
The economy of the occupied territories collapsed and was only able to provide a paltry amount of weapons and ammunition.
So my question is, why did economies of considerable size contribute so little to the Nazis?
The figures are problematic.Pods wrote: ↑30 Jun 2020 23:23During 1940-42 Germany occupied large amounts of territory from the Atlantic to Moscow and made a ruthless plunder, yet its GDP only grew slowly, even below the Allies.
The economy of the occupied territories collapsed and was only able to provide a paltry amount of weapons and ammunition.
So my question is, why did economies of considerable size contribute so little to the Nazis?
I don't think they are problematic. In the case of France, the table refers to the whole of France.
John Ellis addresses this in 'Brute Force'. No surprise there were multiple reasons. Dislocation of labor, insufficient raw materials/blockade, nazi mismanagement were some reasons discussed.
What you posted is the details behind the British position and one of Churchill's most famous speechespaulrward wrote: ↑01 Jul 2020 21:18Hello All :
The key element in my table is the Ratio of Allied to Axis GDP, which, in my revised table, suddenly makes the
entire course of WW2 painfully obvious to anyone who gives the table even a cursory study. It can clearly be seen
that, in the period up until the entry of the United States into the war at the beginning of 1942, the Axis had a
significant advantage in GDP for the period of 1938 - 1940, and even in 1941, with the USSR in the war, the Axis
still possessed a narrow edge in terms of GDP.
Paul R. Ward
Churchill's policy was KBO - Keep B*ggering On - keep going until something turned up. In the meanwhile do everything to get the Americans into the war.What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their Finest Hour.’
GDP is a blunt measure. Not all resources are interchangeable. France as part of the allies had access to resources which occupied France did not. Much of Regions occupied by Germany were short of the same resources as Germany.Pods wrote: ↑02 Jul 2020 08:51I don't think they are problematic. In the case of France, the table refers to the whole of France.
The point is that Germany received a much smaller increase than the French economic reduction in 1940-44.
So, France had to produce a large quantity of weapons and ammunition, but it didn't, why?
Exactly, but Nazism was against the German culture. A thing that a lot of people tend to ignore.
Ironic considering that the one efficient thing that the Nazis did was, in fact, the Holocaust.
Efficiency can be much over valued as thing, it;s a third order concept. If your doing the wrong thing does matter how well you are doing it?
No remotely serious account of WW2 can abide those stereotypes of Germans (which are post-war ideas anyways). The German war economy was dominated by inefficiency, despite many of its leaders' understanding the nature of - and remedy for - such inefficiency.