The Tank Thread

**Fe 26** · 08 Feb 2016, 12:39 AM

Finding out that people smarter than you have written books about things you've observed and said on your own is one of the small joys of reading.

I've said somewhere on this forum that Nazi germany was the result of germany's technology far out pacing the mind's of the average german.

And wouldn't you know it, someone wrote a fancy 264 page book about that idea. He even rejects the idea that Nazism was the dark underbelly of the enlightenment period.

http://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Mo...ct_top?ie=UTF8

One particularity interesting exert from the book is how the regime impacted engineering students.

Hitler was an enthusiast of technical advance. The reception of nazism among German engineers also appears to have been enthusiastic, but less so than that of the legal and medical professions, as indicated by the results of student elections at German technical universities in 1933. About 41 percent of the 10,000 students at the technical universities

voted for the Nazis in student elections compared 48 percent of the 37,000 students at the nontechnical universities. Beyond the campuses, approximately 300,000 people were classified as engineers in 1933, including Germany’s 36,000 architects and 31,000 chemists. Of this total, around 7,000 belonged to the Nazi party. In January 1933, party membership stood at 720,000 (of a population of 32 million). Hence, about the same proportion of Ger-man engineers was drawn to membership in the Nazi party as German citizens generally, but less so than white-collar workers and independent professionals. After 1933, the number of engineers in the Nazi party doubled but the increase in the other middle-class professions was even greater (about 230 percent). Only 13.1 percent of the leadership positions in the mid-1930s were held by engineers, compared to 56 percent for lawyers, and 15.5 percent for doctors.

and

Even if German engineers had not been hindered by ideological criteria, fewer of them were being trained in the late 1930s to design Hitler’s weapons of war. Although the VDI estimated in 1936 that Germany needed 4,000 more engineers, the number of students at the technical universities fell from 17,745 in 1933 to 10,747 in 1936 and rose to 12,287 in 1939 only to fall steadily to 7,866 in 1940 and 6,675 in 1943. At the same time, study length was cut from eight to seven semesters. By comparison, in 1940 enrollments at technical universities in the Soviet Union were three times what they were in 1928. (38) In 1937, several months before he left his position as minister of economics, Helmar Schacht warned that National Socialism’s preference for political-ideological training at the expense of technical education threatened Germany’s technical superiority over other nations, a decline that had grave consequences both because of the importance of exports for the German economy and for military purposes. (39) Schacht’s understanding of the relation between science and technology was not widely shared in the regime. Nazi propaganda focused on the accomplishments of individual inventors and on the immediate, practical benefits of technical advances. In weighing the causes of German technical backwardness, political terror and persecution must be placed alongside the generally antiintellectual and antiscientific ideology of the Nazi regime. Many people in positions of responsibility — Speer, Himmler, Ley, Bormann, and Hitler - simply lacked the background to grasp the implications of scientific advances for technical advances.

I've wondered if the US is experiencing some of these troubles. If our technology has outpaced the growth of the average American? What is the impact of people that do not believe in the science of their computers and smart phones, using said devices to share their beliefs?