German waste of resources??

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LWD
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Re: German waste of resources??

#151

Post by LWD » 07 Mar 2013, 19:24

ljadw wrote:1)About the women :that's an old myth,propagated by Speer,but,debunked by Tooze :already before the war,there were,proportionally more women working in Germany,than in Britain:there was no unused reserve of idle women available . I could give a lot of figures,nut we would go off topic .
...
Labor is a resource and a critical one. I for one wouldn't see this as off topic.

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Re: German waste of resources??

#152

Post by stg 44 » 07 Mar 2013, 19:40

ljadw wrote:1)About the women :that's an old myth,propagated by Speer,but,debunked by Tooze :already before the war,there were,proportionally more women working in Germany,than in Britain:there was no unused reserve of idle women available . I could give a lot of figures,nut we would go off topic .
That's factually inaccurate. In 1939-41 there were still reserves of German women; its even been talked about on this forum more than once. Sure, Germany had mobilized its female population proportionally more than Britain before and throughout the war, but there were still untapped segments of the female population, including some 3 million married women, whose husbands were at war and chose not to work.
See Overy: "Göring: Hitler's Iron Knight". It was Overy that first demonstrated German female mobilization was higher than the Western Allies and Tooze recycled the point without the nuance.

ljadw wrote: 2) About the tank production :till end 1940,priority was given to the war against Britain(and the expected war against the US),but,if the tank factories were given more steel,this would not result in more tanks:more workers,machine tools and factories would be needed,and,if more tanks were produced,more crews were needed,thus,the tank schools would need more tanks,more instructors,etc.More tanks would mean more tank ammunition,etc.
More tanks would result in less artillery,etc,etc.
The German war economy was a mess of inefficiency; the resources were there, but they were badly allocated and there was a ton of waste. As it was the machine tools and factory floor space were there, as I demonstrated with a quote and sourcing in my last post, what wasn't were the orders, the extra workers (could be solved by the group of women I mentioned above), and properly allocated raw materials. In 1940-41 Germany had the time to train more tankers; but even if they didn't they could have replaced their Pz Is, IIs, 35(t)s, and 38(t)s with Pz IVs.

The German economy in 1939-41 was a total mess because of Göring's 'organized chaos', which left the economy pulling in several directions and wasting huge amounts of resources, including steel. Both Overy and the MGFA corroborate the serious problems in allocating resources and labor properly:
http://www.amazon.com/Germany-Second-Wo ... 0198228856
http://www.amazon.com/Germany-Second-Wo ... =pd_cp_b_2
ljadw wrote: 3)There is also the interesting question (always concealed by the Speer boys);why would Germany need more tanks for operation Barbarossa ? The existing PzD had an average tank strength of 200 tanks,which was sufficient .

Here also,it is not so that there was an unused reserve of raw materials,workers,.....available:there were shortages of everything:
some exemples:
5 cm PAK:shortage of 19 %,ammunition :shortage of 20 %
5 cm gun KWK:shortage 23 %,ammunition :shortage :34 %

Source : Va Banque P 39/40
They needed modern tanks instead of the mess of outdated Panzer Is, IIs, and Czech models. Being able to replace those with Pz IVs AND have a reserve would be extremely helpful over what was historically available.
Again, much of the shortages of 1939-41 (and really beyond that) were the result of serious economic mismanagement by Göring and the various other competing bureaucracies.


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Re: German waste of resources??

#153

Post by ljadw » 07 Mar 2013, 21:43

Two points :
1)There were no reserves of unemployed womenin 1939:the story of the 3 million women is a fable;
-already before the war,women wre conscriped,because there was a shortage of workers
-these 3 million women did NOT choose to not work:a lot of them were working (in the agriculture sector) but had no paid job:a lot of farms only survived because no one was paid for his work
:most of these women never had learned a job

-only a very small part of them was useful :when they were called up in 1943/1944,most never were employed

2)I disagree with the claim that the nazi economy was a mess:this is a postwar myth,spreaded by Speer to glorify his realizations .

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Re: German waste of resources??

#154

Post by LWD » 07 Mar 2013, 21:55

ljadw wrote:... 2)I disagree with the claim that the nazi economy was a mess:this is a postwar myth,spreaded by Speer to glorify his realizations .
Actually Tooze makes this point as well. If you are going to accept some of his points you at least need to say why you are rejecting others or vica versa.

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Re: German waste of resources??

#155

Post by stg 44 » 07 Mar 2013, 22:12

ljadw wrote:Two points :
1)There were no reserves of unemployed womenin 1939:the story of the 3 million women is a fable;
-already before the war,women wre conscriped,because there was a shortage of workers
-these 3 million women did NOT choose to not work:a lot of them were working (in the agriculture sector) but had no paid job:a lot of farms only survived because no one was paid for his work
:most of these women never had learned a job.
Besides maids who were not in war work, there were also a class women, whose husbands had been drafted and were able to collect 85% of his pre-military salary who didn't have to work and chose not to. They were not involved in agriculture. Women were of course widely employed in the economy pre-war and during the war, but that doesn't mean that female labor was fully utilized, just that it was more utilized than in Britain and the US.
Training people to work in factories doing specific tasks isn't that hard; industry was typically able to do so in 2-3 months.
ljadw wrote: 2)I disagree with the claim that the nazi economy was a mess:this is a postwar myth,spreaded by Speer to glorify his realizations .
You are misunderstanding the issue; there were a whole host of inefficiencies in the economy, but it wasn't Speer per se that fixed them. Much of the problems were fixed when he was given total control over the economy, centralizing orders for everything, which was the first time in the war that this was done; prior there had been no central authority for anything, so no one actually knew what was going on in terms of labor allocation or mobilization, raw material availability and allocation, or even ordering of weapons/equipment/capital projects.
Once authority to manage all of this was centralized in one office then this cleared up a huge part of the problem; other parts of this were eliminating corruption in issuing contracts/fulfilling them (Göring was awful with this), removing the military from the direct ordering process (they would often only order a handful of weapons at a time instead of mass ordering, which would have allowed for large scale mass production), and actually auditing production to make sure they were properly utilizing materials (lots of factories were caught producing consumers goods off the books with military allotted raw materials for sale come peacetime/on the black market during the war). On that last point industrialists had deals with farmers to get extra food for their workers and traded in a black market with them during the war, just as in WW1.

So while the point about Speer's 'success' being propaganda is true (and already proved in the 1970s by other authors), that doesn't mean that there weren't make economic issues that were sorted out by his rise to power in spite of, not necessarily because of him. Anyone appointed with his same authority would have had the same effect simply because it centralized economic authority AND it removed Göring from power, as he had be the source of corruption and disorganization. Oh and Udet died, which removed a major part of the problem for aircraft production; he was in effect a 'mini-Göring' for his influence on the aircraft industry.

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Re: German waste of resources??

#156

Post by KDF33 » 07 Mar 2013, 23:01

There certainly were inefficiencies in the way Germany ran it's war effort (as was certainly also the case for the other belligerents), but I am unconvinced that the reason for Germany's lackadaisical military production from 1939 to 1941 was primarily bad management. More fundamentally, IMO, the steel allocation for Army armaments production fell continously after the conclusion of the BoF, going from 2,361,000 tons (1-6.40) to 1,965,000 tons (7-12.40), then to 1,680,000 tons (1-6.41) and, finally, reaching it's wartime low of 1,221,000 tons during Barbarossa. It ramped up dramatically in early 1942, reaching 2,097,000 tons from January to June of that year, and then kept increasing until industrial collapse set in during 1944. (All numbers are from Tooze.)

Note that Germany's armaments output stayed essentially flat between 1940 and 1941, despite an overall cut of 33% to the military industry's steel allocation. Thus, some form of rationalization must have been already taking place before Speer's rise to power.

Simply put, Germany didn't produce much armaments early in the war because the leadership didn't focus on producing armaments, not because it was somehow incapable of efficiently producing it. This low production drive also realistically accounts for the spare capacity observed in some industries, as was previously mentioned in the case of tank factory floor space. Micro-level analyses of Göring's or Udet's mismanagement notwithstanding, I believe the elephant in the room is the macro-level 50% cut in steel rations that occured between 1940/I and 1941/II.
Last edited by KDF33 on 07 Mar 2013, 23:23, edited 4 times in total.

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Re: German waste of resources??

#157

Post by ljadw » 07 Mar 2013, 23:17

LWD wrote:
ljadw wrote:... 2)I disagree with the claim that the nazi economy was a mess:this is a postwar myth,spreaded by Speer to glorify his realizations .
Actually Tooze makes this point as well. If you are going to accept some of his points you at least need to say why you are rejecting others or vica versa.
Those who are saying that the nazi economy was a mess (this was propagated not only by Speer,but also by the USSBS boys,claiming that the US capitalist economy was better than the German and Soviet ones)have to prove that (without hindsight and in the present circumstances of the 1933/1945 period) an other economic policy would have resulted in better production figures.

One exemple : the tank production (and the following figures are from Speer) :
In 1940,Germany produced 1643 tanks,in 1941 3806,in 1942 6164.
Now, I want to see some one proving that,without consuming more raw materials,without claiming more workers,etc,Germany could have produced in 1940 6164 tanks .
IMHO,this was out of the question .The German tank production (and even the whole armaments results) was limited by a number of unavoidable factors ,as :shortage of raw materials,and by political decisions ,as the decision to give the war against Britain/the US priority ,which had negative results for Barbarossa .

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Re: German waste of resources??

#158

Post by ljadw » 07 Mar 2013, 23:20

About Udet:he was not the right man in the right place,but,Speer/Milch would not have done better: the problems were not caused by Speer,but were a fact .

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Re: German waste of resources??

#159

Post by LWD » 07 Mar 2013, 23:32

ljadw wrote:
LWD wrote:
ljadw wrote:... 2)I disagree with the claim that the nazi economy was a mess:this is a postwar myth,spreaded by Speer to glorify his realizations .
Actually Tooze makes this point as well. If you are going to accept some of his points you at least need to say why you are rejecting others or vica versa.
Those who are saying that the nazi economy was a mess (this was propagated not only by Speer,but also by the USSBS boys,claiming that the US capitalist economy was better than the German and Soviet ones)have to prove that (without hindsight and in the present circumstances of the 1933/1945 period) an other economic policy would have resulted in better production figures.
....
Like I said Tooze does a pretty good job of doing so.

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Re: German waste of resources??

#160

Post by ljadw » 07 Mar 2013, 23:45

About the reserve of 3.1 million idle rich women that existed in 1939:when they were called up for examination,only 1.25 million passed and were considered as arbeits-und einsatzfähig,of those,50 % could work only partially;after several months,only 500000 were available,of whom 250000 only partially .

The fact is that already before the war ,the Germans were scraping the bottom of the bottle : already before the war,there was a big shortage of workers (women were conscripted for the Westwall;women were legally prevented from leaving the farms); the 3 million women that had no paid job (what does not mean that they were not working) were inapt for the industry .

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Re: German waste of resources??

#161

Post by stg 44 » 07 Mar 2013, 23:48

ljadw wrote:About Udet:he was not the right man in the right place,but,Speer/Milch would not have done better:
I heavily disagree with that, because we know for a fact that Milch did do better with aircraft production with the same material and labor base. With very little new manpower and no new resources Milch produced major increases in production from 1942 on. Even controlling for the fact that in 1944 bomber production was cut off in favor of fighters, in 1942-43 there were major gains in bomber production. Even with the bombing of cities and factories by the Allies, which seriously damaged production and created major inefficiencies by forcing production underground and dispersing it, production went up.

As I already demonstrated in the Tooze thread the British had fewer workers, raw materials, and less factory floor space than the German aircraft industry in 1940, yet produced 50% more aircraft. By 1941 that lead increased, though Germany retained the lead in labor, materials, and floor space through out the year and in fact throughout the war. It wasn't until 1944 that Germany final produced more aircraft than Britain even at a time when production was being ravaged by bombing and all the resulting issues.

Beyond all that let's also remember that the 1944 production numbers of all things, tanks, planes, artillery, etc. was done with the same resource base as 1940; if anything Germany had less raw material access in 1944 than in 1940-43, yet peaked her production. Some of that was of course experienced gained in the production of the types in service and the ending of many incomplete capital projects by 1942 (though Germany was still building more capital projects even after this), even with the bombing and disruptions to infrastructure, which cancels some of the benefit gained from experience, Germany was able to expand production of weapon systems dramatically. There was slack capacity available because inefficiencies were ironed out of the system and bureaucracy was finally centralized. Labor and raw materials were badly allocated, orders were conflicting (there was at least one Henschel factory that produced 0 airplanes from 1940-44 because it was constantly ordered to retool for different aircraft before starting production on the previous type), and factories were wasteful of resources while hoarding raw materials.

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Re: German waste of resources??

#162

Post by KDF33 » 07 Mar 2013, 23:56

There was slack capacity available because inefficiencies were ironed out of the system and bureaucracy was finally centralized. Labor and raw materials were badly allocated, orders were conflicting (there was at least one Henschel factory that produced 0 airplanes from 1940-44 because it was constantly ordered to retool for different aircraft before starting production on the previous type), and factories were wasteful of resources while hoarding raw materials.
Or maybe it was because... Germany started reallocating steel to the production of armaments early in 1942? I.e., my previous post:
(...) the steel allocation for Army armaments production fell continously after the conclusion of the BoF, going from 2,361,000 tons (1-6.40) to 1,965,000 tons (7-12.40), then to 1,680,000 tons (1-6.41) and, finally, reaching it's wartime low of 1,221,000 tons during Barbarossa. It ramped up dramatically in early 1942, reaching 2,097,000 tons from January to June of that year, and then kept increasing until industrial collapse set in during 1944. (All numbers are from Tooze.)

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Re: German waste of resources??

#163

Post by ljadw » 08 Mar 2013, 00:09

It is not because Milch produced more aircraft after the death of Udet,that the same Milch would have produced more aircraft before the death of Udet.One can also reply that,if Udet had not killed himself,the German aircraft production would have increased .
It is wrong to incriminate Udet : there were also a lot of structural problems .

Udet and Todt were laying the foundations for the successes of Milch and Speer .

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Re: German waste of resources??

#164

Post by KDF33 » 08 Mar 2013, 00:40

It isn't true that Germany's 1941 aircraft industry labor force was comparable to that of 1944.

On the eve of Barbarossa, Germany's aircraft industry employed 550,000 workers. Right after Udet's suicide, it employed 630,000. When Germany reached it's peak aircraft production in July 1944, it employed 873,000. That is, respectively, a 59% and a 39% increase in the size of the workforce.

Note that this increase in labor was continuous and gradual, whereas growth in output occured in fits and starts. Thus Germany produced about 6,000 monthly metric tons of aircraft between March 1941 and February 1942, then 8,000 metric tons between March and November 1942, then after a further hike in late 1942 12,000 tons between February 1943 and 1944. It then grew continuously between March and July 1944, peaked at 20,008 metric tons in that month, then started contracting. This indicates, IMO, that Germany's output of aircraft wasn't so much following the growth in labor input as the growth in demand, which begs the question "Why didn't Germany's leadership order a larger procurement program early on?"

I'd suggest that Germany's limited supply of avgas was a major constraint. In 1941, Germany produced 889,000 tons of avgas and imported a further 21,000 tons. However, during the year it's operational units and pilot schools consumed 1,274,000 tons of fuel, leading to a significant drawdown of it's fuel stock. Only in 1942 did Germany's supply and consumption of avgas attain a rough balance. Therefore it would have been pointless to increase airframe production early in the war, since Germany's fuel supply wasn't even sufficient to maintain it's existent air force's operational and training tempo before 1942!

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Re: German waste of resources??

#165

Post by stg 44 » 08 Mar 2013, 01:48

KDF33 wrote:It isn't true that Germany's 1941 aircraft industry labor force was comparable to that of 1944.

On the eve of Barbarossa, Germany's aircraft industry employed 550,000 workers. Right after Udet's suicide, it employed 630,000. When Germany reached it's peak aircraft production in July 1944, it employed 873,000. That is, respectively, a 59% and a 39% increase in the size of the workforce.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FTE9fM ... 40&f=false
I misremembered; the German aircraft industry expanded from 1 million people employed in all parts of aircraft production (which included a lot of subcontracting) in 1940 and 1.8 million in 1941. I don't think your figures include the total numbers employed in all aspects of aircraft production and just include airframe and engine production.

According to the numbers in the link, even as 800,000 workers are added to the German aircraft industry production only went up only about 1500 aircraft even though they have a lower airframe weight than the British aircraft in 1941; the British increased their numbers by 5,000, but only added 300,000 workers.
KDF33 wrote: Note that this increase in labor was continuous and gradual, whereas growth in output occured in fits and starts. Thus Germany produced about 6,000 monthly metric tons of aircraft between March 1941 and February 1942, then 8,000 metric tons between March and November 1942, then after a further hike in late 1942 12,000 tons between February 1943 and 1944. It then grew continuously between March and July 1944, peaked at 20,008 metric tons in that month, then started contracting. This indicates, IMO, that Germany's output of aircraft wasn't so much following the growth in labor input as the growth in demand, which begs the question "Why didn't Germany's leadership order a larger procurement program early on?"
So in 1941 before Udet's death Germany produced 6k tons of aircraft; then after Udet's death in December 1941 and Milch took over production again that expanded to 8k tons and continued to grow after that. Not sure what the figures were before that, which would be an interesting comparison.
Though based on your figures and mine, it seems that as direct labor in airframe and engine manufacturing grew, so did the output. But the catalyst was the death of Udet, which suggests that labor was improperly allocated within the industry prior to Milch's resumption of control over aircraft manufacturing.
KDF33 wrote: I'd suggest that Germany's limited supply of avgas was a major constraint. In 1941, Germany produced 889,000 tons of avgas and imported a further 21,000 tons. However, during the year it's operational units and pilot schools consumed 1,274,000 tons of fuel, leading to a significant drawdown of it's fuel stock. Only in 1942 did Germany's supply and consumption of avgas attain a rough balance. Therefore it would have been pointless to increase airframe production early in the war, since Germany's fuel supply wasn't even sufficient to maintain it's existent air force's operational and training tempo before 1942!
No one is contesting that Avgas was a bottleneck. What this discussion is about is aircraft output, which was unaffected by Avgas production.

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