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Stephen Fry released a statement: "Elon Musk is not a Nazi. Nazis make really good cars."
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
What's great about this, and Stephen Fry is brilliant, is not that he's absolving Musk, or that he's criticizing Tesla, but that it is an argument likely leading to Elon Musk protesting,
'No, my cars are good enough that I can be a Nazi!'
Small country? They were a highly industrialized, highly educated and still quite materially wealthy colonial power going into the wars. They didn't need to be competent. Enough people went along with them and there was plenty of residual wealth to burn on the war machine.
You don't need to be an architect to burn down a building.
Germany didn't really have much wealth after WW1 due to the restrictions placed on them from the western powers.
Most of the reason the Nazi party was popular early on was them championing a number of socialist policies designed to bring the country out an economic morass.
This is a really good book on the subject (and part of a really good trilogy of books about understanding Nazi Germany): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319473.The_Coming_of_the_Third_Reich
I get what you're trying to get at. But I'm talking the developed material wealth of a region. Actual physical infrastructure like rails, mines, factories, universities and everyone with the required education and training to run all of it.
If the victors of the first war received the dividends of that real infrastructure- that matters right up until the moment that they don't anymore.
You do realize Germany lost 48% of it's industrial territory in the treaty of Versailles, right?