The Economics of War, Why Germany Lost
The topic of this report are controversial, I’m sure there are hundreds of theories and hundreds of pages for each theory but I’ll throw mine into the mix.
A great politician and people winner, Hitler was not a military genius although possibly a visionary, battlefield strategy was not his game. Even with such shortfalls Hitler could see Germany’s economy was not ready for a war on two front and the production of a 20th century army. Indeed the aftermath of WWI reduced the German economy to rubble the cost for a loaf of bread in November 1923 was 3 billion papiermarks. The situation was better when Hitler came to power with the new Reichmark having stabilized but clearly work had to be done.
To succeed in a war you have to have vast quantities of oil, steel and rubber, Germany had none. Despite upping imports and synthetic production the oil situation was bad throughout the war, the same goes for steel and rubber even though Germans made steel wheel versions of tanks reducing the amount of rubber used it still put stress on steel supplies.
Germanys second mistake was the construction of a navy this not only wasted valuable steel resources but cost a fortune. If you took the cost of the 10 major German ships and put it towards tanks Hitler could have had 1500 plus more Panther tanks. Those figures don’t account for the up keep or the consumption of diesel or other ships constructed.
Hitler next ordered the invasion of Russia taking extreme casualties invading an ally. The problems it caused are self explanatory.
Then Hitler passed his problems to the factories asking them to change the designs of tanks upping gun sizes and armour causing factories to shut down and refit thus slowing production. Finally he demanded super heavy tanks to be made sucking in resources for slow unnecessary vehicles, but fulfilling what he said in 1933 “That’s what I need! That’s what I want to have”
For the Germans to have won the most important thing was not to invade Russia stay allied with them, number two kill Hitler. He’d done his bit to get Nazis into power so he should have been killed to stop him meddling with the military. Thirdly when Germany invaded Poland they divided it between Russia and themselves but Russia took the portion with 70% of Poland’s oil resources thus depriving Germany the partial solution to the oil crisis. Stalin sums it up brilliantly when in 1949 he said “Hitler’s generals, raised on the dogma of Clausewitz and Moltke, could not understand that war is won in the factories.”
By Andrew