Employment in the aircraft industry in the major powers

[Boby]

I have found a RMfRuK very detailed statistical summary report of those employed in production for the wehrmacht 1941 to 1944

Speer data quoted above is taken from here
https://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/ ... ect/zoom/9

Boby,

[TheMarcksPlan]

I have found a RMfRuK very detailed statistical summary report of those employed in production for the wehrmacht 1941 to 1944

Speer data quoted above is taken from here
https://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/ ... ect/zoom/9

Boby,

Thanks.

Tooze's Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945 is relevant here. From page 278:

Nevertheless, WagenfuÈhr's Gesamtplan was far from complete. The
problem of attributing inputs to outputs remained unsolved. The rows
in WagenfuÈhr's table purported to show the labour, iron, energy and
transport consumed in the production of each type of weapon. In fact,
they recorded only the resources consumed in the final process of
assembly. WagenfuÈhr was able to include sub-contracted specialized
components, such as the labour and steel that went into casting the hull
of a tank. However, his table did not record any of the resources that
went into the mass of generic components from which the tank was
assembled. In the Gesamtplan these were counted in the rows showing
the inputs used by mechanical engineering and other key suppliers,
rather than in the row supposedly showing the inputs required by tank
production

Wagenfuhr was Speer's data guy and he had a very large staff aggregating statistics from across the Reich. Despite this, he was unable to produce an accurate tabulation of labor/resources distribution across Germany's areas of production. He would have been involved in the document Boby linked as well.

If Wagenfuhr couldn't make sense of things in 1944, we have very little hope of doing so now.

And that points up a fundamental problem of Germany's war economy, one that Todt and Speer (to a greater extent) were trying to fix. Unlike the sometimes-praised Georg Thomas, Speer recognized that it was impossible for a central office to enumerate, let alone efficiently to dictate, input-output flows for a massive economy except at the broadest levels. This was and is the scourge of all centrally-planned economies (though perhaps super-computing power will enable luxury Communism soon). The price system had to do most of the work, as the U.S. recognized ("If we want to win, we have to let business owners get rich off it").