Behind the textbooks

A Youtube historian "TIK" who specializes in WWII got fed up with objections to his claims that National Socialists were socialists, and created a 4-hour explanation, with lots of citations. Luckily he realized that many of us weren't about to sit through it, and he made a transcript.

You may argue that his description lacks nuance: I don't care. I'd heard that historians believed the Nazi economy was collapsing, and needed to loot the rest of Europe to survive. His explanation cites the sources for that claim. I don't think I'll find the time soon to read those books myself (one of them is Hitler's Beneficiaries by Aly), unfortunately.

He gets repetitious when he gets irritable, but for the quotes and the sources, it's worth reading. Or skimming. From Aly's book:

“German soldiers literally emptied the shelves of Europe. They sent millions of packages back home from the front. The recipients were mainly women. When one asks the now elderly witnesses about this period in history, their eyes still gleam at the memory of the shoes from North Africa, the velvet, silk, liqueurs, and coffee from France, the tobacco from Greece, the honey and bacon from Russia, and the tons of herring from Norway - not to mention the various gifts that poured in from Germany’s allies Romania, Hungary, and Italy.”

“Interestingly, while female respondents offered accurate descriptions of the period, the men, without exception, denied ever having sent a single package home.”