When Germany took over Czechoslovakia, one of the things they did was buy out a controlling interest in what became known as Waffenwerke Brunn. Headquartered in Prague, the company had two factories; one in Brno (Czechia) and one in Bystrica (Slovakia). The Bystrica factory was already making vz24 Mauser rifles, and under new German control they made a few slight adaptations to create the G24(t). These basically involved adding German sling fittings, as other vz24 elements like the full-length upper handguard and straight bolt handle remained. These rifles were made for two years, with about 115,000 in 1941 and 140,000 in 1942. By late 1942, the factory was retooled to manufacture standard pattern K98k rifles, and G24(t) production ceased before the end of the year.
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“When Germany took over Czechoslovakia, one of the things they did was buy out a controlling interest in what became known as Waffenwerke Brunn”
[facepalm] Oh, sacred American innocence!
Yeah, sure, it was someobody’s property, now it became German, so that means the civilised Germans bought it, isn’t it? Nope, they did not. That “buyout” was in fact a literal rendition of the “hostile takeover”, like in one day the new boss barges in with 500 armed thugs and says “I’m your new boss. Take you complaints to the local Gestapo”. The Brno factory has been taken over, and directly by the SS mind you, who wanted their own source of firearms outside the HWA network. The Czech (now Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’s) economy was simply taken over by the Reich – nobody paid damned Slavs a single broken pfennig for it.
Leszek… Quick question: When Czechoslovakia was formed after WWI, how were the state owners of Brno compensated…?
All that I’ve ever heard and read says that Brno started as a state-owned arsenal during the pre-WWI era when Brno itself was predominantly German, presumably paid for by the Central Government of Austria-Hungary.
Which isn’t to say that the whole thing was proper, just that there’s rather more to the story. The urban bits of Brno were predominantly German, with something like 63% of the population being ethnic Germans who spoke German, and it was only after the Czech post-WWI government decided to glom all the suburban and rural bits around Brno into a greater metropolitan region that you could say the Slavic Czechs were a majority.
I don’t think the issue is quite as cut-and-dried as you’re making it out to be, here. There was ethnocentric idiocy on both sides; without the steps taken by Masaryk during the twenties and thirties, a lot of the animosity that led to ethnic Germans even wanting a reunification with Germany/Austria proper might not have happened. As it was? The whole thing was a mess, and a hell of a lot more nuanced than many claim. I know a Czech expat whose family was mixed German/Czech from that area, and all he has to say about all sides is “F*ck them all…”
Len Deighton mentions often in his WWII books, both history and fiction, that the whole point of the Nazi regime was theft. (Reich = empire, nicht wahr?) Germany wanted the Czech arms industry (second to Germany’s own, and making arms in German calibers!) as an asset towards the rest of their invasion schemes. Some huge percentage of the invaders of Poland carried Czech-made arms. A third of the tanks that rolled through France in 1940 were Czech. Theft of land, theft of agricultural and manufacturing resources, theft of labor through forced relocation and slavery, with genocide of Jews and mass murder of other “undesirables” as side projects. All covered up in polite bureaucratic language, see George Orwell. Thanks for the reminder, Mr. E.
Adam Tooze’s seminal work on Third Reich “economics” lays it all out, from all the little low-level fiddles to the big ones.
The war began when it did mostly due to the fact that the Nazis had run out of internal resources to thieve; they had to go to external, or the entire charade would come caving in on them.
The real person to blame for what happened in WWII was Stalin; absent his massive assistance, the entire German economy and war machine would have literally run out of steam before the invasion of France. The numbers don’t lie: Stalin enabled the Nazis to take over Europe, and likely expected the French to put up a much better fight, the way they had in WWI. I honestly believe the intent was to get the French, British, and Germans embroiled in another WWI-like charnel house, and then when everyone was good and exhausted, stab Germany in the back by invading from the East.
It didn’t work out that way, in no small part because idiot Stalin decided to “egg the pudding” by telling his COMINTERN assets in France to sabotage as much as they could of the French war effort. Which turned out to be very much an “own goal” in 1941.
From a historical perspective, looking at the whole mess, and speaking as one of the lowly enlisted swine, it’s just too damn bad that the various politicians and elites couldn’t have done all the “losing”. Smartest thing that the “common folk” on all sides could have done would have been to say “Oh, hell no…”, marched home, put the assholes on trial, and then executed the lot of them. The world would be a much better place if we’d have done that.
The irony is just how much the supposed “Great Leaders” of that era are revered and honored, these days. Stalin should be memorialized as the greatest mass-murderer of his fellow Russian/Soviet citizens in history, but they’re setting up freakin’ shrines to his sorry ass.
Kirk:
I feel you are right about Stalin. WWII would not have happened at all if he had agreed to guarantee Poland’s security along with Britain and France. He did not because the Poles had humiliated him in 1920 and he wanted their land. The part of Poland annexed to the USSR in 1945 was never returned, it is now part of Ukraine, ironically enough.
Also, I must point out that Slovakia was officially a German ally, run by a Roman Catholic priest. So I doubt the Germans could just have expropriated arms factories there, they would have to have observed legal niceties.
@Kirk,
thanks for the ref.
The late Ralph Raico, seems to have a suitably low opinion of the elites
https://mises.org/library/book/great-wars-and-great-leaders-libertarian-rebuttal
The longer I live, the more cynicism I develop over the way we do things.
I’m also increasingly certain that human organization skills top out at about the size of a football team, or hunter-gatherer band. Anything bigger than that, anything that lasts over a generation or two? You’re looking at something that will become increasingly cliquish and dysfunctional, as people do what people do, and seek out ease and sloth through things like hereditary power. The dubious proposition that “My son is the best replacement leader we could have…” along with all the other similar tropes you run into with other theories of leader selection…?
Ain’t none of them right. Heredity? Pfui. Popularity contests? Double-phui. “Scientific selection”? ROFLMAO…
Frankly, I think we’d be better off dropping “BIG” and going back to a cellular setup wherein large numbers of small groups work together towards a common goal. Every time we throw up a really decent leader, they’re almost always flawed. Sometimes, really flawed. About the only really decent leader-role person in history I can think of off the top of my head is Cincinnatus, and we may only know him by reputation, not actual deed and performance. Maybe he went back to his farm because he had a thing for farm animals, and that just didn’t make it into the history books…