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gohuskies posted:Germany was done the moment they decided to enter a war of total annihilation with Russia without putting their economy on a 100% war footing. Hitler thought he could have guns and butter, and ended up with neither. Germany produced more tanks in 1944 than in 1941, and there's no reason for that except that at first they chose to fight with a hand behind their backs to try to keep the civilians at home happy. Taking this city or that city are minor details in comparison. Actually, this point is completely refuted by modern historiography, see: http://www.amazon.com/Wages-Destruction-Making-Breaking-Economy/dp/0143113208/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316985359&sr=8-1 Hitler most certainly did not lose the war because he spent too much money/materials on civilian goods, germany had a far larger % of their economy dedicated to warfare than the allies during the run-up to and most of the time during world war 2.
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Sep 25, 2011 22:18
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gohuskies posted:A higher percentage, yes, but a higher percentage of a much smaller base. Comparing Germany to the Allies is much less informative than comparing Germany at the beginning to Germany at the end. And Germany did ramp up war production as the war went on, which meant they were clearly underproducing to start. There is no reason that Germany should produce fewer tanks in 1941 than in 1944 except that they didn't produce as many tanks as they possibly could in 1941. If they really wanted a shot at winning, they would have needed to hit that higher percentage of war production earlier. As it was, they didn't go all-out on war production until they had their backs to the wall on the battlefield, a fatal error. A percentage comparison to the Allies is irrelevant to my argument. They did ramp up production, but at the cost of sustainability and quality. They cut corners in important places in order to make up for their inferiority in other places and made heavy use of forced labor in order to ramp up production. The nazi's kept gambling everything on their next scheme in the hope of winning and the idea that Hitler at least tried to do well for the german people is highly overrated. The main point of the book I linked is to show that this idea that Hitler somehow cared too much for the german people's economic wellbeing to commit everything to winning the war is a total myth, it's a very good book and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know about the economic background of world war 2. See also this post: Ferrosol posted:One myth that annoys me is that Speer took Germany to full on total war in 1943. This is not true while weapons production did increase under Speer it was not because germany shifted to a total war strategy. Indeed Nazi Germany had already gone to a total war strategy in 1941, What Speer did was raid the industrial reserve (the percentage of factories and machinery reserved to replace losses due to aerial bombardment or equipment failures) and rationalise production by cancelling some of the more insane Nazi pet projects (the Ratte and Maus being probably the most famous cancelled projects), Also he was much more willing to accept lower quality standards in exchange for greater numbers (for example he authorised the construction of modular uboats whereby each section of the submarine was built in different factories and then final assembly was completed in a drydock.)
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Sep 26, 2011 10:09
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