Submitted by AutoModerator t3_zbfpun in history
[deleted] t1_iyy9lok wrote
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elmonoenano t1_iz5nvap wrote
Hitler was not actually that great of a planner or organizer. The current theory in historical circles about Hitler's management style is that he would kind of voice ideas he might want to get done and then underlings would compete to get them done to impress him. Whoever did it the best would gain his favor and maybe some promotions or a bigger area to manage. There's been some push back on this theory about whether or not Hitler was more intentional or involved in organization, but where that seems to happen were in things Hitler was really interested in like architecture or war planning.
With diplomacy Hitler was kind of distractible. If things were going well he would get more involved, often making grandiose plans. When they weren't he would look for something else to occupy him.
I've never hear of him making plans for reparations from Vichy France. Operation Barbarossa started a year after the Battle of France. He spent just enough time on France to get an occupation set up so he could plan an invasion of England and start planning the part of the war that was more important to him, clearing out the east for Lebensraum. The Battle of Britain didn't go the way he thought, the air war wasn't really as grandiose as he liked, and he kind of lost interest and turned to focus on Barbarossa.
If Barbarossa had turned out differently his attention might have returned to France and he might have been interested in getting reparations to rebuild after the war, but it's hard to say. He was kind of famous for having these monologues at his dinner guests and saying all sorts of grandiose things. He would bring up reparations, but it's all the steps after that we don't really seeing happen. No one was drafting up plans to enforce a reparations policy, or at least if they were they weren't getting invited to dinner with Hitler to take the next steps forward. And if you were ambitious you were probably focusing more on things that Hitler was interested in, like rounding up Jewish people or prosecuting the war, or increasing France's industrial contributions to the war machine.
Realistically, Vichy couldn't borrow money from anyone. And in German SOP they looted France's treasury when they took over. So the best way for France to be useful was to exploit France's industrial base and that's what Germany did. I think the Vichy economy operated at like 110% of it's prewar level in the first year and most of that was producing German war materiel. There's a decent paper on that aspect of the occupation here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30034464
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