Two or three thousand years ago the large continent of Asia was peopled by White peoples. Today we find only small, miserable, mestized remnants such as uyghurs in the most inaccesible oasis of the Gobi desert (pic), and harassed communities like the Tajiks. The Turkic peoples have expanded east to China (where they make up at least 15% of the PRChina's genome - Manchu and other semi-assimilated groups) and to the West and they genes are alive in the mestized peoples deep in Europe, like Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey.
I got alarmed by this historic process reading Nazi racist literature. The highest level of humanity is, for the Nazis, the Nordic man. Yet Nordics are very recent in Europe's North and even Germany was empty forest three thousand years ago. What they call Nordic or Germanic peoples arrived in historic times from the East. The original homeland of the Goths is the Crimean peninsula and not Sweden. They arrived escaping for their lives from Turkic peoples pushing westward, and in the end (if there is an end) they lost their homeland and had to beg admission into the Roman Empire. The Romans let the pitiable Goths escaping with their families in carts pass through the limes with the condition of serving as "cannon fodder" in their legions.
The Turkic westward pressure has not eased: so recently as the 16th century they were at the gates of Vienna. All Eastern Europe and Greece had been conquered and its population replacement was advancing. You cannot find original Spartans or Athenians in the Ancient Greek homeland; Greeks and Turks may imagine whatever they want of themselves, but the people on the street is a mixed mestizo/mulatto population.
The Goths have been pushed to the Western limits of Europe, to Sweden and Norway, to Ireland and Iceland. They are "sitting" at the extreme end of the land with their feet cooling in the Atlantic Ocean, and should the Turkic peoples move again they have nowhere to escape.
It is true that the centrifugal avalanche of Turkic peoples moving out from Asia is less visible today than say during the Mongol rule of Bagdad and Muscovia. Apparently the Whites have won and rule Asia and the whole world. Yet the inherent, genetic capabilities of these two main sub-species of man, which I call the Goth and the Turkic, have not changed. If in the 17 and 18 centuries the West had the upper hand and the movement of peoples was from the West to the East (like the German settlements in the Volga Region), in our time the direction has once more reverted and the Germans and Russians have been rapidly evacuating Asia. Ucraine (meaning the frontier) is weakening once more, opening up Europe to Asian advance.
The question is: Are those black-haired Turkic peoples fitter than the blond Goths?
Maybe we should find the answer studying what happened in Greenland (and probably in America) where the Goths had settled and were pushed out.
62 comments:
You going Madison Grant on us, J?
If anything, I'm pointing out that Nordic people are not from the North (the Evankis are) but expellees of Turkic expansion. Moreover, I'm doubting their long-term staying power vis-a-vis Turkics. Grant was very provincial and never looked afar from Europe so failed to sense that there was a powerful competitor watching on the side.
17th century, not 16th - almost the 18th - the Turks approached Vienna in 1683 to be exact, or just over 300 years ago. And the Ottoman Empire lasted well beyond that - it's been gone for less than 1 century.
Genetically, the "winners" and "losers" are not always clear. Even though the Turks ruled parts of Europe for several hundred years, it's not clear that they made much of a genetic contribution beyond a few percent. It's like the Africans in the Caribbean - the blacks may have come as war captives in chains, but to a Martian landing in Jamaica it would look like the blacks were the successful colonizers and not the whites. On the other hand, modern Muslims are exceptionally fertile compared to almost sterile Europeans. Just in the 10 yr. period when he was on the run from the entire US Government, bin Laden still managed to have more (additional) children than most Europeans have in 2 or 3 lifetimes.
K
Prof. J.,
I'm not sure how mixed the Hungarians really are. Whatever Turanist myths they subscribed to in Imperial times, modern genetic research shows that they are at least 9/10 European by blood (i.e., the ur-Magyar nobility was greatly outnumbered by the Slavic peasants they conquered and with whom they intermarried.)
Here is a paper you can read more easily than I can: http://www.matud.iif.hu/08okt/02.html
It addresses some of the methodological problems with previous attempts at quantifying the mix of the Hungarians.
Mestizaje is advanced to widely varying degrees through the Balkans. For instance, in Romania, "free Dacians" from Oas (in Maramures) are very "white," with lots of blonds and clear, Nordic skin tones. But southerners can be as dark as Turks, or at least "olive." The "Asiatic" Hungarians are usually lighter than these "Europeans" or, for that matter, than many Spaniards, Italians, and even some Irishmen and Germans. There are some "black Serbs," but most Serbs and Croats, in my experience, are clear-skinned.
Of course, none of this is relevant anymore. when double-digit percentages of Western European countries are Bantu, Arab, Berber, and Indian, as the case may be, the relative genetic penetration of non-Europeans into Europe during peacetime dwarfs that that the Turks accomplished in wartime.
Best,
s.n.
It's what the French-Canadians called "the revenge of the cradle". More effective over time than any military conquest.
K
How can you say that the North isn't the Nordic homeland? The Goths went from the North to Crimea; when they left Crimea, they didn't go north but west. Is your looseness with the facts part of the joke? I assume you're joking because I can't imagine that you would truly be persuaded by Nazi propaganda.
If we assume loss of pigmentation is a successful mutation to generate more Vitamin D in a place with not much sunlight (a plausible assumption I think, then the Nordics must have started out somewhere in the North. I would not rely on Nazi propaganda for a truthful account of anything, esp. anything having to do with race.
Speaking of Iran, what is the situation there? Most Iranians today do not look very Aryan - they appear rather Turkic themselves. Some (including Iranian Jews) tend toward the brown skinned - as dark as Northern Indians. Was the original Persian population replaced at some point as in Greece?
K
How can you say that the North isn't the Nordic homeland?
Wiki: The Goths (Gothic: *Gut-þiuda,[1] *Gutans[2]); Old Norse: Gutar/Gotar; German: Goten; Latin: Gothi; Greek: Γότθοι, Gótthoi) were an East Germanic tribe of Scandinavian origin whose two branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, played an important role in the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Medieval Europe.
The first recorded incursion of Goths into the Roman Empire took place in 238.
I know it is confusing, but hisotrically the Goths were living in the Crimean Peninsula and fleeing from the Hun expansion they entered the Roman Empire.
Linguists wishing to study the Gothic language go to the Crimean area where there are remnants of their settlements.
Also other Germanic tribes like the Vandals, Alamn, Suaves, Lombards, etc. came from the East in historical times.
Greeks were not ethnically replaced, idiots.
May I respectfully point out to you Sir that Ionia, that is Asia Minor, was the main area settled by Hellenic peoples. Byzantium developed into the capital of a large Greek Roman Empire.
A few years ago I visited the place and could not find any ionians or ionian-speakers. They spoke some Turkic language sounding like Hungarian. Apparently there was a large immigration of Turkic peoples into Ionia and several studies indicate that about 10 to 30% of the genome is Turkic, what grants me the right that to presume that a large scale mestization took place. No need to feel offended, we all are in this or that degree - mixed blood. We even have non-human genes, from the Neanderthalis spp. and what not.
The people of Anatolia, though they speak Turkish, have very little Turkic genetic input, on the order of 5%, as demonstrated repeatedly by population genetic studies. The Turks invaded Anatolia and were culturally influential, but they were too thin on the ground to physically replace the populace. This "elite dominance" form of conquest is also the type that happened in Hungary. There was clearly no major population/genetic replacement.
J, man, you need to go more in depth. You are right, it is confusing with all these tribes. Before these "eastern Germanic" tribes were in the "East," they came from northern Germany and Scandinavia. That is still considered to be the original "homeland." Of course they also came from somewhere else before that just like all humans are descended from some earlier group or groups who are migrating all over the place. The "eastern Germanic" people were like a colony, basically.
The Alans, by the way, weren't even Germanic. They were an Iranian tribe that really was from somewhere to the east.
Now, as for the Turks. You can't beat someone demographically unless you make babies or rape your enemy's women. And Turks are obviously not doing much of either of those things these days. And "Turks" in Turkey are only slightly Turkic anyway.
It is possible to speak with considerable precision about these things even if much is still unknown.
As for Ionian speakers, we know that the language that people speak and their genetic heritage are two quite different things. There are numerous places where the native language has been displaced even though the natives themselves were not. Getting people to switch languages is pretty easy compared to replacing the gene pool.
K
People, please pay attention that the note is talking about Sogdians and Bactrians, White peoples that once occupied Central Asia and have been replaced.
Regarding Asia Minor Greek population, they were/are in the process of replacement. If we draw concentric circles representing Turkic mixture, in Central Asia it must be around 80% while in the outer circles, such as Asia Minor formerly known as Ionia, it stands now at 5 to 30%. In Hungary is even lower, and in Austria it is almost imperceptible. If the trend of the last three thousand years continues, these percentages are bound to increase.
The point is: Why is this? Is one subspecies fitter than the other? Should we try to manage this thing?
The Turks of Turkey are entirely Caucasian and have been for centuries.
Of course, they too have their own version of Turanism where they claim to have some kind of biological connection with the half-Mongoloid Turkic peoples of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Yes, we should try to manage it. And yes, that will make us Nazis. But the threat these days demographically is from Africa and Arab lands (Semitic rather than Turkic). The threat in terms of economic domination or or hegemony whatever is more from China. But on the other hand, we are witnessing now the fact that Western economic hegemony will not save it from destruction.
Not saying that Africa is Semitic (except for the north). I meant the Arabic people there.
I dont see Africans and/or Arabs as competition. Massive immigration of those peoples into European and similar countries will end as it ended in Haiti and the Caribbeans: (1) emigration of white peoples, and (2) ethnic mixing with consequent averaging of IQs. But these trends can be easily and instantly reversed because AFricans and Arabs are weak and have no organizational capabilities. On the other hand, Turkic peoples are more as capable or more than whites and have been advancing for thousands or years in Asia while whites have been retreating.
Well, and yeah, I guess you are talking about a somewhat more insidious that we may not even notice in some cases. Well, when the Turks advanced across Asia, they did it with mobility, the horse. In many cases, the populations they overran or replaced were also rather nomadic horse-riding people. In locations that were already very sedentary, they had less impact.
Obviously the horse won't get you anywhere now. Now it's technology. I'm not sure that Turkic peoples generally do have the IQ to compete with Europeans. Was it IQ that got them so far in the past? I think it was lifestyle differences. They simply were on the move as a way of life. It was not going to ruin their lives to get on their horses and go raiding, whereas if a bunch of farmers did much of that they wouldn't have enough to eat next year. And perhaps Turkic peoples were producing a large population surplus at the time... In more advanced areas that were already using significant amounts of old technology, highly sedentary, developed civilizations, they may have gotten on top and ran things, but they had little demographic impact and eventually melted away, as in India, and to a lesser extent in Turkey. Sure, they had a small impact in Turkey, but much of Turkey is also the kind of landscape they had people during their time further east, whereas Europe is not that kind of landscape....
And you really don't know what happened to those non-Iranian Whites in central Asia. Maybe they just stop breeding and were swamped. Maybe Buddhism or some other religion had something to do with this. Maybe they formed an elite at the time and did not have the kind of life circumstances that would have encourage lots of babies. Maybe it was similar to some things happening today.
History does not go the way it should go. It just goes the way it goes. Some of us think that IQ is good and therefore it should go up and get more common in the world. But biology doesn't necessarily care.
We have to make sure to draw the line between what we are making as value judgments about what kind of population we might like to have on the one hand, and what just happens in this directionless world on the other.
I heard the argument that Turkic success was based exclusively on their horse+composite bow warfare technology. And that it ended definitely with the invention of gunpowder.
I dont believe that. That technique was invented by Scythians (currently known as ... ?) and Parthians, yet they lost.
We are experiencing a 200 years retreat of the Turkic peoples, although I am not sure they retreated at all. Who knows the future? I dont.
I just don't know why you are assuming that their success was based on higher IQ or organizational skills. Why couldn't it have just been that they had comparable, even slightly lesser abilities, but they had more babies?
And most of the White population inhabiting central Asia was probably not the same as northern Europeans but was rather made up of more Iranian types of people. So the contrapositioning you are making may not be apt.
The Goths that were displaced were trying to farm, so the horse argument does work with at least that northern European population.
Haiti and the Caribbean ended up virtually all black, despite the blacks lack of "organizational" abilities. Apparently the ability to make babies was more important that the ability to organize. Haiti in particular is not an encouraging example in that the blacks were, on the one hand, sufficiently well organized to expel and kill the whites, and yet not sufficiently well organized enough to run a society at above starvation levels. See also Rhodesia. The lesson is that even "better organized" people cannot ultimately maintain control if they are a minority.
K
K
Anonymous: The Indo-European Tocharians in the Tarim Basis at least are confirmed to have been heavily blond.
Whether this is enough to make them "Northern European", I can't say...
I'm aware of the Tocharians, but they were just one group among many. And as said, there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that whatever group we decide is "best" by our subjective criteria will have the most babies. And there was probably a lot of mixing going on in this fluid and borderless central Asia among these various groups, so that they were not organized against each other necessarily along ethnic lines. Under those conditions, it really would be "whoever has the most babies wins" rather than organizational skills or IQ or whatever.
Dienekes has argued that the present day Anatolian Turks are about 15% central Asian, which translates to about 7% non-Caucasian, since the parent population he used in his estimates were Uzbeks, who are close to a 50/50 split. They're mixed technically (as is everyone) but they're not *mixed* the way Mexicans, for example, are mixed.
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2011/05/central-asian-element-in-turks-part-3.html
7% Turkic today, 0% in Herodotus's times. Extrapolate.
In only 30,000 years more the blonds will be gone. I won't be around to worry about it.
I'm always fascinated as to what provokes the most comments - murder, racism - ho, hum. The genetic composition of the Ionians - heated controversy!
K
Regarding Haiti and the Caribbean, whites were always thin on the ground there. The French and British set up those colonies to export raw materials and didn't establish major outposts of their mainland populations there in contrast to the settlement pattern in the United States and Canada. Perhaps climate and disease (malaria, etc.) influenced this.
K,
Blondism won't entirely disappear. The frequency of the recessive alleles may decrease, but if two dark-haired mixed Asian-Western hybrids who possess the recessive alleles mate, they could produce blond children. Brazil is heavily mixed with sub-Saharan Africans, and it still has phenotypic whites, not all of whom are recent European immigrants. The real story is that blond hair appears to be a trait of recent origin (less than 10,000 years old) that has seen rapid increases in frequency during that time, perhpas due to sexual selection.
In only 30,000 years more the blonds will be gone.
Genetic engineering will make everyone blond.
Behold,
Older brunette Ashkenazi Israeli woman who waited to long to marry is now raising Nordic embryos (these embryos were denied US citizenship because they were genetically engineered outside the US and America wants no more white people):
http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/notitas-de-noticias/details/citizens-twins-born-abroad-denied-u.s.-citizenship-because-they-were-concei/14704/
Don't the British still run black-mulatto Barbados?
The article about the IVF twins does not indicate any source for the sperm donation, much less that the source of the sperm was Nordic/Scandinavian in origin. It could even have been Israeli Jewish in origin. Dark-haired Jews can have blond children. I had blond hair as a child, and both of my Jewish parents had dark hair (although a few blondish relatives on each side).
It could even have been Israeli Jewish in origin.
Her children look Scandinavian in every way, not just hair color.
The could be ethnically Jewish, but it is doubtful.
If her eggs were used, and again, the article does not say, then the children are at least half-Jewish ethnically. The IVF procedure can use either the mother's eggs or a donor's, but simple use of the term IVF does not imply a donor.
then the children are at least half-Jewish ethnically.
Alright, but still half-Scandinavian.
This is where mankind will be engineered to go; blondism.
The Soghdians, Khwarezmians, etc. did not go anywhere. If you go to Samarkand, Bukhara, Herat, Kandahar, the valleys of Kafiristan (I mean, Nuristan,) etc., you will see those selfsame white people who are doing just fine despite millennia and waves and waves of Turks, Uzbeks, Mongols and whatnot. The rumors of their demise have been greatly exaggerated. And yes, enough light hair and eyes to this day.
BTW, J, they are good people-the women are beautiful and the food is great.
Great subject you touch J.
I encountered bits of information about the subject but didn't know what to make of them or how to put them in coherent frame before J's touch.
Some time ago I was extremely surprised to observe how very recently the "goths" broke turkic power.
India, Middle East - Persia etc ,up to central europe were under turkic power up to the 19th century.
Whites got a boost from the industrial revolution. And that might be connected to a great unexpected development.
Due to turkic pressure Goths tried to reconnect to Far East and spice production areas by sailing deep into the ocean. Trying do fight the turks was clearly not considered as a career enhancement move. And so they discovered a new continent. Which due to biological warfare - new archeological analysis shows us a much more densely populated Americas - not some great goths military prowess got to be colonised and exploited. And so large capital accumulation which could finance a new stage in social/economical/technical evolution.
Then the goths counterattack came and devastated turkic power. People have generally no idea how very recently they dominated half of eurasia - the rest being tropical to the east of India, China which got anyway under other altaic- tungusic peoples, or Russia which was mixed.
Differences between the two large sub-species seem to be very small. But in the long term they make a very large difference through accumulated results. Due to the small differences coabitation is very easy and natural. They mate and integrate with goths without any problems.
That is why with the exception of western europe their success was not generally seen as an existential threat in eurasia.
Multinational structures like Russia and Persia were possible with the turks on top or the mixed nominal nations of persians or russians on top.
After big power shifts society continued to function exactly as before, there were no differences like in the Americas between the sub- species.
If turks lost power in Persia to the persians it didn't make any difference. It's not a Haiti like scenario. And always tukic structures were meritocratic. Any competent goth which became loyal to the political power group was accepted without any problem. From the Shah/sultan/mogul who was there because his indo-european mother was beautiful and his goths prime minister who was there because he was loyal and competent downwards all social positions were available for the taking, regardless of racial/ethnic origin.
Russians have a very mixed origin, large finnic one plus slavic and turkic ones. The nazis were right after all about the russians, modern genetics shows us this. They are the genetic outpost of Asia, just the interpretation that this fact might make them inferior in any way to pure goths was proved to be absolutely wrong.
And the purely turkic peoples of the SU with inferior equipment and little technical or tactic education compared to the "goths" obliterated them. The untermenchen theory was tested on a mixture of turkic and part turkic peoples and well it proved to be completely wrong.
The tartars and kazakhs or the finnic - slavic - turkic mixture we call russians was absolutely erroneously considered as being inferior. Adolf himself came to this conclusion when the end was near. He somehow gaved us a preview of J's post.
In german war memories there is something like a red line crossing all of them. The dreaded "SIBERIANS". From Manstein to debatable writers like Guy Sayer always the siberians pop up.
The mighty goths are smart and brave and whatever but the russians are too many and hmmmm those horrible siberians always show up in great numbers to ruin the party.
It kept me puzzled for years. Siberia had some 3 million inhabitants then. What are they talking about?
And then I found out. On the Transsiberian railway line they came, but they were the great levy from central asia. Poor mixed goths-turks from the collective farms of central asia.
Of course saying that the uzbeks and kazakhs came and crushed the herrenwolk is extremly unpleasant so the strange race of siberians was invented. Of course nobody saw them before or after but it doesn't matter.
Of course the idea that by large number the mixed blood easterners crushed the goths is another huge lie. In 1942 and 1943 when SU turned the front and went on to win the war the numbers were like this:
SU - 110-120 million people(many of them from the Caucasus or Central Asia, not like pure europeans coming from the european continent like the tartars from the european republic of Tatarstan or baskirs from the other european republic of Baskiristan)
Third Reich - 90 million
Third Reich + allies, occupied countries working for it etc - 360-370 million
But of course from german writtings you get the idea that tiny Germany was fighting against something like China + India on steroids.
Well too bad for Adolf and all of us that he didn't have the opportunity to read this post. He wouldn't have needed a genocidal world war to find out his theories about goths superiority were wrong. An uzbek or mixed turkic - finnic guy called russian was perfectly able to defeat 3 goths by himself. And then the goths have the nerve to say that a whole legion of "siberians" attacked them, instead of a nervous kazakh who came half the world by train to find out who the frack are those psychopatic goths. Looool.
Gentlemen,
For your interest, allow me to present these Udmurts:
http://russianpickle.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/udmurt_people_red.jpg
Note that they are Asians. They come from the Udmurt Republic (Russia,) north of Kazakhstan:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Udmurt_in_Russia.svg/1000px-Udmurt_in_Russia.svg.png
Their language is, of course, a distant cousin of Finnish and a very distant cousin of Hungarian. And despite all the understandable confusion arising from agglutination, vowel harmony, 18th-century Turanism, and umlauts, the Uralic languages are not related to Turkish any more than they're related to English.
Regards,
s.n.
And there was probably a lot of mixing going on in this fluid and borderless central Asia among these various groups, so that they were not organized against each other necessarily along ethnic lines. Under those conditions, it really would be "whoever has the most babies wins" rather than organizational skills or IQ or whatever.
I think we agree in the general picture. No natural frontiers and a fluid organization not along ethnic lines. Part of the Crimean Goths allied themselves with the Huns and mixed with them to the point that we dont really know how the average Hun looked like. In Asia, as far as I understand, there were no racial wars.
Yet, there is a centrifugal expansion of Turkic genes. The trend is very old and persistent, and must mean something.
The Russians beat the Germans with a serious dose of American Lend-Lease weaponry and with the help of Mother Nature. Without the factories of Ford, Boeing, etc. and the Russian winter. it's hard to say whether the "Siberians" could have achieved the same results.
K
slavic and turkic ones. The nazis were right after all about the russians,
Turkey never occupied Russia and therefore could not have mixed with Russians. Even Turk controlled Balkans have little Turkic ancestry today.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
slavic and turkic ones. The nazis were right after all about the russians,
Turkey never occupied Russia and therefore could not have mixed with Russians. Even Turk controlled Balkans have little Turkic ancestry today.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
J uses Turk and Goths in a loose sense. We are talking about two extremely large and complex subgroups of the human race. So we include in the category also the tartars, ugric tribes etc. They are not technically turkish, but part of the extended family from which the turkish peoples are also a part, the most important one.
It's not like in Turkey??? occupied Russia. Turkey never occupied Persia, yet turks did. Real technical turks. Can you understand it's a little bit more complicated?
"The Russians beat the Germans with a serious dose of American Lend-Lease weaponry and with the help of Mother Nature. Without the factories of Ford, Boeing, etc. and the Russian winter. it's hard to say whether the "Siberians" could have achieved the same results."
So due to climate eurasians got an advantage. Goths are too dumb to understand that in northern hemisphere winter comes each year. Good smart warriors but somehow forgot about hmmmm seasons?
And I can't understand anyway why the uzbeks are in advantage if winter comes. I mean they are immune to cold or what?
Or the fact that they had much less to eat - agricultural areas were largely under goths control -probably enhanced their cold resistant abilities.
So in conclusion to see if I understood right.
We got one famelic uzbek. And because it got cold - winter who might have imagined - he got an unfair advantage in front of 3 well fed europeans. Interesting conclusion.
Lend lease kicked in very late in the war. I was already clear by then. The surviving part of the SU was clearly beating by then german europe. When large scale deliveries took place in 1944 it was just a matter of time until the SU would have obliterated the nazis and their allies.
You can find the same by reading US and british sources. I'd recomand starting with this ones:
"The U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (USACAC) is located at Fort Leavenworth and provides leadership and supervision for leader development and professional military and civilian education"
Believe me there are large differences between popular media and academic analysis.
Afterwards you can cross over to the british school.
How the tiny surviving SU was able to crush what is now present day's EU is something so strange and incredible that London School of economics - through it's very interesting historians - still studies today. From an economic, sociological point of view, etc.
And by reading their studies you start to understand their interest. Something the size of France's or Italy's economy was fighting all europe by itself, with less the a third of europe's population and incredibly .... it won. How??? Well that is the subject of an amazing number of studies made by the british and american military establishments.
Of course in mainstream media the approach is completely different.
Propaganda and academia are different.
Population genetic studies show that ethnic Russians have little Turkic admixture. They are largely Finnic and Slavic. The small amount of East Asian may mostly derive from the Finnic substrate, although some of if could come via the Turks and Mongols.
Obviously the Russians were used to Russian winters and their equipment, uniforms, etc. were designed to perform in that climate. The Germans should have known what conditions to expect but they didn't prepare adequately for whatever reason. I'm sure wartime shortages made it difficult to supply adequate clothing. Engineering equipment to perform in subzero temperatures is no trivial matter and may require years to redesign alloys, lubrication systems, etc. As the Germans went deeper into the SU their supply lines became longer and longer, etc. The Soviet troops were fighting to defend their Motherland - the Germans were invaders and less motivated. Etc.
K
The system ate my comment to Teo, so I'll reproduce it. Germany's population in 1941 was 70 million. The USSR's population was almost 200 million (and I have the hunch that it was much younger than Germany's.)
Germany's allies were almost worthless (if we're looking at the Italians and Rumanians,) not good for anything but rear area security, and the Finns were good but they stopped when they got to the 1939 border. As far as occupied Europe was concerned, it pitched in an SS division here and there, but most of these were no good for anything beyond killing civilians in reprisal for partisan attacks. Some areas of occupied Europe, such as Poland, contributed no troops and required occupying forces of their own.
While no one questions the Soviets' post-1941 strategic abilities, operationally and tactically they were very shoddy compared to the Germans, and wound up using brute numbers and artillery concentrations to overcome this lack of ability, paying a commensurate price in casualties. This became a vicious circle-it's hard to build up and maintain expertise at the lower levels with high casualty rates. Very rapidly they ran out of their pre-war professional cadres and the European draftees and volunteers who had replaced them, and were reduced to relying on Uzbeks and Kazakhs for their infantry for the rest of the war.
As far as industrial potential is concerned-sure, the Nazis had occupied Europe making dozens of different models of the everything on unstandardized and constantly sabotaged production lines, with their raw materials cut off by an Allied naval blockade and constant air raids pounding their cities. The Soviets, on the other hand, had a state of the art standardized industrial capacity which had been built in the 1930s by the US, which continued supplying them with any the raw materials they couldn't secure themselves. Their rear areas suffered privation, but no strategic bombing to speak of. Their biggest industrial obstacle was themselves-the atrocious worksmanship and quality control had been remarked upon by the American foremen and engineers working for Amtorg who had set up the factories and mentored the workers in the 1930s, and it got no better from the factories getting evacuated and the work being done by women and kids. Flying a normal Soviet airplane during the war was always exciting, as you never knew what would fail.
Therefore, your comparison between the USSR per se and the equivalent of the EU is disingenuous.
Good analysis, B. The Russian stuff may not have been top quality or cutting edge technology, but it was usually effective in a crude way. Even today the Russian '60s era space capsules are still flying when the American shuttles (those that did not explode) are on display in museums. In a market economy, the great is the enemy of the good (ask Blackberry about the iPhone if you don't know what I mean) but in the Soviet economy once they had a reasonably good thing going (the Lada, for example) they would just keep making it and making it.
The Germans seemed unstoppable when they were fighting 2nd rate armies operating under outmoded tactics - the Poles and French had good sized armies on paper but they were ready to fight WWI again and had no idea how to deal with mechanized warfare where the front could shift hundreds of kilometers a day instead of hundreds of meters. But once the US and the USSR joined the war, the outcome was inevitable and it was only Hitler's insane hubris that blinded him to this.
K
The outcome was almost inevitable to begin with-the Nazis knew that there was insufficient room in the world for themselves and for the UK/USA/USSR alliance, and that their only hope was to strike first and try for a first round knockout.
"The system ate my comment to Teo, so I'll reproduce it. Germany's population in 1941 was 70 million. The USSR's population was almost 200 million (and I have the hunch that it was much younger than Germany's.)"
Nope.
Gross Deutschland in 1941 had 90 mil.
Exactly that number.
SU Had the controversial census in 1937 which showed 162 million people in the whole soyuz. So by 1941 in had growh to probably above 170 million. We have no precise figure.
Out of this in 1941-1942 the union lost some 60-70 million - no precise figure because we don't know exacly how many were evacuated in the chaos of the catastrophic retreat.
So you get some 120-130 mil for the soyuz. Of course russians were around 80 million, probably less. There were more germans in the reich then russians in the 1942 SU.
As a demographic profile the structure was younger in the SU. Many children and fewer adults. How having more 5 year olds instead of 30 year olds was an advantage for the SU I can't see but anyway it doesn't matter.
Probaly somehow russian toddlers were more useful for warfare then german industrial workers.
Of course you can say that illiterate tadjiks were some sort of supermen as compared to european volunteers from Netherlands or Hungarian allies. But I seriously doubt that assumption.
The enormous European population in german europe meant not only soldiers but also labour force. Instead of women from the kolkhoz laboring on some evacuated diparate equipments in the Urals under the clear winter sky Adolf could and did use french and dutch workers in modern factories, as subcontractors. The whole continent operated like this then.
About losing raw materials.
It is true in the agricultural sector. But Adolf solved this problem by cutting access to food to any group he considered useless. So german europe lost some tens of millions of people due to famine or outright killings but the global food situation got stabilized.
About the rest of course the 300 mil tonnes of coal the reich got were less then the 75 million of the SU. As were the 30 mil of german steel versus 8 mil in SU.
I won't continue the subject. You either read some american or british analysis or you don't.
As I previously said popular images created by propaganda are completely different from the academic studies.
Anglo propaganda has a completely different public then the military/civilian academic studies.
One is for the proles the other for the cadres.
I read extensively both of them.
I strongly recomend if you want to read to start from Combat Studies Institute and then to continue to the great analysis done by the brilliant historian of London School of Economics.
Anglo analysis school is in my opinion absolutely great. In any field. I use american technical books also in my field of activity. They are the best.
Of course their propaganda is also the best, just that it operates differently. It's normal because it has a different purpose.
Teo,
For Soviet population in 1941, I'm using Krivosheev's figures. As for Germany's population-does Grossdeutschland include Bohemia, Moravia and Poland?
I've read American sources-for instance, COL Glantz's monographs. The picture you are painting is not to be found in them.
Aside from toddlers, the USSR had proportionately more young men, who are not irrelevant to the subject at hand.
I would like to see sources for the number of Soviet citizens who were left behind during the evacuation.
When you compare coal production, don't forget to factor in oil production, as well as raw materials produced in the USA.
Not counting the ethnic Germans of Alsace-Lorraine, less than 100,000 Frenchmen served in the Heer, SS, etc. This is less than the number of Uzbeks who died fighting in the Soviet Army. That's the difference between volunteers and conscripts.
Germany wound up vacillating between starving its subject populations due to lack of material resources and exploiting them as slave labor due to lack of manpower. You somehow think that this is an advantage over the situation in the USSR, which in addition to its own workers could rely upon the might of American industry.
Aside from "disparate equipment under the clear Ural sky," the Soviets had massive industrial complexes like Magnitogorsk, which had been built in the 30s and never touched by the Germans. And, again, that US industry. Which is how the USSR was able to far outstrip Germany in making things like tanks, planes, artillery pieces and machineguns.
Hello B,
I used Glantz in this context to underline that the eastern hordes which crushed the brave few goth warriors did not exist. Nazis did exactly what their medieval ancestors did before them. Invented some sort of gigantic eastern horde.
We were smart and brave but there were too many of them.
Actually there weren't.
Glantz is very useful to dispel that myth.
About the soviet numbers well the censors got shot for the numbers I quoted.
In 1937 there should have been over 170 million, Stalin himself said something about 180. And those saboteur censors got only ... 162 million.
So by 1941 officially there should have been 190 million. But in reality the number was around 170.
I haven't read Krivosheev. Thx for the hint.
"Taken together, Greater Germany, the occupied territories and the
neutrals aligned with Germany constituted a formidable bloc. France,
Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands all had important steel
industries. They were sophisticated manufacturers of motor vehicles,
weapons, aircraft, electronics and consumer goods of all kinds. France
and Norway were also major producers of aluminium and chemicals.
Added to the formidable industrial capacity of Germany, Austria, Polish
Silesia, the Czech Protectorate and northern Italy, they had the potential
to form a mighty economic bloc"
"It was a sphere of influence with a
population of 290 million people, covering a territory only slightly
smaller than the United States. If the French, Belgian, Dutch and Italian
empires were included in the calculation, the proportions of the German
domain could be made to seem even more impressive. Potentially at
least, the German sphere of influence after the conquest of Western
Europe extended to roughly a fifth of the world's population, approximately
the same proportion of the inhabited territory of the Earth and
30 per cent of global GDP."
If you give me an email adress I'll send Wages of destruction by Adam Tooze.
It's pretty complicated. Europe was not at maximum potential and they couldn't keep the economic activity at normal levels.
But it was cyclopic anyway.
He explains quite well.
To B,
I'll be traveling so I can't search too much until Monday.
If I receive the mail I can also send "THE USSR AND TOTAL WAR:
Why didn't the Soviet economy collapse in 1942?"
There you can find some numbers. We don't have a precise image of the total population evacuated, remaining under occupation etc.
What we know precisely is the number of working age popuation of the SU.
From 86.8 mil in 1940 to 72.9 in 1941 and then down to 54 mil in 1942. Out of that older women remaining in rural areas and working in agriculture represented 24 mil in 1942. SU was not very urbanised then.
So the remaining represents the entire adult population of the soviet juggernaut when it mopped the floor with the monster from the previous message. Not much by any means it seems.
I don't have more time now. I'll come back, the subject is of great interest for me.
Sorry for the first reply, but I have had enough of people quoting a lot of popular myth. At least regarding a very complex subject which took me years to study.
The second book is Ok as an analysis - small and very concise - of the SU, for the opposing forces Tooze does an amazing job.
Again, occupied Europe had a serious industrial base, but compared to the USSR's industrial base in America, well...
Did the USSR wipe the floor with Germany? The first 2 years of the war involved one disaster after the next, with the exception of Stalingrad and the Caucasus. I am not a big fan of triumphalist narratives-my greatgrandfather volunteered for the Leningrad opolcheniye and disappeared into the Bryansk encirclement after making his way out of the previous big one. My grandfather on the other side started off as an infantryman and became an IL-2 gunner; he credited his survival of the war with the fact that after 20 missions (gunner life expectancy was 5 or so,) they made him an instructor at the school. From what I've gotten passed down, the general approach tactically was very rigid, and the lives of the soldiers were considered worthless.
_B_ at hushmail dot com, btw
Wow, IL-2 Gunner - what a job! The gunner was added as an afterthought to what was designed as a single seat aircraft. The pilot's compartment was heavily armored (sort of a Russian WWII A-10 equivalent) but the gunner had almost no protection at all, which accounted for the short lifespan. They built an astounding 43 THOUSAND Shturmoviks, which might give you an idea of Russian industrial capabilities. At the beginning when production was ramping up a little slowly for Comrade Stalin's taste, he wrote a letter to the factory directors saying that IL-2s were as necessary to the Red Army as bread and that THIS IS MY FINAL WARNING. The directors got the message (I can only imagine how much fear must have surged through their veins when they saw that letter) and soon production began in quantity (if not quality).
K
It's more astounding that 26,000 of these were lost (not sure if that includes non-combat losses, which on average were something like 40% of combat losses.)
At the beginning of the war, a lot of the Russian aircraft losses were on the ground - the Luftwaffe would come in and strafe the airfields. The engine of the IL-2 (engines were a Russian aircraft weak point to this day - they were usually a generation behind in reverse engineering Western engines) lasted something like 25 hours, so even though the airframe was armored and could absorb tremendous damage (there are all sorts of stories of planes flying without tails, without pieces of wings, etc.), a lot must have suffered engine failure and gone down anyway. It also took the Russians a while to learn proper tactics - these are hard lessons to learn because you don't live to learn from your mistakes.
K
Very true, and how much more so in the infantry, which took the majority of losses and thus had a difficult time building up and maintaining a knowledge base. Hence the huge amount of Central Asian infantrymen-their European predecessors had gotten wiped out in 1941-1942. The Soviet Army adapted by an extremely top-down approach, "not a step back," mass concentration of forces (especially artillery and air support,) etc. It worked, but at a huge cost, and in most of the places where they ran into a prepared and determined defense and attempted to breach, their lack of auftragstaktik and fuhrerprinzip, in other words, delegation of initiative to the lowest level, bit them in the ass, even as late as the Battle of Berlin.
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