Why was/is Germany so powerful | AskHistorians Archive Observer

This is a minor comment, but it is worth noting: Germany — Prussia first, then exported to the whole nation after unification — was one of the first nations to join at the hip its industrial, scientific, and political forces. Today we consider this characteristic of modern states, but most nations did not really start even experimenting with this in a concrete way until World War II, and the modern "joining" of these did not really cement until the Cold War.

The Prussians were credited for their trouncing of the French in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 for this joining (this is what Prussian artillery looked like — basically a prelude to WWI; this is what French artillery looked like — basically the same as you'd see in the US Civil War), and for their embrace of a thoroughly unified, modern, engineering state (their mastery of the role of railroads in modern war was part of this). And so a nation with a much smaller army, GDP, etc., beat a more powerful one — not just because they had technology, but because they used it well towards these ends. This trend started in the late-18th, early-19th century with the German chemical industry (which you can think of as their major "Industrial Revolution" innovation and spur, in the way that textile manufacturing was for the British).

Other nations did start to "modernize" in this sense a bit after 1870 (France instituted educational reforms and official corps reforms) but in general even in World War I, Germany was still much better at this. German universities were state-run entities who had as part of their explicit mission the goal to coordinate with industrial needs and state needs. This is easily underestimated and frequently left out of our accounts of German science at the time. (Max Planck discovered the quantum not as part of an abstract investigation into the nature of energy but in the service of solving practical problems relating to industrial lighting, for example.)

The United States, despite its vast resources, was very behind in these matters, as an aside. Its industry had only light connections to its educational systems (its professors were largely proud of not associating with banal industrial concerns and considered such ties "tainting") and until World War II had practically no active coordination between military desires and academic research. It was an "older" way of being. This kind of thing is what Germans did very well and were famed for doing very well at the time, to the degree that many influential Americans deliberately emulated the "German model" for things like the creation of the modern research university (Johns Hopkins is credited as that in the USA, deliberately founded on the "Humboldt model"), and reforming existing institutions (James Conant, President of Harvard in the 1930s-40s, deliberately modeled what he thought the modern liberal arts university should be along German lines; during WWII he was immensely influential in organizing US scientific manpower for defense purposes, and later became the top US administrator for West Germany in the Cold War, as an aside).

There are things you could say about other nations and their work on this "transition" — the British and French cases are the closest to the Germans, which is why the UK, French, and Germany were considered the most "powerful" nations prior to WWI/WWII, though even they thought the Germans were especially good at the industrial coordination bit. The Americans and Russians lagged behind until the interwar and WWII period, when both nations underwent reforms (gradual in the USA, massive and at times counterproductive in the USSR) to create states that more resembled a "German model." (The differences between these two states' approach to this kind of mobilization are interesting but somewhat tangential; the US created a "contract state" while the Soviets created a "garrison state." Both were quite capable of producing immense R&D projects.) And this is why, of course, after WWI (unsuccessfully) and after WWII (successfully) the Allied powers conspired to hobble Germany's ability to mobilize its industrial-academic-state combine for war-making.

So you can think of it like this, as a very crude rendering: Germany had "OK" access to resources and population (but in many ways had less of these than were available to other nations at the time, including the UK with its vast imperial holdings, France with its vast population, and the US and Russia with their vasts natural resources), but they were basically the first nation to "mobilize" them in a highly-efficient manner. For various national, cultural, and institutional reasons, they got more "out" of these resources, at least from an industrial-military standpoint, than did these other nations. This made them quite formidable, at least for the early phases of military conflicts. Over the long term, however, there is only so much blood you can get from a stone, and Germany's essential limitations on resources meant that for long-ranging conflicts they would eventually be "out-spent" by nations with much larger access to them. Hence their tactics (and the results — if the Germans could force capitulation early, then they won; if they couldn't, then they lost). Other nations were, in retrospect, surprisingly slow to realize they could, to various degree, emulate the German model. Once the Americans and Soviets in particular did, they vastly outstripped Germany's capabilities, showing the full powers to which such a model could be applied if coupled with nations whose populations were in the hundreds of millions and whose access to natural resources was massive by comparison.

The above is a synthesis of many years of reading and teaching about the early development of "technoscience" as we historians of science/technology tend to call the point at which these things start to merge. Among the useful resources for further reading: Kragh's Quantum Generations is a history of physics with a lot of comparative dimension to it; Kevles' The Physicists has some very nice parts about the state of things in the USA (and also abroad) in the 19th and 20th centuries; McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History is the textbook I teach with usually, and has some good points about comparative approaches to the industrial revolution; Keegan's A History of Warfare is an interesting read that talks quite a lot about the mobilization (and lack thereof in some places) of nations for war; Hershberg's Conant biography has a huge amount about the comparative state of US and Germany chemistry, and Conant's specific role in "Germanizing" US education, industry, and government funding systems.