Obviously disingenuous comment or else frighteningly obtuse. That an ATL starts prewar doesn't mean everything happens pre-war. Again you're debating the opponent you'd like to have.RichardAnderson wrote:To start, how does Germany "ramp up" a workforce of 1.3 million Poles and 1.2 million prisoners of war...in peacetime? 0
Also dude, your 13yo girl's use of emojis is odd for someone who scorns use of the word dude.
Sort of a big hidden premise there. You concede that Polish industrial labor was used only later but imply that it was tied to the Reich going "into extremis." Who knows what you mean by that but the Reich planned for use of forced industrial labor very early and should have ramped this up earlier IN THE WAR (obviously no moral sense to "should" here).RichardAnderson wrote:Polish forced industrial labor and other Ostarbeiter in industry came later as the Reich went into extremis.
No, only if you want to reach 1944 production levels do you need that level of labor. My ATL needs 1-2% higher army production as portion of GDP and the replacement of ~400k Germans. ~1mil should do.No, call the total labor needed what it was, roughly 7.5 to 8 million skilled and unskilled workers or more.
Again you rely on misreading and misrepresentation. Most of the changes are projects never undertaken, not projects cancelled (Z plan, Ju-88 rapid escalation). Otherwise it's cancelling different contracts than OTL (prioritizing and retaining army programs during 1939 financial bottleneck).RichardAnderson wrote:Does your abrupt - and inexplicable I must say - decision to cancel major contracts and reallocate the monies elsewhere result in hundreds of thousands of more motor vehicles and thousands of more tanks by winter 40/spring 41?
There were policy levers not used earlier that were used later. E.g. tying German exports (steel, coal) to workers. This worked later when Germany was losing, would have worked earlier. The drawback is it pisses off your allies/neutrals. Berlin judged the price worth it in 42-44 once it appreciated its strategic crisis. Should have seen that earlier.RichardAnderson wrote:the Germans prewar tried to entice foreign labor with minor results, why do you think that when Germany was at war and "winning" they could exert more "leverage to demand expatriate workers" from those countries? They were German allies, not subjugated countries.
At a 3-1 worker/PW exchange rate. Should have been tried earlier. Wasn't because of political calculus. Was when crisis changed political calculus. Crisis should have been seen earlier.RichardAnderson wrote:2) 1.3 million French PW were put to work from the get go, the Service du travail obligatoire was instituted 22 June 1942 to relieve the prisoners of war from work.
Even in advance of Battle of Britain the LW, including Goering, doubted it could win the war. Probably they thought it could have been a war winner with sufficient investment in strategic bombers, but that investment is an obvious war loser for Germany and never was undertaken. Pure strategic drift.RichardAnderson wrote:But the "sane reading of the strategic situation" interwar was that the Luftwaffe was a war winner and the Ubootewaffe nearly brought Britain to its knees in the Great War...oh, and that commissioning major surface vessels demonstrated Germany had returned as a co-equal to France and Britain.
Germany underinvested in Uboats prior to the war, as I'm sure you know (in part because they doubted they remained war winners in light of ASDIC].
Most - 90%? - of KM spending went to the surface fleet; being "co-equal" with Britain and France was obvious strategic folly.
But my ATL allows Hitler that strategic folly as I don't scrap any actually-constructed capital ships.