Incidentally, the German equivalent of this trope is "At least the Führer built the Autobahn!" and it's surrounded by a different set of myths.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsa...
I always thought the trains running on time was a "sick joke," referring to the nazi death trains, taking Jews and other undesirables to the death camps.
Not about actual public transport trains.
Yeah if you read any of the accounts of the Fascist Grand Council, it was just a bunch of Italian men crying and kissing each other as their pathetic armies got completely routed in six weeks.
It was AFAIK originally a remark about the Italian fascists under Mussolini, and really did mean normal rail transit. It was also always wrong, because in a turn that really shouldn't surprise anyone, fascists don't tend to manage infrastructure well.
“Our system works if a whole bunch of people labor endless without compensation of any kind and we get their belongings too”
- The Reich and the Confederacy
It's not even that so much as that a cult of machismo isn't conducive to paying attention to small details on everyday civilian matters, which is necessary if you want good infrastructure
I've always been fascinated by the S-Bahn Killer, who murdered women in Berlin from '39 to '41, and got away with it for so long because news was suppressed for morale, and authorities refused to consider that the killer might not be a Jew or other undesirable, but rather a Nazi in good standing.
The story I heard was that Mussolini’s govt would invite foreign journalists to tour Italy to report on how the fascists had Made Italy Great Again. And they made damn sure that the trains carrying those journalists ran on time by shunting all other trains aside….
IIRC, "he made the trains run on time" was said about Mussolini, who took over a railway system that already worked fine when he took over the government. Fascists are good at taking credit for things they didn't do.
he REALLY underestimated the USSR because part of his racism was anti-Slavic (it's weird) and he refused to believe backwards farmers could create an industrial capacity. But basically from 1935 on he had "how we beat the UK" targets and just missed them *every single year* until 1945
I'm trying to remember if he covered that? Hitler knew early on that he didn't have the capacity to win but France/UK were militarizing so quickly he had to launch the war earlier than he wanted. And from then on he was behind in productive capacity
if you have the patience for it, "Wages of Destruction" is the book. And that was Hitler's problem - he needed more coal than he had to produce steel which meant he needed to conquer more territory and the machine engulfed itself
