Did Hitler save the worlds economy?

[Csargo]

Well do you think he did? My personal belief is that he helped jump start it by starting WW2 but I think that the Depression would have eventually ended. So what are your thoughts?:2thumbsup:

[stalin]

Isn't the Total War Center a better place for this discussion?

[cegorach]

Of course he didn't in mid-/late 30s most of the countries either recovered from it already or were very close. I would rather say that the war he started with Stalin made so much mess that the recovery took much longer.:book:

[ShadesWolf]

However, you could say he started to technology race.

[Red Peasant]

No. The question implies an act of volition on Hitler's part. Then again, according to many fascist revisionists he was an all-round good guy, so he may have had this end result in mind.

[Avicenna]

Many countries weren't even close to economic revival. Trade tarriffs were up all over the place, and that was quite a major problem. Re-armament was expensive for all the countries as well.

As for the Americans, they already had a lot of soldiers fighting in the Pacific against the Japanese, so even without Hitler, America had filled up a lot of jobs after the war.

[Alexanderofmacedon]

He deffinetly started the technology race (nuclear for sure)

[Aenlic]

Well, his scientists started it. But it turns out that they weren't as close as some had supposed. They were concentrating on trying to build a heavy water reactor which would run on natural, unenriched uranium in order to produce as a byproduct the enriched uranium needed to build a bomb. As it happens, they were on the right track for that particular system; but they told the Wehrmacht that they were looking at a 10-15 year development cycle at best. So the Wehrmacht decided it didn't have a quick enough military application and relegated the whole program to minimally funded civilian research. The only facility found, after the war, was a small partially completed reactor that hadn't even begun to produce enriched uranium.

Meanwhile, in the US and UK, massive amounts of funding and manpower were spent developing means of enriching uranium without using heavy water reactors. The Manhattan Project was the largest industrial project of the war, at Los Alamos, Hansford and Oakridge. It was a massive effort, while the Germans were working in a tiny little civilian lab. The thought that the Nazis were trying to make a bomb was enough, even though it turns out that their effort was minimal at best.

[Atilius]

Well do you think he did? My personal belief is that he helped jump start it by starting WW2 but I think that the Depression would have eventually ended.

It's very difficult to imagine how destroying industry, property, and transportation infrastructure from one end of Europe to the other and killing tens of millions of productive Europeans could possibly be considered economic stimulus.

Some statistics from Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:

Germany
1946 National income and output only 1/3 of 1938 values.

Italy
1945 GNP only 60% of what it was in 1938 - about the level of 1911.

France
National income about 50% of its 1938 level.

For Europe (minus the USSR) as a whole, GNP dropped by 25% over the course of the war.

It is plausible to argue that WW2 stimulated the US economy, which grew enormously during the war, but here the "credit" must go to Japan, not Hitler.

[AwesomeArcher]

I think he helped it out, but he wasnt the sole cause of the pull out of depression. FDR had all of his new deal programs going for the U.S. i think we would have gotten out without hitler. Although he did speed it up a few years.

[Scurvy]

i think he was one of many factors...