Migration. There, you are born into your station. In America, you made your station your own with your hands and your wits and it calls like a siren to Europe and Asia, where many will come to climb the Golden Mountain.
The image handed down to us of the homesteader is a wagon, a gun and a bible - in that order. "God gave this land to us, and we will make the most of it. We will tame the land, and the the savages. And we will make this a garden on earth." You mention the army is small, merely a few cavalry regiments scattered over land far larger than Europe prior to and after the War of the Rebellion, and they ride to where the threats are. But the people themselves are armed and capable. They level forests, alter rivers, and build a massive road to tie the land together.
The true force that forges America into what it would become is the Railroad Industry. A massive conflagration will be fought to ensure the Rails became the dominant force on the Continent and the great engine of trade capable of transforming America into 'The Greatest Country on Earth'. A powerful rail system is good for everyone, no? Well, everyone but the Indian and the Buffalo.
It took MEN to build America, armed with Faith and Belief in purpose, with a gun and their own wits to guide them.
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Goebbels phrased it differently, and the Hitlerjungen were exposed to the great good being done by the Party in the world to make a better tomorrow.
The tactic has been stolen and implemented in many other places since its creation, North Korea being the poster child of teaching a country to believe what you want rather than what truly is.
It is all a matter of forced perspective and making people want to believe in their own superiority over others. Advertising 101. America has bought in wholesale to this concept. As have others around the globe.
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The railroad was not about trade or knitting America together, though it did those things and sold itself as doing so. What the railroad represented, and what it truly was, was a method of land speculation. Land speculation has a long history in America. The founding fathers were mad for it, George Washington chief among them. That's what the railroad really was. For every two acres of land the railroad passed, the operating company was granted one. Useless in 1862 but a potential fortune if you could get settlers out there and bandits and troublesome neighbors cleared away.
How else does one make a fortune from a country of cheap land and high wages? There's two strategies. The south tried to to Make slaves work for free on the cheap land. The Noth tried another tack, to raise the price of land and make workers surrender their wages for the privilege of working it. The second strategy doesn't fully work with an open frontier but you can still grab as much as possible, connect it with rails and wait until the fevered, gun and bible toting hosts have tamed the land and made your worthless acres priceless.
What the railroad will bring us.- 1868
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Yes, you are correct in your points. The nation threw money at men to build railroads, and it is one of the most profitable investments ever made in the history of this great nation. Leland Stanford, leaving the endowment that created the university that bears his name being example number one.
In addition to this, there are multiple forces at work:
The first group is personified by Frederick Lander. Lander builds the 'Lander Road' and barely lives to tell the tale, but he blazes the trail that the final railroad will take for almost all of its passage west. The Chief Architects of the railroads were men in the mold of Lander, tough and unflinching. Lander dies a general in the Union army during the War of the Rebellion, and many men like him wear Union uniforms with high rank. Bill Sherman is their poster child. He would have made a brilliant general in the SS in another place and time.
The second is the steel industry pouring out enough carbon steel to lay thousands of miles of tracks, which opens the book on the rich history of that particular industry. And someone has to use that steel to build locomotives, rolling stock, and all the thousands of little components needed to make it work and keep working.
The third are the banking houses required to pay up front for these purchases, who cash in later when the builders run out of funds and end up owning the whole thing anyway. Because Robber Barons have been Robber Barons since time began.
The fourth is the nacent telegraph, whose growth is inextricably linked to the rails, creating a symbiotic bond that won't be broken until telephones and airplanes make them both obsolete methods of personal travel.
Then, you have the aftereffects. The ability to travel effortlessly. Unfettered trade creating the ability, for example, of Heinz Foods in Pittsburgh able to become a national brand shipping fresh foods across the country and having them on shelves days after they are canned. The need for entire industries to service the rail lines and keep them running. The need for crews to run and operate the trains.
And you are very correct this industry has powerful enemies:
The shipping industry, traditionally the right arm of America, fights back against this second appendage that threatens its stranglehold on travel. They are the first to fall, and their high priced legal teams fall victim to Abraham Lincoln's simple one sentence oratory when he argues that the ability to cross a river is equal to the ability to navigate upon it'.
The second are the Southern planters eager to protect their Peculiar Institution. And when a few Fireeaters in South Carolina object to this Railroad Lawyer seeking to open up the West when none of them had voted for him opened fire on Fort Sumter, Lincoln gets his wish. The South fires first, and the North arms for real.
The concept of completely free trade simply cannot exist in a land where there are border checks. It was unacceptable to have rail schedules and minor border checks to look for Negroes hopping the rails to go North to get away from Mass-ah.
The railroad is the greatest threat to slavery, and slavery is the greatest threat to the viability of a national railroad system. Something was going to give, and it did.
Lincoln's first act, before and above any other, was to sign legislation approving and paying for the Trans-Continental Railway to be built by any means necessary. Then he turned to fight a war.
What weapons does the North use against the South? Railroads and telegraphs marshaling men and material across the Union. In addition to fueling the engines of war that outproduced the South in arms and armaments by a ridiculous amount, these men lay tracks up to the edges of sieges and battlefields. Hancock the Magnificent has a personal telegraph operator with him at all times in any position giving him the ability in one crucial battle to order reinforcements to join the conflict instantaneously when the need arose.
This does not detract from the bravery of men weilding arms at the risk of their own lives in battle; but the rails got those men and arms into position and kept them fed.
And when the war is over what happens? Grant takes the White House, the railroad men praise the Great Captain with great praise, and under his leadership is the most corrupt, pro-business, government in US history before Ronald Reagan. And in this environment, the Railroad takes its ultimate form and is the artery that pumps the blood of trade that creates America into the behemoth it becomes.
Oh, one other, minor, note. What makes the railroad work? The Clock. The Clock is the god of America, and was set in place by our Deist Forefathers who worshiped the Great Clockmaker Himself. And each of these men - almost to a man - will be men who come from the East, seeking the Widow's Son. Don't take my word, look it up. We learned this from the British army if nothing else, just ask Peachy Carnahan and Daniel Dravot.
What make's America great? We worship the clock, and unfortunately we are running a bit late these days.
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The US steel industry was not very well developed at that time, so one of the stipulations in the contracts was that all materials had to be purchased at home and not abroad. That was a great push for the domestic steel industry. Many if not most railroads had used British rails before that time.
When they were chartered, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific became - at once - the two biggest corporations in the history of the world. That was the size and scale of the problem: in a nation where most railroads ran only a few miles, or at most a few hundred, how to build across empty and unpeopled space for thousands of miles, across desert and through mountains of the hardest granite... and to do it without modern explosives, bulldozers, dump trucks or power tools of any kind. All of it was done by hand, with shovels and hand tools, with black powder and sweat. And by the end they were laying track as fast as men could walk forward carrying the rails...
It was the greatest construction project of all time, with only the Trans-Siberian RR and the Panama Canal as contenders.
When they were chartered, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific became - at once - the two biggest corporations in the history of the world. That was the size and scale of the problem: in a nation where most railroads ran only a few miles, or at most a few hundred, how to build across empty and unpeopled space for thousands of miles, across desert and through mountains of the hardest granite... and to do it without modern explosives, bulldozers, dump trucks or power tools of any kind. All of it was done by hand, with shovels and hand tools, with black powder and sweat. And by the end they were laying track as fast as men could walk forward carrying the rails...
It was the greatest construction project of all time, with only the Trans-Siberian RR and the Panama Canal as contenders.
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The first land grant to a railroad was in 1850, and the last major land grant was actually in 1871, and only about 20% of the railroad mileage in use at the end of this period had been built using land grants. Actually, one of the points brought up in the book I'm sourcing this from was that, during this time period, railroads weren't exactly a favored industry in the investment markets (the history of railroad manias that went nowhere tends to dampen moods a lot), so the land grants may well have been necessary to actually finance the construction of the railroads.
Agreed for the most part. When crossing new and uninhabited lands, land grants were the carrot that made the engineers pull the cart. Not to mention, unscrupulous land developers had no problem rigging maps to make lands 'for sale' seem to be right next to railroad access based on maps that had no bearing on reality other than forced perspective.
When railroads crossed lands owned privately, compensation of another kind was required.