> Germany together with the U.S. [!]. If Italy and Japan could be called
> "semi-industrialized" (and my very inadequate understanding is that
> Japan was rather more industrialized than Italy at that time), Germany
> certainly wasn't.
The Axis powers were all underdeveloped relative to the US and Britain: big rural populations, lots of fairly simply extractive tech, no huge consumer culture, deeply archaic/reactionary cultures, etc.
> who are the "dim provincials" referred to?
The Nazis.
> expert either, but I have always thought that Hitler's battlefield
> stupidity was due to the fact that he was just a terrible military
> strategist, but he realized that to keep his regime together he had to
> command the military himself,
Adorno's point was aimed against conservative postwar Germans who blamed Germany's defeat on Hitler's leadership; from our own vantage-point, it's obvious that the war was suicidal from the very beginning (I think the US had something like six times the economic output of Nazi Germany in 1940), though of course this wasn't at all obvious to observers at the time.
-- DRR