Why didn't the promise of the imminent Green Revolution forestall German territorial ambitions just before World War 2? [closed]

Question

Many Germans, even before World War I, believed that Germany needed to occupy Lebensraum or living space in other countries to achieve resource security. Also in the early 1900's scientists around the world worried about global food shortages resulting from exponential population growth outpacing agricultural production. Part of this included the anticipated exhaustion of the world's supplies of saltpeter and guano fertilizers.

In light of world-wide food shortages during the 1930's, why didn't Germany and other countries pursue an intense agricultural policy, especially since the means to achieve improvements (synthesis of fertilizer and selective breeding) were already available? Shortly after World War 2, once countries stepped down from war footing, the green agricultural revolution led to wide-spread use of synthetic fertilizer and higher-yielding plants. I wonder if the unprecedented marshalling of scientific efforts for developing the atomic bomb (and other WW2 military innovations) had instead been directed towards improved agricultural development, if the Green Revolution could have occurred a couple decades earlier. Though even today Germany doesn't produce all of its own food, the promise of wide-spread availability of food might have assuaged German concerns about resource insecurity. As a side note, it also seems especially ironic to me that Fritz Haber, one of the scientists who discovered how to synthetically produce ammonia -a key components of fertilizer- was a German Jew who had to unceremoniously flee Germany.

Germany was a world leader in chemistry and industrialization. Focusing this on the German perspective, did German agricultural scientists appreciate the promise of improved agriculture? The Green revolution seems to have unfolded along with internationalization of agricultural trade, and certainly German physicists collaborated with peers in other nations. From what I can tell, the improved crop varieties were propagated by hybridization rather than bioengineering and so the experimental techniques seem to have already been in hand. I wonder if a war-defeated German population would have supported Hitler's territorial expansion and the horrific racial ideology that he argued justified it if there was a more promising alternative.

Answer 1

Your counterfactual is based on the issue of "Lebensraum" and Germany's capability to feed itself alone.

But "Lebensraum" was only one thing. Geostrategic reasons were another^[1], the Bolchevics as political enemy the third, rearmament financed by unbacked loans as a driving factor for the recovering economy the fourth -- and the latter basically required going to war before the unbacked loans became due and the whole bubble collapsed.

[1]: Ref. Hitler, "Mein Kampf", basically stating that Germany should not suffer a neighboring state capable of staging war against Germany, identifying the UK and Soviet Russia as the main antagonists.

Edit: You added this:

I wonder if a war-defeated German population would have supported Hitler's territorial expansion and the horrific racial ideology that he argued justified it if there was a more promising alternative.

Oh, boy. That's a whole new can of worms. There's the Treaty of Versailles that Hitler promised to get Germany out of. There is the fact that you can have a perfectly wealthy nation falling victim to hate speech, xenophobia and conspiracy theories utilitzed by right-wing persons or parties to help them rise to power. Back then it was Germany and the Jews. Today it's USA and the Mexicans, Europe and the Muslims, Britain and the EU, ...

Answer 2

Counterfactual history can be a thought experiment in the study of historical processes. When historians want to explain why event X caused outcome Y, it might be helpful to think about the likely outcome of the counterfactual event not X. To make sense, the event not X needs to be plausible.

Alternate history is a literary genre which follows the fictional developments from a point of divergence in an entertaining and somewhat plausible manner.

The assumption that a group of visionary scientists and industrialists have already built the necessary factories is not a valid starting point for a counterfactual. The building would have had to happen during WWI, the unstable 20s, and the Great Depression. During WWI, the money and manpower would have gone into war production, and might have tilted the outcome of the war.

The assumption that they plan to build the necessary factories would have them run into the economic realities of the 20s and 30s.

Things like synthetic fertilizer are very power-hungry, so just introducing them without any other changes would resolve nothing. Instead of guano, Germany would need oil and gas to produce ammonia. No better position. Also, shifting things by a decade or two would not be enough to introduce the full effects of the green revolution before the Nazis were in power, and once they were in power, they needed to perpetuate their lies to justify their earlier crimes.

For these reasons, I would see your speculation in the realm of alternate history, not in the realm of counterfactual history.