An Agro-Technical Appendix, V: Evil as Strategy

Someone had to go and make Rimmer an admiral, didn't they?

Unlike apparently every other person on Earth, I've really got no problem with the Empire building one death star after another, and getting them blown up, one after another. It's a dysfunctional regime, guys. That's what dysfunctional regimes do. If you need an explanation, just borrow a cynical line about someone's interest/income, whatever. If the Dark Side is all about evil and genocide, then regimes dominated by the Dark Side are going to be impervious to the idea that genocide is bad policy. Dark Siders like doing genocide: Rationalisation to follow.

The Third Reich wasn't dominated by Sith lords because Sith lords don't exist. So what's going on? The leadership's dysfunction is easily explained. They were the usual lot of over-promoted narcissists. The two questions are: how did people like that achieve power; and; Why genocide? The answer is that the Nazis promised to do stuff for people that other parties wouldn't. Weimar struggled for years over (agricultural) land reform because big owners and small had divergent interests. The Nazis promised to give both big and small what they wanted --and a pony! This is a trick that narcissists can do, because they don't give a shit about anything but postive reinforcement right now now now now. Since the big farmers largely wanted their  old Polish estates back, the outlines of policy were clear enough. The problem was not having stuff that belonged to foreigners, so the solution was taking stuff from foreigners. What would happen to the foreigners? They would, like all the other "useless mouths" and whatever other pejorative label we like today, just go away. (They're crude and nasty and backwards, so it's practically a good deed to shoot them in the back of the head. Am I being subtle enough here?)

There. No more subtle.

So, no Sith, but, nevertheless, a policy of genocide. I doubt that my summary of an argument about the roots of Nazi genocidal policy is going to sound anything more than glib and unconvincing tot he vast number of scholars who investigate these questions, so take my contribution for what it is worth. Where I can possibly push forward is by  asking how evil as strategy worked out. Not very well, is the well-known answer, but there's some interesting details in the corners of the situation.

A story in two images: Hitler as paladin in shining armour. 

This is a reference to many other images, from Ulrich von Hutten to Prince Eugen, but since the Leader of the German People is wearing something called "Maximilian plate," after Maximilian I, here is  Imperator to compare with Leader.

Alle Erde ist Oesterreich Untertanen

The first image is usually cited as presenting Hitler as a crusader. (I tend to think "Don Quixote," but that is probably too kind to Hitler.)  Max,who did spend his career jousting with windmills, is here presenting himself as the Conquering Sun. He has an agenda, and this is important. It embraces the reforms he pushed through the 1495 Diet of Worms, and above all the Common Penny. This Empire-wide tax was meant to fund wars, including crusades. Hitler, on the other hand, did not ask for money. His crusade was supposed to pay for itself, remedy the deficiencies of German agriculture and solve the social problem. It would also have the effect of "exterminating" the indigenous population of this vast East, arguably a goal in its own right. Again, I feel inadequate in the face of an overwhelming literature to which I've scarcely attended, a ringside seat at the sausage-making factory aside.

As Hitler understood the problem, the root cause of the deficiencies of German agriculture was the lack of arable land in Germany. Germany lacked, stop me if you've heard this one, "elbow room." As the stronger power, at the racial apex of human evolution, Germany had a right to this crucial, and limited resouce. For, after all, it is because this wide Earth is finite that "Food supply grows linearly, population grows exponentially." Again, by seizing land and grain in Ukraine, he would solve both problems, while generating a surplus of food that would feed the German people. He would even make money on the project by forcing Ukraine to pay for its own occupation. There is no particular controversy over the results, which hardly extended beyond  a great many deaths. He didn't get the money, nor the grain, nor even the genocide. Nazi effectiveness proved overrated. Sad, even. 

Max's project is pretty obviously different. He was moving the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in a direction that would turn out (to dodge desperately around teleology) to be that of the modern nation state. In retrospect, it was a charmingly naive project, and so obviously flawed that we probably underestimate the extent of its actual successes. 

The administrative circles of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as laid out in the 1500 and 1512 Diets. Let's see Charles V screw this up!

It wasn't all bad for Hitler. Unlike Soviet Russia, supposed beneficiary of the unlimited manpower of the East; or the United States, with its miracle of mass production, the Hitler regime actually had access to something nearly as good as cloning vats. The German language was spoken well outside the borders of 1938 Germany, and there's this dirty little secret about German-Polish bilingualism that we won't talk about because that might take us uncomfortable places. A population of 80 millions grew to one in excess of 100l and, if that failed, it could draw on the labour, forced or otherwise, of all occupied Europe. Even justify it! The Flemings were Germanic-speakers after all, and you can see Flanders on the map there, part of the Burgundian Circle. (The Walloons, incoveniently, speak French. But "French" is from "Frank," so there is probably some monkey business, here.)

This talk of an expanding Germany is incongruent. Before the war, the ruling conceit was that Germany had too many people. One might count military strength in numbers capable of bearing rifles, but when it comes to economics, population only seems to multiply "distressed areas" and "disadvantaged populations." (Although while it  had too many people, it was also not having enough children. Nazi contradictions are contradictory.)

Germans having different anxieties than Americans, the quintessential useless mouth in Germany was the peasant farmer inefficiently cultivating a too-small acreage. Statistically, the problem was focused on minimal proprietors who were almost certainly factory-working hobby farmers, but they don't count. When it was concluded in the summer of 1949 that the Greater German Reich needed 7 million empty acres of arable land to the 34 million within its boundaries, it was with an eye to the average farm holding of 2.1 arable hectares, this was supposed to mean the presumed 12 million German farmers, or 88% of the total, who were land-poor, and therefore poor, period.* A few years earlier, in the mid-1930s, when Germany was assessed as having 19 million hectares of arable land, basically the same as today, it was pointed out that neighbouring Poland had 18.6; and Canada, 23 million). Since Germany had more farmers than Canada, fewer than Poland, the German farmer was intermediate between Canadian and Pole --poor, but not destitute. Practically, no-one had to parse statistics to figure that out. The German peasant really couldn't afford the clothes, radios and other consumer luxuries that German industry wasn't producing, anyway. (Hmm.)

As we've seen the Nazis had stepped back from Weimar's anyways half-hearted land reforms. From that perspective, the global "2.1" figure was a nice misdirect, conflating very large estates with very small ones. Since structural reform was clearly the solution to Germany's backwards agricultural sector, Weimar's solution of reducing size of too-large inefficient estates, so as to increase the size of others, which were too small, was just not on.

As solutions go, it wasn't doomed for being bloodless and technocratic. It was doomed because there wasn't the land! Clearly, the only way to cure Junker-envy was by making all German farmers into Junkers. In practice, few true German citizens of the Reich suffered more during the war than the unfortunate few who volunteered, or were compelled to volunteer, to take on this role of Much-Further-East-of-the-Elbian landlords. But the theory is excellent!

Well, maybe. Because reality has pretty clearly disproven the theory. The German wheat harvest for 2016 is in but I prefer to look back at the 2015 harvest, for the very important reason that the Ministry press release is online, and leads off with some perfect Anglo-German:

The German cereal and rapeseed harvest has generated average yields this year. This is demonstrated by the current harvest statement of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture . . . Including grain maize, the German grain harvest will reach a value of approximately 48.2 million tonnes . . . Cereals for grain production were grown on a total of 6.54 million hectares, a slightly larger area than in the previous year. Cereal yields per hectare have been average in the 2015 crop year. If all cereals are taken together, the yield per hectare amounts to 73.7 quintals based on the measurements available to date, a figure which is 8.4 percent down on the previous year. The multi-year average (71.2 quintals per hectare) is exceeded by 3.6 percent . . . . Wheat is the most important cereal crop in Germany, with a harvest of 26.4 million tonnes, 5 percent less than in the previous year. Winter wheat, which also has the highest yield potential among cereal crops apart from grain maize, accounts for 98 percent of this quantity. A nationwide average yield per hectare of 81 quintals will be achieved this year for winter wheat. As in previous years, yields in northern Germany are much higher still, albeit slightly lower on light soils such as in Brandenburg or locations particularly affected by drought. . . At 3.35 million tonnes, the rye harvest for 2015 was much smaller than in the previous year (-13 percent). . . . Yields of winter barley, the cereal crop which ripens earliest, amounted to 76.9 quintals per hectare, thereby almost matching the figure from the previous year. Over a slightly larger cultivated area, the winter barley harvest of 9.7 million tonnes was much greater than in recent years (+15.2 percent compared to the multi-year average). Around 2.03 million tonnes of summer barley, the majority of which is used for the production of brewing malt, were harvested from a slightly larger cultivated area.

Speaking of quaint and colourful writing from the Interwebs, I sure hope that this link to the business pages of the Chicago Tribune for 3 September 1937 resolves. It's not the best source for the German wheat bread grain harvest of that year, as it is still preliminary results (11.4 million tons, but possibly adversely affected by recent rain). It's just that the article ends with an almost-completely unrelated story about German scientists being on the verge of perfecting a method of making edible fats out of wood pulp, the bridge between the two being that a disappointing harvest means that Germany will have to spend scarce foreign exchange on world grain again. 

It's a weird, weird world where the Germans can make edible fats from wood pulp at an economical price, yet can't export enough to cover their imports of Argentine wheat. I must say. 

Now let's look at some pretty pictures about how the modern German grain harvest is grown.

*

	1990	2000
Agricultural land (sq km)	180,320	170,680
% of land area, Germany	51.7%	48.9%
Arable land (hectares)	11,971,000	11,804,000
% of land area, Germany	34.4%	33.8%
Permanent cropland % land	1.3%	0.6%
Forest area, sq km	107,410	110,760
Forest area, % land area	30.8	31.7
Land area, sq km	348,770	348,950

Nothing looks very different here. Germany has experienced the same agricultural miracle as the United Kingdom. Grain yield per acre is up enormously in spite of much lower labour inputs.Here's a great graph that I've scraped with banner ad included, because my conscience is bothering me. 

Source: 

This is a highly synthesised measure, but assuming that the statisticians are doing it right, German "grain yield per hectare" has slightly more than doubled since 1968, the first year for which this data is available to the site. The Internet doesn't seem interested in the postwar history of the German grain harvest, but the mid-70s harvest is normally taken as double the immediate postwar yield, because of the Green Revolution and all of that. While I tend to doubt the deep historical insight of people who burble on about how the high natural fertility of western European farms naturally makes them grain exporters -- a notion that would have had a pre-1939 agronomist spitting up his rich, smooth, Nabob Breakfast Blend coffee (Look for it at your local Safeway), I'll take the numbers as given. After all, 11ish million tons, doubled twice, takes us into the rance of 48ish. Precision!

So, had Nazi agronomists a crystal ball, they would have concluded that the country did not need elbow room so much as tractors, fertilisers, and pesticides. Given those, Germany could feed itself and export grain. It's also not clear that this point could not be grasped by contemporaries. A troll through Google Books reveals that German yields (bushels per acre) were almost half those of the Netherlands, which, in turn, had somewhat higher yields than Belgium.

Annual Statistical Report of the New York Produce Exchange For the Year 1884, Prepared by E. H. Walker, Statistican of the Exchange (New York: Jones, 1886): 182. 

This arguing with the past is probably a bad idea. These guys knew farming. If hindsight tells us that there was plenty of room for the German harvest to grow, it was not obvious at the time, whatever statistics I pull out of the available literature. (Comparative data for the Netherlands and Belgium in 1937, for example, eludes me.) 

Ruling out a technocratic solution, labour imports also look dicey. After all, bringing in 7 million foreign workers to bring in the German harvest implies feeding 7 million more people. Pushing through the inanities of Nazi policy, one ends up in a situation where "Eastern" workers are brought in and directed to be fed a subsistence diet, so that labour exploitation and genocide could go hand in hand, while "Western" workers were to be fed as well as possible, so that the wayward Germans of Flanders and their ilk could be integrated into the common European struggle against Bolshevism. Subsequent trials and investigations have revealed that the German farmers who employed "Eatern" labour were kinder than official policy; and while it is possible to be cynical about this, there is a curious connection between Germany and Ukraine, forged in this period. (When I say "curious," I assure the reader that I'm aware that an explanation exists. I'm just not entirely convinced, whatever the new President's best friends might say.)

But, like I said, I can hardly break new ground in matters of genocide and anti-Semitism. Fortunately, Dr. Collingham has given some coverage to Europe's most-easily forgotten country. So remarkable did Dr. Collingham find Belgium's wartime experience that she gives it (and poor, famine-struck Greece) its own sub-chapter heading. 

On its face, Belgium should have been just like France, where artificial exchange rates, war reparations, and the simple facts of occupation combined to produce brutal food exploitation and a steady decline in the harvest as French farmers declined to play a rigged game. Instead, Belgium faced a crisis. Far from being self-sufficient, like France, it had imported 1.2 million tons of grain a year.. Germany, which considered it strategically necessary to sustain the Belgian industrial workforce, scraped up 890,000 tons of grain to replace the imports -- that is, 890,000 tons over five years. This was obviously utterly inadequate, and the occupation authorityhad to sttep in. By closely controlling the farms and strictly rationing food, the Corporation Nationale de l'Alimentation et de l'Agriculture was able to distribute a ration of between 1000 and 1500 calories per person, per day. Since this was far short of a subsistence diet, all the Belgians, of course, died.

Or, wait, no. It was by no means an easy war for the Belgians. Eighty percent of Belgian children suffered from rickets in 1945, according to one source, whose accuracy I somewhat question. However, the Belgians did feed themselves. 

How? Well, the black market, obviously. But the curious thing here is that the black market, operating outside and in parallel to the official apparatus, not only fed the Belgian population, but also made up that 1.2 million ton grain import deficit. 

It's enough to bring a tear to a Libertarian's eyes. Except, being slightly skeptical of Libertarian thinking in general, I'd like to know a bit more about how this was achieved. In Ukraine and in France, we have plenty of evidence of farmers withdrawing from  market agriculture and scaling back efforts to aim for subsistence. That seems like a rational approach to a world in which government had all but disappeared apart from random gangs of mass killers. (The problem with the Ukrainian occupation as a test of the effectiveness of government by terror is that the Germans were unable to deploy terrorists in large enough numbers to say that a trial had been fairly made. Which must have been a considerable consolation to the mass-murdered.) 

In the Belgian case, it looks like a withdrawal of the actually-existing state structure, and its ostensible replacement by the occupation authority, led to a rise in agricultural productivity! What  the heck happened?

I don't know, but I do know that, while the Common Penny was revoked quickly, Belgium was still technically part of the Burgundian Circle when the French Revolution broke over it. If I were goiung to theorise this, I'd go back to my post about the Coal Wood, and point out that while we all know that Belgium is the cockpit/crossroads of Europe, we are less aware of the reason for it, which is that the gentle remains of the Variscan orogeny of the Old Red Aeon have created a ridge that, paradoxically, slopes downhill from Bologne to Cologne. Along its northern and southern slopes, a spring line runs, with northern streams running into the North Sea, and southern ones into the Somme. The old, traditional roads run along the top of the orogeny, and between spring line and plain to either side lie the charcoal forests of the Walloons,the wild folk. (Because, oddly enough, in Teutonic Euorpe, the wild folk speak Romance langauges. Or Welsh.) 

So maybe it is something special about Belgium and its history. Or, maybe, it is just necessity. Whatever be the case, we now know that more food could be won from the European ground than Europeans permitted themselves to win in the 1930s. We know that a crisis that drove a genocidal war need have been no crisis at all. 

I wonder if we'll learn anything from all of this? I mean, the Belgians aren't that bright. They put mayonnaise on their fries. 

Potatoes, tallow, a cauldon, charcoal. Then, egg yolk and "salad oil," with lemon, salt and pepper to taste.