How big of a leap in technology did the Germans need to counter the Soviets?

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Carl Schwamberger
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Re: How big of a leap in technology did the Germans need to counter the Soviets?

#451

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 04 Jan 2018, 17:16

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Now correct me if I'm wrong but:

1) Did Germany ever endeavor to conscript en masse men from the occupied territories? I'd imagine a significant portion could have come from Poland for example (as the Soviets demonstrated right after the war).
for military or combat service? Strictly speaking no. There were strong incentives to volunteer but those were not the same. so folks might say a former Red Army PW held by the Germans & faced with slow starvation & other maltreatment is not exactly a volunteer when he steps forward to serve in German Army Ost battalion. I'll leave debating that nuance to others.
2) Did Germany ever endeavor to recruit men from the occupied territories for industrial efforts? (Recall reading Hitler once ordering a recruitment drive to move 800,000 Germans from non essential industries into the armed forces.)
Yes, there were efforts to recruit voluntary workers for skilled jobs in German industry. The incentives and treatment varied. At the top were well paid/compensated technicians who contracted directly with the German businesses. At the bottom were the 'slave' laborers who were drawn from PoW, and those rounded up & imprisoned for racial or political reasons. The collaborationist leaders in France participated in several programs to provide German with extra labor. One program was 'recruiting' French industrial workers to replace PoW in German service so the PW could return to France. Another was turning over the prison camps at Vernet & other locations that held refuges from Germany. The Nazis were happy to have control of that lot again & put them back to work.

Where the Nazi industrial labor programs fell short was their haphazard organization by competing agencies, and the maltreatment of such a large portion of the labors recruited and conscripted or enslaved.
3) Did Germany ever make an extensive effort to utilize the conquered populations in the war effort at all? (POWs being used as slave labor don't count, I'm looking for cases of active recruitment of foreign populations to fulfill wartime needs.)
As in #2 there were guest worker programs that paid well in some cases and various degrees of adequacy in other cases.

One of the problems in mobilizing Europes considerable skilled labor force was the lack of material to operate the factories. The Blockade became increasingly effective & left the German controled industrial base without sufficient raw materials. In theory the Germans could have returned every French worker needed to the aircraft industry & stood the factories back up. But both scrap aluminum and aluminum ore available were insufficient to restart full, or even half production. When German production managers looked at the Italian aircraft production potential in latter 1943 they found aluminum sufficient for a few weeks production & none beyond that.

Another problem was the ad hoc looting of industrial plant after each nation surrendered. The Nazis lacked a coherent policy & their cronies in German industry management were allowed to grab what they wanted in terms of machine tools, production materials, transportation, ect... that crippled a number of factories in the occupied nations.

John Ellis addresses some of this inefficiency in his analysis of the effects of industrial effort on military strategy & operations. Titled 'Brute Force'. Tooze touches on the same in his 'Wages of Destruction. I'm unsure if Flannigan published anything on it, tho he did refer to the problem in his lectures.

So yes the Nazis did recruit & conscript labor from occupied Europe, and they made some efforts to operate the occupied nations industry for their direct benefit. Those efforts were not well organized & in some cases counter productive.

*****
On a personal note: My father had been assigned to the US 1st Army from February to April 1945 as a air liaison officer. When released in late April to return to his Group station in France he witnessed tens of thousands non German "guest workers" walking along the roads west to France. Some were well dressed in good work clothing & wither coats, others not so well, and many in ragged prison coveralls. He was returning in a truck convoy deadheading empty back to France & he & the convoy commander allowed five hundred of so of the marchers to ride back to the French border in the US Army trucks.



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