Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

Discussions on the economic history of the nations taking part in WW2, from the recovery after the depression until the economy at war.
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bf109 emil
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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#256

Post by bf109 emil » 04 May 2010, 17:53

takata_1940 wrote:Hi,
very nice Jon! (How to break a thread in one easy lesson).
About supplying the eastern front, sheer train numbers does'nt tell much. The difficulty was to get them running to the right place, to unload, go elsewhere to pick up some raw materials, and all this without depriving the economy from too much rolling stock and for a too long time. But making those trains from Germany was not such a tremendeous task at the first place.

S~
Olivier
Can the eastern front be summed up by showing that 200 trains daily to the eastern front as simply as stating " without depriving the economy from too much rolling stock and for a too long time. But making those trains from Germany was not such a tremendeous task at the first place." and assuming that these 200 trains did not deprive the German economy?

IMHO sure 200 trains is a drop in the bucket so to say. But what of the thousands of trains that where required to haul iron ore, coal, oil, timber, food items, horse feed, etc. from around the Reich, manufacture, smelt, produce, refine, etc. goods to make or allow these 200 trains daily, each and every day be available to support an army in the millions with finished goods, weapons, food, etc.

and IIRC having the Wehrmacht have priority over shipped goods required for it's arsenal would have deprived Germany and her economy from allowing her to make goods, ship goods and trade goods which would have bolstered her economy more then sending arms to support an army, which IMHO was a draw from the economy as opposed to a benefit.

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#257

Post by Jon G. » 09 May 2010, 03:32

bf109 emil wrote: Can the eastern front be summed up by showing that 200 trains daily to the eastern front as simply as stating " without depriving the economy from too much rolling stock and for a too long time. But making those trains from Germany was not such a tremendeous task at the first place." and assuming that these 200 trains did not deprive the German economy?
They didn't, by and large, and excepting the winter crisis of 1941-1942, which did have something of an impact on overall Reichsbahn effort. As has been shown upthread, trains with bullets &c for the Ostheer only made up a small part of the Reichsbahn's total effort.
IMHO sure 200 trains is a drop in the bucket so to say. But what of the thousands of trains that where required to haul iron ore, coal, oil, timber, food items, horse feed, etc. from around the Reich, manufacture, smelt, produce, refine, etc. goods to make or allow these 200 trains daily, each and every day be available to support an army in the millions with finished goods, weapons, food, etc.
Well, you're making a false connection here. All those thousands and thousands of trains would have been running anyway, East Front or no East Front, war or no war. They're part of the economy, not a strain on it.
and IIRC having the Wehrmacht have priority over shipped goods required for it's arsenal would have deprived Germany and her economy from allowing her to make goods, ship goods and trade goods which would have bolstered her economy more then sending arms to support an army, which IMHO was a draw from the economy as opposed to a benefit.
By and large, operational movements of Wehrmacht units by rail was something which the Germans had the capacity to do almost until the very end of the war. Even if the Wehrmacht was the RB's largest single customer, overall Wehrmacht traffic was, as you say, the proverbial drop in a bucket as a fraction of all trains run by the RB.


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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#258

Post by bf109 emil » 09 May 2010, 20:38

Well, you're making a false connection here. All those thousands and thousands of trains would have been running anyway, East Front or no East Front, war or no war. They're part of the economy, not a strain on it.
Perhaps your right as I assumed an economy was the ability of a nation to trade and sell goods to others in an effort to bolster a nations wealth and spending potential of her citizens to purchase items or seek wealth.

Sure these trains would have still ran, but doing so to support a war effort, which deemed the running of these trains as a must and controlling the goods carried upon trains IMHO is in some ways a direct opposite as a nation using railways to bolster her economy financially, as opposed to employ citizens in seeking the continuation of a war now deemed necessary.

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#259

Post by Jon G. » 10 May 2010, 02:42

You lost me.

Are you trying to tell me that trains running with steel, coal &c weren't part of the economy because the stuff they were transporting went into the war effort? In that case, I suggest you read through this thread again.

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#260

Post by LopEaredGaloot » 20 Jan 2011, 01:42

PRR,

Might want to take a look at these LINKS-

_Hitler 1889-1935; Hubris_
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/nazi.htm

And

_Trading With The Enemy_
http://www.american-buddha.com/hig.trad ... enemy7.htm

Rockefeller The Nazi Symp
http://www.maxstandridge.net/rocky.htm

The more I read between the lines, the more it looks like WWII was a staged event that could not and indeed _would not_ have continued more than about six months except that it was profitable to industry and energizing to societies to do so.

The you effectively removed the old Colonial/Imperial European powers from existence, only to replace them with ultimately equally unstable Nationalist Republics is also suspicious because the fewer powers controlling things the more supplantive 'commercial' forces gain the power to effect extranationalist controls.

Germany had 34 critical georesources of which she ABSOLUTELY could only source 26 from outside her borders.

We sold, directly it would appear, ball bearings critically needed for our own manufacturing AFTER the famous Schweinfurt Regensburg raids which only saw the obliteration of so many Allied platforms because the Germans were alerted.

Rather than leave the Germans to rot in the desert with only dysentary for company (they literally were going nowhere) and invade Norway to take Sweden out of the iron ore and ball bearing resupply game, we stayed out of Europe altogether to piddle about in the Mediterranean, removing 'oh no, we had them last time!' Italy from the fight FULLY KNOWING that the boot was one giant mountain range that ended at an even bigger mountain range: The Alps.

We never took out the huge transformation/rectification plants whose transformer windings would amount to -tons- of irreplaceable copper.

We allowed Mexico to ship oil to the Reich well into 1943, using an American to manage their drilling companies and shell-game shifting oil south until it could be loaded on Germaan blockade runners.

Hitler used some 850 of his 930 million reichsmarks worth of gold reserve and nobody pushed hard on his oversupplied currency system to drive Germany into bankruptcy.

Despite claiming to employ everyone, as many as 2.5 million or 14% of Germany's workers were in fact out of work, and that didn't include the non-German (Communist, Slav and Jewish) people who were not only disenfranchised from work but also without unemployment insurance (yes, Germany led in that as well).

Forget the Lebensborn, Hitler -paid- to take women out of the workforce and start large families.

During the war, there is also evidence that Hitler relied heavily on Swedish and Swiss companies to source materials (diamonds from Africa via Ju-290 for instance) for which he paid premiums to the Dulles/Forrestal/Rockefeller clique.

To me, it looks an awful lot less like containing a runaway rogue 'too little, too late' and more like giving a revolutionary just enough economic rope to hang himself, with the given that you -want- WWII to happen. And are simply shaping the dates and places and materiel vulnerabilities by which the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

With this as a given, was the war run badly? Of course it was.

Hitler wanted to enter into WWII sometime between 1944 and 1946. But his baseline economy was too vulnerable and too depleted by his mass social engineering efforts (not all of which look that much different from the 'Stimulus' and 'Quantitative Easing' packages we ourselves are foolishly undertaking today I might add). Such that it becomes obvious that he could never have made it to the later warstart, even if his armaments program had gone ahead as planned rather than in competitive abaitment of fiscally responsible economic policies.

Hitler, elected on a 37% vote and the word of Hindenburg, had to stay in power to prove his system worked. He could only stay in power if he went to war, half cocked. He didn't realize how he was being strung along like a puppet. Or by whom. Bormann did. He worked for them and by 1943 was the real power in the 3rd Reich's industries as well as the Reich Evacuation Plan which took the most valuable of process patents, technologies and financial holdings offshore.

Again, just like we are seeing today with first manufacturing, then IT/Office and now R&D up for grabs.

WWII was an economic fraud far more than a strategic 3GW military failure.


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Guaporense
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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#261

Post by Guaporense » 20 Jan 2011, 20:07

There is probably nothing worth in the post above this one.
"In tactics, as in strategy, superiority in numbers is the most common element of victory." - Carl von Clausewitz

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#262

Post by ljadw » 20 Jan 2011, 20:11

Hitler as a puppett(of the capitalists? or of the Illuminati :P ):a new one in the series:The myths of WWII :roll: 8O

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#263

Post by LWD » 20 Jan 2011, 20:15

Guaporense wrote:There is probably nothing worth in the post above this one.
The milenium has come I find myself for the most part agreeing with Guaporense.

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#264

Post by ljadw » 20 Jan 2011, 21:44

There are still 345 days (=8280 hours) to dissent with Guaporense .

Jon G.
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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#265

Post by Jon G. » 11 Nov 2011, 23:47

Two articles about the BR 52 war locomotive:

"The German Class 52 Locomotive" from Tactical and Technical Trends (via Lone Sentry)
http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/ttt/ ... otive.html

History of the BR-52 locomotive
http://www.militarymodelling.com/news/a ... asp?a=3326

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#266

Post by phylo_roadking » 12 Nov 2011, 00:29

Oh did you have to??? He could be tracking this thread....
Twenty years ago we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Now we have no Cash, no Hope and no Jobs....
Lord, please keep Kevin Bacon alive...

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#267

Post by Jon G. » 12 Nov 2011, 00:40

:P That risk I am willing to take, seeing that Olivier is back among us since yesterday :)

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Badly? Try horrid in areas..

#268

Post by waldzee » 01 Mar 2012, 04:18

Mostlyharmless wrote:
prr wrote:Finally, Tooze said that Germany was well aware that they had to go back to the west and fight against Britain and the US, and that a lot of their arms production was devoted to producing/designing material that would be used in an air/naval campaign against those Allies, and not against the USSR--as an explanation as to why the Germans didn't throw everything they had against the USSR from the get-go.
I think Tooze is giving the German leadership too much credit for far sightedness as he is such an obvious fan of Speer :D. For example, it is hard to see how completing the Volkswagen factory was going to help an air/naval campaign. Also if Germany had defeated the USSR, it would not have needed most of the synthetic oil plants. Hitler was surprised by the British and French declarations of war. The official plan assumed that war was only likely in 1943-44 (the naval Z-plan for example). The synthetic oil programme made sense on that assumption. I suspect that nobody changed the plans even when they no longer made sense.

There was an earlier thread on German versus USSR steel production http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 6&t=119848 that might suggest that the limitation on, for example, tank production was not lack of raw materials. However, Lend Lease might have allowed the USSR to concentrate more on weapons, so it is not absolutely clear.
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First: they built monuments, like the Autobahn, instead of overhauling their rail structureto the level that would support the rail effort.
Second: They built 'victory stadia', & threw major circuses when they should have bartered for cheap oil from 1936-1939 - & stored it!
third: they built fragile, experimental synthetic fuel plants that couldn't deliver!
Despite all that - they won the war in - 1938 & 1940- then threw it away. Invading the Soviet Union was at least a decade pre mature.
Last edited by waldzee on 01 Mar 2012, 11:19, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Was Germany's War Effort Badly Run?

#269

Post by steverodgers801 » 01 Mar 2012, 10:49

Hitler always felt that the Roosevelt led US was the main threat. Hitler did try to build all three branches at the same time until war came when the navy was put on the back burner. Tank production was not the only problem. The truck industry was very limited and for what ever reason seems to not have had much attention prewar.

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Re: Badly? Try horrid in areas..

#270

Post by Jon G. » 02 Mar 2012, 06:47

This has more to do with how the economic effort running up to war was lead, although you could make a point that the German economy was already mobilized well prior to 1939:
waldzee wrote: First: they built monuments, like the Autobahn, instead of overhauling their rail structureto the level that would support the rail effort.
The Autobahnen, which as I understand it were plans inherited from pre-Hitler governments, were 'new' infrastructure projects which could be completed basically with domestic resources and plenty of labour, which Germany had in abundance when Hitler took over in 1933.

The railroads of Germany, on the other hand, were part of a fully matured system (quite unlike the Autobahn), and with big domestic coal deposits there was not much incentive to modernize to diesel (which would have meant importing more oil), or electrification (with a few exceptions) which in a strategic sense would just have meant burning the coal elsewhere.

Also, I guess you could make a point that the DRG as a well-established government agency well prior to 1933 lent itself less readily to nazification than new organisations such as eg. Organisation Todt (which built the Autobahnen), which were all-Nazi from the onset. Maybe it tells us something that the DRG was only 'nazified' (as the DR) in 1937, which was also the year when the swastika was added to the DR eagle - still, a good proportion of those very few Germans who had the opportunity to offer resistance to Hitler and the Nazis were railroadmen.

And Dorpmüller the head of the DR/DRG held his post right from 1926 until 1945.
Second: They built 'victory stadia', & threw major circuses when they should have bartered for cheap oil from 1936-1939 - & stored it!
Well, how would you exchange Nürnberg mass rallies and similar with oil? Propaganda, mass rallies &c. were all part and parcel of the Nazi regime, and not things which they could have made away with without consequence. Also, and just like Autobahnen, mass rallies, olympic stadia and the like could be procured, mostly, from domestic resources.
third: they built fragile, experimental synthetic fuel plants that couldn't deliver!
Synthetic fuel is crazy from an economic point of view - unless rearmament is your #1 priority, you have too little fuel to cover your own growing needs, and you need to save as much foreign currency as possible for #1, above - but it did eventually deliver at the end, after massive investments. The Germans didn't lose the war for want of oil.
Despite all that - they won the war in - 1938 & 1940- then threw it away. Invading the Soviet Union was at least a decade pre mature.
That is highly speculative, and also not the subject of this thread.

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