Was Hitler responsible in making Germany the world leader in technology, that it is today?

Question

And what does he have to do with Volkswagen?

Answer 1

Hitler was the antithesis of a technocrat. He was a high school dropout who couldn't have designed his @ss with an extra pair of hands and a drafting table! The only thing Hitler had to do with Volkswagen was to insist on creating a "People's Car" (Volkswagen in German) that would sell for 800 marks. The only one who took him up on it was Ferdinand Porshe, who eventually got the price down to the low 900's. Nobody else thought it could be done for under a thousand. But the Volkswagen was merely a subterfuge for Hitler's rearmament effort. Germany was forbidden to build military vehicles, but civilian ones were okay. Yet the VW was merely a military vehicle with a civilian body shell. A VW Bug has a 15" ground clearance (which is why they made such good dune buggies in the '60's and '70's). Compare that to most Jap pickups today with their 13" clearance. And remember "The Thing"? It was marketed in the 70's as a sort of off-road recreational vehicle. That was the Kubelwagen, Germany's equivalent of the Jeep. Take off the civilian shell, instant military vehicle! See what Hitler was up to now? Aeronautical Engineers like Ernst Heinkel and Willy Messerschmitt (who designed the first jet aircraft), and rocket scientist Werhner Von Braun, made Germany a technological leader due to Germany's excellent education system, but Hitler had nothing to do with that. In fact, he dismantled it when he came to power! Hitler's policies actually caused his country to lose the technological race, and the war. Nearly all the men on the Manhatten Project that developed the Atomic bomb were Jews who'd been driven out of Germany by Hitler's misguided racial policies. They included Dr. Robert Oppenheimer (who headed the Manhatten Project, and is considered the father of the A-bomb) and Albert Einstein, whose theories made creation of the bomb possible. Indeed, it was a letter Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt expressing fears that Germany was working on such a weapon that resulted in the creation of the Manhatten Project.

Answer 2

Volkswagen has to do with Hitler because Hitler tried to improve the country's economy, or rather decrease the unemployment rate that Germany was experiencing after WWI and the Great Depression. (Better employment rate trusted him public support, although people got payed so little money.)

And there could be many reasons to say or not say that Hitler is responsible for making Germany the world leader in technology. Many factories were built to produce war goods under his regime.

Answer 3

No, he is not responsible. But it would be a lie to say he wasn't a factor by rapidly increasing Germany's technological output. That said, he was still only one factor in many, and there is no way to say that they would not have jumped out ahead anyway. Perhaps they would have developed even faster, because Hitler's regime chased out many of their best scientists, many of whom came to the United States and jump-started our own technological revolution. So arguably Hitler could have been a big hinderance to their ability to become a world leader in technology. Who knows what might have happened had their country not been torn apart by the war?

Answer 4

World leader would be Japan.
The basis of germany technological succes is rather
1. the Weimar Republic which is seen as a golden era of science, a number of nobel prizes went to germany in that era
2. the german school educational system; though it has deteriorated somewhat, it still is significantly better than the american (but worse than the japanese).

Heart of Fire : You forgot about german companies such as AMD, SAP etc.Israel does definitely not outperform german tech level, and i very much doubt that the US tech level is higher than the german.Otherwise, germany wouldn't outperform the US in total export numbers.
http://wm2006.deutschland.de/EN/Content/Host-Country-Germany/Germany-in-brief/germany-as-a-centre-of-business.html
ebay and Microsoft are not good examples for technical superiority, btw.

Answer 5

hitler did concieve the idea of a peoples car Volkswagen AG (ISIN: DE0007664005), or VW, is an automobile manufacturer based in Wolfsburg, Germany. It forms the core of Volkswagen Group and is the world's fourth largest car producer after Toyota, GM and Ford, respectively.

The name means "people's car" in German, in which it is pronounced [ˈfolksvagən]. Its German tagline is "Aus Liebe zum Automobil", which is translated as "For the love of the car" - or, "For Love of the People's Cars", as translated by VW in other languages.
the germans did also come up with a lot of inventions the v1and v2 -jet aircraft and possibly a ufo nicknamed a foo fighter

Answer 6

Forget Volkswagen.
One of the major things that he did, for Germany, was to make the best transport infrastructure in Europe.
The Autobahns are still one of the best road systems in Europe.
n.b. I am not a fan of Hitler, but I do have German friends.

Answer 7

As far as I understand, Germany is not the world leader in technology; consider countries like Japan, the US, and Israel and tell me how Germany out-ranks them as the world leader....

Unless companies like Adobe, Cisco, eBay, IBM, and Microsoft are headquartered in Germany, I don't see how your statement can be true.

Answer 8

No, that would be the US - the Marshall Plan, which provided $$ and technology to our former enemies in WWII, enabled Germany to develop their industrial capabilities which had been decimated by the war.

Hitler is not someone you should be admiring.

Answer 9

No, but he tried to take advantage of the technology the German scientists possessed.

Answer 10

Hello,

Just because a leader of a country is a butcher and mass murderer of millions does not necessarily mean tha they accomplish nothing with regards to their economies, inventions and infrastructure. History is full of examples like Herod The Great, Nero, Tamerlane, Ghengis Khan, Ivan The Terrible, Peter The Great, Shaka The Napoleon of Africa etc who had very nasty despositions but were non the less good architects, artists and planners. Hitler himself had some very sharp minds in his administration, many of which had post graduate degrees. Who can say a rascist or murderer has no other skills and talents just because they are racists and murderers?

Hitler was as mentioned a drop out but he had the talent to pick the right people to surround him. (mind you Bill Gates as was Honda who flunked his engineering etrance exams). Germany had been regarded as a country of great technical innovations for over the last century, She only has beena unified country since the 1870's. Anyway, for those who do not think that the Third Reich made significant contributions to science and technology, please think again:

Volkswagen
KdF
computer, invented by Konrad Zuse 1941.
Jet plane in 1939 by Heinkel Flugzeugwerke.
The first manned rocket flight in 1945 (unfortunately it lasted only some seconds and pilot Lothar Sieber died)
Nazi doctors, in line with their campaign for public health were the first to write a major scientific paper linking smoking with lung cancer.
Nazis invented Nerve gasses Sarin and Tabun.
Invented first effective automatic rifle, single person anti-tank weapons (precursors to RPGs).
Magnificant architecture by Speer that was planned in nearly any documentary on the man.
Autobahns
Stealth technolgy was invented by the Horten brothers during the Reich.
Audio technology using magnetic tape was a Third Reich invention. Copying German tape recorders was how the famous American corporation Ampex got its start. Magnetic tape was also essential later for the video tape recorder. Allies hadn't a clue how the Axis was transmitting speeches and programs hours apart to different locations and having them sound "live." It was top of the list of technologies to capture as the war concluded.
Management systems for keeping massive and complex development programs on track was another "invention" transferred to the US, along with its scientists and project managers. These systems allowed the Germans to have developments underway in numerous categories and perform them remarkably well.
The Wankel engine, which is now referred to as the "rotary engine" was invented during the Third Reich. Mazda uses this engine extensively.

Autobahnen though an idea thought up during the Weimar Republic it was the Reih's the will and energy to put unemployed workers to work doing things that needed to be done.

Missile technology: Ground-to-ground, air-to-air, air-to-ground, ground-to-air, ship-to-ship, etc., using wire guidance, TV guidance, IR guidance (everything but laser quidance). Most of these missiles were not at the highest form of development, but their work launched and made a bundle of money later on for corporations like Boeing, Raytheon, Hughes Aircraft, North American Aviation (Rocketdyne Div.), etc. All of these companies had their German "Chief Scientist" heading up research and development operations.

The promising IR technologies were mostly all developed during the Third Reich. They had "night vision" devices while the Allies were still wondering if such things were possible.

Modern sewer treatment facilities are all derived from Third Reich technology. You've probably seen them with their settling ponds and huge skimmers.

While the Englishman, Farnsworth, gets credit for the invention of a very rudimentary television, it was the Third Reich that perfected television and conducted the first broadcasting.

Application of geophones for seismic wave detection was used for locating artillary.

The "wishbone cannon" was invented and installed at Calais, France. It was destroyed before it was operable.

The "rail gun" was another significant invention, which the US and SU copied. This weapon employes a series of ring magnets to propell a rail mounted projectile. The significant feature of this "gun" is that it can accelerate the projectile at a speed nearing infinity -- at least in theory. Conventional explosives are limited by their individual, finite rates of expansion and hence constrained in how fast they can make a projectile move.

The intial "invention" of the Third Reich that made everything possible was the breaking away from the international banking system, which made its money on debt finance .

In all, 300,000 patents and copyrights were expropriated from Germany by the Allies after 1945.

The Fischer-Tropsch process to produce synthetic fuels from coal, which fueled Germany's armed forces throughout the war.

The dicovery of the ingesting of faecal bacteria to cure gut problems

During the Nazi era, German scientists and engineers either developed or greatly improved television, jet-propelled aircraft (including the ejection seat), guided missiles, electronic computers, the electron microscope, atomic fission, data-processing technologies, pesticides, complexes. The first magnetic tape recording was of a speech by Hitler,.

Physicians documented the health hazards of asbestos, and in 1943 Germany became the first nation to recognize lung cancer and mesothelioma caused by asbestos inhalation as compensable occupational illnesses.

The opiate drugs methadone (the heroin substitute) and pethidine (a powerful pain killer) were Nazi inventions.

Western society in general, took as much of the Nazi technology and social control mechanisms as they could.Turbine engines (the kind on airplanes and in powerplants), modern aircraft designs, rockets, superhighways, propaganda techniques, political manipulation, modern insecticides, nerve gas and audiotape are all Nazi inventions. We didn't invent them, and we weren't working on them at the same time. We took them from the Nazis wholesale (and we were entirely right to do so).

Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM machines leased to the Nazis, helped organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination.
IBM's German subsidiary was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, known by the acronym Dehomag.
For example, one series of punch cards was designed to record religion, national origin, and mother tongue, but by creating special columns and rows for Jew, Polish language, Polish nationality, the fur trade as an occupation, and then Berlin, Nazis could quickly cross-tabulate, at the rate of 25,000 cards per hour, exactly how many Berlin furriers were Jews of Polish extraction. Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through the entire German infrastructure in Europe.

Regards,

Michael Kelly