I've always heard that the Nazis shot themselves in the foot by redirecting resources towards non-war avenues at times when they couldn't afford to do so, usually through the pursuit of "better" weapons instead of simply "more" weapons as well as the vast effort spent on the Holocaust.
If the Nazis had a more production focused economy, for example cutting the majority of wunderwaffe projects and redirecting these efforts towards practical pursuits of improving existing tech in production, not pursuing things that were not practical in the scope of the war or did not have an impact relative to their cost (V series rockets).
Even things that were used to a large extent I commonly see criticized, according to Wikipedia one Tiger 2 cost the same as about 9 Panzer IVs.
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The V weapons project was relative to the economy more expensive than the manhattan project and it achieved very little. Killing more slave labour than it ever did allied soldiers or civilians.
More than 10% of all concrete spent on the Atlantic wall defensive project was spend on the Channel Islands. Which offered no strategic benefit and were simply ignored.
There are more examples like this. From the Type XXI submarine to the Me-262, the railroad cannons or their massive tanks.
While all of that is true though it’s hardly the full picture.
55 to 60% of all German industrial output went into trying to stop the daily bombing campaigns run by the British and Americans. Compare that to just 8% to all armoured vehicles out there.
By late 1944 Germany employed as many people making aircraft as the U.S. did. Most of them German labour because it was important and slave labour couldn’t be trusted. But once again the bombing campaigns got in the way. Simply by forcing a decentralised approach to construction and destroying a lot before it ever reached fully got assembled. An airframe destroyed on a train before there’s an engine it took exactly as much time and effort to make as an airframe that makes it into the sky after all.
The German economy was inefficient and not working properly. But nothing Todd or Speer or Goring or Goebbels could have done or wanted to do from efficiency projects, to carefully planned economies, to total war economies would have helped. Simply because they could not win the air war against the British and they were outproduced and couldn’t defend themselves against the RAF.
When the U.S. joined the war, and their air force joined the bombing campaigns. The situation for Germany went from bad to downright horrible.
Meaning that while certain things could have been more efficient. Ultimately the Germans hadn’t a snowballs chance in hell.
Yeah, something like the Willow Run plant was just completely infeasible in a German context. And losing out on those kinds of economies of scale makes a big difference.
Also important to note that the U.S. adopted the assembly line style of industry and took it to perfection at an enormous scale. The Germans didn’t really follow the same style to the same extent.
For cultural reasons, German industry made much more reliance on skilled artisanship over the complete commitment to assembly lines as the U.S. had.
I think the last point is overplayed in these discussions. They still churned out thousands of stugs, and iirc the 109 is still the most mass produced fighter in history. Sure i read that somewhere, but could be wrong.
They definitely wasted huge amounts on pointless projects like v rockets, maus etc but we're able to produce vast amounts of fighter planes, they just never had enough fuel to train new pilots
The 109 may be the most individually produced fighter. But take P-38, P-39, P-40, and you've matched that number. Take P-47 and P-51. now you've close to doubled it. Now add in the Navy-Marines fighters, and that's well over that number again. And the 109 went into production many years earlier than any of those American fighters.
To add to this the U.S. and Britain reduced the share of their industrial capacity spent on fighters during the war, because it wasn’t as necessary. Germany on the other hand continued trying to build more and more and more, because they had to.
In 1944, Germany managed to turn out about 40,000 planes. In 1944 the Americans alone produced more than 96,000, more than twice what Germany was capable of.
I don’t debate that they had high production numbers. I’m just talking about the “tactics” of industry in these two countries. The U.S. industrial companies favored using unskilled labor in very complex production arrangements where people’s tasks were so routinized they didn’t need real training.
Other economies didn’t so the same.
In part, this can be explained through the massive pool of unskilled proletarian labor in America. Between the economic migrants who had emigrated to the United States and the internal American migrants who left farms in the countryside looking for a better life in the industrialized cities, America had a mass of people waiting to be turned into an industrial machine.
Germany, Britain, Japan didn’t have the same thing, and so didn’t approach the technical problems the same way
TIL the word infeasible!
I’d also add that they simply didn’t mobilize and retool their industry as thoroughly as the Allies did. There was still a huge amount of industry facing consumer goods that could have been oriented towards war materiel and would have been in other economies.
The Type XXI u-boats were a complete disaster. Speer had no clue what he was doing.
In addition to Wages of Destruction, there’s a 1939 book called The Vampire Economy that discusses the insanity of trying to conduct business in Nazi germany.
A great read on this topic is The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze (2006).
Basically, yes: It is a complete myth that the German war economy was this ruthless efficient machine. It WAS ruthless, but also highly incompetent, inefficient, and torn by (intentional) rivalries:
--It was full of redundancies, crazy projects, inefficiencies, corruption, political backbiting, clashing egos, and factional fighting. (By the way, just like we had an example in Syria with the collapse of the dictatorial regime, dictatorships are by nature inefficient because they don't like to build up any actual power too much in one place that might challenge the top leaders politically).
--Very little war production was rational. Producing lots of different models and variations of something that they could've simplified and just focused on quantity with quality.
--Lack of understanding of basic economics that led to a lot of instability that would've crashed the economy, even if there hadn't been a war.
--Complete delusional thinking about the availability of vital resources.
--More delusional thinking in basically planning everything for a short war.
--Overcommitment to flashy "wonder weapons" (like the V1, V2, Tiger II) that had little or no military value.
--this is both political and economic, but besides their obvious evil genocides they seemingly intentionally committed enormous cruelties on populations that probably would've collaborated with them if they weren't so busy being massacred or starved.
It is also important to note that one of the mythologies that emerged from the war is that the German war economy was partly irrational and stumbling but along came the heroic "technocrat" Albert Speer who put everything right in 1944...but by then it was too late. Actually, most of Speer's megaprojects ended in objective failure. He tried to impose a "rational" process but often that didn't take into account the actual production systems and even personnel that were available.
A great example, almost a hilarious one, was his new system of submarine manufacturing that was supposed to churn better mass production of vehicle frames. The result was shoddy plating, which is sort of disastrous when you're building the hull of a submarine! There really was no improvement, but it all looked good in his slide presentations to Hitler.
The American production system had its issues but was astoundingly more efficient than those of Nazi Germany.
Seconding your recommendation. It’s an excellent book, and the stuff he covers is wild.
Yes, I'm assuming a lot of the stuff that he uncovers was known to specialist historians. But it certainly hasn't leaked to the Internet, where the meme and myth of the superefficient Nazi economy is still bubbling
The story about the submarines, to me, was the wildest of all. Speer's ultra efficient new process forgot that with submarines you have to have zero error in fitting plates or well... it's a submarine!
Sometimes things are done the way they are for a good reason😊
Exactly. It's like those great stories about the slave laborers intentionally doing shoddy work
It was madness to think that slaves who are being worked and starved to death would have the same productivity.
I read about them assembling V2’s in caverns and it amazes that Speer and the others never once stopped and asked themselves “what the hell are we doing?!” They’ve reached the point of supervillain schemes. That’s when you know shit has really gotten out of hand.
Even if Germany had managed to create the best technology on the planet somehow, it would still have run into impossible walls: too little access to vital war materials, too many enemies in too many regions, and too little credibility to allow for a negotiated peace. No amount of science can change that; at least, on a timescale that matters.
Even if we take the best case, where Germany somehow rushes development of reliable nukes, with a reliable delivery system to boot, and this somehow doesn't create major material deficiencies elsewhere in the military that even the US struggled with, what happens? Germany nukes London, or Moscow, and then what? Everybody just surrenders?
No, they'll rush everything Germany needs to make more nukes regardless of casualties, and regardless of war crimes. Hell, they'll even make peace with Japan and send everything in the Pacific at Germany too if they have to, because Germany had just lied too much: it broke the Versailles Treaty too quickly, it lied about Czechoslovakia and Poland, and it genocided Eastern Europe. Nobody would gamble on peace after all that.
That's why Germany has to win by 1942, when all its weapons were still very favorably comparable to Allied ones, because if it doesn't, it can't win, and everyone knows it. In that sense, the Wunderwaffens were actually the best use of Germany's resources, because they convinced the average soldiers that they still had some advantage even when they didn't, and that bought time for all the rats to try and find a way to flee their sinking ship.
Ive seen and heard from a number of sources that if the Germans had invested in more Panzer IVs, Panthers and Stugs it would have likely prolonged the war but not changed it. Instead they went with over engineered nonsense.
You can also look at the fact the logistics system was utterly wild. They had so much random equipment that they had captured its a wonder every one of their QMs didn't have a stroke after checking their inventorys.
Then there's the meddling in aircraft production and design, im sure Hitler wanted the ME262 to have dive bombing capabilities and so production and introduction was significantly delayed when the 262 would have caused the allies all sorts of problems.
Then there's the over reliance on horses when every peer nation was mechanising at an incredible rate even before 1941.
Im not an expert on the Kriegsmarine, but I can't see them being any less of a clown car than the other services.
The constant switching between priorities for your armed forces and what you wanted them to do, the cut throat rivalry and infighting within the Nazi party, picking a fight with the US, USSR and GB, no co-ordination between any of the axis powers in any grand strategy, resources directed toward the holocaust, alienating potential allies in occupied Soviet territories and firefighting every front, was never gonna turn out well.
About their equipment, isn't this a bit counterintuitive? I think Germans knew full well that they don't have the industrial resources of the allies, so in theory the design philosophy of overengineering makes sense, considering that the numbers game was a losing battle.
Obviously as we know now it was a losing battle either way, but they had to swing for the fences to even have a theoretical chance.
The problem is that they swung too hard, and should have understood better.
So take your argument, they over-engineered it because they couldn't match quantity. So resources are a problem, right? So you over-engineer to save resources, right? Of course not! You do the opposite apparently.
A German MG34 according to Nazi documents cost 40kg of high-grade steel to make. The weapon itself only weighs around 12kg in total. Because you start with a solid steel block and tool it out to make the most precisely engineered weapon. This is what Nazi-German over-engineering looked like. You just wasted 28kg of steel in shavings on a factory floor.
Eventually they try and fix that problem and there is the update MG 42 model but in typical Nazi fashion both versions are made throughout the war.
Almost every piece of wargear from Nazi-Germany has some element of this, some factor that is too clever by far for it's own good. I forget if it was the Panther or Tiger with a gearbox so advanced an inexperienced driver could destroy it just by changing gears non-optimally. And when you inevitably tear the gearbox apart, an incredibly finely machined device I might add (ie tricky and costly to make), to replace it you have to gut the entire tank to get it out!
And then they are under-engineered anyway. The Nazis go to war with a fictional mechanised army that they then make up with capturing vehicles from conquered nations. I believe the number was something like 2000 different models and make of trucks to support Barbarossa. That is 2000 different service manuals to translate and create. 2000 x who knows how many spare parts they need.
And then you get the bewildering array of variants and updates. In theory improving the tank should be a smart thing, but in a wartime situation trying to keep up with machining and tooling for 3, 4 up to 20ish variants for some vehicles creates a logistical nightmare. Consider that the Allies declined to deploy the Pershing heavy tank widely in the ETO in 1944 because they didn't want to upset their logistics support network.
I cant recall where I read/saw it, but I thought the panther was even worse than the Tiger in terms of leaving the factory yard, much less making it to the battlefield. Or at least, initially.
But yes, the whole of the German system was ludicrous. The kriegsmarine wanted to protect their bases from aerial attack. It makes sense. The Luftwaffe apparently controlled ALL of the AA guns. So when they were ordered elsewhere, shucks, too bad Herr Kriegsmarine, your base isnt our priority.
Ohh, and then theres the "infamous" development of an aircraft carrier, which would be controlled by the navy. But it would carry, and operate air force fighters off its deck.
In more measured tones though, the Kriegsmarine did have some "normal" era internal politics. Namely in that Adm. Raeder was an old school thinking surface fleet, big ships fanboi admiral. He convinced Hitler to direct funding toward Tirpitz and Bismarck, and away from a sizable U-Boat fleet. Adm Dönitz came up through the U-Boat ranks, and believed he could do more damage overall with more u-boats (obviously both make grandiose claims of 'ending' the war in Germany's favor). But, this sort of political game was being played in ALL of the major navies to some degree. Even the US navy had internal squabbles about how best to lay out ships and the naval forces.
The Nazi economy was a basket case from them committing fraud to fund their re-armament onwards. They set up work camps to eliminate the unemployed, and gave them fake jobs. They implemented rationing secretly from 1935. They made it impossible for more than a million people to change jobs legally. They employed proportionally more women in the workforce than the US or UK, but then wasted so much manpower they needed to import slaves. At every level, examining their decisions with even a smidgeon of critical thinking, the Nazi economy was absolute bullshit.
"More weapons" was simply not an option for Germany. From the start German economy was smaller than their enemies so matching comparable weapons on 1-1 basis was not possible. So German approach was quality over quantity, fewer better weapons used by well trained soldiers using superior doctrine. And it worked until late 1942. So next generation of tanks, like Panther and Tiger, was a logical step and a better option than keep churning out Pz IV that were comparable to allied tanks, but in fewer numbers.
Approach itself is not wrong, Germany simply wasn't able to develop next generation of weapons properly. Not just tanks but also submarines and aircraft.
It's also worth noting that western powers went with this approach post war/cold war