kontextmaschine:

Germany starved during WWI, that makes a lot of WWII and the Nazis make a lot more sense.

The German Empire was the most advanced civilization on Earth but it couldn’t feed itself, didn’t even have significant farming colonies of its own. In good times it imported by sea, but during the War its colonial rivals refused to sell and blockaded those who would.

This explains a lot!

This explains the dolchstosslegende, the “stab-in-the-back-myth”. Winning was out of the question with the American arrival and the exhaustion of reserves, but they could have probably got a better peace than Versailles, except with no hope of victory the starving German people revolted, overthrew their nobility and governments, and left Germany crippled with its enemies bearing down.

This explains the WWII U-Boat campaign, as an attempt to inflict the same fate on Britain. And the importance of the American “Victory Ship” campaign in averting this. American wartime rationing was to free up food for export.

This explains why Germany turned on Russia before securing its western front, to capture and secure the Ukrainian breadbasket, a massive food exporter with secure overland transport routes.

(This explains the Holodomor, the engineered Ukrainian famine - the Russians predicted the Ukraine would be invaded, and that the local elites, the Catholic Church and landholding magnates, would welcome the turning-back of communism, so they prophylactically weakened the nation and killed off a source of recruits or farm labor. Also, each bushel diverted from local consumption to export meant more foreign currency reserves with which to equip up for the looming war.)

This explains Aktion T4, the widespread killing of the disabled. “Useless mouths” wasn’t a metaphor, Germany was shedding calorie consumers who did not contribute to the war effort in advance of the inevitable conflict.

This explains the camp system, which might not have always been execution camps (that happened after the Russian front turned, as an attempt to scuttle the condemned lest they come for revenge in the aftermath) but were always death camps – the idea was to work them to death, supporting war production on drastically reduced rations, but segregated from society and under direct control so they couldn’t revolt and their misery wouldn’t affect domestic morale.

this explains Civilization, and its tiles producing food/industry/wealth, because the strategy gaming genre is a legacy of getting a bunch of grognards in a room and asking them to win WWII