Specifically, I am wondering because I was reading about Ethiopia and its Red Terror, as well as remembering China's Cultural Revolution, both of which significantly devastated each country's ability to compete economically and technologically.
Germany not only committed genocide against a large proportion of their population, nor were they spared when it came to wartime losses, and many people, particularly prominent scientists, emigrated before, during and after the war (to the best of my knowledge).
Was their recovery to what they are today to be expected (it would not seem as such, given talk about the "German miracle"), given that the Red Terror in Ethiopia and the cultural revolution in China are both more recent events neither may have fully recovered from, or did they somehow manage to avoid the worst?
I am asking besides money, because I am wondering how they made up for what must have been a huge loss of manpower, following genocide, turmoil before and after the war, and wartime losses.
If it was just the money, how was it capable of having such an impact and are there any lessons that could be learned from that?
I do not feel wikipedia gives me an adequate picture of how Germany was able to recover as quickly as it did.
Thank you in advance!
Yes, a lot has to do with money. And with its location: Since Germany was the frontier between east and west - and a "cold war" was already on sight - West-Germany got a lot of help by its new allies.
Another important aspect is an organisational one - Germany was heavily bombed and many of its cities were destroyed - but not all of it. Outside the bombed cities, much of the infrastructure (and bureaucracy) was still in place and working.
And there is another - very controversial - topic: The old elites were partially kept in place. While most top-nazis were prosecuted (and many people later - in the 1960s for instance - say the prosecution of nazis was way too tame and way too slow), minor followers ("Mitläufer") weren't punished too hard. Police officers, state officials and the like, who didn't partake in crimes, kept their job after taking an oath to democracy. So, the state structures and functions (I don't know a better word) were working (which would have been a problem if every nazi-party-member would have been fired - as they would have deserved, by the way). As I said, this is still a controversial topic. Later. Germany was perhaps exemplar in its coping with the past - in the early years after the war it was not. Sometimes, judges kept a job and were later outed to have handed death penalty against deserters and the like. But - seen in retrospective - it was good for Germany not to swap out all officials with brown nazi hands in an instance.
A third aspect is the german mentality. People had a strong urge to build up the country again.
Fun fact: There were some sorts of punishments against Germany, of course. Sometimes, they were a blessing in disguise: Germany - for example - lost many of its radio-frequencies to the allies. So, German radio manufakturers and broadcasters needed to quickly embrace VHF. In the end, Germany had a top-notch radio and tv industry. Where technology was lost, the replacement was better most of the time.