Paul Hollywood's Big Continental Road Trip.

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08tlc9q/paul-hollywoods-big-continental-road-trip-series-1-2-germany

Did you see the first screening of this new show? But what I did notice is how Germany has picked itself out of the ruins of WW2 to be what it has become today.

The car industry, the roads the whole infrastructure, it should make our politicians hide their heads in shame at the way they have let our once great country get into the state that it is today.

[emmie]

but they have an immigration policy that puts ours to shame, and they will reap those rewards when more bombs appear on those magnificent streets, not all natural born Germans want this mass influx of people from all over.
we have a car industry surprise surprise and most of our roads are passable.

[Guilbert53]

Sadly even though we "won" the war it left us totally bankrupt.

Because of our empire we not only had to fight in Europe but also Africa, Asia etc. and this cost us a lot of money.

We had to borrow equipment and money off the USA and we had to pay that back after the war and only finished paying it back a couple of years ago.

Also because Germany and Japan "lost" they had lots of help and support to get their countries back on their feet again but nobody helped us (the USA gave a lot of help to get Japan back on their feet after the war which is why many US sports like baseball are popular in Japan)

One example in the UK of our problems after the war is the railways. The railway network in Germany and France was almost totally destroyed in WW2 due to bombing. So when they rebuilt it they electrified it.

But we could not afford to do that (and our railways were not in bad shape) so we had to work with steam trains for decades after the war (because we had a lot of coal). So we lagged a long way behind them with our railway technology.

I sometimes think if we really did "win" the war because even though we tried to save the free world nobody thanked us and certainly nobody gave us any money to help us "start again".

It was not rally till the early 1960s that we began get on our feet again after WW2, up until then we had no money, the country was littered with bomb sites, and we still had rationing till the mid 1950s.

[pastafreak]

I've seen both episodes so dar...the first was through Italy. Not my usual choice of program but good fun to watch.
I know little about Germany and its recovery post ww11, but isnt their product design and manufacturing ethic very focused and precise? I'm not sure that politics is the reason...more the nature of Germans.

[jlcm]

The people who keep saying that Germany had help after the war are totally correct,it came in the form [mostly] of the American Marshall plan ,I was in the Reichstag museum in 1990 and German history finished in 1933 and started again in 1945 and a bomb damaged building was exhibited with a big notice on it saying it was being repaired compliments of the Marshall plan ,now the point of the answer who was the recipient of at least 50% of the money made available by the American marshal plan it was of course the United Kingdom who then proceeded to line the pockets of the industrialists whose factories where worn out and antiquated machinery was to be replaced,not in the UK get the money and pocket it so when it's said that Germany had an advantage that is wrong, it's down to the greedy British not investing in the industrial backbone of the country