Berlin 1936 ... in colour

[Calilasseia]

An unexpected find whilst looking for something completely different ... footage of Berlin in 1936, shot on colour film ...



It was quite a surprise to see electric trains back in 1936, for one thing. Those six wheel buses were interesting too. All tinged with sadness at the thought that in just nine years' time, it would all be in ruins, after a war that killed 55 million people.

[FBM]

And the 3-wheeled car at 05:23.

Seeing that in color makes the place and time much less other-worldly for me. The B&W films make it seem more distanced and alien.

[cronus]

Yet with the money from the Marshall Plan all would be rebuilt even better in the years to come and Germany would thrive whilst the rest of Europe withered on the vine.

[Thinking Aloud]

An unexpected find whilst looking for something completely different ... footage of Berlin in 1936, shot on colour film ...

It was quite a surprise to see electric trains back in 1936, for one thing. Those six wheel buses were interesting too. All tinged with sadness at the thought that in just nine years' time, it would all be in ruins, after a war that killed 55 million people.

I had similar thoughts - although the trains weren't a surprise, since the first application of the technology was demonstrated in Berlin in 1879 - and 11 years later London's first underground (subway) line was built as an electric railway.

Fascinating find.

[Jason]

Is it my imagination, or was not Berlin famous for its electric rail system (subways, above ground, and elevated) well before the outbreak of WWII?

[Cormac]

Yet with the money from the Marshall Plan all would be rebuilt even better in the years to come and Germany would thrive whilst the rest of Europe withered on the vine.

Yes. Germany, the fiscally conservative, frugal, "live within their means" economic masters, became an European industrial powerhouse...(shock/horror), specifically not through austerity economics but through Keynesian spending.


(Not that the Keynesian approach is right either. The dice can roll against you more times than you can double your wager).

Anyway - mendacious fucking hypocrites.

By which I mean the German governments for the last decade, and the ECB.

[Jason]

How exactly did they become an industrial powerhouse before WWII when the world had a stranglehold on their economy exactly? Printing counterfeit US currency?

[Cormac]

How exactly did they become an industrial powerhouse before WWII when the world had a stranglehold on their economy exactly? Printing counterfeit US currency?

Well, I was talking about the post-Marshall Plan period up to today.

[Calilasseia]

How exactly did they become an industrial powerhouse before WWII when the world had a stranglehold on their economy exactly? Printing counterfeit US currency?

Look up Hjalmar Schacht. He was the banking genius who arranged for Germany to emerge from hyperinflation, securing a loan from the Bank of England against which a new currency was founded. Also, he came up with a a scheme known as the "Mefo bill". "Mefo" was an abbreviation for Metallurgische Forschungsgesellshaft, a dummy company set up by four of the biggest German industrial companies. Mefo bills were guaranteed by the government, and could be discounted at any German bank. By skilful use of the Mefo bills, 12 billion Reichmarks was loaned to the armaments industry without increasing the money supply. Which was the reason Germany ended up with a large, well-equipped army, navy and air force by the time 1939 arrived. As a result of his creative schemes for rescheduling debt and arranging loans to various industry sectors to expand, Schacht managed to turn the German economy around in just three years.

Schacht's big weakness was his galactic arrogance. Which was so colossal in scale, and so pathologically incurable, that he ended up rubbing his fellow Nazis up the wrong way once too often, to the point of being thrown into a concentration camp in 1944. He managed to run rings round the American prosecutor at Nuremberg, and escaped from the court with an acquittal. Of all the defendants at Nuremberg, Schacht had the highest IQ, when the American psychologists conducted tests, but his problem was he knew he was a smartass even before the IQ tests, to the point of regarding people like Goering as being beneath him. A bad move when you remember that Goering was in effect the head of the Gestapo, having founded the organisation in 1934. Even though Himmler was de facto in charge of political repression, Goering, as Minister of the Interior in 1934, was in overall charge from a policy standpoint, and consequently was not someone you made an enemy of lightly. The Gestapo's first commander in chief, Rudolf Diels, was a Goering protegé, and Himmler only got the job later after Goering gave him the nod.

[Cormac]

/derail.

Sorry Cali.

[Cormac]

The MEFO bills are interesting aren't they.

[Calilasseia]

Heh, not much of a derail, given that the Mefo bills probably paid for much of what was seen in that video clip.

[HomerJay]

An unexpected find whilst looking for something completely different ... footage of Berlin in 1936, shot on colour film ...

It was quite a surprise to see electric trains back in 1936, for one thing. Those six wheel buses were interesting too. All tinged with sadness at the thought that in just nine years' time, it would all be in ruins, after a war that killed 55 million people.

I had similar thoughts - although the trains weren't a surprise, since the first application of the technology was demonstrated in Berlin in 1879 - and 11 years later London's first underground (subway) line was built as an electric railway.

I thought there were many electric tram systems that had already been killed off by 1936 due to the rising power of the oil companies?

The Wuppertal Electric Elevated Tram was built at the turn of the century (1903):

[Cormac]

Heh, not much of a derail, given that the Mefo bills probably paid for much of what was seen in that video clip.

Not to mention setting a very bad precedent.