From that Yglesias twat:
Name one.
Seriously. I have studied Nazi Germany extensively for well over half a century — both as an amateur historian* and as a serious student (as part of my Western Civ major) — and I’ve yet to come up with a single Nazi “idea” that can be called good.
And I don’t accept the red herring about aeronautics and blitzkrieg, for instance. Those were engineering and military ideas conceived by Germans, not Nazis; and in many if not most cases, they predate the NDSAP’s assumption of power in 1933.
If you exclude any “good” Nazi ideas that weren’t related to making war, propaganda or genocide more efficient, or furthering the Nazis’ obsession with race, you’re not going to find any.
Ich habe Dachau gesehen.
Oh, and please don’t even think of the “medical advances” made by using concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs, because that just turns my stomach. Ditto the “miracle” of keeping their industrial centers going despite the Allied bombing, which they achieved only through extensive use of slave labor.
So as a piece of provocative writing, Yglesias’s little statement is cute — but it’s also specious. The Nazis had no good ideas, and to even suggest they did is either malicious or moronic.
*I first read Shirer’s Rise And Fall back when I was in high school, and have re-read it maybe a dozen times since. Ditto works from Erich Manstein and a host of other military figures. Even that slimy little shit Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich has been on my bookshelf. And the lasting impression from all of them is that the Nazis were absolutely hopeless, at everything.
