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.
Shirer’s “Rise and Fall” was a Did Not Finish for me. As much as I find the rise of those totalitarians interesting in a “train accident that is too horrifying to look away” type of curiosity, I just couldn’t finish.
The nazis, socialists, fascists or imperialists of Japan did not have good ideas. What they did was take bad ideas such as propaganda, military tactics etc and exploit them to further their utterly insidious ideologies. If these regimes were good at anything it was exploitation and manipulation. That is it.
They pretended a form of socialism and called it national socialism.
It was, in truth, a thugocracy (IMHO).
Yglesias, IMHO, either has limited brain function or is unable to see the world as it really exists; I won’t waste my time reading his founderings.
They were a thugocracy, but they were actual socialists too -they are mutually exclusive positions (same for Cuba and Venezuelafor instance.
Ludwig Von Mises probably showed it best.
https://mises.org/mises-daily/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-socialism-totalitarian
It was socialism, just as communism is socialism, and fascism.
Just a very specific brand of it. Same desired end result: a worldwide superstate with total power over everything.
The only difference is the way they planned to go about achieving it.
Ah, come on. From what I hear, he did make the trains run on time. And they were snappy dressers. Can’t be all bad.
That’s the Italians. Snappy Hugo Boss dress uniforms, timely trains etc.
German trains always ran on time, so that wouldn’t have been much of a campaign promise.
Kim – In the big picture you are entirely correct, and I woukd say the same for the Communists too.
Of course, they were/are complete governing ideologies, so one could sift through everything they did and find some nugget here or there, but those nuggets are incidental to what made them Nazis or communist – so who cares. It is like a serial killer who was nice to their mother, it doesn’t change what they were.
The Nazi’s did kick the Frankfurt School out in 1933.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Frankfurt_School
It moved to Geneva for a year and then settled in at Columbia University.
All of our miseries today? Critical theory, race, socialism, feminism, anti-capitalism.
These all originated with these people.
The peoples car (Volkswagen) and the autobahn.
The Volkswagen was a confidence trick — not one was ever delivered to a civilian — and the autobahns were built to speed up the movement of troops from one part of the country to another, to assist the invasions of neighboring countries.
Keep trying.
The Bug lasted long after Germany was reduced to ashes. World wide sale to civilians.
Eisenhower was so impressed with the autobahn that he started the interstate highway here in the US. Yea I know he saw it as a way to move troops in time of conflict but it benefited business and travelers a hell of a lot more.
IIRC the original conception and implementation of the autobahn was a bit of a disaster – straight-line roads were imposed upon the topography resulting in accidents induced by the artificiality of it all. So, they went back to adopting the roads to the topography: sweeping curves and grades to match the road to that topography requiring drivers to stay awake and drive.
Didn’t Hitler do good for animal welfare? For example they banned vivisection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germany
However, as Wikipedia says, ‘Although various laws were enacted for animal protection, the extent to which they were enforced has been questioned.’
I’m not sure it counts as a “good idea”, but they pretty much defined the idea of “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
Ich habe Dachau auch gesehen. Nie vergessen.
Ich auch, und das Kehlsteinhaus.
When Yglesias said they had “good” ideas, he didn’t say “new ideas that were good”, just “good”.
Yglesias is a socialist. As such he probably approves, to one degree or another of things (taken from the Nazi Party platform):
“””
We demand that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. If it should prove impossible to feed the entire population, foreign nationals (non-citizens) must be deported from the Reich.
“””
Now, he’s probably uncomfortable with the last clause but only a little.
“””
We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.
“””
And
“””
We demand the extensive development of insurance for old age.
“””
The first is basically redistribution (although one can argue that today buying into an S&P mutual fund is the capitalist way of doing that.
And Social Security/Medicare is the second one. Of which he’s probably a big fan.
“””
The State must consider a thorough reconstruction of our national system of education (with the aim of opening up to every able and hard-working German the possibility of higher education and of thus obtaining advancement). The curricula of all educational establishments must be brought into line with the requirements of practical life. The aim of the school must be to give the pupil, beginning with the first sign of intelligence, a grasp of the notion of the State (through the study of civic affairs). We demand the education of gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class or occupation, at the expense of the State.
“””
The language is 100 years out of date, but yeah, I think that Yglesias would be a fan of themes in that statement.
I think he’s also be up for the censorship implied in the “We demand legal warfare on deliberate political mendacity and its dissemination in the press. To facilitate the creation of a German national press we demand:” and following lines, though updated for Democrats in 2026.
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Yglesias is a Spanish name, and although Hitler aided Franco, and vice versa, the Nazi opinion of Spaniards was that they were an inferior race. If Hitler and the Nazis had taken over all of Europe they would have eventually turned on Franco & Spain. “Moorish” Spaniards would have probably gone to the gas chambers, and all others would have been separated like Polish men and women were, so they’d eventually have died out – more lebensraum for Germans. Let Yglesias ponder that – if he dares.
They introduced mandatory vacation time for all employees, set number of days of paid leave per year.
They also introduced national health insurance, something unheard of before.
Neither idea was explicitly born out of their ideology, but they were introduced by and inspired by parts of said ideology, especially the idea that the common worker and farmer needed to be treated decently to increase their productivity, something unheard of at the time (prior most companies would almost literally work their paid employees to death, which the nazis only did with slave labour. These days most people consider themselves pretty much slaves to their employees and governments btw, forced to work themselves to death just so they can pay their rent, insurance, grocery bills, and taxes).
They also invented the Autobahn, which was later adopted by the USA as the Interstate network. Again, not born out of their ideology per se, but out of the necessity to rapidly move military columns across the country, with trains being often too cumbersome (and as turned out later in the war, vulnerable).
And no, they did not invent the concentration camp or even the extermination camp, nor the idea of killing people by working them to death in such camps.
The Soviets had those from the 1920s, based on an older system introduces by the Russian empire in the 19th century.
The Brits also had them in both South Africa during the Boer wars, and in India and that general area in the 19th century.
The most famous Brit to use such camps to exterminate “undesirables” btw was one Winston Churchill who during the Boer wars deliberately put tens of thousands of women and children in such camps, with next to no food, medical care, or even clothes and barracks to protect them against the elements.
The German camps like Dachau (built by the Bavarian government before the nazis took power) and Bergen Belsen were downright luxurious in comparison.
During the Boer War Churchill was in his early 20s, had resigned his commission, and was there as a journalist. Captured by the Boers, he escaped captivity, wrote about the experience, and gained national fame. He was not responsible for the concentration camps.