Nazi Fordismus

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Stefan J. Link
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Technological Systems ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Industrial Base ◽  
Export Sector ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Steel Machine

This chapter investigates Nazi Germany's efforts to acquire American mass production technology in order to create their own version of Fordism in the Thirties. Unlike the Soviet Union, Germany boasted a highly developed industrial base in its own right, centered around classic producer goods, such as coal, steel, machine tools, and instruments. Though Germany's machine tool builders were a proud and venerable branch with considerable export clout, they were unequipped to supply mass production factories. Acquiring automotive mass production was of neuralgic significance: it not only harbored the potential of a growth-generating consumer and export sector, but it was also — more immediately urgent to the Nazi regime — of primary military-strategic significance. Accordingly, the Nazi regime did not purchase bulk machinery and entire technological systems wholesale, Soviet-style. Instead, it resorted to targeted industrial reconnaissance and the recruitment of American specialists — that is, to Detroit missions such as those of Ferdinand Porsche, Otto Dyckhoff, and William Werner. The Nazi regime ensnared the American multinationals operating in Germany in a web of political pressure and economic incentives, and in doing so found ways to appropriate the Americans' technology without spending significant amounts of US dollars.

Not by Firkowicz’s Fault: Daniel Chwolson’s Comic Blunders in Research of Hebrew Epigraphy of the Crimea and Caucasus, and their Impact on Jewish Studies in Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-668
Author(s):  
Michael Nosonovsky ◽  
Dan Shapira ◽  
Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
Academic Argument

AbstractDaniel Chwolson (1819–1911) made a huge impact upon the research of Hebrew epigraphy from the Crimea and Caucasus. Despite that, his role in the more-than-a-century-long controversy regarding Crimean Hebrew tomb inscriptions has not been well studied. Chwolson, at first, adopted Abraham Firkowicz’s forgeries, and then quickly realized his mistake; however, he could not back up. Th e criticism by both Abraham Harkavy and German Hebraists questioned Chwolson’s scholarly qualifications and integrity. Consequently, the interference of political pressure into the academic argument resulted in the prevailing of the scholarly flawed opinion. We revisit the interpretation of these findings by Russian, Jewish, Karaite and Georgian historians in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Soviet period, Jewish Studies in the USSR were in neglect and nobody seriously studied the whole complex of the inscriptions from the South of Russia / the Soviet Union. The remnants of the scholarly community were hypnotized by Chwolson’s authority, who was the teacher of their teachers’ teachers. At the same time, Western scholars did not have access to these materials and/or lacked the understanding of the broader context, and thus a number of erroneous Chwolson’s conclusion have entered academic literature for decades.

The Politics of Foreign Aid: Impact of Superpowers’ Economic Assistance on India and Pakistan during the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-79
Author(s):  
Surinder Mohan ◽  
J. Susanna Lobo
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Industrial Base ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

This article traces the impact of superpowers’ foreign aid on India and Pakistan during the early decades of the Cold War. It shows how the American policy-makers have drawn their initial strategies to bring India under the Western fold and later, when the Indian leadership resisted by adopting the foreign policy non-alignment, charted a new approach to keep it at an adequate distance from the Soviet influence—particularly by exploiting its food insecurity and inability to complete the five-year plans. In contrast, the Soviet Union extended project-aid to India which assisted it to build much required large industrial base and attain self-sufficiency in the long run. By adhering to the non-aligned doctrine, India not only managed a negotiable balance with the superpower politics but also extracted considerable benefits for its overall development. On the other hand, aligned Pakistan had shown least enthusiasm with regard to self-sufficiency and pursued policies imbued with militarism which ended up it as a rent-seeking dependent state.

»Selbständiges verantwortliches Handeln«. Generalleutnant Hans Graf von Sponeck (1888–1944) und das Schicksal der Juden in der Ukraine, Juni–Dezember 1941

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-50
Author(s):  
Erik Grimmer-Solem
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Close Cooperation

Abstract While the crimes of the Wehrmacht in the Russian campaign have been critically reappraised over the last 20 years, General Hans von Sponeck’s command over units of the 11th Army in the Ukraine in 1941 has been obscured by legends that serve his public commemoration as a military resistance hero and victim of the Nazi regime. The well-documented war crimes of the 11th Army and their units’ close cooperation with the SS in genocide in the summer and autumn of 1941 raise the question of Sponeck’s involvement in them. An analysis of the orders and a reconstruction of events within the area of Sponeck’s command reveal that Sponeck and his units participated actively in the struggle against »Jewish Bolshevism« and thus enabled the Nazi regime’s policy of »ethnic cleansing« in the Soviet Union. That this has until now been unknown and that von Sponeck continues to be commemorated as a resistance fighter raises renewed questions about the public‘s awareness of the role of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust.

scholarly journals I periodici per l’infanzia degli anni Venti e la creazione del futuro cittadino sovietico

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Emeliyanova
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
New Man ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Educational Engineering ◽  
Soviet Russia

In the interwar period, the Soviet Union experienced an unprecedented attention towards children’s literature. The October revolution was a driving force for all the arts and particularly for the editorial production aimed at forging the ‘new man’, embodied in the present moment by the younger generation. The CPSU increased its investment in all forms of publications – books, magazines, posters – and proposed them for mass production with the scope of educational engineering. Through an analysis of the literary and visual contents of the 1920’s issues of the magazine Murzilka, this paper aims at defining the characteristics of the new man as they appeared on the pages of one of the most popular magazines for children in Soviet Russia.

Totalitarianism: Racial Values vs. Religious Values:Clerical Opposition to Nazi Anti-Polish Racial Policy

2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-294
Author(s):  
John J. Delaney
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Labor Shortage ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Living Space ◽  
Strict Control ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Racial Policy ◽  
Restrictive Measures

Hitler's wars for living space sent millions of Germans abroad and aggravated a severe labor shortage at home. German authorities recruited or forcibly transported up to seven million foreign workers to the Reich from 1939 to 1945. A great many of these civilian workers, POWs, and slave laborers came from Poland, the Ukraine, and western areas of the Soviet Union, that is, homelands the Nazi regime stigmatized as particularly “inferior.” Nazi racial thinking and wartime security concerns produced an extensive set of discriminatory measures aimed at the subjugation and strict control of Slavs. Nazi edicts required Poles and so-called Eastern Workers (Ostarbeiter) to wear a purple “P” or “Ost” badge on their outer clothing. Restrictive measures limited allowable movement to their immediate area of residence and work. The regime also imposed a system akin to apartheid. Racial law thus prohibited unnecessary social contact between members of the so-called master race and their “racial inferiors.”

The Tibetan Rebellion of 1959 and China's Changing Relations with India and the Soviet Union

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 54-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chen Jian
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
People's Liberation Army ◽  
Dalai Lama ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
People’S Liberation Army

Tibet, which had enjoyed de facto independence from 1911 to 1950, was resubordinated to China in late 1950 and 1951 through a combination of political pressure and military force. On 10 March 1959 a mass revolt broke out in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Amid growing turmoil, the 14th Dalai Lama fled the capital. After Chinese troops moved into Lhasa on 20 March to crush the rebellion, the Tibetan leader took refuge in neighboring India. The Chinese People's Liberation Army quelled the unrest and disbanded the local government. This article looks back at those events in order to determine how the rebellion was perceived in China and what effect it had on relations with India.

The Soviet Auto Giant

2020 ◽  
pp. 90-130
Author(s):  
Stefan J. Link
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Ford Motor Company ◽  
Central Russia ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Automobile Factory ◽  
Maxim Gorky ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how the Soviet Union strove to acquire American mass production technology in order to create their own version of Fordism in the 1930s. It traces the origin and operation of one of the prestigious objects of the First Five-Year Plan: the automobile factory at Nizhnii Novgorod. After 1933, when the city changed names in honor of its scion Maxim Gorky, the Soviet River Rouge went by the official name of Gaz (Gor'kovskii Avtomobil'nyi Zavod); but to the Soviet press, it was known simply as the “Auto Giant.” The chapter then follows four men who helped the Auto Giant awaken and rise. Economist Nikolai Osinskii pushed through an ambitious agenda for Soviet motorization that culminated in the foreign technical assistance contract with the Ford Motor Company of May 1929. In fulfillment of this agreement, Stepan Dybets traveled to Detroit and led a group of Soviet engineers who were in charge of transferring Ford technology and know-how from the Midwest to central Russia during the years of the First Five-Year Plan. Meanwhile, as director of Gaz between 1932 and 1938, Sergei D'iakonov oversaw the uneven and troubled implementation of Fordism during the Second Five-Year Plan. Finally, Ivan Loskutov ascended to the helm of Gaz after Stalin's purges, and presided over the factory's redoubled embrace of Fordism in the late 1930s and World War II.

War of the Factories

2020 ◽  
pp. 172-206
Author(s):  
Stefan J. Link
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
World War ◽  
War Economy ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
War Machine

This chapter evaluates how both regimes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany put Fordism to use during World War II. William Werner's ascent to the commanding heights of Nazi Germany's wartime industrial complex illustrates how the state-led pursuit of mass production that began in the 1930s intensified under the conditions of total war. With greater force than before, the Nazi regime sought to bind industry to the war economy. The bureaucracy of the armaments began telling firms what to produce, how to produce, and whom to hire. Werner's career, then, sheds light on a crucial but little-explored realm of the Nazi war economy: the institutional interface that bridged the ministries and the shop floors. Like the Nazi war machine, the Soviet armaments industry had to find ways to achieve, in the words of William Werner, “higher output with fewer skilled workers.” How this worked can be illustrated by looking, once more, at Gaz.

Forging Global Fordism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan J. Link
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Automobile Industry ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
American Hegemony

As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. This book traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. The book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order. The book uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. It explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war. The book challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post-World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.

scholarly journals Transformation of the image of the nazi regime in the soviet propaganda (23 august 1939 – june 1941): a source study aspect

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-119
Author(s):  
Sergey V. Eremin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Key Events

The article, based on a wide range of historical sources, examines the key events associated with changes in the coverage of the Nazi regime by Soviet propaganda bodies in connection with the signing of the Soviet-German treaties: on non-aggression (August 1939), on friendship and the border (September 1939 g.). It is noted that both sides tried to find common ground on a number of secondary, "peripheral" issues, that the turn in Soviet propaganda, which began in August 1939, gave an impetus to create a positive cultural image of the former enemy. However, for reasons, primarily of an ideological nature, it was not possible to fully use the expected advantages from this political rapprochement in order to develop cultural ties. The reasons for the unsuccessful attempt at cultural rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich are analyzed. It points to the attempts of the Soviet leadership to study the experience of propaganda work in Germany with a view to further use. It is noted that, starting in the summer of 1940, in the conditions of a gradual deterioration in Soviet-German relations, the nature of the activities of propaganda structures is gradually changing. Increasingly, criticism of the Nazi regime is voiced in a veiled form. It is shown that in May June 1941, a new anti-Nazi turn in Soviet propaganda took place. It is concluded that if during the warming of relations with Germany in Soviet propaganda the class paradigm was temporarily replaced by a national or cultural-historical one, then the political and ideological campaign that unfolded in May-June 1941 had a clearly anti-German and anti-Nazi character.

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