besides the Autobahn and the Volkswagen, there can be little good said about Nazi Germany and it's socio-economic policies.That said, their weapons reseach and development was awsome. If they did not embrace anti-Semitism as an official govermental policy,  I think Germany would have developed an atomic bomb before the US.And in airplanes, armor, and small arms, Germany would field designs whose influence would be felt well into the 70's.And, like it or not, Nazi Germany helped put a man on the moon.Sounds silly, but just think if all that talent was put to peaceful purposes....     

Germany may have been advanced in weapons research but they could not gwet these advanced designs into production in high enough numbers to make a difference on the battlefield.  It doesnt matter how cool your gadgets are if you cant make enough to use them.As to the free specch aspect, when I got married I shocked my wife.  She is German and was amazed that I not only had a copy of Mein Kampf, but had read it as well.  The book is way illegal in Germany, I think you can actually go to jail for posessing it, and to her it is amazing that we have the freedom to buy some of the seditious stuff you can find on the shelves over here.  Needless to say, she has since read it and does not get why he was so popular.  She trots out some very simplistic answers and cannot get beyond them.  I tried to explain the historical time in which it was written but her attitudes towards the Nazis are an abject lesson in the power of the modern educational system to indoctrinate people.  She is incapable of having a rational discussion of Nazism and its attraction for the Germans of the 1920's and 30's.

True dat. They didn't call the USA "The Arsenal of Democracy" for nothing.Our tanks may have been outclassed by the Nazis, but for every 1 of theirs there were 20 of ours.Ditto fighters...the Me-262 was a world beater...but there were too many P-51's....and the Mustang pilots figured out if you can't shoot 'em down at altitude, they sure are vunerable when landing.And, again, nothing, no matter how advanced, works without fuel.IIRC back in the 20's and 30's there were 2 versions of "Mein Kampf"...the one meant for domestic reading in Germany, and the translated versions for the rest of the world....and the translated ones were edited and toned down to scale back some of Hitler's more "radical" ideas...can anyone elaborate on that?