User:MinorProphet/Draft subpages/German aluminium casting alloys made during WW2

Being a fan of alloys in general, I wondered which particular aluminium alloy the cylinder blocks of the Maybach HL210 P30 & P45 engines were made of; and whether the widely-believed shortage of aluminium in Germany was actually the case. Imagine my surprise on learning that only the first question was directly answerable.

This vast article now includes five separate sections:

• Type of aluminium alloy used in the Maybach HL210 engine
• German aluminium production during WW2
• Aluminium production info/statistics by country during WW2
• Other metals, inc. iron & steel, copper, tungsten and manganese
• Economy of Germany 1933-1945

They are superficially linked by the topic of 'shortages', although these can arise through many different causes: for example, faulty economic planning; lack of manufacturing data returns; inability to transport goods or raw materials; lack of energy/power eg to smelt aluminium; lack of raw materials; lack of alloying elements (or their ores) for eg aluminium or steel alloys; lack of labour; and sudden emergencies which transfer already-allocated materials to various other sections of industry. There may be others. All these are mentioned at some point below.

It would appear that the entire edifice of the German war economy from 1933-1945 was built around shortages, since there was never enough of anything (except coal) to manufacture enough armaments to equip the entirety of the German armed forces, Army, Luftwaffe, and Navy.

Although it may seem that Germany's armaments production tailed off towards the end of the war, in some cases manufacturing continued unabated: eg VOMAG produced a record number of Panzer IV tanks (185) in one month on January 1945, and probably had the capacity to make many more.

Also:

• MOVE CITES TO SOURCES!
• PIX!

Type of aluminium alloy used in the Maybach HL210 engine

It may well have been an aluminium-silicon type, since it was widely used in e.g. the Daimler-Benz DB 600 of 1933, which had cast Silumin cylinder blocks with steel liners screwed (and pre-war, shrunk) into the block. It had roller bearings (rather than plain lead-bronze ones), and thin-wall nuts clamped the threaded lower ends of the sleeves against the top of the Dural crankcase, and the pistons were Lo-Ex. This description is taken from Bill Gunston, who certainly knows what he's talking about: but I always thought that dural, or duralminium, was for forging, rather than casting. Hmm.

The Germans licensed the successor of the DB 600, the Daimler-Benz DB 601 to the Italians (Macchi C.202, Reggiane Re.2001 Falco II) and to the Japanese (Yokosuka D4Y1/2). and the DB 605 was license built as the Fiat Typhoon, powering the Fiat G.55, Macchi C.205, and Reggiane Re.2005.

Also, the Jumo 210 had the crankcase and cylinder blocks cast as a single piece of light alloy (which???). The Jumo 211 had the c/case and cylinder blocks cast separately, with crank webs as flat plates extended to form balance weights. NB This is what Maybach used in the HL210 and 230 - very compact use of space.

HL230 engine workshop manual:

• Oberkommando des Heeres (1 April 1944). Panzerkampfwagen Panther. Werkstatthandbuch zum Maybach-Motor HL230 P30 – HL210 P30 [Workshop Handbook]. Publication D 655/31c (in German). Heereswaffenamt: Amtsgruppe für Entwicklung und Prüfung. I.A.[Im Auftrage=p.p.] Holzhäuer.

Light alloys suitable for casting cylinder blocks

Modern "...commercial die castings are generally limited to a relatively small number of compositions, namely, 360.0, A360.0, 380.0, A380.0, 383.0, 384.0, A384.0, B390.0, 413.0, C443.0, and 518.0." These appear to be from the 3xx.x and 4xx.x casting series.

Matching up some of these types with this table from Cast & Alloys:

• 360 = perhaps straight Silumin Al-Si?
• A360 = LM 9 = Al-Si10Mg (lo-pressure die casting) (Silumin-beta)
• A380 = LM 24 = Al-Si8Cu3Fe (large, intricate, thin-walled castings, all types)
• 383
• A384 = LM 2 = Al-Si10Cu2Fe (one of the two most widely used)
• A413 = LM 20 = Al-Si12Cu / Al-Si12CuFe (pressure die casting)
• B390
• ?A390 = LM 30 = Al-Si17Cu4Mg (Alusil) (unlined die cast cylinder blocks)
• 413, C443, A518

The above compositions show that all except 360 & A360 contain some copper. The original Silumin contains only silicon as an alloying element, which may be 360.0. See table below.

List of casting aluminium alloys made in Germany during WWII

Some of these date back to WWI...

Sources: mainly : otherwise (marked Ritter in table). Modern compositions (and some "outdated or retired" ones) are listed in Frick 2000:

• Frick, John P., ed. (2000). Woldman's Engineering Alloys (9th ed.). ASM Intenational. ISBN 0871706911. Move to sources!

The (G.) after the composition stands for Gusslegierung, i.e. casting alloy. (K.) = (Knetlegierung) = wrought or forged alloy.

Aluminium alloys suitable for casting, made in Germany during WW2

Name	Compostition	Manufacturer
Alusil	Al-Si-Cu (G.)	Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke AG Heddernheim, Frankfurt/Main Al Si17% Cu4% Mg
Anticorodal (Swiss)	Al-Mg-Si (G.)	Vereinigte Aluminiumgießereien Villingen GmbH Villingen Schwarzwald
American Alloy	Al-Cu 8%	(Ritter-forging?)
Deutsche Legierung	Al-Zn-Cu (G.)	"German Alloy" Various Producers
Duranalium	Al-Mg (G.)	Dürener Metallwerke AG, Berlin-Borsigwalde
E.C. 124	Al-Si-Cu	Karl Schmidt, Dürener - Piston alloy "English manufacture", cast or pressed.
(Elektron)	Mg-Al (G.)	Mahle AG, Cannstadt, Stuttgart. Magnesium alloys (NB Mg 90%, Al 10%), and finishing of piston blanks cast by Karl Schmidt, who made 60% of Germany's pistons in 1939 - 5,000 a day.
Hydronalium	Al-Mg (G.)	IG Farbenindustrie AG, Bitterfeld plant
Hy 21	Al-Mg 2% (G.)	IG Farben
Hy 31	Al-Mg 3%	IG Farben (see Woldman's Engineering Alloys)
Hy 51	Al-Mg 5%	IG Farben
Hy 71	Al-Mg 7%	IG Farben
Hiduminium, R.R. 50, 53	Al-Cu-Ni (G.)	Rudolph Rautenbach Leichtmetallgießereien Solingen and Wernigerode = RR alloys
KS No. 1275, 245, 280	Al-Si-Cu	KS = Karl Schmidt GmbH, Neckarsulm; Honsel Werke AG; Vereinigte Leichtmetallwerke GmbH, Linden, Hannover Pistons, Lo-expansion, up to Si 21%
KS-Seewasser	Al-Mg (G.)	Karl Schmidt; Honsel; Vereinigte Leichtmetallwerke.
KS Y	Al-Mg (G.)	Karl Schmidt
Lo-Ex	Al-Si14%-Ni2%-Cu-Mg	Dürener - for pistons
Neonalium	Al-Cu (G.)	Aluminiumwerk Nürnberg GmbH, Nuremberg
Nüral 5	Al-Mg-Si (G.)	Aluminiumwerk Nürnberg
Nüral 30, 122, 185, 200	Al-Cu (G.)	Aluminiumwerk Nürnberg
Nüral 43	Al-Mg-Si (G.)	Aluminiumwerk Nürnberg
Nüral 77	Al-Zn-Cu (G.)	Aluminiumwerk Nürnberg
Nüral 85	Al-Si-Cu	Aluminiumwerk Nürnberg "Special casting alloy" Si 5~7%, Cu 2~4%. Chill casting
Nüral 132	Al-Si-Ni	Aluminiumwerk Nürnberg "Special casting alloy" Si 12~14%, Ni 2.4%. Chill casting
Nüral 94, 142	Al-Cu-Ni (G.)	Aluminiumwerk Nürnberg
Pantal	Al-Mg-Si	Forging? Modern compo Mg 0.9%; Si 0.7%; T 0.2% max made by VAW, ; Vereinigte Leichmetall, Krupp
Pantal 5	Al-Si-Mg (G.)	Dürener (casting). Modern compo Si 5-13%; Mg, Mn 0.7% NB Modern Al Si7Mg is called Pantal 7
Peraluman	Al-Mg 1~10%	7(AW421) (not in WD 31-131) - (Ritter) cast or forged
Polital	Al-Mg-Si (G.)	Dürener
Silumin	Al-Si (G.)	Silumin-GmbH, Frankfurt/Main
Silumin-beta	Al-Si-Mg (G.)	Silumin-GmbH - NB beta & gamma include increasing amounts of Mg. Modern Silumin-Beta Sr (9.0-10.5% silicon) also contains small amounts (0.020 to 0.030%) of Strontium
Silumin-gamma	Al-Si-Mg (G.)	Silumin-GmbH
Copper-Silumin	Al-Si-Cu (G.)	Silumin-GmbH (Kupfer-Silumin) Si 12%,Cu 0.8%, Mn 0.3%. For engine blocks; high fluidity.
Stalanium	Al-Mg (G.)	R Stock & Co AG, Berlin-Marienfelde
Titan-Sonder-Seewasser	Al-Mg-Ti	Karl Schmidt - Piston alloy
T.S.S. 3, 5, 8	Al-Mg-Ti (cast)	Karl Schmidt - Mg 3,5,8%, Ti 0.3%
Ulmal	Al-Mg-Si	(Ritter) forging? Mg 1.0%; Si, 0.9%; Mn, 0.5
Y alloy	Al-Cu-Ni (G.)	Various (+ Ritter - Forging)

Plus:

• 13 Siemens Schuckertwerke AG Berlin-Siemensstadt
• 14 Edmund Becker Leipzig
• 15 W & W Schenk Maulbronn

More info

In Appendix 2, Spielberger (or the compiler, Th. Icken) says that the HL230's pistons were supplied by Mahle in Bad Cannstatt. As the table above shows, Mahle produced Elektron, a magnesium-aluminium alloy, and also produced finished pistons, made from blanks cast by Karl Schmidt; this included piston alloys EC 124, KS 280, 1275, & 245.

Getting closer...

HL210 at Bovington

Sooo, I was looking at the List of WWII Maybach engines#Gallery and thought, "the HL210 was never called a TRM, it didn't have any letters except P30 or P45." I noticed some letters cast into the top of the V, so I grabbed the pic, rotated it 180° - and lo and behold, there is

GAL SI CU
MM 021A 42501-18

where G is Gusslegierung, 'cast alloy', followed by Al-Si-Cu, and MM is Maybach Motorenbau, followed by possibly a part number.

So it would appear that the engine block of the Maybach HL210 might be made of a cast aluminium-silicon-copper alloy. There are various of these types in the table above: perhaps a likely one is Copper-Silumin (Kupfer-Silumin) made by Silumin-GmbH, Frankfurt/Main, where yer average Silumin is just Al-Si. So it would appear to be a 300 series type, could be A380 = LM 24 = Al-Si8Cu3Fe (large, intricate, thin-walled castings, all types) or A384 = LM 2 = Al-Si10Cu2Fe (one of the two most widely used), from the #Light alloys suitable for casting cylinder blocks section above. Modern Kupfer-Silumin contains Si 12%, Cu 0.8%, Mn 0.3%

The chemical composition of modern EN-AC 46000 Silumin wt% (ie Al-Si9-Cu3)

 Si   Fe   Cu   Mn   Mg   Cr   Ni   Zn   Pb   Sn   Ti
8.66 0.86 2.36 0.23 0.33 0.04 0.11 0.93 0.09 0.03 0.05

There is also a Cu-Mn Silumin, apparently used in watch-making.

Well, having theoretically found out the type of alloy used in the HL210, I wonder if the DB600 (see #Type of aluminium alloy used in the Maybach HL210 engine) really used copper-silumin and not plain silumin, and old Bill Gunston didn't know or care about the difference?

• Yep, haha, well sort of... This forum has this pic from Luftfahrt Lehrbücherei Band 21 Die deutschen Flugmotoren DB 600 (1940), where the pistons (Kolben) are described as Aluminium-Silizium-Legierung EC124 (ie cast Al-Si), and grokk above at the #List of casting aluminium alloys made in Germany during WWII, and there is EC 124, Al-Si-Cu made by Karl Schmidt, the most likely suspect. But Bill said the pistons were Lo-Ex, which isn't the same thing at all. Still no more on the cylinders/crankcase. MinorProphet (talk) 15:22, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

So it was there all the time, I just didn't look hard enough. Y

Mate, you can give yourself all the ticks and gold stars you like , but this may count as Original research. Pics aren't evidence. ?

Maybach made a 400hp diesel V-12 for railcars in 1932, which had a Silumin crankcase. Also from the same report:

"We noticed that the Firm were manufacturing a considerable number of 150 hp Diesel engines for railcar work. These were of the six-cylinder in-line type with air injection. The Firm (Zeppelin) stated that they had adopted this method of injection because the compressed air was useful for other purposes in the railcar and also because it gave greater economy at low speeds. We observed that the bottom half of the crankcase of these engines were manufactured of silumin, and that long vertical steel bolts were employed between the cylinder head and the main bearing caps."

Silumin GmbH

Company record from German archives at DDB.

Silumin Gmbh, Fechenheim, Frankfurt am Main, was a manufacturer of light metal alloys. Before and during WW2 it was a subsidiary of two larger concerns, each owning 50%: Metallgesellschaft AG, and Vereinigte Aluminium-Werke AG.

Metallgesellschaft AG, Frankfurt am Main, was an aluminium combine, whose principal stockholders included IG Farben (with and through Degussa); British Metal Corporation (London); and Schweizerische Gesellschaft f. Metallwerke (Basel). Other subsidiary and affiliate firms of Metallgesellschaft AG included:

• Aluminiumwerk Gmbh (Bitterfeld) (50% owned)
• Lurgi-Thermie GmbH (Horrem) (de:Horrem (Kerpen)) (100%) - Electro-thermic production of aluminium-silicon alloys BIOS Final Report No. 976, (no text) and coal gasification process
• Norddeutsche Leichtmetall- u. Kolbenwerke GmbH (Hamburg-Altona) (100% owned)
• Karl Schmidt GmbH (Neckarsulm) (100%);
• Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke AG (maj.% owned with 20,575,000 RM invested)
• Vereinigte Leichtmetall-Werke (Hannover)

Vereinigte Leichtmetall-werke and Durener Metall AG together produced 80% of all the Duralumin in Germany in 1936. (Elimination of German Resources for War: Hearings, p. 284-5), which also shows all the vast Reichswerke Hermann Göring companies.

The other 50% of Silumin was owned by Vereinigte Aluminium-Werke AG, (Berlin) (VAWAG). Vereinigte was over 90% owned by Vereinigte Industrie-Unternehmungen AG (de:VIAG), the Reich holding company. VIAG also had interests in:

• Vereinigte Leichtmetall-werke GmbH (Hannover)(37%)
• Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke AG (Frankfurt) (VDM) (25%)
• and Bauxit Trust AG, (Zurich) (16%). Bauxit Trust was formed by the Budapest firm of Aluminiumerz Bergbau und Industrie AG in 1917, to manage its foreign concerns and subsidiaries in Fiume (Rijeka), Trieste, Bucharest and Zagreb. in the 1920s it was taken over by German interests, becoming one of the world's biggest bauxite concerns. NB Ref name "Hanners" not working! It was later bought by MAL Magyar Alumínium Termelő és Kereskedelmi Zrt..

Index of 100 biggest German companies:

• US Office of Strategic Services (July 1944). A hundred major German industrial corporations. R & A No. 1910. Washington,, DC: US State Department, Office of Intelligence Research: Research and Analysis branch. Move to sources!

Records from Junkers apparently include materials tests on Silumin, ("Enthält u.a.: VLW-Merkblätter (Vereinigte Leichtmetall-Werke GmbH Hannover-Linden). - Prüfberichte. - Tagungsberichte. - Materialproben von Silumin." but this link doesn't mention these things.

Other districts of Frankfurt include Dornbusch, Griesheim (CFA), Höchst, Oberursel (Gnome engines) Sachsenhausen, etc.

• BIOS/253 - Production of silumin alloys Horrem
• BIOS/335 - Metallgesellschaft A.G. and the Lurgi group of chemical engineering companies
• BIOS/1311 - Design and performance of the Tatra V-12 air - cooled 14.8 litre oil engine (by Leyland Motors)
• BIOS/1314 - German gear cutting machines and tools for use therewith

Notes

References

German aluminium production during WW2

I recently came across the following apt description of the difficulty which the German Armed Forces experienced in recruiting enough men to continue fighting the war. I think it can be expanded to apply to almost every aspect of the German economy, its resources and its war industry as a whole:

"In gross terms, the Wehrmacht's manpower problems were insoluble. Germany simply had too few men of military age to meet its expanding requirements. Also, Germany's consistent mismanagement and misuse of the manpower it did possess made this reality even harsher.

"Adolf Hitler's Third Reich allocated its manpower resources similar to an oriental bazaar, forcing the German Army to jostle its way through various military, paramilitary, economic, governmental, and Nazi Party organizations like a none-too-wealthy rug merchant in search of a bargain. Each of these competing agencies jealously defended its claims to draft-age men by patronage and political intrigue, thereby robbing the army of choice manpower badly needed at the front. The two greatest offenders (and the ones with the most influence with Hitler, were the SS and the Luftwaffe".

Overview

I still can't work out whether aluminium became scarcer in Germany during WW2. As far as I can see, there was little problem getting the raw bauxite, since all Germany's pre-war European imports came from countries now under her control (unless the Yugoslavian output was badly harassed by the partisans). Err, that's exactly what happened. Partisan activity reduced Croatia's output from 400,000 tons in 1938 to 70,000 t in 1941, and in 1943 had only reached half the pre-war figure.

Maybe the Allied industrial bombing campaigns from 1944 had more impact than anything else...

• A number of memoir-writing Generals and modern historians (Scherner) cite the USSSBS (US Strategic Bombing Survey) as being more reliable than other, often incomplete, sources. MinorProphet (talk) 07:52, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

In fact the 1945 US War Department pamphlet The Light Metals Industry in Germany states on p. 14, having given figures in various tables, that "Supplies are, therefore, are believed to be sufficient of Germany's wartime requirements of aluminum." In 1942 and 1943, aluminium was recommended in some cases to be replaced by iron, steel or plastics; and in the same years a shortage of aluminium supplies was reported in the armaments industry - but this may have been due to lack of facilities for working up finished parts rather than a lack of metal itself.

As Jonas Scherner puts it, Germany "did not lose the war because of a lack of metals".

• Scherner, Jonas (2022a). "Preparing for the Next Blockade: Non-ferrous Metals and the Strategic Economic Policy of the Third Reich". The English Historical Review. 137 (585). doi:10.1093/ehr/ceac063.

Scherner, Incompetence or Ingenuity p. 571 (check cite date! May 2022) "In total, only 50 per cent of newly produced shells in Italy were made from steel in 1942, i.e. at a point of time, when copper was almost completely eliminated in the German ammunition production."

In fact, production of aircraft in Germany reached its highest levels in late 1944 (see Karl Gundelach, The Effect of Allied Air Attacks on the Ground Echelon of the Luftwaffe in W. Europe in 1944 towards the end I fink, and VOMAG made more tanks in January 1945 than in any other month.(somewhere...?)

Well, well - US Strategic Bombing Survey report 86, 2nd edition, 1947 Maybach Motor Works has lots on production figures, in addition to the Light Metals Industry Report no. 20, cited in List of WWII Maybach engines.

Also, Tank Industry Report, Second Edition, January 1947, page 4 (web transcription) says:

"4. h. The tank industry in common with the German economy as a whole depended on imports from foreign countries for many basic raw materials such as copper, lead, vanadium and other alloys, rubber, etc. However, there was no indication that the production of finished units was ever hurt from the lack of materials, although there were cases of companies manufacturing the same model interchanging parts and materials to avert shortages. The scheduling of shipments of components from subcontractors and the inter-shipment between plants was entirely under the control of the the government. For the most part, components were supplied on a "free issue" basis by the army."

"5. b. The expansion of the finished components plants, on the other hand, resulted in a very effective and very necessary dispersal program. Siegmar by increasing engine output after Maybach had been put out of production by bombing in April 1944, nullified the bombing effort against Maybach, and by the time the engine plant at Siegmar had been destroyed in September, Maybach had completely recovered so that finished tanks were not held up by lack of engines. The bombing of Zahradfabrik was a repetition of the above as the plants set up for increased production were able to absorb the loss of the Zahradfabrik output." (Tank Industry Report, p. 13) Add to Maybach engines article!

BIOS Final Report No. 1159, The Uses of Zinc in Germany, states that production of aluminium increased from 200,000 tonnes in 1939 to nearly 250,000 t in 1944, the supplies exceeding consumption except in 1940.

The metal in shortest supply was copper: supplies of primary (virgin) copper declined steadily from 210,000 tonnes in 1939 to under 50,000 in 1944, leading to great efforts to recover secondary copper from scrap as the shortage became increasingly serious. As a result zinc (which has similar properties) was used in e.g. zinc alloys for electrical connectors and bearings.

Aluminium-zinc-magnesium alloys as substitutes for super-duralumin, BIOS Final Report 1770, High-strength Al-Zn-Mg Alloy Development in Germany (update table with Hydronalium info!)

All metals were controlled by the Reichstelle fur Eisen und Metalle (State Department for Iron and Metals).

• Stubbs, R. L.; Darrah, B. D.; Lowe, J. J. (n.d.) [c.1946]. The Uses of Zinc in Germany. BIOS Final Report No. 1159. London: H.M. Stationery Office. Move to sources!

Another source: The German Economy in the Twentieth Century, Braun "From the beginning in 1933 onwards, the German aircraft industry had been subsidised by the state. The firms were not subject to pressures from the market and there were few incentives for rationalisation. Waste during the production process, especially the squandering of aluminium, was notorious." 68 [68.] Richard J. Overy, The Air War (Europa Publications, London, 1980), p. 166.

"The substitution of copper by aluminium was partly successful, however. Copper consumption was reduced from 448,000 tons in 1938 to 221,000 tons in 1943. Something similar goes for tin and nickel. 73" [73.] Eichholtz, Deutsche Kriegswirtschaft, vol. 2, p. 318.

See also Berenice A.Carroll, Design for total war. Arms and economics in the Third Reich (Mouton, The Hague, 1968), pp. 217–31

"There are several instances of spectacular production increases, especially in aircraft production. The introduction of special flow-production machinery at the BMW plant in Augsburg in 1944, for example, cut production costs and raw materials use by half and reduced worktime per engine from 3,150 hours to 1,250. Similar reports came from Messerschmitt where, after the introduction of flow-production methods, construction time on the Me 109 [Bf 109, shurely?] was cut by 53 per cent during 1942 and a further 15 per cent in 1943. Although less aluminium was supplied in 1942 than in 1941, about 50 per cent more aircraft were produced. 77" [[77]. Overy, Air War, pp. 187–90.

• OK, see #German aluminium production below: :

1940 - 205,000; 1941 - 212,000; 1942 - 227,000; 1943 - 203,000; 1944 - 191,000; 1945 - 20,000.

Well, these figures indicate (although these are production figures vs. supply),

1942 production = 27,000 t, and 1941 production = 212,000, and my super-basic maths shows there was more aluminium around in 1942 than 1941: - where does Overy get his figures from? Best find out, fool!

NB! All the above is from The German Economy in the Twentieth Century, Hans-Joachim Braun, Routledge, London and New York 1990. isbn 0-203-40364-9. pp. 135-6. Full ref somewhere... Aha!

More Tooze, & Martin: The economics of the war with Nazi Germany, Camb Hist WW2 Vol. 3

Examples of supposed shortages

Ex. 1

• "7.5 cm Pak 40. Shortage of light alloys forced the inclusion of heavier steels into the manufacture of the Pak 40 carriage making it proportionately much heavier than those of the 3· 7-cm and 5-cm carriages."
  • Gander T. J. German Anti-tank Guns 1939-1945 1973 London Almark Publications Ltd ISBN 0 85524 142 X p. 21

The idea of a 7.5cm Pak was mooted in 1939, and the Rheinmetall-Borsig 75mm Pak 40 was designated in 1940. The ineffectiveness of the 50mm Pak 38 against the Soviet T-38s led to increased production. So although the Pak 40 didn't make its combat debut until the Battle of Kursk in 1943, Check, fool! the use of steel for the trails would have been down to any aluminium shortage in 1939 - which seems to have been exactly the case. See next.

• Haupt, Werner (1990). German Anti-tank Guns 37mm - 50mm - 75mm - 88mm PAK 1935-1945 without self-propelled mountings. Schiffer Military History 2. West Chester, PA: Schiffer Military History. ISBN 0887402410. Move to sources!

Well, there seems to have been a shortage of aluminium, but there was conversely an increase in the amount of steel allocated to the Wehrmacht as a result of typical boom-and-bust economics: "The complete equipment of the squadrons would not be achieved until April 1939, a delay of six months on their original target. By the end of October 1937 even this prediction was recognized as over-optimistic, and Milch advised Göring that the iron and steel deficit was such as to set back some elements of the next five years’ production programme by as much as another five years." (Irving 1973, p. 65)

But: "The dilemma, [exports vs. armaments] however, could not be escaped. Something had to be done to revive Germany’s faltering exports and this was bound to come at the expense of the armaments programmes. Already on 24 November 1938, the armed forces received the news that in the coming year their overall steel ration was to be cut back from 530,000 to only 300,000 tons.58" (Tooze, p. 327)

But: "To cope with its straitened supply of raw materials, the Luftwaffe was thus adopting an increasingly risky strategy of weapons procurement. For aluminium, the all-important material in airframe production, the Luftwaffe’s ration as of January 1939 was a third lower than that required to meet the modest procurement targets of Plan 11. For copper, the initial ration was set at 50 per cent of requirement. As of July 1939 this was cut to a derisory 20 per cent...
"Figure 10 shows the impact on both the Luftwaffe and army procurement first of the armaments recession of 1937 and then the even more dramatic slump in production caused by the raw material shortages of 1939. In both cases the response in final output of armaments was lagging by a few months. But, given that raw materials took up to nine months to work their way completely through the industrial metabolism, this was only to be expected. The overall pattern of boom and bust could hardly have been more pronounced."(Tooze, p. 329)

But: "...in the interests of satisfying its demands "steel production was maintained at 1.6 million tons per month, even if this meant eating into Germany’s limited stockpile of iron ore. Of this monthly production, by the first quarter of 1940 the Wehrmacht was already receiving a share of 55 per cent, or 885,000 tons."(Tooze, p. 382)

So there you go. If I'm right, there was indeed a shortage of aluminium, and then a relative glut of steel at just the time the Pak 40 was being designed in 1939.

Ex. 2

• Pic caption: "Manhandling the s FH 18 across a narrow bridge. The gun was quite heavy at 5.43 tons and considerable efforts were made to produce a lighter variant. The resulting 15 cm sFH 36 weighed 3.23 tons, as it had a shorter barrel and a carriage largely made of alloy. Production ceased in 1942 because of a shortage of light alloys." NB! Which alloy? Probably a forging one, find out! Hogg has pix of the riveted box-section carriage trails.
  • Olive, Michael, 2014. Steel Thunder on the Eastern Front: German and Russian artillery in World War II. Stackpole Books (Stackpole military photo series) eISBN 978-0-8117-4996-1 p. 66

This was a lighter horse-drawn version of the 15 cm sFH 18. Wiki article says " Production of the sFH 36 ceased in 1942 due to increased mechanization of the army, limited supplies of light alloys and the prioritization of their use for aircraft production.", citing Hogg 1997, pp. 64–72.

Hmmm, see proper Hogg cite, #Oh dear, Economy of Germany 1933-1945. But was there REALLY a total shortage, or was production being funelled towards some other "axis of production" (my term)?

Well, if Scherner et al are right, lots of aluminium was used to replace copper high-voltage cables and telecoms wires around the country. There was indeed increased production of aircraft in 1942, although Irving/Milch or Tooze shows how improved production techniques used far less aluminium per aircraft while maintaining manufacturing rates. I'm not sure if "increased mechanization of the army" took place -

"As World War II dragged on, the German Army became even more dependent on horses. One German staff officer admitted, “At times [horses] are the last and only thing we can rely on. Thanks to them we made it through the winter, even if they died in their thousands from exhaustion, lack of fodder and their tremendous exertions.”

"A veterinarian officer also remarked, “In spite of Hitler’s marked opposition to horses, the number of horses serving with our forces in the East grew steadily as the war went on, an indication that the use of horses was a compelling necessity.” Horse-drawn supply columns were crucial to keeping the German Army supplied in Russia, particularly in the winter." Horses & The Mechanized Myth of the Eastern Front

Hmm, "...increased mechanization of the army" may just mean the creation of more armoured divisions: the 22nd to the 27th Panzer divisions were created from September 1941 to October 1942. See User:MinorProphet/Draft subpages/Panzer Artillery Regiments#List of divisions and their artillery regiments. Several were probably under-strength - several others were annihilated at Stalingrad and elsewhere and were only reformed later in 1943.

So it looks likely that the sFH 36 did cease production because of a "shortage" of light alloys - although this could have been due to a re-allocation from the army (ordnance, ammo, tanks) to aircraft production - aluminium ingot production rose slightly during 1942-43 (see #Germany).

Ex. 3

Hogg 1997, p. 192 says that production of the 4.2 cm Panzerjägerkanone 41 ceased in 1942 because of a shortage of #Manganese (needed for some alloy carriage components) and #Tungsten (for the ammunition). So not necessarily an aluminum shortage but other alloying elements. But, but, but certainly the tungsten section below indicates that there was absolutely no shortage of wolframite at all, since supplies came uninterruptedly from Portugal until mid-1944. What is the man on about? But 'shortages', as shown in the second part of this unwieldy article, may arise for many reasons. Manganese - especially for Duralumin, could have been diverted to the Luftwaffe/aircraft industry in 1942 - and that could create a lack of it for the Army. That's how things worked. Find out!

NB see also #Tungsten, needed to make the solid core of the AP shells for the similar 7.5 cm Pak 41, only 150 made.

Other possible reasons

Hmm, the Führerbefehl "Rüstung" of 10 January 1942 attempted to generally increase productivity for the army, rationalise the number of different weapons being made, simplify production, cut back on raw materials, and use more synthetics as substitutes. This could easily be the overall rationale for stopping production of various weapons: but the non-stop re-assignnment of raw materials and production is very hard to keep track of, especially since actual improved production figures are always several months behind any specific push. By the time any improvement is felt, some other vital requirement has already intruded into the pipeline.

A litter further on, from Mierzejewski (this was written after Overy's Goering, “Heavy Industry and the State,” “Hitler’s War and the German Economy,” and The Nazi Economic Recovery; and before Tooze's Wages of Destruction):

"The final German drive on Moscow stalled, and a new phase in the war opened with the eruption of a dangerous Soviet counteroffensive on 6 December 1941 that tumbled the Wehrmacht back over 150 kilometers. Casualties were severe, losses of weapons and materiel massive and stocks of replacements dwindled.[38] Now the failure to increase armaments production loomed large, threatening to magnify the retreat into a rout. In 1941, munitions output amounted to only 540,000 tons, 325,000 tons less thanin 1940.[39] Armaments final production still accounted for only 19 percent of total industrial output.[40] Hitler’s reaction to the crisis was the Führer Order Rüstung 1942 issued on 10 January 1942. It wasn't until Speer took charge later in in 1942? after Fritz Todt's death that any semblance of order became apparent." pp. 23–4.

A rather different cause for a shortage towards the end of the war: Speer had concentrated the production of all anti-tank ammunition in Strasbourg. When the city was liberated in November 1944 by General Leclerc it was only a matter of time before all available AT shells had been expended, and there would be no more.

Aluminium production info/statistics by country during WW2

Basic contemporary sources

• Minerals Yearbook 1932-1933
• Minerals Yearbook 1940 (pub. July 1941) - it was hoped to publish the necessarily confidential data "at the close of the emergency". (p. vii) - this seems to have been done in the 1946 edition.
• Minerals Yearbook 1946 (pub. 1948)
• Minerals Yearbook 1947 (pub. 1949)

World

Aluminium production figures for 1940 (Minerals Yearbook 1946 p. 122.)

Germany 205,000 tonnes
US      187,000
Canada   99,000
France   61,000
USSR     60,000
Italy    39,000
Japan    30,000
Switz.   28,000
Norway   28,000 Mostly by British, Canadian and French-owned firms 
UK       19,000

Germany

Germany had no little or native bauxite of its own, and had to import everything, plus cryolite for the electrolysis of pure aluminium from alumina.

• Maier, Helmut (1997). "'New Age Metal' or 'ersatz'? Technological Uncertainties and Ideological Implications of Aluminium up to the 1930s". Icon. 3. International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC). JSTOR 23786136.

The Mediterranean Bauxite Province, which the Axis powers completely overran during WW2, supplied much of Germany's pre-war raw material needs anyway. For general economic exploitation of Greece during WW2, see DEGRIGES.

• In 1928 Germany imported 432,000 tonnes of bauxite in 1928, 387,000 t in 1929, and 300,000 t in 1930 (obviously right in the middle of the Depression.)
• In 1931 Germany imported total 211,000 tonnes of bauxite and and produced 25,000 t of aluminium. Production of aluminium was 31,750t in 1928 ; 31,700 t in 1929; and 30,000 in 1930. Bauxite imports: from France - 83,000 t; Hungary 64,000 t; Yugoslavia 46,000 t; Italy 16,000 t; plus Denmark 2,000 t (mostly cryolite from Greenland, for electrolyte used in production of aluminium from alumina). Germany tried to control bauxite in Hungary, Yugo & Italy, but met with political and other complications.
• In 1939 Germany imported 1,100,000 tons of bauxite, Really?? I make it about 638,000 t and produced 180,000 tons of aluminium (c. 200,000 with Austria). Bauxite imports: Hungary, 223,000 t; Yugo, 201,500 t; [424,500] Greece, 63,500 t; Dutch East Indies (Java?) 57,500 t; France, 47,500 t; Italy 45,500 t; Denmark 6,000 t, probs. cryolite again. Arnold Bloch seems to have been responsible for buying/setting up plants in Germany (Martinswerk, Bergheim) France, and Hungary.

In the German-Soviet trade deal signed in January 1940, Germany agreed to supply 30,000 tonnes of aluminium and 150 t. of cobalt, as well as RM7m worth of Luftwaffe equipment. That's nearly 7% of its total output of 1940 (see 2 paras below).

• In September 1940 the US stationed troops in Ivittuut, Greenland, the world's largest naturally-occurring source of cryolite, thus depriving Germany of its main source, used in the Hall-Héroult process. The Germans started making synthetic cryolite (Na₃AlF₆) in Heroya, Norway, next to the Nordische Aluminium Co. aluminum smelter. A successful Allied bombing raid on July 24, 1943, however, prevented full-scale production of synthetic cryolite there. See #Norway.

• In October 1940 the RAF bombed aluminium plants at Erftwerk, Lautawerk, Rheinfelden, Lippewerk and Bitterfeld.

• Production of aluminium in Germany during the war years (figures in metric tonnes, rounded by me)

1940 - 205,000; 1941 - 212,000; 1942 - 227,000; 1943 - 203,000; 1944 - 191,000; 1945 - 20,000.

• Which may mean that if production of aluminium stayed relatively constant from 200,000 to slightly under 230,000 tonnes in 1942, then there might have been a shortage if they were making considerably more aircraft...
• But between early 1942 and early 1943 the monthly output of aircraft more than doubled. Tooze says that this would indicate very considerable efficiency gains, since the labour force only increased slightly, and there was no increase of raw aluminium production at all.(Tooze, pp. 604-605) This only slightly contradicts the above Minerals Yearbook figures, which show an increase of around 20,000 tons in 1940–1942.

Braun says on p. 101 that the late 1936 Four-Year plan envisaged 273,000 tonnes of aluminium, with 166,000 tonnes produced in 1938, and 260,000 in 1942, making a 98% fulfilment of the plan. Obviously this was just a plan, whose targets weren't reached. This is much more than the 1946 Minerals Yearbook says was actually produced.

• Braun, Hans-Joachim (1990). The German Economy in the Twentieth Century. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-02101-4.

In February 1943 there were eight plants producing aluminium in Germany: 6 in N. Germany; Erftwerk, Lippewerk, Aken?, 2 in Bitterfeld, and Lautawerk; and Rheinfelden on the Swiss border, and Innwerk in the south. Six alumina plants at Martinswerk, Lippewerk, Lautawerk, Mundesheim and Nabwerk in Schwondorf (VAW AG). Also three aluminium reduction plants in Austria and one in Hungary.

Hmm. "Germany was almost entirely dependent on Hungary and Yugoslavia for bauxite [2/3 of pre-war imports as above], used in the production of Duralumin, a copper alloy of aluminium critical to aircraft production. The British attempted to stop the bauxite trade by sending undercover agents to blast the Iron Gate, the narrow gorge where the Danube cuts through the Carpathian Mountains by sailing a fleet of dynamite barges down the river, but the plan was prevented by Romanian police acting on a tip-off from the pro-German Iron Guard." Lol, lifted straight out of (From Blockade of Germany (1939–1945)#Intensification of the blockade)

Well, this was apparently 'Section D' of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6, forerunner of the SOE, reffed as Foot, M. R. D. (2000). SOE in France. Frank Cass. ISBN 0-7146-5528-7. pp. 15-16.

British bombers did lay aerial mines in the Danube from April-October 1944. WWII Mining the Danube

This caused considerable difficulties for the Germans, creating an extra transport bottleneck while the Ploesti oilfields were under attack.(Rise and Fall 1948 p. 353)

And anyway, see somewhere below that Germany was actually exporting aluminium to Japan at some point...

Switzerland

The Swiss firm Aluminium Industrie Aktiengesellschaft AG (AIAG), renamed Alusuisse in 1963 contributed to the German industry with its hydro-electric generating plants in Neuhausen and another in Austria. AIAG also bought a bauxite mine near Marseille. The Swiss parent firm did not have enough control over its independent German subsidiaries.

Switzerland produced 28,000 tonnes of ingots in 1940; 24,200 in 1941; 24,000 in 1942; 20,000 in 1943 ('42-43 winter drought, very low water levels); 34,000 in 1944. Minerals Yearbook 1946 p. 122.

France

France produced approx. 62,000 tonnes of ingots in 1940; 64,000 in 1941; 45,000 in 1942; 46,500 in 1943; 26,000 in 1944; 37,000 in 1945 (after liberation of France); and 47,000 in 1946.

But: "Unoccupied France ( Zone libre ) was left with only the rubber industries and textile factories around Lyon and its considerable reserves of bauxite, which because of the British blockade ended up in German hands anyway, giving her abundant supplies of aluminum for aircraft production." (From Blockade of Germany (1939–1945)#Intensification of the blockade)

I'm fairly sure that the Germans actually bought one or more French mines before the war - perhaps Tooze confirms somewhere? [Yep, see 1939, #Germany section above] But how does a blockade of the zone libre result in exports to Germany? Maybe after November 1942, when said zone was invaded by the German and Italian armies in Case Anton, as a response to Operation Torch. Makes sense-ish...

Which tends to indicate that if there was more bauxite available, then there would tend to be more aluminium ingots, assuming all the other raw materials were available to process it...

Yah, but the Germans simply couldn't persuade their conquered countries in any way to produce more of ANTYHING. What would YOU do, if you were a worker in a French aluminium plant? Yep, 10/10 points. Go to the top of the class.

...Which by 1943 was becoming more precarious - haha! see #Contemporary resources for Bombing Survey thing on Giulini and availability of raw materials. e.g., Gebruder Giulini refined alumina from bauxite using both the Pyrogen or Deville process and the Bayer process. Appendix J1 & J2 from Gebruder Giulini ref - Boiler coal came from the Ruhr & Saar, brown coal from Heidelberg, anthracite from Aachen, sodium hyrdoxide (caustic soda) from Höchst (Frankfurt), Ludwigshafen, Rheinberg and Reinhfelden; bauxite from Zagreb, Trieste, Budapest, Marseilles and Athens; sodium sulphate from Wintershall, Merkers, Leimbach-Kaiseroda; sodium carbonate (crystal soda) from Heilbronn, Saaralben, Dombasle, Bernburg & Whylen; and limestone from a quarry in Fachingen. Caustic soda and limestone receipts were practically non-existent for months.

Turkey

Also, Panzers at War 1943-1945 - "British control of aluminium supplies from Turkey dictated that the light alloy block used in the HL 210 was soon replaced by a less effective cast iron block." - this would have been by May 1943 when the HL230 was fitted to new Tigers and Panthers. NB However, this is probably complete nonsense, given the unimpeded chromite trade with Germany as above, probably via Black Sea through Romania and Hungary...? and since "control of aluminium supplies from Turkey" doesn't necessarily mean bauxite or ingots, it could just mean "supplies necessary for producing aluminium ingots", which would have been more likely if it had actually been the case which it apparently wasn't.

Basically, there was nothing of interest to do with aluminium or bauxite in Turkey at the time.

Ah! Wot about the Allied-Soviet Persian Corridor from 1942? Did they get there via Turkey? No, it was neutral, and pro-Germany. Since Britain controlled that end of the Mediterranean and well beyond, everything would have been shipped via Suez and back past Aden up the Gulf to good old 'Mespot' i fink.

"The first production of bauxite in Turkey was in 1964 when the Turkish Mineral Research and Exploration Institute mined and shipped 800 tons of high-silica bauxite from the Akseki deposits for use as refractories in metallurgical furnaces near Antalya."

Norway

Overview

The cheap and plentiful hydro-electric power in Norway made it an obvious source for smelting aluminium. In 1940 Norway produced 37 000 metric tons per year (mtpy) of aluminium and 12 000 mtpy of alumina. As the result of a plan by Heinrich Koppenberg, the head of Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke, in November 1940 Herman Göring decicided that capacity for alumina was to be expanded to 330 000 mtpy, and the capacity for aluminium to between 150 000 and 180 000 mtpy. In the end this huge planned expansion never happened and Norway never produced a single extra ton of aluminium. Also find the bit where millions of Reichmarks were pumped into Norway to achieve this production. (US BBS?)

Milch was scathing about Göring after the war: "General Kreipe came back on to the theme of the aluminium plants in Norway, which I had opposed both verbally and in writing. Today I am beginning to suspect that Göring was getting his cut from these as well, like Koppenberg and friends. After all, one and a half billion marks were invested for a return of nil point nil. We never got as much aluminium out of Norway during the war as the existing factories had produced there in peacetime... The crook’s proper place is before a German court martial!" (Irving p. 334)

• Frøland, Hans Otto; Kobberrød, Jan Thomas (2001). "The Norwegian contribution to Goring's Megalomania. Norway's aluminium industry during World War II". Cahiers d'histoire de l'aluminium. 2009/1 (42–43). Institut pour l’histoire de l’aluminium. doi:10.3917/cha.042.0130. ISSN 0990-6908.

History

One company, NACO, got all its bauxite from Greece, an attempt at setting up a smelter in France having failed. (p. 134) Naco was at pains to keep Norsk Hydro (closely associated with IG Farben since 1927) out of the industry. Norsk had developed a plan in c1920 to smelt anorthosite, another source of alumina, using nitric acid? which had never made the leap from laboratory to industrial scale. The Pedersen process was also in theory capable of making alumina from anorthosite.

Goring was hugely misled by Koppenberg, who greatly exaggerated the Norwegian industry's capacity to expand. However, Herøya in southern Norway was selected as a suitable site for a new smelter using Norsk's nitric acid process - but it had never worked on an industrial scale. It was meant to be in full operation by the end of 1941, along with increased capacity at the Haugvik site, and a new alumina plant at Sauda.

In September 1940 (before it became involved in the war) the US stationed troops in Ivittuut, Greenland, the world's largest naturally-occurring source of cryolite, thus depriving Germany of its main source, used in the Hall-Héroult process. The Germans started making synthetic cryolite (Na₃AlF₆) in Heroya, Norway, next to the Nordische Aluminium Co. aluminum smelter. A successful Allied bombing raid on July 24, 1943, however, prevented full-scale production of synthetic cryolite there. See #Germany

1941 Göring plan for aluminium expansion in Europe, production in metric tons

Existing              <--  Projected expansion -->           New German
German capacity | Norway   France  Italy    Rest of Europe | capacity

  288 000         240 000  95 000  100 000      70 000        218 000

"Göring and Koppenberg now envisioned that the campaigns in the Balkans and the Soviet Union would open possibilities for making the expansion programme real. New alumina refineries in Croatia and Greece were supposed to furnish the smelters in Norway with 250 000 mtpy of alumina. The remainder was to be taken from the Soviet alumina refineries on the Kandalaksha Gulf on the Kola peninsula and Tikhvin near Leningrad. The Soviet refineries' combined capacity was more than 100 000 mtpy in 1940. Aluminium was now placed in the 'SS' (Sonder-Stufe) or Dringlichkeitsstufe category, giving it literally 'top priority' in the war economy."

However, none of this would come to pass. Partisan activity reduced Croatia's bauxite output from 400,000 tons in 1938 to 70,000 t in 1941, and in 1943 had only reached half the pre-war figure. Furthermore, the German forces only occupied Tikhvin for one month, from 8 November to December 1941,(ref Wiki article) which thereafter became important for the relief of the Siege of Leningrad; and the Germans certainly never reached the Russian side of the Koala Peninsula from the south. Thus the hoped-for supplies of alumina and bauxite never materialsed. NB And what about Greece?

In Norway, an allied raid in December 1942 knocked out the Glomfjord power plant, which provided the electricity for the nearby Haugvik smelter; and the US Eighth Air Force dropped more than 1,600 bombs on Herøya on July 24th 1943.(US Bombing Survey thing Light Metal Industry in Germany, p. 23)

The end result of the entire enterprise to increase Norway's production of aluminum was negligible. "Only the alumina plant in Sauda, which was operational from January 1944, delivered 2 000 metric tons of alumina, due to a lack of resources, e.g. bauxite."

Norwegian Aluminium production: 1936 - 15,400; 1937 - 23,000; 1938 - 29,000; 1939 - 31,000; 1940 - 15,000 (est.)

Other metals

Read me now, you fool!

Aluminium was used very successfully used as a substitute for copper, and huge savings were effected by reducing waste during manufacturing processes. "Germany didn't lose the war because of a shortage of metals." (Scherner, somewhere, FIND IT!)

After accumulating quite a lot of historians' opinions, I think that Jonas Scherner et al's various books and papers have convinced me (a non-expert) that quite a lot of shortages, especially of non-ferrous metals from around 1942, were deliberately manufactured / brought about. Not many other hstorians/scholars have put forward this theory - keep looking, fool!

The failures of Operation Barbarossa and Operation Typhoon meant that a much longer war was finally being envisaged by the High Command: and Speer's organisations started stockpiling non-ferrous metals as a bulwark against later shortages. It seems to me that a significant number of the 'shortages' discussed both above and below are a result of this policy. Gather various existing refs!. The fact that almost no-one was aware of the overall picture (because of the endemic political and bureaucratic secrecy inherent in the Third Reich) made it much easier to declare shortages since no-one could check the figures from other departments and the industries they controlled.

General overview

"The Soviet Union up to the Eve of Attack" by Joachim Hoffmann, in Germany and the Second World War, vol. 4 - The Attack on the Soviet Union p. 115 lists some of the materials which the USSR exported to Germany during the first year of the ecomomic agreement concluded in February 1940:

" 1m. t. of oil, 1m. t. of grain, 8000,000t. of iron ore and scrap, 500,000t. of phosphate, 100,000t. of cotton, 100,000t. of chrome ore, 80,000t. of man­ganese, 10,800t. of copper, 1,575 t. of nickel, 985t. of tin, and 1,300t. of raw rubber."

Some of these were re-exports of Soviet imports, but supplied under the terms of the treaty. Sadly he doesn't mention what Germany sent to the Soviets in return. Machine tools, i fink. "Industrial produucts over a period of 5 years"(p. 123)

Yup: "In return the Reich had to agree to extensive deliveries of German armaments to the Soviet Union, which were to prove a perceptible burden on German armament production for years to come— especially in the naval engineering and ma­chine tool areas."(p. 125) (i.e. lathes, milling machines, hugely expensive gear-cutting tools etc.)

In Historical Turning Points in the German Air Force War Effort, Richard Suchenwirth quotes a letter from Udet dated 7 February 1940: "The present shortage of aluminium as well of other nonferrous metals such as copper, tin, molybdenum, and chromium leaves me no choice but to recommend the following:" basically, a decrease of production of aircraft not already in active use at the front. Training and reconnaissance machines could be converted from single- and twin-engined fighters. Suchenwirth goes on for several pages about this "Stoppage of Development" which seemed to have infected most of the industry.

By February 1940 only Poland had been conquered, and the dominance over the rest of Europe and the Balkans had not been secured. But the lack of these metals was already being felt.

From The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939-1945 (British Strategic Bombing Survey), pp 84-5

"When hostilities began,stocks were adequate for only six months or less (as measured by peace­time consumption) for most imported commodities. Manganese, where stocks were sufficient for 18 months, was an exception. So,too,were chromium,tungsten and iron ore, where stocks were sufficient for 8-10 months. Effective steps were taken very early to ensure the conservation of all these materials. It was also found that considerable stocks of metal could be reclaimed from scrap. In addition, as in both British and American war industry, technical advances made it possible to curtail the use of rare minerals in armament production. Thus, as one raw material came into short supply, another which was more plentiful was substituted. Equally it was discovered that the quality specifica­tions for steel could be satisfied by using much smaller amounts than previously of critical alloys. Such developments reduced considerably the quantity of critical materials used in armament production, and the consumption of many declined during the course of the war in spite of the increasing output of munitions.

The consumption of copper, for example, which in 1938 amounted to about 450,000 tons, was less than 200,000 tons in 1943. Between 1938 and 1943, the annual consumption of wolfram/#tungsten, #molybdenum and #cobalt? was also reduced by about two-thirds. At the same time stocks(and even more so the ratio of stocks to consumption) increased, for the victories of 1939 and 1940-41 led to the capture of considerable amounts of these materials and also to many new sources of supply—for example, #chromium from Bulgaria and Greece; #nickel and #molybdenum from Finland and Norway; #copper from Yugoslavia, Norway and Finland; #manganese from Russia; mercury from Italy and Spain; and bauxite from Hungary,France, Jugo­slavia and Italy. Sometimes these spoils materialised just in time to relieve a critical shortage. Thus manganese stocks were down to four months consumption when the occupation of Nikopol relieved the situation for the rest of the war." The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939-1945. Report of British Bombing Survey Unit, pp. 84-85.

Iron and Steel

The supply of iron and steel to industry was of overriding importance in allocating [raw] material priorities. Allocation of everything else flowed on from this decision. (see BIOS report #273: Interrogations and Reports on German Methods of Statistical Reporting, p. 23?)

CIOS XXIX-30 ("Hermann Göring Steel Works: Paul Pleiger Hutte, Stahlwerke Branschweig"), p. 4, says that the shortage of steel in 1937/8 was because Sweden especially decided to restrict exports. [I seem to remember reading somewhere that in fact Germany was being very tardy in making payments.]

* Rolf Karlbom (1965) "Sweden's iron ore exports to Germany, 1933–1944", Scandinavian Economic History Review, 13:1, 65-93, DOI: 10.1080/03585522.1965.10414365 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03585522.1965.10414365 

is going to explain how. Also, Minerals yearbooks review of 1940 has some figures for 1936-40.

Well, there a was a slight reduction in Sweden's iron ore exports to Germany in 1937/38, but not drastic, approx. 400,000 tons from 8.8 million tons. If the Germans had been expecting more to sustain a greater effort by the armaments industry in general, I suppose that might count as a 'shortage'.

• WP:OR: If they had been expecting say 9.2 million tons over 1937, that would be a shortfall of 800,000 tons, i.e. 10% (or more), a non-negligible amount in terms of industrial production.

          Swedish exports of iron ore to Germany, 1933–1944 

Year            1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944
1000's of tons  2153 4804 5006 7479 8818 8441 9981 8170 7928 6876 8430 3652

As Karlbom points out several times, the Swedish ore was very pure and high in iron, possibly 60% iron, whereas other ores could be as little as 30-35% iron by weight and not so free of phosphorus and/or [sulphur]. In other words, it was probably more economical to import high-quality ore mostly free of contaminants, rather than spend more money on further processes for lower-quality German ores from Salzgitter to remove these and other unwanted elements.

• Halder War Diary, original 1947 US typescript edition, Vol. II p. 14 [pdf 35]: "Raw materials question; iron from Sweden up to now 9 million, will drop to 6 million. Thomas steel [ie made by Gilchrist-Thomas basic Bessemer process ] 1.3 million instead of 1.9 million now. Peace-time consumption 1.9; additional wartime requirements 0.4: total 2.3 million tons." [It seems that Sweden was also exporting steel ingots as well.] Halder p. 17 [pdf 38]: "Germany has monthly steel deficit of 600,000 tons."

Hmm. Total of iron ore supply (native + imported) in Germany in 1929 was 21,280 1000s of tons (ie 21.27 million t). It fell to 5,400 t in 1932 before climbing back to 21,170 t in 1935. Germany's own production was between roughly 25% and 30% of the total in any year 1929–1935, Sweden supplied 32–39%, France 16–31%, and Spain 4–11%.(R. J. Overy, Goering, p. 63) Question is, I thought that Germany's own ore mines were deliberately exluded by the established iron and steel makers and were barely worked at all. Since the mines were obviously productive, what was the ore being used for? Cast iron?

CIOS-XXIX-30, pp. 6, 7 as above says that the Salzgitter and Peine mines produced 20,000 tonnes of ore per day (ie 7.3 million tonnes per annum) "before the war", rising to a max of 30,000 t per day (10.9 million tonnes per annum) in 1940. The ores are oolitic limonite (brown hematite), very high in silicon in the case of Salzgitter, very high in lime in Peine, the latter of which are also high in magnanese and self-fluxing, although they have signicant amounts of the contaminants of phosphorous and sulphur.

Quantitative anyalsis of ores from Salzgitter (composite sample from various mines) (1) and Peine (2):(CIOS-XXIX-30, p. 7)

     Fe   Mn   P   SiO2  Al2O3   CaO   MgO   V     S    As
1.  30.5 0.15 0.5  25.2   9.4    4.5   2.0  0.1   0.3  0.06
2.  22.7 3.70 0.8   7.6   1.7   24.0   2.5  0.03  0.2  trace 

The Salzgitter ores were treated in a rotary Lurgi kiln, the Fe2O3 reduced to Fe304 and then sintered.

Well, there's always a reason for everything: "Owing largely to German difficulties over deliveries and payment, and to rising Wehrmacht transport costs, Germany had become increasingly indebted to Sweden by the end of 1941. The conse­quence was a gradual decline in Swedish deliveries of iron ore to Germany. In order to guarantee the export of iron ore at its previous levels, Stockholm therefore granted a bigger state export credit for deliveries to Germany as part of the new economic agreement. An attempt was made to settle the balance of payment and trade by arranging new Swedish purchases of war equipment in Germany."

And, in alphabetical order:

Chromium

Needed to produce armour plate. The main source of chromium for Germany was Turkey. Turkey was important because it supplied up to 100% of Germany's needs for chromite ore.

U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations With Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury. Chapter: "Allied Relations and Negotiations With Turkey"

"At the beginning of the war Germany had an estimated stockpile of about 250,000 tons of chromite, which had been accumulated by heavy purchases in Africa, Turkey, and the Balkans in the late 1930s."(U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations" p. 7)

"Until January 1943 no chromite reached Germany. Britain and France had concluded an agreement with Turkey in January 1940 that guaranteed their sole purchase of all Turkish chromite for 1940 and 1941. Britain, joined by the United States, extended this arrangement with Turkey through 1942. In October 1941, however, the Clodius agreement between Turkey and Germany was concluded, providing for chromite sales to Germany of up to 45,000 tons by March 1943 and an additional 90,000 tons in 1943 and 1944. Turkish chromite shipments to Germany began in January 1943. In that year, Turkey exported more than 45,700 tons of chromite ore to Germany. Since the Allies estimated the German annual requirement for chromite ore to be between 40,000 and 45,000 tons, Turkey was supplying most of and possibly more than what Germany required." (U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations" p. 8)

A report entitled "Raw Materials Position of Enemy Europe," February 14, 1944, estimated German chromite supplies in 1943 at 232,000 tons, of which 166,000 tons were produced in occupied Balkans and 46,000 tons were imported from Turkey.(U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations" p. 7n)

"In October 1941 Germany concluded an important trade agreement with Turkey that provided for an exchange of Turkish raw materials, especially chromite ore, for German war material, together with iron and steel products and other manufactured goods, in order to draw Turkey further into the Axis orbit. In 1943 Turkey provided essentially 100 percent of German requirements. According to Albert Speer, Hitler's Armaments Minister, the German war machine would have ground to a halt without chromite ore."

"During most of the war, Turkey sought to balance the needs and expectations of Germany and the Axis on the one hand, and those of the Allies on the other. Thus, while being a major trading partner with Germany, Turkey maintained its friendly relations with the Allies, which provided Turkey with modern military equipment, and who sought to minimize the effect of Turkey's exports to Germany by preclusively buying products, particularly chromite, at exceedingly high prices. Turkey conducted such a robust commerce with both sides that it raised its gold reserve from 27 tons to 216 tons by the end of 1945...During 1943 and into 1944, Turkey continued to receive Allied military assistance but resisted entry into the war."

For the Germans, by the end of July 1943 "it was becoming clear that the neutrality of Turkey could not be relied upon to last much longer".(Rise and Fall of the German Air Force 1933–1945 (1948), p. 359)

"In April 1944, Turkey halted its sales of chromite to Germany" Military history of the Republic of Turkey but un-reffed.

"Turkey halted the export of chromite to Germany in late April 1944 and suspended all commercial and diplomatic relations with Germany in August 1944...Early American experts estimated that Turkey received as much as $10 million to $15 million in gold during the war, much of it probably for its chromite exports."

Speer said that chromium was in short supply by October 1944, meaning that "either the number of Panzers produced must be reduced or it will be necessary to reduce the thickness of the armor plate. In that case, the troops will unequivocally ask for a reduction of the armor thickness in order to increase the total number of Panzers produced."

Copper

Always in short supply. From Minerals Yearbook Review of 1940, (pub. 1941) p. 88:

Germany mined 33,000 short tons (st) of copper yearly, but consumed an annual average of 266,000 st in 1924-28, 219,000 st in 1929-33, and an average 308,000 st per year in 1934-38. The deficit was filled with imports from the Western Hemisphere (the Americas?) and Africa (large amounts in Belgian Congo). Stockpiled large amounts in 1938-39 but probs. had to draw on this in 1940. If Germany had commandeered the whole of continental European output it would have had access to about 190,000 tons annually. Acquisition of deposits in the USSR would have increased this to about 350,000 short tons.

Germany mined more copper in 1940 (30,000 metric tons) than any other European country except Yugoslavia, with nearly 43,000 metric tons in 1940, but which fell to 23,000 to 32,000 during the war. Finland and Norway produced around 15,500 metric tons in 1940, and Spain around 13,000 mt. Sweden made 9,500 metric tons in 1940, increasing to 13,000, 18,000, 18,000, 16,000 and 15,000 mt in 1941 to 1945. I wonder how much got to Germany? (Minerals Yearbook Review of 1946, pub. 1948, p. 479)

Smelter production of copper (metric tons)

           1940     1941     1942     1943     1944    1945
Germany   49,100   44,400   38,300   31,300   24,000     ?
USSR     157,000  160,000  169,000  130,000  130,000  160,000

The USA smelted over 1,000,000 tons per year 1941-1944. (Minerals Yearbook Review of 1946, pub. 1948, p. 480)

Copper consumption was reduced from 448,000 tons in 1938 to 221,000 tons in 1943, through the substitution of aluminium and other metals. Based on pre-war levels, the allies consistently over-estimated the German consumption. Something similar goes for tin and nickel.[73] 73. Eichholtz, Deutsche Kriegswirtschaft, vol. 2, p. 318. (Braun 1990, pp. 135-6)

The German Economy in the Twentieth Century 
Hans-Joachim Braun
Routledge
London and New York
1990
ISBN 0-203-40364-9

By 1941 the Bor mine in Yugoslavia (now in Serbia), Europe’s largest copper mine, had been completely transferred to German control.(Tooze, p. 420) Bor is one of the largest copper reserves in Serbia and in the world, having estimated reserves of 200 million tonnes of ore grading 1.5% copper in 2012. Copper was only discovered accidentally in 1902.

Somewhere below it says (perhaps Tooze or Irving) that the Italians had been secretly stockpiling copper and claiming to the Germans that they never had enough.

According to the Belgian government, by 1942 the entire output of the Belgian Congo of copper and palm oil was being exported to the United Kingdom. Britain was very keen that the Congo didn't fall into German hands. Hmm, because of Tanganyika Concessions#Union Minière du Haut-Katanga. Not surprised...

The US imported lots of other stuff from Congo, including uranium for the atomic bomb. See Belgian Congo in World War II.

Manganese

As the table above shows, #List of casting aluminium alloys made in Germany during WWII, manganese is essential for making most types of aluminium alloy. In Europe in eg 1942, manganese ore was produced in (approx. metric tonnes) Sweden 24,000 t, Romania 29,000, Hungary 32,000, Italy 60,000 and Ukraine/USSR 1,823,000 (1941 2,400,000 t).

I imagine that much of the output of Romania, Hungary, and Italy was nicked by Germany. How much was taken by Germany from Russia, I don't know but in September 1941 the BHO (Berg- und Huttenwerkgesellschaft Ostmbh) took over the Krivoj Rog and Nikopol mining installation (under Pleiger) and in March 1942 the coal workings in the Donets basin and the Dnepropetrovsk industrial complex: with huge investment and moving of engineers and equipment from the Reich, this kick-started the output of coal, manganese and steel.

It's important to remember that the whole point of the invasion of the USSR was not to kill Russians/Soviets, but an economic one: to appropriate its mineral, industrial, and agricultural production and reserves. Enslavement of the population was also part of the idea - the NS-regime generally viewed the Russians/Soviets as sub-human.

• Actually, this is quite wrong. It should have been exactly the military purpose to completely destroy military resistance (cf. von Clausewitz, von Bismarck et al i fink), and then the subsequent political purpose to harness the agricultural and industrial output of especially Ukraine. However, various reports had indicated (based on WWI experiences) that Germany would be unable to take control of Soviet production because it would need an entire new administration setting up. The Soviets would anyway probably destroy existing industrial plants. [They did: cf. their 'Scorched Earth' policy.] The Walther memorandum warned about the insignificant economic advantage of a campaign against the USSR. However, as usual Hitler got the wrong idea and proceeeded with the idea that the invasion would have a positive economic outcome for Germany. General Thomas was to have been the overall head of the organisation to oversee all economic activity in the Soviet Union, but he was quickly sidelined; no-one was in control and it descended into chaos. The idea that millions of civilians would have to starve to death didn't seem to worry anyone too much, but how the harvests were going to be gathered with Ukrainian help if they weren't going to be fed seems to have escaped the High Command's notice.

Aha!

"The National Socialist government had hoped to obtain vast amounts of foodstuffs and raw materials from an invaded and conquered Soviet Union. Apart from the grains in the Ukraine, mineral oil of the Caucasus, the iron ore and manganese deposits of Krivoi Rog and Nikopol attracted the invaders. [28] After the invasion the results were somewhat disappointing, because of the Soviet scorched earth policy. The Germans did a lot of reconstruction work to make the plants and installations usable again, but these efforts were only partly successful because of the lack of raw materials and tools. Only 10 to 20 per cent of the regular coal production from the coalfields east of the Dnieper could be obtained. The case with manganese was different: during the German occupation of the Soviet Union roughly 90 per cent of the manganese used in Germany came from there." [28.] Milward, War, Economy and Society, pp. 144–63.

"Simultaneously, by their advance [by July 1941] the Germans also gained possession of territories with highly important production facilities, territories where before the war 58 per cent of Soviet steel, 71 per cent of pig-iron, and 57 per cent of rolling-mill items had been produced. German seizure of the Nikopol region soon resulted in the loss to the Soviets of 92 per cent of manganese production. In losing the Donets basin, the Rostov coalfields, and the Moscow coal basin the Soviets lost 63 per cent of their coal extraction."

Mining operations at Nikopol to extract manganes ore had ceased during the winter of 1943/44, and anyway stocks at the mine could not be moved "owing to the transport situation in the Romanian region, which had been difficult since the beginning of hostilities in the sector and was by then beyond repair."

CIOS XXIX-30, p. 17: Reichswerke Hermann Goering (Paul Pleiger) says that the manganese shortage had become so severe in late 1943 that one of the open-hearth convertors at the plant converted to acid practice had to be returned to basic operation.

They also recovered vanadium from the iron ores at Salzgitter, through an acid bessemer converter which made slag containing 50 to 100 tons of vanadium per month.(CIOS XXIX-30 p. 20)

Molybdenum

Molybdenum steel is used in weapons production. The French Schneider-Creusot company used it in armour plate in 1891. Moly is only half the density of tungsten, and during WW1 it often replaced tungsten in many high-hardness and impact-resistant steels. It was used in Big Bertha because traditional steel melts at the temperatures produced by the propellant of the one ton shell. Also used in molybdenum armour British tanks of WW1 (which?)

It could be used in artillery firing chambers and rocket nozzles.

German homogenous armour post 1934 is a Chromium-Molybdenum type armour.

During WWII, the molybdenite mines in Knaben, S. Norway, were one of the very few molybdenum mines still in operation. The German invasion in 1940 secured the mines' production for German production. The site was bombed twice, in March and November 1943.

"The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 redirected Soviet manganese exports from the USA to Germany, so American metallurgists developed improved molybdenum-alloy steels as a substitute using molybdenum from Arizona and Colorado."

For the Jagdpanther, the gun collar which covered the opening for the gun, was made from cast steel. In January 1943 the Brandenburger Eisenwerke in de:Kirchmöser was requested to work towards a molybdenum-free cast steel. The factory made all the superstructures for the Jagdpanther.

"The machinery producer Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen (ZF) tested on behalf of the Reichsstelle für Stahl and Eisen (Reich Agency for Steel and Iron) new steel alloys as a possible substitute for molybdenum.", citing BArch (BundesArchiv), R 13 III/1621, Erfahrungen mit Einsatzstählen [ie cementation steel] EC-80, EC-100 und ECMO-200 (Bericht über die Ergebnisse von Betriebs-, Laboratoriums- und Fahrversuchen der Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen; Druck), 24 Oct. 1940.

Moly can also be used as a substitute for tungsten.

Nickel

Lots of info about Petsamo and general nickel production statistics at

• Interrogation of Dr. Leo Schlecht: Carbonyl Nickel and Carbonyl Iron Powders, their Production and Properties. BIOS Final Report 1575. HM Stationery Office. n.d. [1947].

Hmm, in Operation Silver Fox the plan was to seize control of the nickel mines in the far northern province of Petsamo, and then to take the port of Murmansk (Operation Platinum Fox). Petsamo had belonged to Finland since the 1920 Treaty of Tartu, and nickel had been discovered in 1921. The southern part of Operation Silver Fox (Operation Arctic Fox ) was intended to capture Kandalaksha on the south side of the the Kola Peninsula and take control of the Murmansk railway there [and I suppose the aluminium ore mines/plant]. The Germans took control of Petsamo, but the rest was a complete failure.

• MOVE TO SOURCES!! Ueberschär, Gerd R. (1998). "Strategy and Policy in Northern Europe". In Boog, Horst; Förster, Jürgen; Hoffmann, Joachim; Klink, Ernst; Müller, Rolf-Dieter; Ueberschär, Gerd R. (eds.). The Attack on the Soviet Union. Germany and the Second World War. Vol. IV. Translated by McMurry, Dean S.; Osers, Ewald; Willmot, Louise. Military History Research Office (Germany). Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 941–1020. ISBN 0-19-822886-4.

see also |contributor-last= |contributor-first= |contribution= text and |contribution-url=

"In order to check an impending occupation of northern Finland in the event of military action by the Soviet Union, Hitler ordered the German forces in northern Norway to be reinforced. One of the main reasons was the great importance attached to the north Finnish Petsamo area; under a recent German-Finnish agreement 60 per cent of Finland’s nickel-ore production was to be consigned to Germany.5 Hitler gave instructions for a force to be concentrated which, in the event of a Soviet attack, could occupy northern Finland and the Petsamo region, preventing any further Soviet move towards the Baltic or Scandinavia and safeguarding German economic interests in the nickel-ore mines at Petsamo-Kolosjoki."

"Control of these mines at Petsamo in northern Finland, the concession to which had been granted to a British-Canadian concern in 1934 on a long-term basis, had become an issue of crucial importance to the German war effort when, at the outbreak of war, the loss of overseas deliveries of nickel and molybdenum, metals important for alloyed steel, had caused a considerable gap in supplies. Agreement on major Finnish deliveries of copper, molyb­denum, pyrites, and nickel had therefore been the principal objective of German-Finnish trade negotiations in the spring of 1940. Studies by mining experts of IG-Farbenindustrie A G convinced the Reich ministry of economic affairs that the deliveries of 60 per cent of the total output, agreed in the German-Finnish trade and delivery contracts of 29 June and 23 July 1940, would entirely cover the current German demand for nickel. The nickel-ore deliveries from Petsamo, along with Finnish timber products, were therefore of outstanding importance in German-Finnish trade." The remaining 40% went to the USSR.

• Finland, Germany, and the Soviet Union, 1940-1941; the Petsamo dispute by Krosby, H. Peter (1968).

And then everything went bang on my PC argh, but IG Farben's new nickel process and a deal with the British-Canadian Nickel International firm who owned the concession in Petsamo allowed IG Farben to make lots. Germany consumed 9,000 metric tons of nickel in 1939, 6,000 made in Germany, and Farben made 4,168 tons alone.(Krosby p.28) Petsamo was thought to be able to produce 10,000 tons of nickel-copper matte and 5,000 tons of nickel a year in 1942.(Krosby pp. 45, 88)

See Operation Rentier. Nickel was indispensible for submarine warfare.(p. 71) The rest of the book is all about the diplomacy which had occupied Germans, Finns and Soviets for 18 months until Barbarossa. The final chapter, Epilogue, p. 186ff details the immense difficulties which the Germans had in getting the smelter going, and moving the raw ore and smelted matte to Kirkenes in Norway. The Finns pulled out of the war [for a number of reasons] which made it even harder...

From January 1943 to October 1944 the mine produced approx 387,600 metric tons of ore, of which approx 113,500 tons were sent to Germany: and 17,000 tons of smelted nickel matte, of which 15,500 tons sent to Germany. According to Albert Speer in August 1944, this was 4/5 of Germany's entire needs in 1943–44, and plus more German mining efforts, stockpiles would have lasted until June 1946.(Krosby p. 198) Soviet forces over-ran the area in early October 1944, and on 10 October the entire plant was totally and utterly demolished by the retreating German 20th Mountain Army.(Krosby p. 202)

As Scherner demonstrates, in a similar fashion to Germany's pre-war exploration of its native tungsten mines, nickel ores were also identified and made ready for exploitation. When supplies from Petsamo stopped, German native monthly nickel production "quadrupled between July and October 1944. The plan was to raise German nickel production further to 5,000 tons annually until late 1945; German ores would then have covered 75 per cent of domestic consumption. Combined with the still-existing stocks, German nickel consumption could have been met up to 1948."

Tungsten

Important for making tungsten carbide for armour-piercing ammunition, and for machine tools for cutting gears etc. But the Allies induced a shortage of it by economic warfare against Germany via two neutral countries, Spain and Portugal.

The squeeze bore 7.5 cm Pak 41 [NB don't confuse with normal 7.5 cm Pak 40 ] used a tungsten core flanged shell (like a Röchling shell). Good pic here: For the Porsche Typ 100 VK 30.01 (P) (forerunner of the Tiger), "...Henschel chose to install the 7.5cm Panzerabwehrkanone 41 (7.5cm PaK), a taper-bore gun, and although it had a smaller calibre than the KwK 36 it had extraordinary penetration performance. However, the ammunition for this required substantial amounts of tungsten in its manufacture and since the supply of this strategic material was not ensured, the project was terminated." Only 150 PAK 41s were ever produced. (says wiki Pak 41 article)

In Europe, Portugal produced the most 60% WO₃ concentrated ore - maximum approximately 7,500 metric tons in 1943, followed by Spain 4,000 t: Britain and Sweden, a mere max. 350 & 335 t respectively.

So, did Germany get tungsten from Portugal? Well, well, yes they did, see Portugal during World War II#Wolfram (Tungsten), and the Portuguese sold it equally to the Allies (and to Britain on credit, not for sterling/gold) until shortly before D-day when they stopped selling to everyone.

"Portugal was a neutral country during World War II (WWII). The government extended favorable trade terms to Great Britain, with which it had a centuries-old treaty, but continued supplying goods and tungsten – an essential material for the arms industry – to Nazi Germany until mid-1944. The Nazis paid with gold bullion looted from countries they had conquered and, it is suspected, from victims of the Holocaust."

Argh, it gets deeper: - This web forum has links to this slightly unhinged site, and a story about Nazi Gold (It starts at goldp1.html).

Basically, the Allies were waging economic warfare, and buying up as much wolframite/tungsten from Portugal as they could get, to deprive Germany of it.

"To maintain its neutrality, Portugal set up a strict export quota system in 1942. The system allowed each side to export ore from their own mines and a fixed percentage of the output from independent mines. England owned the largest mine, while Germany owned two mid size concerns and several smaller mines. The output of Portugal's second largest mine was owned by France and the output was tied up in litgation throughout 1941. In January 1942, Portugal concluded a secret trade pact with Germany. The pact allowed the Nazis export licenses for up to 2,800 tons of wolfram. In turn, Germany was to supply Portugal with coal, steel, and fertilizer, which Portugal needed and which the Allies could not supply. In 1943, the Allies tried to negotiate a new wolfram agreement. Portugal asked for price reductions in ammonium sulfate, petroleum products, and other materials from the Allies. The Allies refused any price reductions and Portugal refused to increase the Allies export licenses. At the same time, Portugal completed a new agreement with Nazi Germany."

And Spain:

"However, the real competition in trade with Spain was for wolfram ore. Unlike Portugal, which had a quota system, Spain relied on an open market for wolfram. The open market provided an edge to the Allies with their better access to hard currency. By 1941, Germany had developed most of Spain’s wolfram mines and controlled the largest producer through es: SOFINDUS. In 1941, the Nazis acquired almost all of the wolfram ore produced. England had only managed to purchase 32 tons. Starting early in 1942, England and the US started a unified program to buy up as much of the ore as possible. The program caused mines' output to nearly double production from the previous year. Production had increased to nearly 2000 tons and the price had risen from $75 a ton to $16,800. In June, Spain set a minimum price of $16,380 per ton, which included a $4,546 export tax. In an effort to better compete with the Nazis, the Allies set up their own dummy corporate front to purchase the ore and in 1942 purchased roughly half of the ore."

"In December 1942, under pressure from the Nazis, Spain signed a new trade agreement with Germany with more explicit quotas. The agreement soon fell apart with both sides blaming the other for the failure. In February 1943, Spain signed a secret agreement with Germany to replace the failed agreement. In the agreement, Germany agreed to provide Spain with armaments at cost. However, during the negotiations the Nazis had at first demanded a 400 percent markup on the weapons. The Nazis, desperate for wolfram and Spanish pesetas, had to relent to Spain’s demand of weapons for cost. After the war, the Nazi negotiator noted that the talks were strained and difficult. In August 1942, Spain had reached agreement with the Nazis to pay back its debt from the Civil War in four installments, in which the Nazis would use, the money to purchase wolfram. During 1943, Germany purchased roughly 35 percent of the total production of wolfram. Total mine production of wolfram in Spain was roughly 4 to 5 times the production of 1940."

Well, well, wellity well: The Spanish Wolfram Crisis emerged in November 1943, and Spain made huge reductions in wolframite exports to Germany by 1944. But this was rather later than the 'shortages' discussed so far.

In fact, the Germans had been making geological surevys for native tungsten for some time and making standby mines, but it was cheaper to import/steal it until it the supply failed. Thus Scherner:

" In 1942, the Reichsamt für Bodenforschung considered the German tungsten mines as rich as those of Portugal and Spain. 165 By the end of 1942, when annual German production amounted to only 180 tons per annum, standby capacities would have allowed an immediate annual output increase to 700 tons per annum, roughly one-third of German tungsten consumption in 1943. 166 Yet, up to mid-1944, a full utilisation of these standby capacities was not considered necessary." [...when the Wolframite crisis threatened.]

"On Feb. 22, 1944, the Allies issued the 'Gold Declaration', which warned neutral countries that the Allies would not buy gold on the international market unless it could be clearly proven it had not come from the Axis powers' looted reserves. Coupled with the Gold Declaration, a growing threat of a larger Allied embargo against them led to Spain and then Portugal both cutting off all exports to Germany in late 1944." Rather wanky See also Operation Safehaven (1944–1948).

This fits well with the following:

"The 8.8cm Panzergranate 40/43 (PzGr 40/43) APCBC round was a very powerful AP fitted with a tungsten core. Armour penetration was some 15 percent higher than the PzGr 39/1, and accuracy was very good. Due to the shortage of tungsten [hah!] this shell was only available in very small numbers. By late 1943, production was reduced to very small quantities, and subsequently ceased."

Germany even received shipments of wolframite from Japan during blockade-running 1942/43, apparently in return for exports of (among other things) aluminium. So it can't have been all bad, if Germany was exporting aluminium to Japan in 1942/43 as Speer claims.

Indeed not. According to Jonas Scherner, the Germans deliberately under-reported usage/stocks of non-ferrous metals before the war (or even failed to report them in the state Inventory), and secretly investigated native mining capabilities. Thus when tungsten ore shipments from the Iberian peninsula stopped in mid-1944, "a massive capacity expansion of the German tungsten mines was ordered. Within a year, total German tungsten production was supposed to increase to 1,200 tons, covering two-thirds of Germany’s consumption needs. Combined with the still-existing stocks, German tungsten consumption could have been met up to 1948."

See #Read me now, you fool! - If I am correct in my assumptions about Scherner et al. - it seems likely that it was an anticipated shortfall in tungsten ore (described above) which led to the 'shortage' of tungsten, rather any actual lack of immediate supplies. It seems possible (according to my interpretation of Scherner) that the planners were already thinking in terms of a rather more extended war than had ever been envisaged. MinorProphet (talk) 15:19, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Tungsten in the UK

Amazingly, the Drakelands Mine in SW Devon has the 4th-largest tungsten-tin deposit in the world. Also Castle an Dinas, St Columb Major is the biggest in Cornwall. Carrock Fell in Cumbria is the only tungsten ore mine outside the South-West which has been worked commercially, and only 1901-1919, and 1971-1981. Bolivia and Brazil have huge amounts, and Zimbabwe as well.

Vanadium

Germany was self-sufficient in vanadium.

Zinc

There was plenty of native zinc as well.

Consquences of lack of alloying elememts

Spielberger, Panther tank and its variants (in English), pp 82–6, has a good section about how the Germans got round the increasing scarcity of nickel, tungsten and molybdenum in continuing to produce high-quality armour plate. They introduced nixkel-free and then low-alloy steels and developed methods of heat treatment. All the armour steel and cast armour manufacturers were in a committee which benefitted from exchange of ideas and techniques. Machining armour steel was replace with flame cutting. Face hardening was improved with recarbuzation, 1.5 meteres wide to a depth of 100mmm. Also improved welding techniques (also described with pics) allowed things like the Panther's sloping armour, vs. the square faces of the Panzer IV.

Finally, some answers

Well, (following on the last paragraph of #Tungsten above) this is rather what had been going through my head for some days now: I had been thinking that there seems to be less and less actual evidence to connect any of these supposed 'shortages' with any known failure of supply of raw materials, or the capacity to produce ingots, or the inabilty to produce the actual armaments. So perhaps the authorities were just taking the piss, inventing shortages where none existed, deliberately messing with peoples' heads. In some cases below where Tooze joins up railways/transportation, coal, etc., there do appear to have been genuine difficulties in supplying certain goods. But read this (two whole pages):

"It has been claimed that the increase of mining output [of native woframite/tungsten ore] started too late, that is, only at the end of the war.[175] The implicit assumption of this claim is that an earlier expansion of German mining production would have made metal allocation cuts, such as those implemented for nickel and tungsten, unnecessary. No doubt such cuts did take place, and in some instances—but certainly not always—negatively affected the quality and output of German armaments. For example, scholars note that in summer 1943 armour-piercing ammunition production was suspended in order to conserve tungsten.[176] In the same year, the Luftwaffe complained about nickel allocations being too short.[177] Yet, considering the size of German stocks at the time, it seems that allocation cuts were dictated neither by an actual metal shortage nor by a delayed expansion of German mining.[178] In the case of armour-piercing ammunition, a continuation of production from mid-1943 to mid-1944 would have required only 360 tons of tungsten, leaving Germany with some stocks (about 1,200 tons) once it began to use its tungsten standby capacities.[179]"

"With regard to the Luftwaffe, too, there is no indication that the actual nickel allocation was dictated by a metal shortage or by a delayed expansion of German mining.180 In 1943, German nickel stocks were more than 8,000 tons—not much lower than in September 1939. Stocks even slightly increased during the next twelve months. The additional quantity demanded by the Luftwaffe in 1943 cannot have been large—certainly significantly lower than the average nickel consumption of the Luftwaffe during the first three years of the war (around 150 tons per month).181 Anyway, the actual amount of allocation cannot be explained by a real shortage of nickel, especially when considering the German mining potential. This is confirmed by the fact that, in the case of nickel from 1943 onwards (as in the case of copper and tin), the relative share of metals allocated to the companies which was not called up by them increased.[182]" [NB need to check these cites...]

"In other words, there is little indication that decisions to cut allocations during the second half of the war owed much to an immediate or a medium-term shortage; rather, they were the result of an allocation and stockpiling policy which aimed to stretch out Germany’s capacity to wage war under blockade conditions. From 1943 on, the goal of the German tungsten policy was, as the annual plan for 1943 reveals, the expansion of the German stock.183 This stockpiling policy is also confirmed by the decision to continue the very expensive—in terms of workforce required—metal mobilisation measures for copper and tin beyond late 1942, despite the fact that both tin and copper stocks were at this point far bigger than at the beginning of the war.184 This policy was mainly responsible for the fact that by November 1944 German stocks actually exceeded those in September 1939 by 135 per cent (copper) and 150 per cent (tin). This stockpiling policy, expressed in allocation cuts in the case of tungsten and continued metal mobilisation in the cases of copper and tin, probably resulted from the fact that Germany’s strategic outlook had become bleak in the eyes of Albert Speer and the leading Nazis in 1943: from this point on, Germany had to wait for mistakes to be made by the enemy in order to win the war. 185 Indeed, whereas the time horizon of German supply plans in the early stage of the war had a duration of three years, 1943 plans had a five-year coverage."

Well, I started this draft in May 2020, and although it's grown a bit, I think Scherner has finally provided some answers to the question of shortages, at least of the non-ferrous metals. MinorProphet (talk) 16:45, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

This apparently aligns with Budrass, Scherner & Streb's earlier article:

"Since we also found a steady increase in the firms’ factor endowment during the war, we can be certain that the development of German aircraft production should not be subdivided into two distinct periods; in fact, it followed a rather continuous growth path during the Second World War. We consequently reject both the old 'Blitzkrieg' thesis and the new 'inefficiency thesis', at least for the aircraft industry—and the explosives industry, for which similar results have been found."

Contemporary resources

US Strategic Bombing Survey

These reports were published as 2nd editions in 1947, 75 years ago. There may well be much more recent research on most of the topics. Beware, probably.

Aircraft Industry Division Report, 2nd ed., January 1947

List of some available reports as pdfs US Strategic Bombing Survey – Europe, although none of the Light Metals industry ones below are online.

Light Metals Industry reports

• Light Metals Industry, originally Report 20
• 021 Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke, Hildesheim, Germany
• 022 Metallgussgesellschaft, GmbH, Leipzig, Germany
• 023 Aluminiumwerk GmbH, Plant No. 2, Bitterfeld, Germany
• 024 Gebruder Giulini GmbH Ludwigshafen-am-Rhein - Plant Report No. 4
• 025 Luftschiffbau, Zepplin GmbH, Friedrichshafen on Bodensee, Germany
• 026 Wieland Werke AG, Ulm, Germany
• 027 Rudolph Rautenbach Lieghmetallgiessereien, Solingen, Germany
• 028 Lippewerke Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke AG, Lunen, Germany
• 029 Vereinigte Deutsche Metalwerke, Heddernheim, Germany
• 030 Duerener Metallwerke AG, Duren Wittenau-Berlin & Waren, Germany

Motor Vehicles and Tanks section reports

NB These mostly detail the effect of bombing raids, but often contain useful snippets of company history, general info etc.:

• Motor Vehicles Report, Report 77
• Tank Industry Report, Report 78
• Daimler-Benz, Unterturkheim, Stuttgart, Report 79
• Renault, Billancourt, Paris, report 80
• Adam Opel, Russelsheim, report 81
• Daimler-Benz, Gaggenau, 82
• Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nurnberg (MAN), Report 83
• Auto Union AG, Chemnitz and Zwickau, Report 84
• Henschel und Sohn AG, Kassel (Plant No. 3, Mittelfeld), report 85 - stuff about Tiger production & Maybach engines
  • Not be confused with Henschel & Sohn, Kassel, Germany (Plant No. 1), (Ordnance Report 103)
• Maybach Motor Works, Report 86
• Voigtlander Maschinenfabrik AG, Plauen, Report 87
  • ie VOMAG, made Panzer IVs. They didn't experience any severe shortages throughout the war, and in fact made the most tanks (185 Pz IVs) in January 1945 (p. 3) Transmissions delivered from ZF, and from summer 1944 from Hamel in Chemnitz (p. 7) (Hamel was a pre-war competitor to VOMAG, making textile machinery.) Vomag produced up to 25% of all Pz IVs, 3,038 units during 1941-1945, plus spare parts equivalent to 20-30% of tank unit production.(p. 8) The tank plant manager said they could have produced 250 tanks per month on one shift if they had been supplied with enough components - hulls, motors, turrets etc. The authorities never provided enough parts to do this. (p. 9)
    • Against this, Krupp-Gruson had great difficulties: "An example of how transportation bombing reduced armaments final production in central Germany is provided by the Krupp-Gruson plant at Magdeburg. The failure of gas supplies from the RWHG, the collapse of coal deliveries to Gruson itself, and the disruption of components deliveries from Vomag and Nibelungen caused MK IV tank output to decline by 43 percent in January 1945 compared to the first quarter 1944 monthly average." (pdf p. 162)
• Volkswagenwerke, Fallersleben, Report 88
• Bussing NAG, Brunswick, Report 89
• Muhlenbau Industrie AG (MIAG), Report 90

——

• Ordnance Industry Report, Report 101

BIOS reports

British Exploitation of German Science and Technology from War to Post-War, 1943-1948]. Charlie Hall, Ph.D. History Thesis. University of Kent, August 2016. Gives the detailed background for the CIOS and BIOS reports.

Reports of the British Intelligence Oversight Subcommittee (BIOS). Description and overview at BIOS Collection of the Royal Armouries.

Haha, Colonel Derek Ezra, (later Lord Ezra, Chairman of the Coal Board) was chairman of BIOS. The scheme was dubbed 'Reparation by Technology Transfer'. On the staff were Anthony R. Michaelis, head of the Research Section, who later coined the word 'pulsar', and former PoW Geoffrey Brigstocke who married Heather Brigstocke, Baroness Brigstocke and died on Turkish Airlines Flight 981.

BIOS reports on light alloys listed at BIOS reports; and Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee (CIOS) reports at CIOS reports at the Fischer-Tropsch archive.

Some BIOS, CIOS & FIAT Reports listed at Foundation for German communication and related technologies. What an appalling web design! Search in the main contents for BIOS, CIOS & FIAT: many listed on this page.

Some BIOS reports listed at North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers (NEIMME) - but naturally mostly to do with mining...

Huge collection (1,826 items) at the Royal Armouries Collections, Leeds, but apparently not digitised.

The selected reports listed below are mostly to do with aluminium and light metals, aircraft, steel, tanks and armaments.

• BIOS Report 144 - Wrought Light Alloy Plants in NW Germany
• Report 229 - Wrought Light Alloy Plants in Southern Germany
• Report 279 - German Technique in the Production of Light Alloys
• Report 288 - Aluminum hydrate and aluminum production in German factories
• Report 308 - The production of aluminium in Italy
• Report 316 - German Light Alloy Foundry Industry
• Report 375 - The Wrought Light Alloy Industry in the Ruhr
• Report 396 - Report on Visit to Germany and Austria to Investigate Alloys for use at High Temperature
• Report 505 - Light alloy manufacture at Aluminiumwerke Gottingen G.m.b.H., Gottingen
• Report 693 - The Investigation of the Light Alloy Forging Industry in Germany
• Report 895 - Aluminium production at Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke (V.A.W.) Lunen
• Final Report No. 974 - Alumina and aluminium production at the Lippewerk of the Vereinigte Aluminium-Werke A.G. Lunen
• Final Report No. 1861 - Light Alloy Foundries in Germany

• Survey Report 29 Telecommunications and Equipment in Germany during the period 1939-1945 - telephones only , not relevant
• Misc. Report 72 Manufacture of Aviation Gasoline in Germany - all chemistry

Final Reports

• 17 - Statistics: interrogation of Dr. Rolf Wagenfuhr, Statistical Section of the Planungsamt, Speer Armaments Ministry
• 28 - The Voith Schneider Propellor
• 37 - German Aircraft Industry, Dornier - Werke, Friedrichshafen Area - p. 5: light alloy, sheet, extrusions and forgings always in good supply - steel sheet varied in thickness & tensile strength
• 61 - Weapons Section of the LFA, Volkerode
  • "The statement that...[Terminal Ballistics] research in Germany was in 'watertight' compartments, and that jealousy existed between companies, institutes and Ministries is probably correct." (p. 19) And high-speed photography during development of the MG 42: Quenching of blocking pieces; Research on ejection and deviation of cartridge cases; locking process of bolt (p. 32-1); Cartridge case jamming (p. 32-5); Movements of the plain and the drilled breech spring - single shot firing (32-6); Pictures of the time/space curve of the oscillation of the breech block (p. 32-7)
• 89 - Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke A.G., Frankfurt (Main) - Heddernheim
• 109 - Report on German steel foundries
• 141 - Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW), Oberwiesenfeld, Munich und Allach, near Munich
• 151 - German aluminium and magnesium melting and rolling practices
• 170 - Visits in American and French Zones, aircraft and aircraft engines
• 199 - Ten years of oxygen-gasification at Leuna
• 213 - Siemens-Halske Werke, Erlangen
• 225 - German gear cutting plant, gear manufacturing technique and design development
• 238 - Visit to Mahle Kom. Ges. [KG] Pragstrasse 26, Stuttgart, Bad Cannstadt
• 253 - Production of silumin alloys, Horrem
• 254 - German Aircraft Industry - mostly Blohm & Voss - weren't allowed to use alclad.*Final Report 412 - The Ott Differential Analyser (see also BIOS Report 1289 German Drawing Instrument Industry which mentions this device - one division of Faber-Castell churned out 1,000,000 high-quality slide rules a year.
• 264 - German brass and copper wire industry
• 265 - The German bichromate and chrome compound industry
• 273 - Interrogations and Reports on German Methods of Statistical Reporting - including interviews with Albert Speer & Rolf Wagenfuhr, stuff about inaccuracy of reporting for various reasons. NB! Overy is scathing about both the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) and Wagenfuhr.
  • Backlogs of untested aircraft could distort production figures by up to 1,200 units in the winter - only flown and tested a/c were officially counted.(p. 8)
  • An investigation in 1944 showed that the steel industry actually had a entire year's output in stock or in the pipeline, in reserve.(p. 22)
  • Iron reserves were kept back to meet the requirements of the Fuhrer-Programm, rather than repairing bomb damage.(notes, pp 22-23)
  • The entirety of the main quarterly planning procedure for all industry was based around iron and steel, then secondly the non-ferrous metals.(pp. 12, 20-21) Repaired aircraft may have appeared as new production.(p. 20)
  • The plan for steel for fairly simple: produce as much as possible. Expansion of aluminium production was subject to decisions by other departments - ultimately the plan depended on the supply of bauxite and the availability of power.(p. 23)
  • Wagenfuhr was asked: Did the increase in armaments production in 1943/44 result from long-term planning in 1939/41? A: No, Tank production in the first months of the war was only around 60. In 1940/41 exaggerated quotas gave rise to the idea that there would be a steel shortage. After France, production was cut down, which was repeated in 2nd half of 1941, when Russia (USSR) was thought to be already defeated. It was only from early 1942 that thoughts of a long war were being entertained, and industrial experts were called in. Wagenfuhr says that Speer first organised complete tank production, and in 2nd half 1942 production of components. In 1943 all armaments production was converted to mass production, and considerable increases were evident in 1st half of 1944. Then came the breakdown, and raw materials were almost completely exhausted.(pp. 36-37)
  • Wagenfuhr was asked: What was the decisive bottleneck in the German war economy? A: It changed. In 1939/40 it was thought there would be too little iron. Military control of the armaments industry was an organisational bottleneck. In 1942/43 there were shortages of skilled workers and components. in 1944 transport, supplies of coal, energy and iron again constituted the bottleneck.(p. 38)

• 277 - Inspection methods and procedure on German A.F.V. manufacture. Part II
• 283 A - Precision machine tools and gauges
• 283 B - Appendix, Samples of four types of measuring apparatus of German manufacture
• 284 - German production of guns, gun mountings and carriages and small arms
• 292 - German aircraft development as applicable to civil transport
• 295 - German small arms ammunition factories
• 300 - Investigation of the developments in the German automobile industry during the war period
• 301 - German piston and piston ring industry
• 314 - The German electricity supply system
• 321 - Steel propellor blade development at V.D.M., Hamburg
• 322 - Rheinmetall Borsig A.G. Dusseldorf
• 323 - Waggonfabrik A.G. (Ringfeder (G.m.b.H.)) Uerdingen
• 335 - Metallgesellschaft A.G. and the Lurgi Group of chemical engineering companies
• 340 - German small arms ammunition
• 342 - The German wartime electricity supply conditions, development, trends
• 343 - German diesel engine industry
• 346 - The German ball and roller bearing industry
• 361 - Non-metallic materials for aircraft - visits to research establishments in Germany
• 374 - German aluminium foil industry
• 376 - Recovery of aluminium alloys from aircraft scraps
• 381 - Investigation into the design, manufacture and inspection technique of aero engine gears
• 392 - Welding of aluminium and aluminium alloys with particular reference to the manufacture of pressure vessels
• 402 - Rolled non-ferrous metal industries in Germany
• 430 - The German locomotive industry
• 476 - Report on investigation of German industrial research and development with particular regard to the manufacture of heavy forgings and large bombs
• 504 - Visit to Metallgesellschaft A.G., Frankfurt a.M.
• 519 - German war time work on machinability, economy high speed steels, lead-bearing steels
• 527 - Iron, steel and non-ferrous metal works plant and machinery
• 537 A Investigation of production, control and organisation in German factories
• 537 B Investigation of production, control and organisation in German factories. Appendix, Heinkel aircraft organisation
• 553 - Drop forgings industry
• 589 - German light alloy die casting industry : machine tools for die sinking
• 592 - Iron ore preparation in Germany
• 605 - Some marine applications of light alloys in Germany
• 620 - The German motor cycle industry
• 641 - The German machine tool industry
• 648 - Ordnance muzzle brakes
• 650 - Armament production and design
• 694 - Magnesium pressure die casting Mahlewerk, Fellbach, Stuttgart
• 716 - Technical report on German steel foundries
• 729 - German aluminium and bronze flake powder industry
• 764 - Production of aluminium compounds in Germany
• 789 - Special steels : notes on practice at Krupp A.G., Essen, and Deutsche Edelstahlwerke A.G., Krefeld
• 790 - Armour plate : notes on gas carburising process carried out at Krupp A.G., Essen
• 798 The German ferro-alloy industry
• 806 - Investigation of the methods used by a few selected firms of German ball and roller bearing manufacturers
• 818 - Foundries : notes on German iron and steel foundries including centrifugal casting
• 821 - Heavy forging equipment : notes on German heavy hydraulic forging presses
• 825 - Steelmaking : notes on German practice
• 881 - Conditions in German aircraft instrument industry
• 884 - Ball bearings : notes on production of ball tubing at Deutsche Edelstahlwerke A.G. Krefeld, and production of ball races at Kugelfscher A.G., Schweinfurt
• 888 - Gun boring
• 890 - German methods of forging and machining H.E. and A.P. shell
• 895 - Aluminium production at Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke (V.A.W.) Lunen
• 897 - Ferro-alloy production furnaces at Elektrowerk Weisweiler
• 900 - German armament development technique
• 908 - Manufacture of products from powdered metals
• 910 - Investigation concerning design, material technique and production methods for valves in Germany
• 915 - German manufacture of agricultural machine parts
• 922 - Tatra car, Type 87, V-8 aircooled engine at rear
• 923 - ZF electro-magnetic gearbox type 6EV-18
• 946 - The organisation of the Siemens-Schuckert turbine works
• 954 - German steel rolling mill practice
• 958 - Utility of a Klingeinberg worm grinding machine
• 969 - Report on diesel engines and turbines : interrogation of Dr. Ing. K. Zinner of the M.A.N. at St. Ermin's Hotel, Caxton Street, London, SW1
• 974 - Alumina and aluminium production at the Lippewerk of the Vereinigte Aluminium-Werke A.G. Lunen
• 975 - Alumina production at Martinswerk Bergheim, Rhineland
• 976 - Electro-thermic production of aluminium-silicon alloys at Lurgi-Thermie G.m.b.H., Horrem
• 981 - Light alloys : notes on German technique on continuous casting and extrusion of aluminium alloys with particular reference to tube extrusion, tude reducing machines and vertical extrusion presses at the works of V.L.W., Hannover, Linden, and the works of V.D.W., Frankfurt, Heddernheim
• 982 - Light alloy rolling, Osnabruck Kupfer and Drahtwerke, Osnabruck
• 990 - The German perforated metals industry
• 997 - German alloy steel and tool steel plants
• 1003 - Some aspects of copper, nickel and cobalt production in Germany
• 1034 - Allowable gear stress and its calculation at Zahnradfabrik (Friedrichshafen)
• 1084 - German aluminium fabricating equipment
• 1089 - Aluminium refining and scrap recovery at V.A.W. Erftwerk Grevenbroich
• 1098 - Design and performance of the Steyr V.8 air-cooled automobile engine
• 1099 - Survey of secondary aluminium industry in Germany
• 1100 - German aluminium foil industry
• 1102 - 40,000 tons forging press and other hydraulic plant
• 1132 - Investigation into the inspection organisation of the German armament industry
• 1158 - Mining of iron ore by underground and opencast methods
• 1159 The Uses of Zinc in Germany - sadly only around 12 pages of 180.
• 1179 - A survey of German research and development work on titanium
• 1199 - The basic Bessemer plant and steel making practice at Reichswerke A.G. Braunschweig
• 1227 - Development of the Agile R.N.D. electrode for welding German armour plate: composite interrogation report of Dr. Wilhelm Schieffelbein (late of Agil, Berlin)
• 1237 - Engineering grey iron
• 1250 - Report on German engineers' tool industry
• 1263 - German flame hardening of armour plate and flame cutting and flame hardening of sprockets for armoured fighting vehicles
• 1295 - The production of certain types of phosphor bronze, brass and light alloy castings in Germany
• 1311 - Design and performance of the Tatra V-12 air-cooled 14.8 litre oil engine
• 1314 - German gear cutting machines and tools for use therewith
• 1318 - Manufacturing methods in the German motor cycle industry
• 1329 - German apparatus for twisting heavy forged steel crankshafts
• 1336 - The Klingelnberg system of hobbing spiral bevel gears
• 1343 - German steel armour piercing projectiles and theory of penetration
• 1354 - Aspects of German foundry practice
• 1378 - Investigation of the manufacture of diesel engines made by Klockner-Humboldt-Deutz A.G. with a view to setting up the manufacture of these engines in this country
• 1385 - The German hard metal industry
• 1391 - Development of loopscavenged two-cycle high-speed compression ignition engines of small bore
• 1423 - The application of aluminium and its alloys in Germany
• 1461 - Metallurgical examination of German centrifugally cast gun barrels ex Bochumer Verein plant
• 1469 - Impact evaluation and light alloy cartridge case manufacture in Germany
• 1554 - German malleable iron foundries (with a note on Schenck fatigue machines)
• 1580 - A rapid method for the gravimetric determination of silicon with particular reference to aluminium alloys, as practised in Materialprufundsanstalt, in Berlin
• 1609 - Compression ignition applied to the Otto cycle : the "Ring" process
• 1610 - Fundamental work on friction, lubrication and wear in Germany
• 1656 - Extrusion of light alloys in Germany : interrogation of Herr K.F. Brauninger
• 1660 - A general survey of the German non-ferrous industry
• 1670 - The production of ship armour in Italy
• 1703 - Manufacture of aluminium at I.G. Farben factory, Bitterfeld
• 1757 - Manufacture of super-purity aluminium at the Vereinigte Aluminium Werke, Erftwerk, Grevenbroich
• 1770 - High-strength Al-Zn-Mg Alloy Development in Germany
• 1833 - 400 kv transmission lines with special reference to multiple conductor lines (Bundelleitungen)
• 1850 - Iron and steel works in Germany
• 1861 - Light Alloy Foundries in Germany
• 1874 - Steam drying of coal

And then Japanese reports (Royal Armouries Coll.)

And then Misc. German reports

BIOS Surveys Report No. 23 - The non-ferrous metal industry in Germany during the period 1939-1945

Field Information Agency, Technical reports

• FIAT Final Report 1153 Mahle Hot Chamber Pressure Die Casting Machine (for die-casting Elektron)

Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee reports

Plenty listed here, many with text:

• CIOS File no. XXII-19: I.G. Farbenindustrie A.G. Leuna, Germany
• CIOS File no. XXII-20: I.G. Farbenindustrie A.G. Bunawerk, Schkopau, Germany
• CIOS File no. XXIII-38: Underground Factories in Germany - Jumo 004 and Jumo 213 (p. 30); Panzerfaust (p. 69)
• CIOS File No. XXV-45: German Aircraft Maintenance (see also XXXI-69, Spare Parts and Provisioning in the German Air Force - Luftwaffe )
• CIOS File No. XXVI-60: Light Metal Production and Development for Aircraft, I.G. Farbenindustrie, Bitterfeld
  • Wow, they had a 30,000 tonne press, the biggest in the world - 86 feet high, 3 years to build from 1939. Cost 12,000,000 RM ($4,800,000) with cast-iron dies costing 30,000 RM, which made 100,000 magnesium/elektron? propeller blades before wearing out; the press could make up 80–100 blades in 8 hours. Plus lots on aluminium and magnesium (Elektron) alloys. Plus, "The pressure of the Ministry of Aircraft Production and the Luftwaffe tended to retard the development of aluminium, and especially magnesium in favour of steel, allegedly because the necessity for control and utilisation of electricity."(p. 2)
    • Well, there's one very good reason for a 'shortage of aluminium alloy' - it's incredibly expensive to make. Hence the #Norway hydro-powered smelting/reduction scheme fiasco with Koppenberg. Narvik was utterly vital for shipments from Sweden of high-quality iron ore (almost free of contaminants like sulphur and phosphorus) during the winter; and aluminium was almost as important. And there were definitely shortages of coal throughout the war (Germany's only abundant raw material), for various reasons, including not enough coal trucks to transport the stuff because not enough steel to go round... See Part 2 below.
• CIOS File No. XXVI-83: Bayerische Motor Werke (BMW) - Rocket thrust meter testing
• CIOS File No. XXVII-76: German Die-Casting Plants - Factories and manufactured output were generally below US and UK standards; machinery mostly around 10 years old; sub-standard production and testing facilities at most plants: only Mahle was comparable with Allied production. Even Mahle's machinery had safety concerns and a high fatal/accident rate.
• CIOS File No. XXVIII-54: Production Statistics German Steel Industry 1943 and 1944; Detailed stats by Reich district for types of steel, pig iron, rolling mills, specific products etc. Extra production table
• CIOS File No. XXVIII-62: Glossary of some German Names for Chemical Products
• CIOS File No. XXIX-3: Production & Fabrication of Magnesium Alloys I.G. Farbenindustrie, Bitterfeld and Aken - inc. Mg casting alloys, and the 30,000 tonne press for forging Duralumin propellors, two at a stroke. Mg forgings for jet engines and castings for artillery and aircraft wheels; best technological improvement was pressure die-casting at Cannstadt. Plus a huge plant for the recovery of Al and Mg scrap.
• CIOS File No. XXIX-30: Hermann Göring Steel Works Paul Pleiger Hutte Stahlwerke Braunschweig - good explanation of steel shortage in 1937-8: just not enough iron ore from Sweden [but see #Iron and Steel below]. The Salzgitter ores were high in silicon, the Peine ores were lower in Fe content but high in lime and Mn, self-fluxing. (p. 9) Lots of useful steel info, manufacturing methods, etc. - 1,000,000,000 RM invested in the Braunschweig plant. Basically the ore needed a load more beneficiating than Swedish ore and was therefore more expensive, but the quality of the steel was good enough, plus some vanadium content.
• CIOS File No. XXXI-23 Metallgesellschaft-Lurgi Frankfurt Am Main - 3 separate pdfs, mostly detailing chemical processes.
• CIOS File No. XXXI-69: Spare Parts and Provisioning in the G.A.F. (ie Luftwaffe)
  • inc. why Me 262s were grounded for lack of parts, and the provision on the Eastern Front of entire railway trains full of spare parts... (see also XXV-45 German Aircraft Maintenance.) In fact, the spare parts system of the Luftwaffe appears to have been incredibly well-organised compared to the Army up until the last year of the war. However, Adolf Galland's wartime memoirs The first and the last: the rise and fall of the German fighter forces, 1938-1945 says otherwise, claiming that provision of spares and maintenance were as bad as the Army's. In Russia it was not the Soviet air defence but complete lack of the prerequisites of supplies and repair that was a deciding factor, plus the Army's urgent demands.(Galland p. 63)

USAF Historical Studies

Air Force Historical Research Agency

Approximately 200 reports on all sorts of air subjects, around 50 written by German generals etc. after the war: Nos. 150-200 Including all parts of The German Air Force Versus Russia, 1941–1943 and reports on Poland, 1940 campaigns, and other interesting titles.

Other

Findmittel der Eigenbestände, Nachlässe und Sammlungen (Finding aids): III. 55. Reichswerke Hermann Göring. Pub. Stiftung für Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Includes Allied reports, inc. BIOS, towards the end.

Summary of contemporary resources

The Germans really should have won the war, judged on effort alone - they didn't because the NS-regime installed Nazi nincompoops and lickspittles from Göring downwards instead of capable administrators like Erhard Milch, former head of Lufthansa up to 1933?, who appears to be consistently praised throughout most of the sources. Plus, Hitler was in too much of a hurry, or was persuaded that his re-armament plans would be completed much earlier. And the omnipresent blind faith that brand new weapons would work perfectly, misreporting of true status, having Hitler as supreme commander of the Army, inter-service and intra-service rivalry etc., etc.

Armaments production in 1943-44 seems to have been highest during the entire period, which was about the time when Hitler should have actually started the war with any hope of winning. The war was lost by December 1941 'before the gates of Moscow.' There was never enough provision of supplies and maintenance to keep one Army Group going on the Eastern Front, let alone all three.

Oh dear, Economy of Germany 1933-1945

See also: Economy of Nazi Germany

A backwards glance o'er travell'd roads

Although this article began by inquiring about the type of aluminium alloy used in the Maybach HL210, tanks only accounted for about 4 or 5% of total armaments production, and apart from lots of armour plate it was mostly cast iron for crankcases and special steels for crankshafts, etc. Only a max. of 500 HL210s with alloy crankcases were ever made, and apart from large numbers of alloy pistons, that was pretty much it for light metal usage in tank engines: the main engine crankcases, cylinders and heads on all the other production Maybach engines were made of cast iron. Really? Check... Maybach's pre-war plans for an entire range of much lighter alloy engines came - i fink - to almost nothing.

There was nothing particularly wrong with the HL210 - it was just wasn't powerful enough for the first production Panther and Tigers, which weighed considerably more than their prototypes: and only a cast iron engine with bigger and stronger cylinders could provide more power from exactly the same engine dimensions, since they had been designed to fit in a specific size engine compartment.

• It seems that there were other alloy engines apart from the HL210: the HL30 (1939), HL45 (1939) and HL66 (1941) made series production, the HL116 (1938) didn't. Source: see User:MinorProphet/Draft subpages/WW2 Maybach gearboxes#Table 1 - List of many Maybach engines: NB! click 'Notes' column to sort by engines with aluminium alloy blocks (needs Javascript)

The tank industry in general mostly needed steel, either for hardened armour plate and castings: or for ordnance, ammunition, road wheels, tracks and so on.

Attempts to make eg lighter gun carriages from aluminium alloys seem to have been abandoned because raw materials were channeled towards the aircraft industry. See eg Hogg somewhere. Haha, haha, see #Ex. 2 So how did Hogg arrive at this idea???

• Hogg, Ian V. (1997) [1975]. German Artillery of World War Two (2nd, corrected ed.). Mechanicsville, PA: Stackpole Books. ISBN 1-85367-480-X.

By far the greatest consumer of aluminium and copper was the aircraft industry, which from September 1939 onwards accounted for at least 40% of Germany's armaments output, followed closely by ordnance, shell casings and cartridges, which needed steel, copper and vanadium.(Tooze, chart p. 374)

The second half of this article has thus turned into a search for how the constant lack of raw materials was somehow overcome until 1944; and how the permanent shortages of everything, especially metals both ferrous and non-ferrous, affected production in various parts of the German war industry.

The whole of the following definitely needs a complete split into a separate article or something.

Tentative overview

This is the sort of thing I'm looking for, but about relating to Germany:

• Erin M. K. Weir - "German Submarine Blockade, Overseas Imports, and British Military Production in World War II" Journal of Strategic Military Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2003): Spring 2003

In fact, the above work pointed me towards the rest of the following sections.

Reading Scherner et al. and Tooze below: If I have understood correctly: there may well have been a perceived or actual shortage of aluminium in 1942 & 1943, as remarked on by the US Strategic Bombing Survey above. In early 1942 Albert Speer instituted a big drive to replace existing copper overhead power lines and telecoms cables with aluminium ones, since copper was considerably more industrially and economically important. Furthermore, it wasn't necessarily an actual aluminium shortage that was the problem: from January 1943 Speer and Hitler's massive tank program meant there was a greatly increased emphasis on steel for tanks (see #Speer, and historiography and #Tooze below) which may have held up supply of other materials, eg aluminium. Not quite sure, but looks persuasive.

After Operation Barbarossa, Erich von Manstein's armies had captured Krivoj Rog, a main centre of Soviet iron ore production, and holding on to it was the key to increased steel production. Also, manganese (which also removes sulphur, present in many iron ores), vanadium and chromium were essential for production of specialist steels, eg for crankshafts, and there were large deposits in the Ukraine which needed to remain under the control of the occupying German armies. {Tooze, pp. 622-3) In fact (as I have since discovered) the Nikopol manganese mines provided 90% of Germany's needs while they were under occupation, and a corrseponding 90% loss of the entire Soviet output.(See #Manganese.)

Plus, as the #Norway section shows, Croatia's bauxite exports dwindled to almost nothing, and the Germans never got to the bauxite reserves in the northern Koala (lol) peninsula.

But by March 1943 the RAF had enough bombers to start bombing western Germany's industrial cities in earnest, and the Battle of the Ruhr had begun.{Tooze, pp. 622-3) This signalled the end of the boom in armaments for the rest of 1943.(Tooze, Figure 22, p. 627, & pp. 632-3)

Even by May 1943, when the Eastern front was temporarily quieter, expectations of even more steel production were high. And then the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, for which the Germans were simply not prepared and had absolutely no reserves either. Kursk itself was not totally disastrous, it was just a failed pincer movement; but its consequences were. The Germans never actually got to Moscow, or Leningrad, or the main oil wells in the Caucasus, let alone Baku. The entire Eastern campaign turned out to be a complete disaster by August 1941.

Kursk

Many myths grew up about Kursk. This is extensively analysed in Part II of Germany and the Second World War. Volume VIII, The Eastern Front 1943-1944 - the war in the East and on the neighbouring fronts. First English edition, 2017. Make cite book!

What seems apparent from the author's research is that Operation Citadel was never meant to be a make-or-break 'decisive battle'. Its main reason to was to shorten the front line by around 250 km and to relieve some troops for the expected opening of a second, Western front. Hitler was always ready to break it off if the Allies invaded Sicily, which happened almost immediately after on 10 July 1943.

The Germans were aware that Soviets knew all about the attackers' plans even to the time of day, and even so the Germans made a frontal assault at the most heavily defended point. The defending Soviets attacked even before the German assault had begun. On p. 154 there is a graphic of relative losses: the Germans only lost c. 250 tanks (etc.) out of 2,700, while the Soviets lost c. 1,950 tanks out of 8,200. The Germans lost 54,000 men out of 625,000, against 319,000 out of very nearly 2 million Soviet troops. The Germans had absolutely no strategic or tactical reserves whatsoever, and the Soviets just poured wave after wave of tanks and men (probably very drunk, p. 123) into the cauldron of destruction. So despite horrendous losses on the defenders' part, the Soviets were always going to be ahead in resources, manpower, weapons and reserves.

The whole operation failed in its objective to snip the bulge of the Kursk salient with a pincer movement, and was hurriedly called off on 16 July 1943. (Summary, pp 168-170) Mussolini's Fascist regime fell on 24–25 July 1943.

A graph on p. 156 shows that total German tanks/assault guns were around 1,250 on 5-6 July, but the Soviets had 3,500. The Germans had replenished their losses by October 1943 and had nearly 1,600 tanks on hand by December: and the Soviets - with seven times the tank losses at Kursk - had built back up to a similar 3,500 tanks again also by December 1943.

Speer's drive for tanks certainly paid off (see further below under Tooze), although tanks only made up around 5% of Germany's total armaments production. And anyway, the war had been essentially lost in December 1941 with the failure before Moscow of Operation Barbarossa. The author of Part II of Germany and the Second World War. Volume VIII says that the Sicily landings were a far more significant event than Kursk, which had little strategic significance.

Tank thing diversion

The lede of List of WWII Maybach engines needs updating because the HL120s fitted in the Ferdinand (whose debut was at Kursk) were not designed for it, and certainly didn't like the treatment they were given. For a start the intended twin Porsche Type 101 petrol air-cooled V-10s never worked satisfactorily, and the HL120s were theoretically a stopgap - until the never-to-be-produced new generation of alloy engines appeared... The Maybachs had to run at the top of their rev range to drive the electric generators and motors. Thus overheating because the radiators took up so much space compared to the air-cooled Porsches, and had an 800 km maximum lifetime, if that.

See Anderson, Thomas (2015) Elefant and Ferdinand Tank Destroyer Oxford: Osprey Publishing isbn 9781472813466 - the latest super-heavy Ferdinand assault guns, Sturmpanzers and tracked explosive devices like the Borgward IV and Goliath tracked mine for minefield clearance etc. were just not sorted enough to be combat ready, exactly the same as the arrival of the Panther in 1942.(ref Anderson 2015 p. 127) These delays in readying the latest Durchbruchwaffen meant that the Soviets had plenty of time to prepare their well-constructed defences, and had also built up massive reserves; the Germans had nothing extra in reserve; although only a small handful of Ferdinands were completely destroyed by enemy action, many were knocked out and almost half the Ferdinands suffered from technical failures although they were later recovered.

In the end only around 50 Ferdinands survived to go back to the Nibelungenwerk in Vienna. Operation Husky (the Sicily landings) happened almost immediately after Kursk, and loads of divisions were withdrawn from the East & elsewhere to counter the new southern European threat. Around 11 refurbished and re-named Elefants went to Italy from Vienna for the Anzio landings where they were completely unsuited first to the marshy terrain at the bridgehead and then in the retreat to the wotsit line. Winding mountain roads destroyed the brakes, steering and tracks: only 2 + one Berge Elefant survived the Italian campaign by August 1944, and all the remaining 40 or so were sent back from Vienna to the Eastern Front where they were all slowly destroyed in the retreat towards Berlin in 1945 when only one or two remained.

Anderson, pp. 145-155, shows the typical situation with regard to spares and repairs in September 1943 on the Eastern Front suffered by Panzerjäger-Regiment 656: difficulty of finding suitable premises to carry out repairs; only 10 engines out of 60 needed for Ferdinand overhaul arrived; spares sent to the wrong place; parts going missing in transit; lack of cranes, tools, grinding wheels to alter thousands of individual track extensions; only 30 out of 75 final drives converted by Škoda being delivered; 30 new engines needing to to be pulled off the production line of Panzer III and IVs since the Nibelungenwerk only had 10 (p. 154); a complete mess and waste of time. The new engines still hadn't arrived by March 1944 when 19 Ferdinands were being disassembled at the St. Valentin works.(p. 166)

November 1943: The engines only had a lifetime of 800 km, having to drive electric motors at full revs - another new 90 engines (two per vehicle) were still needed for the 45 Ferdinands in November 1943, otherwise there all the tanks would be lost.(p. 158). Require urgent supply of 30 sets pistons and cylinder liners for Ferdinand engines including four tool sets to install them, to be delivered via air transport [Junkers 57]. Due to the lack of engines the running repair works and thus operational readiness is at stake.(p. 158)

A number of German tanks were plagued with problems. Series production of the Panzer III was delayed by over a year because of the new Maybach gearbox: the Tiger and Panther had endless teething problems; over-stressed Maybach HL120 engines driving electrical generators in the Ferdinand, but installed in a space designed for air-cooled Porsche engines which had never worked satisfactorily; and so on. Expectations of the Ferdinand were so high that delays in getting it vaguely combat-ready delayed the start of the Battle of Kursk by over two months. And the Balkan diversion (Yugoslavian coup?) as well.

——

I constantly get the sense that the most of the High Command were not technically minded in the least, and were totally incapable of understanding the difficulties involved in developing brand-new tanks/aircraft into combat-ready weapons. Although Göring was the head of the Luftwaffe, he was also much more into his other enterprises - the Hermann Göring Reichswerke was vast, and after his failures in both Britain and the Soviet Union he became much less interested in 'his' air force. But he seems often not to have been kept informed on the status of various projects eg the Heinkel 177 with its disastrous linked engines.

This same old wishful thinking, exacerbated by wildly inaccurate estimates, that untried and untested technology was going to work straight out of the box.

And spares for the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front with Milch ...

"Colonel Petersen sent to Rechlin [in Germany] for cold-start squads to work on the sixty-five Junkers transporters abandoned to the Russian winter at Zverevo. They found that no attempt whatever had been made by the Junkers crews to operate the trustworthy cold-start procedure. ‘The Ju 52 squadrons did not even know of it,’ Milch later related, ‘because they had arrived from Africa.’ Special cold-start fuel was also available not far away, but the squadrons had no transport and dared not appropriate the army’s unused vehicles. Meantime, Milch investigated what had happened to the accommodation and equipment the Air Transport Commander had requested through service channels. ‘They are probably still waiting for it,’ he mocked three weeks later. ‘I found out that the trains did actually set out, in part, but they were shunted off somewhere else because more important stuff had to be transported. So they lay around . . . and who knows where they are today?’ " (Irving 1973, p. 213)

Anyway, back to aluminium...

Speer, and historiography

Well, I'm obviously not the first to wonder about Germany's wartime economy. Two main theories grew up after the war to explain the surge in productivity from 1942: the Blitzkrieg thesis; and the 'inefficiency' thesis of of Richard Overy and Rolf-Dieter Müller, both arising from historians' views concerning Albert Speer's appointment as Armaments Minister in February 1942 and his drive to reduce costs. Jonas Scherner et al., following i fink Adam Tooze, claim that production was already increasing from c1936, and existing cost-plus contracts were replaced with fixed-price contracts. i fink.

In fact the increase in aircraft production was mostly due to Erhard Milch, who had been the chief of Lufthansa before 1933 and became friendly with Hitler. He was head of the Air Ministry's technical department in 1938 but was replaced by Ernst Udet, appointed by Göring. Udet, while a brilliant pilot and bon viveur, was totally unsuitable for the job, and almost all the problems faced by the Luftwaffe from 1942 are the result of Udet's mismanagement from 1938 to late 1941. The only immediately successful German aircraft design to appear after the start of the war was the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 - everything else was a mess. When Milch succeeded Udet after his suicide, the rate of production - which had been nearly flat since the war started - was greatly increased.

See The Rise and fall of the German Air Force, 1933-1945 - London: Air Ministry 1948, Intros and chapter 20 https://archive.org/details/risefallofgerman0000unse_q7k4/page/3

Blitzkrieg thesis

"In the first three decades following the Second World War, this discontinuous development of German armament production was usually explained by the so-called Blitzkrieg thesis. Scholars claimed that Hitler deliberately decided to under-mobilize the German armament industry in order to free up resources for producing consumption goods that were needed to maintain the German population’s approval of the Nazi’s antagonistic policies. Only after the military failures at the end of 1941 did German military planners acknowledge that they had to increase weapons production considerably by assigning as many resources and workers to armament production as possible.This view was first expressed by the Final Report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) (by J. K. Galbraith ??) published in October 1945: ‘The Germans did not plan for a long war, nor were they prepared for it. Hitler’s strategy contemplated a series of separate thrusts and quick victories’."

'Inefficiency' thesis

"Since the 1980s, however, the validity of the Blitzkrieg thesis has been questioned by many scholars, for two main reasons.[8] On the one hand, historians failed to discover evidence which proves that Hitler went into war with a deliberate Blitzkrieg strategy. On the other hand, it became clear that the Nazis did not consciously under-mobilize the armament industry before 1942 but heavily invested in armament production in the early period of the Second World War...

"Overy and Müller therefore introduced the inefficiency thesis into the historiography of the German Second World War economy. [10] In Overy’s view, it was the untimely outbreak of the Second World War, originally planned to start not earlier than 1942, that brought German mobilization into temporary disorder. Müller claims that the inefficiency of the armament industry resulted from the political incoherence (polycracy) of the Third Reich. Both authors share the opinion that first and foremost it was armament minister Albert Speer, who assumed office in February 1942, who was responsible for fostering German armament production by removing the major obstacles for productivity growth...

"Speer is especially credited with making the following political decisions. 12 First, the number of weapon types was reduced, which might have allowed many firms to move to mass production and exploit economies of scale. Second, the frequency of minor design changes of a special type was decreased, so firms could save at least some of the costs arising from adapting their production equipment. Third, against the express wishes of the armed forces, finishing (fi lol) procedures like polishing or lacquering that add nothing to the destructive power of a weapon were abolished, which reduced the working hours needed to produce one piece of an armament good. Fourth, firms were forced to share technological know-how in newly established inter-firm committees in order to give less efficient firms the information considered necessary for imitating the technology of the superior firms. This might have especially accelerated the diffusion of flow production techniques in German industry."

Wow... MinorProphet (talk) 02:51, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

"The fact that labour was probably the most important bottleneck in the German war industry explains why armament manufacturers were often not able to utilize their production capacity fully by running two or three shifts. 51 [51] This observation was stressed by Kaldor, ‘German war economy’, p. 35." This is mentioned in the BIOSreport on the Light Metal Industry i fink, see below. Also Irving 1973, p. 186: "At this time [August 1942] ninety percent of the aircraft industry was not even able to work a second shift because of the labour shortage."

The rest of their well-written and convincing paper is mostly concerned with reducing labour costs, and not raw materials/light alloys; but the intro is helpful (i fink) in outlining some of the apparent shortages from 1942.

• Budrass, Lutz; Scherner, Jonas; Streb, Jochen (2010). "Fixed-price contracts, learning, and outsourcing: Explaining the Continuous Growth of Output and Labour Productivity in the German Aircraft Industry During WW2". Economic History Review. 63 (1): 107–136. or on JSTOR.

Aha! From section II of the above,

"In order to address this problem, we explore German armament firms' economic development on the basis of the annual audit reports of the Deutsche Revisions- und Treuhand AG, which have been widely ignored until now.31"

"The Federal Archives in Berlin possess a large collection of the audit reports of the Deutsche Revisions- und Treuhand AG [VIAG] for firms that were engaged in German armament production during the Second World War.32 Most of the available audit reports cover the period from 1939 to 1943. Since the auditors needed at least one year to prepare their reports, most of the audits for the accounting years 1943/4 and 1944 are unfortunately missing and were probably never finished."

These are the monthly reports by the Reichsamt fur wehrwirtschaftliche Planung, listed on p. 53 [61] of Guides to German records microfilmed at Alexandria, VA, No. 1: Records of the Reich Ministry of Economics. I went hunting for them without success, but apparently Scherner et al. have examined them.

Also re-read A re-assessment of the German Armaments Production during World War II by Ioannis-Dionysios Salavrakos.

Scherner et al: Non-ferrous metals in Germany

Eg Aluminium, copper, tin. NB Alumimium + copper = Duralumin, for aircraft production. Check out also compulsory? purchase of German church bells, and also loss of French public statuary?, for tin (Zinn) component of bronze.

"In early summer 1942, Germany’s supply prospects were even significantly better because the Nazi government had just decided to replace copper wires [ie power transmission cables] across the country with open wires[?] made of aluminium and an iron-zinc alloy.27 [27] J. Scherner, Lernen und Lernversagen immediately below, pp. 258-60." (Scherner, Incompetence, p. 559) Well, they wouldn't have been able to do that if there wasn't enough aluminium to go round, would they? Hmm, this was NS-regime Germany...

NB Machine translation from German: "Even if all of these measures made it possible to cover around two months of German copper consumption, they still by far did not represent a liberation, as had happened with tin with the bell purchase. Therefore, it was decided to carry out two further, significantly "more productive" measures in the early summer of 1942: the "Fellgiebel Action", which included the collection of copper from unnecessary civilian and military communication cables and light lines, and the "Copper Action", which included the mobilization and substitution of copper electrical high and medium voltage lines. 152 In contrast to the previous mobilization measures, the Kupferaktion was not directly subordinate to the RWM, but to Albert Speer, so that it was often also called "Kupferaktion Speer" in official correspondence: the General Inspector for Water and Energy was responsible for the Kupferaktion. 153 (Scherner, Metallmobilisierung , pdf extract [pp. 27-28], corresponding (i fink) to pp. 258-60 of the original paper cited in Scherner, Incomptence)

"The mobilization of copper power lines was not a new idea, nor was it due to Speer - the first considerations had been made before Speer took office and it was also a measure that had already been taken in the First World War. 154 Ever since the "seizure of power" (Machtergreifung) new power lines in Germany had been made almost exclusively of aluminum to save foreign exchange, and it was clear that the existing copper cables had a high potential for mobilization. 155 It can therefore be assumed that this measure had already been subsumed by Zimmermann at the beginning of 1940 under the mobilization measures to be carried out at a later date because they were very expensive due to the necessary provision of replacements. At the beginning of 1942, the RWM had also drawn up a plan to mobilize 40,000 tons of copper by replacing overhead copper lines with aluminum cables. 156 (Scherner, Metallmobilisierung , [p. 28])

"It is also clear, however, that it was only after Speer took office that the copper campaign to be carried out quickly took shape and was massively expanded compared to the original plans of the RWM. An estimate of the amount of copper that could be mobilized in this way, requested by Hitler by May 1st, was 157,000 to 157 for power lines alone - which could have covered about eight months of German copper consumption at that time." (Scherner, Metallmobilisierung , [p. 28])

• J. Scherner, Lernen und Lernversagen: Metallmobilisierung im Deutschen Reich 1939-45 https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2579663/JonasSchernerMetallmobilisierung.pdf

"Several factors were responsible for the underreporting of German imports in the official trade statistics. One important reason, and crucial for the examination of German – Italian trade relations in a comparative perspective, was that from 1939 on imports of the so-called Wehrmachtgut (goods owned by the Wehrmacht or goods imported to be used directly by the military) were exempt from statistical registration.35 This leads to the stunning insight that goods produced on the behalf of the Wehrmacht all over Europe, i.e. in Axis, neutral and occupied countries, are only partly included in official German trade statistics. (Scherner, Incompetence, p. 560)

"By placing civilian orders abroad, German authorities aimed to free up domestic industrial capacities for armament production and, by using idle capacities of foreign companies, to avoid unnecessary investments." (Scherner, Incompetence, p. 561)

"Substitution of copper with aluminium in the electrotechnical industry seems to have started only in the late 1930s. The recycling of aluminium scrap [for that industry?] started only after Italy was involved in the war, i.e. at a point of time when recycling covered already 27 per cent of Germany’s aluminium consumption. 95 [95] L. Budraß, Ideology and Business Strategy: Assessing Nazi Germany’s Different Approaches to the Supply of Light Metals for the Luftwaffe" (Scherner, Incompetence, p. 570)

Abstract of L. Budraß, Ideology and Business Strategy: "The Leichtmetallausbau Norwegen was an epitome of the Nazi Grossraumwirtschaft (Greater Economic Area) for Europe. At first, a domestic aluminium ore, labradorite, was to be used; at a later stage a much richer ore, bauxite, should be transported from France, Hungary and Croatia to Norway." https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-53423-1_2 - AHA! See #Norway - this produced almost exactly nil (0%) more aluminium, thanks to inefficiency, lack of imported bauxite supplies, wishful thinking, and Allied bombing.

Source cited by Scherner: Bundesarchiv (BArch) R 3/1797, Rapid statistical reports on war production (copper, nickel and steel), BArch RW 19/2336 (aluminium). (Scherner, Incompetence, p. 569, n88)

RW= RW 1 Reichswehrministerium / Reichskriegsministerium https://www.bundesarchiv.de/EN/Navigation/Find/Digitised-Fonds/digitised-fonds.html

But RW 19 is not digitised... alas.

All the above is the result of

• Scherner, Jonas: Incompetence or Ingenuity - Why Did Nazi Germany Not Seek Closer Wartime Economic Cooperation with Italy? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00220094221100002

• See also: #Finally, some answers, which I think lays most questions in this article to rest

Tooze

MAKE SUB-SECTIONS!

MOVE CITES TO SOURCES!!

And then:

• Tooze, Adam (2007). The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Viking. ISBN 9780670038268.

Blimey, it's incredibly complicated.

"The German economy was simply not strong enough to create the military force necessary to overwhelm all its European neighbours, including both Britain and the Soviet Union, let alone the United States." (Tooze, e-book p. 26)

"We are thus left with the truly vertiginous conclusion that Hitler went to war in September 1939 without any coherent plan as to how actually to defeat the British Empire, his major antagonist.Why did Hitler take this epic gamble? This surely is the fundamental question." (Tooze, e-book pp. 26-7)

Well, Tooze's book makes the case that the German war economy suffered from continuous shortages. I think it's quite convincing, but who am I to know? There's lots of extracts further below.

Richard Overy says this is not the case at all. He states that Germany had "more aluminium, steel, coal, and machine tools than Britain or, after the 1941 invasion, the Soviet Union, and more manpower." Overy 1994 [wot?] and Mülller 2000 proposed the #'Inefficiency' thesis - Overy says the war started too early, and Mülller says that the entire regime and production methods suffered from political incoherence (polycracy), too many bosses. It's clear to everyone (or at least me) that filling the list of military-party managers with grafting, NS incompetents and replacing people like Erhard Milch with Ernst Udet and Jeschonnek was never going to work. Overy again: "In 1941 Germany still produced only 3,298 tanks, none of them heavy models." - yah, but they had only just suffered the total surprise of the T-38 in Russia in June, and weren't expecting any upsets. "Tank production was hamstrung during this period because the army favoured specialist producers and high technical specifications." True, but the only other manufacturers with real-world mass production experience were Opel and Ford, both US-owned.

• Overy, Richard (2020). "The German economy from peace to war: The Blitzkrieg economy revisited". In Broadberry, Stephen; Harrison, Mark (eds.). The Economics of the Second World War: Seventy-Five Years On (PDF). London: CEPR Press. ISBN 978-1-912179-31-2.

R. J. Overy, in the intro to his collection of earlier essays

• Overy, Richard (1994). War and economy in the Third Reich. Clarendon Press. ISBN 0191647373.

says that "...Hitler came to realise that industry had something he wanted: the ability to run the war economy more effectively than the party-military alliance that tried to do so for the first two years of the conflict." [And indeed for several for years previously.] The lack of new aircraft designs during the war was directly down to Udet and Göring's meddling from 1936 ownwards.

As the interview with Wagenführ above shows... wot? Hmm - Overy 1994, pp. 27–8, disses Wagenführ as not knowing enough about the wider implications of the economy, and working from raw data. Overy admits (or shows) that a) German industry practices were simply incredibly wasteful until Speer's appointment and that b) the economy itself was managed with an extraordinary degree of muddle and inefficiency.

In the end, you're never going to get to the end of this sad tale - do yourself a favour and concentrate on ZF and Maybach gearboxes...

Germany economy up to 1939

"In 1926, at its Leuna facility near Merseburg, in the central German industrial belt, IG Farben (BASF, Robert Bosch, Hoechst AG & Bayer AG), embarked on the construction of the world’s first facility for coal hydrogenation, the alchemical process through which coal was transformed into petrol." (Tooze, p. 142)

In fact the oil rush in Texas in 1930 and Venezuela meant that the price of oil fell dramatically, and for the time the investment was worthless - until the war when 4 million tons annually of synthetic fuel and lubricants were made.. German synthetic fuel factories, at huge expense, produced a flow of petrol that rose from 4 million tons in 1940 to a maximum of 6.5 million tons in 1943.(Tooze, p. 441)

During winter 1943–1944 the Brabag synthetic fuel industry made huge strides. Reserve stocks were 280,000 tonnes in September 1943; 390,000 by December; and 574,000 t by April 1944. But from May 1944 USAAF and RAF bombers hit the plants of Leuna, Pölitz, Böhlen, Lützkendorf, Magdeburg, Zeitz and Ruhland, and by the end of June 90% production had been lost. The reserves lasted another 3 months, but by August 1944 the lack of aircraft fuel was dire.(Rise and Fall of the German Air Force 1933-1945, pp. 348-9, graph on p. 350) Excellent pic of the railway sidings at Leuna on p. 351. However, the Allies failed to follow up the raids; production re-started with 18,000 tonnes in October and 39,000 tonnes in November 1944. This made air support possible during the Ardennes campaign and the Remagen bridgehead. Blimey, it was fairly desperate. In fact the Panzer divisions in the Ardennes ran out of fuel before reaching their targets. Further bombing by the Allies from December 1944, including a synthetic plant at Brüx in Czech, brought production almost completely to a halt by April 1945.(Rise and Fall of the German Air Force 1933-1945, p. 352)

In 1934 Hjalmar Schacht, head of the Reichsbank, forced the creation of a compulsory cartel of brown coal mining firms named Braunkohlenbenzin AG (Brabag) to invest in the process, which was overseen by Heinrich Koppenberg who had been installed as the president of Junkers, who was also involved in the Norwegian aluminium fiasco from 1940. see #Norway above...(Tooze, pp. 142-144)

Lots about the ordnance and armaments industry and how involved the Nazis were in the whole scheme (Tooze, c. p. 148) inc. Hanomag, Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke etc.,

Oh I see, the Nazis simply slowly siezed Junkers [Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke AG (JFM)], from Professor Hugo Junkers by October 1933 and installed Koppenberg as the head. The whole of the aircraft industry was created and owned by the NS-regime, and they wanted Junkers as well. (Tooze, p. 152)

"Like steel, aluminium production in Germany depended on imports of bauxite ore. But unlike iron ore, bauxite could be obtained in sufficient quantity from Hungary and Yugoslavia, countries with which the RWM had negotiated efficient bilateral trading agreements. To process the ore, the state-owned Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke, part of the VIAG group, poured 180 million Reichsmarks into a tenfold expansion of smelting capacity.98" (Tooze, p. 154)

According to Tooze, almost the entire NS-regime economy was owned and run by the state for the sole purpose of producing armaments. Because the NS regime was permanently short of foreign exchange, domestic non-ferrous and steel production was rationed from early 1937, in favour of steel exports which earned cash (Tooze, pp. 256-7) - Perversely, but predictably, this squeeze affected the whole of the armaments and rail industries. Although Hitler's Four Year Plan had been aiming for war in four years from 1936, at the rate of current arms and aircraft production in 1937-8 the Wehrmacht High Command wasn't going to be properly prepared and equipped for war until around 1943.(Tooze, p. 267, 285)

"Weeks before, in Milch’s absence, [Göring] had already taken a crucial decision. He had ordered [around March-April 1937] the scrapping of both the four-engined heavy bomber prototypes developed by Junkers and Dornier to meet the requirement issued by Milch and Wever four years before. The Ju 89 and the Do 19—the latter with its 110-foot wingspan and 19 tons take-off weight—were generally considered to be far ahead of their time.

"Only later did Milch learn of this arbitrary decision and how it had come about: Kesselring and Jeschonnek had suggested to Göring that it would be better to drop the heavy bomber projects in view of the pressure on scarce raw materials. The records do indeed show that of the 4,500 tons of aluminium required monthly for aircraft manufacture, only about half was currently available. Göring had inquired, 'How many twin-engined aircraft can we make for each four-engined one?' The reply was 'about two and a half.' 'The Führer,' concluded Göring, 'does not ask me how big my bombers are, but how many there are.' " (Irving 1973, p. 62)

"The increase in the Luftwaffe proceeded, but not as planned. In September Göring approved Milch’s estimate of three thousand million Reichsmarks for this programme in 1938; but money alone was not enough, as raw material shortages had become increasingly apparent, particularly in the supply of iron and steel as the services competed for them. Early in June Hitler had asked Blomberg to report on the effect of these shortages on rearmament, and late in August the Air Ministry had to warn that because of them there would have to be ‘a significant reduction in the Luftwaffe’s rate of expansion’. The complete equipment of the squadrons would not be achieved until April 1939, a delay of six months on their original target. By the end of October 1937 even this prediction was recognized as over-optimistic, and Milch advised Göring that the iron and steel deficit was such as to set back some elements of the next five years’ production programme by as much as another five years." (Irving 1973, p. 65)

Although there were huge untapped reserves of low-to-medium quality iron ore in the Saarland eg Salzgitter, the steel industry, mostly Vereinigte Stahlwereke, was in in favour of importing high-grade ore from Sweden.(Tooze, p. 260) In July 1937 Goering compulsorily purchased the entirety of the German iron ore fields and initiated the erection of three huge steel plants for the purpose.(Tooze, p. 262) In fact, the steel made at Salzgitter was of such poor quality that the plant only operated intermittently. Vereinigte Steel had owned the Salzgitter ore fields for many years but deemed the steel to not be of marketable quality.(Elimination of German Resources for War, Hearings, p. 232)

Well, Lord Copper, it depends what you mean by 'marketable'. Iron is iron, and its many ores vary greatly in quality. Compared to typical imported Swedish ores with high Fe content (up to 60%?), the ores contain less native iron (23–30%) are very high (approx. 25%) in either silicon (Si) or in lime (CaO), with significant amounts of phosphorus and sulphur (contaminants needeing to be removed by extra benficiation/smelting processes. This makes the resulting steel more expensive to produce. See CIOS XXIX-30 (Hermann Göring Steel Works: Paul Pleiger Hutte, Stahlwerke Branschweig), p. 7, for much more detail. The Corby steelworks in Northamptonshire, England, had lit its first Bessemer converter in 1934, with a fourth converter being in operation by the end of 1937. The ores there were POSSIBLY? quite similar to the Salzgitter/Peine mines, and showed that steel could be made economically. Ha! Find Iron Ores of Great Britain (which one?) This was one reason why the Göring Works was set up in the first place, although it never produced enough steel to make a profit. There were open-hearth and electric furnaces, and Gilchrist-Thomas basic converters. Much of the output of the various methods was blended/mixed to make specific steels.(CIOS XXIX-30, p. 19)

Also, the Anschluss of 1938 had made the Austrian Erzberg available, with its enormous mountain of high-grade ore.(Tooze, p. 271) The Reichswerke Hermann Goering summarily expropriated the whole lot.(Tooze, p. 271) Nevertheless, armaments and explosive production fell in 1938 because of the steel squeeze.

Milch, who had been sidelined in 1938 by the appointment of Udet by a jealous Göring as his deputy Air Minister, warned in summer 1939 of the effects of short-termism on the projected growth of the Lufwaffe until 1942. He warned that England would go to war over the Danzig / Polish corridor question, and it would be folly to provoke war in such an unprepared state.(The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force 19335-1945, p. 20)

But it wasn't until September 1938 that General Hellmuth Felmy reported to Göring that he simply didn't have a strategic bomber force capable of taking on the RAF. "The Luftwaffe was incapable of effectively attacking Britain. 'With the means available,' [Felmy] wrote, 'we cannot expect to achieve anything more than a disruptive effect. Whether this will lead to an erosion of the British will to fight is something that depends on imponderable and certainly unpredictable factors... A war of annihilation against Britain appears out of the question with the means at hand.'"(Irving, 1973, p. 73) According to Irving, Milch had been warning of this since 1933, when he said he needed ten years to turn the Luftwaffe into an efficient fighting force.(Irving, 1973, p. 81)

Thus the revitalised Junkers Ju 88, which first flew in June 1938 and wasn't introduced until 1939 - according to wiki article (reffed) there were only 12 in the invasion of Poland.

"The Luftwaffe’s expansion was due for completion in 1942, and as late as the end of July 1939 Göring calmly accepted the assessment by Milch and Udet that the ultimate strength of five thousand Ju 88 bombers would be reached in April 1943. On 22 July 1939 Raeder confirmed to his officers that the Führer had given him an undertaking that no war was at hand. Hitler made similar statements to Milch, when the latter reported that recently in Rome Mussolini had also stated, 'War is inevitable, but we shall try to postpone it until 1942.' "(Irving, 1973, p. 81)

And thus the enormous pre-allocation of aluminium to the Luftwaffe, whether it was going to be available or not. And it seems that no-one but Hitler was expecting war in September 1939.

Impossible aircraft production targets

"The dilemma, [exports vs. armaments] however, could not be escaped. Something had to be done to revive Germany’s faltering exports and this was bound to come at the expense of the armaments programmes. Already on 24 November 1938, the armed forces received the news that in the coming year their overall steel ration was to be cut back from 530,000 to only 300,000 tons.58" (Tooze, p. 327)

"By July 1939 there were cuts even to the army’s weapons programmes...Perhaps most dramatically in light of later events, the tank programme, which aimed for the production of 1,200 medium battle tanks and command vehicles between October 1939 and October 1940, was now to be cut in half.63 [63] BAMA RH15/152, 37. = Bundesarchiv RH 15 OKH / Allgemeines Heeresamt " (Tooze, p. 328)

Well, I'll tell you why: it's because of the Maybach SRG 32 8 145 semi-automatic pre-selector gearbox fitted in the medium Panzer III Ausf. E, F, & G. Endless problems in the development of the increasingly complex gearbox meant that the very first Panzer III Ausf. E was only approved by an Army Inspector in December 1938, and series production only got going very slowly from January 1939.

"By far the most excessive in its implications was the programme of the Luftwaffe. Its real absurdity lay, not in the targets set for the annual production of aircraft, but in the goal of starting the war with an air fleet of 21,000 planes. During World War II, the Luftwaffe’s maximum strength barely exceeded 5,000 aircraft in December 1944. [NB! Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe 1933-1945, p. 233 says there were almost exactly 6,000 in June 1943.] Britain, which devoted a larger share of its armaments effort to the air war, managed to accumulate just over 8,300 aircraft for the final phase of its bomber offensive in 1944. The Soviet Union peaked at 17,000 front-line aircraft in April 1945, of which only a small number were heavy bombers. Even the mighty US Army Air Force deployed no more than 21,000 front-line combat aircraft.29 For medium-sized European states like Britain or Germany, the infrastructural costs of an airfleet of 21,000 planes were simply outlandish."(Tooze, p. 320) Tooze goes on to show that the stockpile of fuel needed to power such a fleet would be more than the entire world annual production.

"Hitler's demand for a Concentrated Programme in 1938 was just such an instance. Through Göring he demanded a fivefold increase in air strength. 8 Within three or four months Udet's department had whittled down the new plans, and had brought them back to the level fixed by Udet and Goring in early 1938. When the Economics Ministry or the producers complained about raw materials priorities and shortages Udet listened to them with respect, rather than insisting that the problems should be overcome whatever their nature. He became, in fact, the victim of the resources advisers." (Overy 1975, p. 789)

"Air force raw materials depended very heavily on the outside supply of valuable metals and ores, many of which had to be shared with the other services. If no extra earning power could be generated abroad, then a severe limitation was placed on aircraft expansion. The shortage of foreign exchange became another constant theme in Air Ministry discussions. The Nazis, with a rather narrow view of economics, sought where possible to export aircraft in the hope that these funds could be directly used for buying the necessary materials, and the export of aircraft became an important feature of the late 1930s. Nevertheless the shortages of most important metals, and the difficulty of expanding aluminium production any faster (which depended on foreign bauxite) meant that Göring and Udet could use these shortages as the rationale behind the refusal to develop a four-engined bomber as a main part of the programme, and as an excuse when the Concentrated Programme fell down. In fact at conference after conference Udet had to defend the poor performance of aircraft production on the basis of the difficulties experienced in getting raw materials. This meant not simply raw materials from abroad, but a fair share of the raw materials once they had been imported and were being fought over by the civilian economy and the three separate services." (Overy 1975, p. 791)

The German pre-war aircraft production plans: November 1936–April 1939
R. J. Overy
The English Historical Review, Volume XC, Issue CCCLVII, October 1975, Pages 778–797, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/XC.CCCLVII.778
01 October 1975

Permanent shortage of metals, aluminium, copper, steel etc.

NB! This and other sections quote works by David Irving. According to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 430 and other discussions, Irving is not acceptable as WP:RS being viewed as a writer than a historian. Which means I'll have to find other sources.

"To cope with its straitened supply of raw materials, the Luftwaffe was thus adopting an increasingly risky strategy of weapons procurement. For aluminium, the all-important material in airframe production, the Luftwaffe’s ration as of January 1939 was a third lower than that required to meet the modest procurement targets of Plan 11. For copper, the initial ration was set at 50 per cent of requirement. As of July 1939 this was cut to a derisory 20 per cent...
"Figure 10 shows the impact on both the Luftwaffe and army procurement first of the armaments recession of 1937 and then the even more dramatic slump in production caused by the raw material shortages of 1939. In both cases the response in final output of armaments was lagging by a few months. But, given that raw materials took up to nine months to work their way completely through the industrial metabolism, this was only to be expected. The overall pattern of boom and bust could hardly have been more pronounced."(Tooze, p. 329)

"There was, however, one industrial problem that the Nazis could do very little about. This was the general problem of building up an industrial sector geared to the requirements of a large-scale air force. This was a matter of time. It took years to train the workforce, to perfect tooling and production methods, to experiment with materials, to dovetail research in aeronautics with design in the factory. It took an unpredictable amount of time to solve technical and developmental problems, and during the 1930s a span of four to five years for the development of one aircraft type was the norm. When Göring tried to speed up this process, as he did with the Junkers Ju 88 bomber, it threw out of gear the whole pattern of technical development and led to innumerable complications." (Overy 1975, pp. 791-2)

Hmm, surely it was Ernst Udet who changed things? - He was installed as deputy Air Minister by Hermann Göring who had grown jealous of Erhard Milch's evident capabilities. Milch evidently had a genuine technical appreciation and understanding of how it would take ten years from 1933 to create a modern, fully-trained, fully-functioning, combat-ready air force from scratch. The trouble was that Göring appears to have been deeply sensible to Hitler's tongue-lashings, and therefore misrepresented Milch's generally sensible estimates of what was physically achievable to Hitler. Thus these insane estimates which were never going to be achievable.

• The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe

"It took time, too, to build the factories and arrange the contracts. Some Nazis hoped to create the industry overnight, yet because they were reluctant to increase rearmament expenditure beyond a certain limit they had to fall back on the method of industrial self-financing. In other words the expansion of the industry came to depend on the ploughing back of industrial profits. This by its very nature would take time. By 1938/9 a large factory expansion took place with the second stage of Milch's build-up to a peace-time complement, but this occurred too late to affect Hitler's new programme and anyway was held up because of the shortages of labour and materials in the construction industry." [Which itself was a victim of the emphasis on the permanent armaments vs exports crisis - and the entirety of the German population was already fully employed.] (Overy 1975, p. 792)

"Both Messerschmitt and Heinkel considered that the leadership knew nothing about the planning of technical innovation."(Overy 1975, p. 792 n2) In fact, those two and Kurt Tank were particularly mistrusted by the Nazis who never saw them as reliable.(Overy 1975, p. 794)

Messerschmitt wouldn't do as he was asked, wasted vast amounts of time on the Me 410, and deliberately put off development of the Me 262 which was fated anyway because Hitler wanted a fast bomber not a very fast fighter. And anyway they were vulnerable at take-off and landing.

"Major aircraft types had an estimated 32,000 parts per 1,000 kilos weight. A large aircraft weighed anything up to seven or eight times this figure." (Overy 1975, p. 793 n3)

And Overy shows how the manufacturing of these aircraft parts was mostly outsourced to specialist, sub-contracted engineering firms. They tended to be highly independent-minded and difficult to co-ordinate when a standardised method of production was imposed under the centralised control of by Albert Speer's Ministry of Armaments.(yep, Overy 1975, pp. 793-5) Overy goes on to show how deep the general sense of disaffection went: there was a mutual mistrust between the civilian manufacturers, many of whom weren't pro-Nazi, and the military Luftwaffe whose placed the orders and set the targets; there was intense competition between the manufacturers leading to favouritism in awarding contracts; the makers distrusted the Nazis in general, and were wary of over-committing themselves in case the NS regime collapsed, or if war were never to happen; the Lutwaffe was accused of "inefficiency, bad faith, and poor planning." There was even dissent within the ranks of the Luftwaffe.(Overy 1975, pp. 793-5)

Interestingly, by around 1934-1935 (not long after the introduction of the Panzer I) Maybach had been designated as the sole supplier of engines for all the tanks and half-tracks of the Germany Army's new mechanised battalions. Maybach had been carrying on pretty much the same manufacturing practice as the aircraft industry, ever since it was created in 1916 – the firm's main activity was machining the main engine castings of its own design, made and supplied by other foundries. The rest of the engine components, including finished crankshafts, camshafts, pistons, and bearings, were all bought in from other engineering firms; and all the ancillary parts like fuel pumps, carburetters and electrical equipment were provided by third party equipment suppliers. See List of WWII Maybach engines#Maybach history, 1935–1945. It seems at least possible that Maybach used its own separate small foundry on the site in Friedrichshafen for making its experimental/development engines which were then manufactured by other licensed firms for full-scale production.

In July 1939 Milch and Göring arranged a demonstration for Hitler at Rechlin of the Luftwaffe's latest capabilities, including the He 100 and Bf 109 fighters, the 30mm MK 101 cannon, a Heinkel He 111 with rocket-assisted take-off (RATO) and a high-altitude pressurized cockpit. Four years later the squadrons were still waiting for most of this equipment.(Irving, pp. 83-4)

"The eventual peak output of the MK cannon was set at 172 per month, but Udet advised Hitler at Rechlin that this was impossible because of the aluminium shortage; Göring reluctantly approved cuts in the other aircraft types to allow the Ju 88 target to be met." (Irving, p. 85)

Actually, this 'magic show' (Irving somewhere i fink) was to try to impress Hitler what the Luftwaffe was intending to be capable of - Hitler should have been shown operational squadrons, not future techno marvels. Göring and Hitler later both recognised they had been somewhat deceived and spoke of the display in denigrating terms.(Irving, p. 84)

David Irving (yes, that one)
The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch
1975 (e-version 2002)
Focal point

And even in August 1939 Göring demanded a colossal expansion of the Luftwaffe: by April 1943 he wanted 32 new bomber wings of 4,330 aircraft, 2,460 of which were to be Ju 88s: the Air Staff also asked for 800 He 177s and 3,000 Me 210s. Britain at that time had no more than 150 total flak guns. But by that date [ie April 1943] there was just one squadron with less than a dozen serviceable He 177s; and the Me 210 had been completely scrapped. (Irving 1973, pp. 86-8)

Mini-summary

This was exactly what I had been thinking. It wasn't really until around 1938 that Hitler finally realised that his incredibly aggressive programme of re-armament meant that he was going to have to fight a war in western Europe before he could begin his eastward expansion. The whole of the above 'Tooze' section tends to show that up until 1939 it was Germany's lack of foreign exchange reserves and consequent drive for cash-earning exports that ultimately regulated the supply of imported raw materials, both ferrous and non-ferrous.

• NB! IG Farben was the biggest single earner of free foreign exchange with its vast global resources. This allowed the authorities to purchase essential raw materials, equipment and technical processes essential to Germany's rearmament programme.
  • Move to Sources! Committee on Military Affairs (December 1945). "Part 7: I.G. Farben material submitted by the War Department" (PDF). Elimination Of German Resources For War. Hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs. United States Senate. Seventy-Ninth Congress...Authorizing a study of war mobilization problems. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. p. 953 [pdf 995].

Wildly excessive armaments production estimates led to constant infighting between the services for what was going to be available. Sudden changes of direction as to what was going to be needed, and when and why, led to this constant see-sawing of boom and bust which seems to have characterised the German economy during the whole time the Nazis were in power.

The almost constant shortages seem to be have been almost built-in to the entire war-based economic strategy because it simply demanded too much of everything and everyone. Germany by 1938 had achieved literally full employment - there were entire districts where there were only a very few thousand unemployed, if that, and they were either actors and musicians who kicked up a fuss when asked to do anything else, or physically unfit for work or mentally deficient. This dire shortage of labour meant that if e.g. ammunition production were to be cut - as actually happened in 1938(??) - 100,000 skilled and trained workers would instantly and permanently be lost to the industry.Find ref, fool! Tooze, probs...

The constant re-allocation of limited resources inevitably created shortages in one sector or another, and it's more surprising that Germany survived as long as it did, given the complete confusion that seems to have reigned everywhere, the intense infighting within the services, the lack of technical insight evident in the high command, the ubiquitous wishful thinking and Hitler's disastrous micro-management. I would put it down largely to the dedication of the workforce and the German armed forces and 'papa' Hitler's undeniable personal magnetism.

Ha, I was nearly there:

"LAURENCE REES: Moving onto the last few years of the war, how do you see the role of Albert Speer?

ADAM TOOZE: The grand continuity in Speer’s career is the triumph of the will. The triumph of the will is the slogan which in a sense answers your previous question. How the Germans succeeded in France in 1940 is not through tanks but through the triumph of the will. How they’re going to succeed in 1941 over these spectacular spaces and how they’re going to get to the Caucasus in one single blow is the triumph of the will.

[Well, they didn't, really. It was a particularly useless operation. They had to get to Rostov on Don first in 1942, and the whole campaign was destined to fail: not enough close air support, which was essential for success; tanks re-directed to Stalingrad; very slow general progress; General List hardly hurried. The Soviets had destroyed the oil wells in Maikop, the only oil-producing site the Germans actually captured.

"I have reached one conclusion, Zeitzler," [Hitler]] declared, pointing to Stalingrad on the map. "Under no circumstances can we give that up. We would never win it back again. We know what that means... If we abandon it, we sacrifice the entire meaning of this campaign. To imagine that I will get there again next time is insanity."70 Hitler's statement reveals a substantial shift in thinking. During Blau's planning stage and early operations, Stalingrad had not even been a primary target. Now Hitler was calling it "the entire meaning of the campaign", making no mention of the Caucasus oilfields, the original strategic goal NB Hayward is there in the refs, MAKE PROPER CITE, fool!

That’s how you see these pictures of the German army advancing across the Steppe with these individual, isolated figures with these tiny little tanks in this enormous space. This is nothing but the assertion of the triumph of German will over space and material obstacles. And what Speer enacts after 1942 is one demonstration after another on the factory floors of the Reich of that simple message: 'will' will triumph over material. And we will make out of Germany’s limited resources the quality of weapons and the quantity of weapons we need to allow our supreme fighting men to prevail in this war." ww2history.com interview with Tooze, no date

Wow, the appearance of the Riefenstahl/Nietzsche thesis... It's very convincing. In fact, Hitler and his 'magnetic personality' could very easily be seen as the personal embodiment and worldly expression of the triumph of the will, so complete was the identification with him of large sections (it seems) of the greater German populace.(Tooze, p. 587)

A much later war?

Overy spends some time showing how Hitler didn't expect war over Poland. The whole Luftwaffe program wasn't expected to be ready until at least 1941, the Navy until the mid 1940s, the railway rebuild not until 1944, the Army should be training until 1944 or '45, and the Italians were constantly told through 1938/39 not to expect war until at least 1942.

More Tooze... Finally, the war

This entire section mostly depends on a single source,

• Tooze, Adam (2006). The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9566-1.

Obviously other sources dealing with the German war economy need to be integrated into this overview, notably Jonas Scherner and colleagues, whose publications seem to make more consistent sense about how the war was [mis-]managed and fought to defeat by the German High Command. See #Finally, some answers about whether there really were "shortages" of certain resources, specifically aluminium: the entire point of this vast and incomplete WP:Wall of text. Anyway...

Tooze shows how Germany went through a number of mini-booms and busts, all related to the constricted availability of imported raw materials, including iron ore for steel, bauxite for aluminium, copper, tin and other elements. These were only available when Germany had exported enough to earn foreign exchange credit. The squeeze from October 1938 on domestic armaments production, and especially on ammunition,(Tooze pp. 338-8) and the rise in British and American aircraft manufacture to equal Germany's, meant that Hitler was increasingly aware that there was little point in pursuing a peace-time arms race. When the order to attack Poland was given in spring 1939, there was no dissent from the generals.

"Then, in the third week of August 1939, when Hitler was preoccupied with the coming war, Koppenberg and Ernst Udet, chief of the technical office at the RLM, coaxed him into signing a Fuehrer Order restoring the Ju 88 programme to top priority. The consequences were dramatic. For the rest of the war, the Luftwaffe was to claim at least 40 per cent of the German armaments effort." (Tooze, pp. 365-6) "After aircraft production, supplying the enormous volumes of ammunition demanded by modern warfare was by far the largest industrial challenge facing the German economy in World War II."(Tooze, p. 366)

"Between them, [aircraft and ammunition] claimed more than two-thirds of the resources committed to all armaments production in the first ten months of the war. In June 1940, when Hitler’s ammunition programme reached its peak, their combined share topped 70 per cent... Tanks, vehicles, weapons and all the needs of the navy had to make do with one-third of the resources committed to the armaments effort."(Tooze, p. 367-8) Chart on p. 374 shows that ammo made up 20% of all armaments production, and aircraft from 20 to 40%; shipbuilding, weapons and vehicles equally took up the remaining 30-40%, with tanks a tiny 3 or 4% by the end of 1941.

That's because the fatally ill-advised High Command (OKW and OKH) were expecting a swift victory against the Soviet Union, comparable to those against Poland in 1939, and against the Low Countries and France in 1940. Barbarossa was never going to work unless complete victory was assured within three months from June 1941. The German High Command woefully underestimated the initial strength and reserves of the USSSR. Oh dear, the T-34 which made mincemeat of the German tanks. By August 1941 the entire enterprise was failing hard, and by December after the failure of Operation Typhoon the outcome of the war had already been determined. There was never going to be enough of anything in Germany (eg raw materials, labour, factory production capacity) except will-power to defeat the USSR, the British and the Empire, and the USA.

But the outbreak of war meant that Germany's imports were hugely reduced; iron ore supplies from Narvik were cut off, and imports of copper and oil fell nearly to zero.(Tooze, 358-9) Armaments production fell drastically. The immediate casualty was the Z Plan, the planned gigantic expansion of a high seas fleet capable of taking on the Royal Navy.(Tooze, p. 365)

Irving partly blames lack of steel & duralumin for continuing lack of aircraft production: the race to make more aircraft for a short war (ending 1941 at the latest) meant that Udet cancelled development on the Jumo 004 engine and the Me 262 airframe.(Irving 1973, p. 96)

The one resource Germany had plenty of was coal. But the coal mines were mostly in the west and east of the Reich, and the industry was in the north, centre and south. The railways were needed to transport coal and derivatives, using up one-third of their total freight capacity. The constant underfunding of the railways for a decade, including a general lack of steel for building new freight trucks, meant that its capacity in 1940 to transport the required volume was severely reduced.(Tooze, p. 369-70) This translated into a "coal shortage" because although unused stockpiles of mined coal were building up, there weren't enough coal trucks to deliver it to where it was needed.

• Mierzejewski, Collapse of the German War Economy, says that "Reichsbahn officials at the time and after the war, and many historians as well, have concluded that the DR was not adequately prepared for war." (p 70) But he contradicts this view saying that the Deutsches Reichbahn was well prepared for the short wars of conquest envisioned by Hitler, and there had been considerable investment between the wars, and it improved its performance during the war: " When the war began, contrary to the generally accepted view, the Reichsbahn had a large fleet of modern vehicles run on solid, beautifully maintained right-of-way with an extensive maintenance organization supporting both." (pdf p. 71)

Nevertheless, a huge increase in the steel and copper allocation for the army in September 1939 resulted in armaments production nearly doubling from January to July 1940.(Tooze, p. 371) But the ammunition crisis had became so severe that in April 1940 General Becker, the head of the army procurement office, was relieved of his command and shot himself. Fritz Todt was installed as head of the new Armaments Ministry, and in autumn 1940 he set up a national committee for tank production, under the chairmanship of Walter Rohland of the de:Deutsche Edelstahlwerke AG.(Tooze, p. 377)

Because the war effort was using up over 33% of the national output, there was a consequent lack of goods on the shelves for consumers. [By 1943 it had reached 76%. (Tooze, table, p. 436)] This manifested itself in huge household savings in the local savings banks (Sparkassen but no history, strangely...) In 1940 they channelled 8 billion Reichsmarks into the war effort, and 12.8 billion in 1941.(Tooze, pp. 379-80) There was nothing other than government debt to invest in. It was this 'silent system' of war financing (geräuschlose Kriegsfinanzierung) which seems to have allowed "the burden of war expenditure to be distributed relatively safely across the financial system."(Tooze p. 381).

Well, there's one solution to my question: How did Germany continue to pay for the war after it had started? Answer: with the savings of its own citizens, who had nothing to spend their cash on since all the country's resources were being gobbled up to make aircraft, ammunition and explosives, guns, U-boats, and tanks.

"But by January 1940, the German steel rationing system was prioritizing the immediate needs of the Wehrmacht, over all other considerations, including the long-run sustainability of the industrial war effort...However, in the interests of satisfying the demands of the Wehrmacht, steel production was maintained at 1.6 million tons per month, even if this meant eating into Germany’s limited stockpile of iron ore.105 Of this monthly production, by the first quarter of 1940 the Wehrmacht was already receiving a share of 55 per cent, or 885,000 tons."(Tooze, p. 382) Since this latest drastic re-allocation of steel affected the rest of German industry, including the continuing manufacture of items necessary for an extended conflict, this placed the long-term viability of the German war machine in considerable jeopardy.(Tooze, p. 382) However, the expected victories over Belgium and northern France would deliver the huge reserves and industrial capacity of those regions into German hands, which would replace the loss of iron ore from Sweden.(Tooze, p. 383)

French campaign

In the event, the audacious final development of Case Yellow (Fall Gelb) over the winter of 1939-1940 resulted in a complete victory of the Low Countries and France in May-June 1940. The invasion of Belgium and Holland by Army Group B was a feint, designed to draw the Allies into the Channel coastal areas, while the tank armies of Army Group A slipped through the Ardennes and 'scythed' their way east of Paris and round the Allies' rear towards the Somme and Abbeville, and thence even to Calais.(Tooze, p. 397) "The Germans suffered 49,000 dead and missing. The French casualties give a truer indication of the intensity of the fighting: in only six weeks, the French suffered 120,000 killed."(Tooze, p. 398)

So, Tooze begins on deciphering the real reasons for German victory in 1940. My reasons before reading (see also User:MinorProphet/Draft subpages/WW2 Maybach gearboxes):

1. French politics was broken since the 1920s. And industry, and everything else.
2. The French armed forces were the biggest and strongest in Europe. But they were planning for a defensive war.
3. Highly mobile motorised divisions were against the army's way of thinking. The DLMs (Divisions Légères Mécaniques eg 1st Light Mechanized Division) weren't even formed until 1939 after war had begun.
4. The heavy tanks, the Char B1 bis, Somua and ?Hotchkiss were slow and thirsty. It took six whole months to train the overworked 4-man? crews of the Char B1 to combat readiness. See Osprey's Panzer IV vs Char B1 bis.
5. Also, very few French tanks even had Morse wireless sets, let alone radio voice contact.
6. Most of the heavy tanks were subordinated to the infantry, and were never used en masse as a decisive attacking force. However, in certain battles on the Meuse? the Char B1 bis had some stunning successes.
7. The general morale of French troops, especially the infantry, was very low.
8. Lack of co-ordination between French and British BEF commanders led to confusion.
9. The French heavy tanks were far superior to anything the Germans had, they were almost invulnerable to German tank guns. Only heavy anti-tank artillery was able to stop them, luckily the Germans had enough of that.
10. Even a Panzer III could be knocked out by a French 20mm AT round through the frontal armour to disable the final drive, and they only had 37mm guns.
11. French military command was slow to anticipate and respond to German moves.
12. The Germans ran a huge risk in the south ran of being attacked on the flank by superior tank forces. Luckily this didn't materialise.
13. The intense push to constantly drive the tanks onward, made by generals like Guderian, was so concentrated and decisive that it succeeded; but once again over-stretched supply lines meant that Army Group A's advance ground to a halt.

Well, I think Tooze covers most of these, except he says that Germany had *no* anti-tank guns capable of defeating a Char B1 bis. German combat reports say they did. What was actually the case? Well, the only anti-tank gun used by the Germans apart from the 3.7 cm PaK 36 was the Panzerjäger I which mounted the Czech 4,7cm KPÚV vz. 38 (German designation "4.7 cm PaK (t)" on a Panzer I Ausf. B chassis. 202 of these were produced in 1940 and 1941 [says Wiki article - wot says Panzer Tracts 23? Nowt, coz they weren't yer actual tanks: see Panzerjagers.] Not to be confused with the 15 cm sIG 33 (Sf) auf Panzerkampfwagen I Ausf B which was the standard heavy infantry gun: but the SiG 33 didn't fire anti-tank shells. See 15 cm sIG 33#Ammunition

Careful! The book of pix of the 1st Panzer Division has plenty of these in France - but check if they are the Panzerjäger I or the sIG 33 SP artillery. Or maybe the long propaganda film Sieg im Westen? The 5 cm PaK 38 wasn't used until Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Thus Tooze is correct if he means native German anti-tank weapons, but the self-propelled Panzerjäger I used the Czech 4.7cm gun. So he's wrong in this case.

Tooze in this book gives Erich von Manstein the credit for success, using Napoleon's strategy of concentrating his forces at a single point with greater force than the defenders.(Tooze, pp. 403-4) Later (see previous #Mini-summary section) he puts it down to 'the triumph of the will'.

" After the successful completion of the Polish campaign in October 1939, the tank forces of the German army were at a shockingly low ebb. The Wehrmacht had only 2,701 serviceable tanks/vehicles of which the vast majority were obsolete Mark I and Mark II models. There were only 541 battleworthy medium tanks, suitable for use against France...By 10 May 1940, Germany’s equipment with medium-heavy battle-tanks had almost tripled relative to the position at the end of the Polish campaign. Germany now had 785 Mark IIIs, 290 Mark IVs and 381 Czech medium tanks, 1,456 vehicles in total."(Tooze, p. 404) The remainder were still Mk Is and Mk IIs: "Of Germany’s 93 combat-ready divisions on 10 May 1940, only 9 were Panzer divisions, with a total of 2,439 tanks between them."(Tooze, p. 400)

NB Most of these Mark IIIs only had a 37mm cannon, and used the un-tried Maybach semi-auto gearbox whose slow development was the major factor in the late start of series production of the Panzer III Ausf. E only in autumn 1939.

HMMM... But in User:MinorProphet/Draft subpages/WW2 Maybach gearboxes#Installation in Panzer III Ausf. E, F, G Panzertruppen vol. 1, by Thomas Jentz, pp. 117, 120-121 says "at the start of the French Campaign (or Fall Gelb) there were 349 Panzer IIIs (381 total inc. reserves), of which 135 were lost; and 280 Pz IVs, of which 97 were lost." WHICH IS RIGHT???

Huge gamble in France: Army Group A had several armoured columns each 400 km long. (p. 404-408)

French equipment losses:

"Amongst army weapons this included 314,878 rifles, 5,017 artillery pieces, 3.9 million shells and 2,170 tanks.43 Of the tanks, hundreds were still in use with the Wehrmacht in France and in the Balkans years later. Captured French artillery made an even more important contribution to the defence of the Nazi Empire. In March 1944, of the total German artillery park of 17,589 guns, no less than 47 per cent were of foreign origin and of these the largest number was French.44 Another third of the German booty was accounted for by transport and communications equipment and services provided by the French railway. The largest items here were the thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of freight cars ‘borrowed’ by the Reichsbahn. All in all, the French, Dutch and Belgian railways provided Germany with 4,260 locomotives and 140,000 wagons, figures that dwarfed the Reich’s own investment in rolling stock in the 1930s. Next in the French list came raw materials valued at 13 billion francs, whose strategic importance to the Germans vastly exceeded their monetary value to their French owners. In France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the Wehrmacht took 81,000 tons of copper, enough to extend the Reich’s stocks to eight months. [ie 10,000 tons per month, which means Germany used c. 120,000 tons of copper per annum.] The Germans also found enough tin and nickel to cover their needs for a full year. Crucially, the Germans captured substantial stocks of petrol and oil."(Tooze, pdf 412)

Irving 1973 somewhere mentions how Milch/the Germans discovered huge stockpiles of raw materials when they took over Italy after its surrender in 1944. The Italians had been complaining about low supplies, but had been quietly building up massive reserves, perhaps a year's worth of copper, etc.

Ensuring resources - Sweden & Norway, Rumania, Yugoslavia and France

"In 1940 more than half of Germany’s iron ore needs were supplied by imports and 83 per cent of these imports came from Sweden. If Swedish ore deliveries had stopped in September 1939, German armaments production would have been subject to a drastic squeeze from the autumn of 1940, at the latest. Not that Hitler’s regime had anything to fear from the Swedes. Germany held the whip hand over Sweden, as over Switzerland, since both depended on Germany for their supplies of coal. As early as April 1939, the Social Democratic government in Stockholm had assured Berlin of its willingness to continue iron ore deliveries in the event of war. Sweden was not the problem. The problem was Norway, with its exposed North Sea coastline and in particular the port of Narvik, through which Swedish ore was shipped to Germany during the winter months." [Because the Baltic froze over.] (Tooze, p. 409)

Thus the Norwegian Campaign and the British attack on Narvik in April 1940, but the campaign failed within three months; Sweden supplied iron ore to Germany for the rest of the war.(Tooze, pp. 409-10)

"In 1940, thanks to the huge expansion undertaken by the Wehrmacht, Germany was the world’s leader in aluminium production, with annual output of 300,000 tons." (Tooze, p. 477)

Hmm. The Minerals Yearbook 1946 (pub. 1948), p. 122 (see #Germany) says that it was 200,000 tonnes, which is quite a difference.

What do they mean by 'Germany'? Where actual production of aluminium ingots is concerned, Germany led the world up to 1939 - followed in Europe by perhaps France, with its own bauxite mines in the south; the bauxite/alumina capabilities of the Balkan countries, cryolite from Greenland/Denmark and chromite from Turkey were mostly geared to exporting raw-ish basic materials to Germany where they were refined to make ingots. Norway's production was the result of British, Canadian and French-owned refining plants.

The #USSBS report on the Gebruder Giulini GmbH Ludwigshafen-am-Rhein shows how the bauxite–alumina–aluminium continuum is dependent on considerably more than just bauxite - perhaps up to 10 different raw materials are needed to convert various kinds of bauxite minerals into ingots (including obviously coal to make steam and thus huge amounts of electricity): and the non-appearance of any one of these, including rock - ie limestone of the right type - meant that production could and often did grind completely to a halt, especially after 1943. The heavy-duty electrical switching gear needed to harness the power of the main high-voltage electricity grid was particularly susceptible to bombing, since there was (i fink) only one factory in the whole of Germany that turned out the transformers, and they needed millions of metres of copper to produce.

Where steel is concerned, there's Das Altreich, Germany in eg 1933 - but the acquisition of the previously-occupied Rheinland, Alsace-Lorraine (France), the Saarland, Sudetenland (western Czech), and the Anschluss of Austria were obviously very beneficial to Germany.

It's easy to forget how Britain's own huge natural resources of coal and iron ore, along with tin and various other metals and minerals eg cement, salt, limestone etc., allowed it to produce enough armaments to keep going, allied with the immense reserves of its Empire, and a merchant navy to transport them protected by its huge armed naval fleet. Although the US had been protectionist and isolationist for most of the 20th century, it was really only after December 1941 that it woke up.

See also how Germany's espionage attempts didn't stop with the end of WWI, but carried on in the inter-war years: eg The Enemy Within by Severance Johnson, Celebrated Spies Sabotage etc.

By the end of May 1940, Rumania had agreed to sell its entire oil production from Ploesti to Germany, as well as depriving Britain of 40% of the pre-war output. Germany thus received from 200,000 to 300,000 tons of oil per month, making up the vast majority of its oil supplies until much later in the war.

Finance - well, another answer to the question "How did Germany pay for the war?" Well, they ran a mountainous deficit, thanks to the German clearing system, explained here:

"The best measure of the success of Schlotterer’s [who? - an economist?] cynical system was the gigantic deficit that Germany was able to accumulate by the end of the war. Normally, of course, private suppliers in France, Belgium or the Netherlands would not have been willing to go on delivering goods to a foreign customer that had tens of billions of Reichsmarks in unpaid bills. But since the 1930s the Reichsbank’s clearing systems had been designed to remove any such obstacles. Exporters in each country were paid, not by their customers in Germany, but by their own central banks, in their own currency. The foreign central bank then chalked up the deficit to Germany’s clearing account in Berlin. The Germans received their goods, the foreign suppliers received prompt payment, but the account was never settled. At the end of 1944, the Reichsbank recorded almost 30 billion Reichsmarks owing to members of the clearing system. France, Germany’s largest trade creditor, was owed 8.5 billion Reichsmarks. Almost 6 billion Reichsmarks were outstanding to the Dutch. Five billion Reichsmarks were owed to Belgium and Luxembourg and 4.7 billion were outstanding on the Polish account."(Tooze, p. 416)

By 1941 the Bor mine in Yugoslavia (now in Serbia), Europe’s largest copper mine, had been completely transferred to German control.(Tooze, p. 420) Bor is one of the largest copper reserves in Serbia and in the world, having estimated reserves of 200 million tonnes of ore grading 1.5% copper in 2012. Copper was only discovered accidentally in 1902.

Also in April 1941 German forces arrived in N. Africa to reinforce the badly mauled Italians. This proved to be a huge drain on the country's resources, having to fly or ship everything in via where, exactly? How did the Afrika Korps even get there? Via Sicily, I suppose... Nope, from Naples. Anyway, the first elements of the 5th Light Division (Panzer Regiment 5) landed at Tripoli harbour, Libya, in February 1941 as part of Operation Sonnenblume. Rommel had only the 15th Panzer Division with only two battalions plus the extra Panzer Regiment 5) as his entire command during this early stage.

"Britain inherited [the defeated] France’s orders in the United States. Combined with the contracts Britain itself had placed since the start of the war, London by the end of June 1940 was expecting delivery from the United States of no less than 10,800 aircraft and 13,000 aero-engines over the next eighteen months.41 This was in addition to Britain’s own production of 15,000 military aircraft. At the same time, the British Ministry of Aircraft Production was negotiating with the Americans to order many thousands more. By way of comparison, total German aircraft production in 1940 came to only 10,826 aircraft and in 1941 it expanded to only 12,000, a disappointing increase which we shall discuss in greater detail below."

So how does this translate into aluminium shortages in 1942 and 1943 if aluminium production (see #Germany), and aircraft production, had stayed fairly level? How much did Speer's early 1942 plan to replace copper power lines with aluminium really have to do with it all?

"On 12 February 1941 the Luftwaffe finally got its deal. France agreed to produce 3,000 aircraft under licence as well as 13,500 aero-engines. So anxious was the Reich Air Ministry to get production started, that it abandoned its demand for ownership of the French factories. But a highly significant sticking point remained. To make the aircraft, France would need aluminium and, though France had bauxite and smelting capacity, it lacked the coal necessary to generate electricity. The French calculated that to meet the German demands they would need a delivery of 120,000 tons of coal per month. Germany could promise only 4,000 tons." (Tooze, p. 439)

"But in 1941 the petrol shortage was already so severe that the Wehrmacht was licensing its soldiers to drive heavy trucks with less than 15 kilometres of on-road experience, a measure which was blamed for the appalling attrition of motor vehicles during the Russian campaign."(Tooze p. 442) Opel had to close down its main truck production line, there wasn't even enough petrol to test the fuel pumps on the assembled engines.{NB page needed!)

Germany had naturally appropriated the best of the railway rolling stock of its defeated enemies, but this led to a shortage of coal trucks in those countries, especially in N. France where cities were sometimes starved of fuel... Output from the French coal mines fell as well, and the consequent shortage of coal led to a dramatic drop in steel output in Lorraine and northern France.(Tooze, p. 443-4) Further difficulties in coal output in Germany itself led to a complete re-organisation of the coal industry, whose existing cartels were placed under the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs as the Reich Coal Organisation (RVK).(Tooze, p. 596) [Technically it was the Reichsvereinigung Kohle, Reich Coal Union. Elimination of German Resources for War, Hearings p. 203] The head, Paul Pleiger, hired a load of industrial statisticians from the respected Institute of Economic Research and laid the way for the shake-up of heavy industry in 1942.

"A report by a Hermann Winkhaus [who?] concluded that maximum current capacity in the German-controlled zone was in the order of 46 million tons [of steel] per annum, of which 17.5 million would come from the Ruhr. Whether or not Germany could come close to this figure would depend on the supply of ores."(Tooze, p. 446) But this figure was further dependent on the continued of supply of coking coal. Production of coal had been fairly stagnant since the start of the war. The cause of the problem was a shortage of labour for the mines, typically dirty, underpaid and overworked. So by May of 1941 there were already close to 70,000 foreign workers in German mines, thousands of Poles, tens of thousands of French prisoners of war, and many thousands of Silesians drafted under Goering’s conscription decree of 1938. This is a forerunner of the 'Speer system.'(Tooze, p. 448-9)

The war also set off a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. The removal by Germany of horses, animal feed, fertilizer (otherwise needed for explosives) and peasant manpower to move its mostly horse-drawn army war left the whole of Europe short of food. The 1940 wheat harvest in France was half the yield of 1938; both Yugoslavia and Hungary had poor harvests as well. Only Rumania did well.(Tooze, p. 448) The new German Empire turned out to be a basket case. Despite the voracious demands of the German war effort, no Western European country occupied from 1939 experienced any economic growth over the next five years. Norway (aluminium) and Czech (armaments) just broke even, but France, Belgium and the Netherlands suffered a complete collapse of economic activity which never revived before the end of the war.(Tooze, p. 449)

Soviet Union

The USSR had all the natural resources that Germany was desperately short of: agricltural produce from Ukraine; coal, iron and metal ores from Russia; and oil from the Caucasus.(Tooze, p. 450)

Aware of their importance, in 1941 i fink the Soviets demanded complete blueprints of the synthetic petrol and rubber (Buna) plants, and the construction of examples of both, along with the complex monitoring instrumentation needed to run them. The Germans didn't deliver them, but right up till Operation Barbarossa they still had to keep on exporting high-value goods like machine tools to the Soviet Union, in order to maintain supplies of oil, grain and alloy metals.(Tooze, p. 452) This in turn dragged down output of German factories for the next great war effort.

I see, the Soviet Union was seen as the 'Far Eastern sword' of Britain and the United States, pointing at Japan. If the Soviets were to be decisively defeated in 1941, Japan would not have to worry about a war on its doorstep and in July 1941 Hitler proposed to the Japanese ambassador a German-Japanese alliance against Britain and the United States.(Tooze 453-3)

And here we get to a refutation of traditional view of Blitzkrieg, espoused by eg JK Galbraith straight after the war:

"In this sense, [a swift decisive war on the USSR] it was in anticipation of Barbarossa that Nazi Germany really did adopt a fully fledged Blitzkrieg strategy, a synthesis of campaign plan, military technology and industrial armaments programme, all premised on the assumption of lightning battlefield success. No such grand synthesis had been conceivable prior to the campaign in France, because the effects that could be achieved by combining modern technology with classical maxims of operational warfare came as a surprise even to the German leadership. It was only after the defeat of France that the possibility of decisive battlefield success within the space of a few months began to be taken for granted as an integral component of Hitler’s war strategy. And it was only then that armaments policy could be systematically organized on this assumption." (Tooze, p. 458)

The adoption of the newly-formulated Blitzkrieg strategy from 1940-41 "allowed the German war effort to be split into two parts. The factories producing for the army directed their efforts towards providing the equipment for a swift, motorized Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the rest of the German military-industrial complex began to gird itself for the aerial confrontation with Britain and America." (Tooze, p. 459) Tooze shows how "the record of industrial production between June 1940 and June 1941 in fact bears the unmistakable imprint of strategic design. Armaments production and economic policy were linked to a strategic war plan and when the data are analysed carefully, the evidence suggests that this strategy was successful in producing a very substantial further mobilization of the German economy. That this was not enough to defeat the Soviet Union is another matter." (Tooze p. 460)

• Hmmmmm. "...providing the equipment for a swift, motorized Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union." This is in direct contrast with the US Strategic Bombing Survey Report No. 77, German Motor Vehicles Industry], pp. 3–6: (admittedly 2nd edition, published in 1947)

NBB! This term, "a swift, motorized Blitzkrieg", refers mostly to armoured Panzer divisions and mobile troops (later panzer grenadiers), not to the rest of the motor vehicle industry, which produced mostly trucks. Yet these were just as essential to the success of the entire operation. Yet only 10% of all German troops were motorised in any way. Horses and footsloggers made up the vast preponderance of the army.

" No evidence was discovered of a systematic plan for converting the [motor vehicle] industry to war production. Actually most of the productive facilities were not utilized even to the prewar extent until 1942 or 1943, and then their excess capacity was converted chiefly to production of components for the aircraft and tank industries... While the second largest automobile factory, Auto Union, Zwickau, remained a motor vehicle producer throughout the war, it wasn't until April 1943 that the plant was utilized rather completely by converting from the production of light armored cars to three-ton half-tracks."

"The German government expected a short war and accordingly decided to keep the [Volkswagen Plant at Fallersleben] intact for postwar production of automobiles. This is supported by the fact that the plant remained virtually idle, its 1941 production representing only 20 - 25 per cent of the plant's capabilities. During the entire course of the war the plant never produced more than 50 per cent of its capacity."

"Both Dr. von Heydekampf, head of the Main Committee for Motor Vehicles, Tanks and Locomotives, and Mr. Vorwig, manager of the Committee for Motor Vehicles, expressed the opinion that the automotive industry was not utilized during the war to anywhere near the extent possible, and that if a comprehensive program for conversion had existed at the beginning of the war the industry's contribution to the war economy would have been much greater." (USSBS Report No. 77, pp. 4-6)

"[a] swift, motorized Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union." (Tooze, above.) Sounds like total bollocks. Only about 10% of the army was completely mechanised/motorised.Ref pls m8. Apart from the Panzer divisions, and the few armoured/motorised infantry divisions/(later Panzer Grenadiers), literally the entire remainder (approx. 90%) of the army depended on horses and footsloggers, and railways and air transport. Each Army Group (North, Centre, South) had no more than two complete Panzer divisions + an armoured regiment or so each. The tanks always wildly outran the rest of their backup/supply/infantry, including all the railways beyond Poland which had to be completely re-laid as German gauge rather than Russian/Soviet gauge. Because the Soviets took their locos with them. If the High Command had considered for one moment why the German advance really ran out of steam in France in May 1940, they would have realised that they outran their supply train. And the BEF only had the Channel to cross, they couldn't fall back into a hinterland thousands of miles deep. Exactly the same happened in the USSR in 1941. Germany began Operation Barbarossa with over 2,000 different vehicle types. Failure from the beginning just for spares and repairs, even for a 3-month campaign. The German High Command were seriously misinformed as to the strength of the Soviet forces in June 1941, their essentially unlimited reserves, and the fighting integrity of the Soviet soldier. And anyway, the Army high command (OKH) had different strategic aims (conquer Moscow) from Hitler et al., who wanted the economic resources of Ukraine and oil from Maikop/Baku. The whole thing was a genuine mess, dreamed up by people who had no idea whatsoever what they were up against. MinorProphet (talk) 03:44, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

In summer 1940 Fritz Todt attached a Main Committee for Tanks to his Ministry for Ammunition and Weapons. In the tank drive of 1940-41, the production of Pz III & IVs and Czech 35/6 and 38(t) doubled between May 1940 and June 1941.(Tooze, p. 462) [NB The Panzer III Ausf. H with the ZF SSG 77 gearbox went into production from c.September 1940.(Panzer Tracts 3-2, p. 3-2-68, -71) Probably not important.] The chairman was Walter Rohland, head of the de:Deutsche Edelstahlwerke AG in Krefeld, and also on the board of the giant Vereinigte Stahlwerke conglomerate. "The real political muscle on the Main Committee was provided by Karl Saur, Fritz Todt’s pugnacious deputy. Saur, who oversaw tank production uninterruptedly between the summer of 1940 and the end of the war, earned himself a well-justified reputation as one of the war economy’s most fanatical slave-drivers."(Tooze, p. 462)

"In 1941 hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks were invested in the tank industry. In Kassel, Henschel & Sohn added almost a hundred thousand square metres of new floor space. A gigantic new plant, the Nibelungenwerk, was opened at Sankt Valentin, Austria, and two new factories–Vomag at Plauen and the de:Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen Hannover – were converted to tank production." (Tooze, p. 469)

Synthetic rubber and petrol plants were built at Auschwitz, before it had turned into a death camp. The rubber plant is still there, the biggest in Europe, producing 5% of global consumption.(Tooze p. 473-4) Altogether, the Upper Silesian chemicals complex must have consumed in the order of 1.3 billion Reichsmarks, or roughly 13 billion euros in modern money.(Tooze, p. 473)

It took 6 months to build an aircraft from raw material to finished product.(p. 467)

The Ju 88 was not as great a success as it had been hoped back in 1938. Slow, badly defended and carrying a completely inadequate payload for strategic bombing, it was outclassed by eg the Heinkel He 111 (which it was meant to replace) and the Dornier Do 17, both with upgraded engines. (Tooze, p. 475)

Germany had seriously underestimated the Soviet forces: instead of having to face an expected 200 divisions, there were 600 by the end of 1941, of which the Germans had only counted 360.(Tooze p. 516)

General Halder said that it was the neither Nazi nor the Fascist regimes which exemplified the slogan 'the triumph of the will', but Stalin's Soviet Union.(Tooze 516} And the T-34 destroyed the Germantank divisions: the 5th Panzer Division had only 38 vehicles by mid-October 1941, and the 10th had only 60 out of 200. (Tooze, p. 520)

The reserve stocks of coal had dwindled to almost nothing, and output was down. The consequent coal shortage of 1941 meant that that the projected output of the synthetic petrol and Buna rubber plants would need an extra 30 million tonnes on top of an existing deficit of 35–40 mt: and anyway there was neither steel nor labour to even complete the plants. Only 1.65 million tonnes out the required 2 mt of steel could be made, and the total steel deficit was 12 million tonnes.(Tooze, pp. 524-5) The Luftwaffe could only replace the aircraft lost in the last two months and build no more new ones. The army's ration was cut to 173,000 tonnes per month, a level not seen since the crisis of 1938.(Tooze, pp. 524-5) The likelihood of re-supplying the army on the Eastern Front in 1942 disappeared; the supply lines to Moscow were over-stretched to 500 km, and no preparations had been made for a winter campaign. The whole ordering system for the German economy broke down. (Tooze, pp. 526, 595-7) See #More Speer, and Udet/Milch below.

Operation Barbarossa

Sooo... The Yugoslav coup d'état took place in March 1941, overthrowing the pr-German regency of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, in favour of an anti-German government with Peter II on the throne. According to William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 824 [840], Hitler flew into a rage: captured secret OKW notes stated that Hitler told his generals: "The beginning of the Barbarossa operations will have to be postponed for up to four weeks." In the directive of 18 December 1940 it had been originally set for 15 May. (p. 824n) It finally got going on 22 June 1941. Whether the coup did actually delay Barbarossa has been much debated, see Yugoslav coup d'état#Legacy and historical evaluation. Shirer says that the German generals felt that the delay had cost them the war after the attack on Moscow failed only three or four weeks short of victory.(Shirer, pp. 824-5)

Later on Shirer where?? find ref, fool says that in around November '41 Hitler made the decision to thrust more forcefully north to Leningrad and south into Ukraine: but he didn't have the necessary armoured divisions. These were detached from Army Group Centre, leaving it much weakened and without tanks and unable to progress further towards the capital. See Operation Barbarossa#Leningrad and Operation Barbarossa#Kiev, although unreffed.

And then huge army losses in the offensive campaign to the north of Moscow from 5 December 1941, which ground to a halt in January 1942. The Soviet Union and Japan had concluded a Neutrality Pact in 1941, which allowed the Soviets to form three whole new armies from troops withdrawn from Siberia and the frontier with Manchuria: Marshal Georgy Zhukov now had 1.1 million men, 7,652 guns and mortars, 774 tanks and 1,370 aircraft on his Western Front after the appalling losses since June 1941. This was on a par with the German forces.(Tooze, p. 527) Zhukov renewed the attack but didn't quite manage to break through at the weakest point: the entire Eastern Front settled into an uneasy stability by March 1942.(Tooze, p. 528)

Which will eventually lead us back to the Battle of Kursk in summer 1943 (Tooze, p. 622) with which I began this entire #Modern economic thinking section, hoping to swiftly discover the reasons for a supposed aluminium shortage in 1942-3. Hmmm. But first, Stalingrad, which was really only a diversion for the race for the oil in the Caucasus...

The Caucasus oilfields

Map (in Ukranian) of furthest extent of German occupation of the Soviet Union

Onwards and upwards... Operation Taifun aimed at capturing Moscow had been a disastrous failure. Ernst Udet, chief of the Luftwaffe procurement organization, shot himself on 17 November 1941.(Tooze, p. 533) Walter Rohland and leading industrialists had visited the front in November 1941, and were shocked at the complete disorder. On their return they baldly told Todt that "the war with Russia cannot be won!" With the increasing likelihood of the United Sates entering the war before the Soviet Union could be conquered, Todt told Hitler that only a political solution could end the war when they met at the very end of November 1941.(Tooze, pp. 534-5) But Todt's plane exploded shortly after takeoff in February 1941. And thus Speer to the fore.

The dire shortage of petrol had already been foreseen, and basic economic reasoning dictated that capturing the oilfields of the Caucasus would become the main purpose for continuing the war in 1942.(Tooze, p. 536)

Hitler said in June 1942 that If he didn’t get the oil of Maikop and Grozny, then he would have to liquidate the war. (Tooze, p. 613)

• Forczyk, Robert (2015). The Caucasus 1942–3: Kleist's race for oil. Campaign 281. Oxford: Osprey. ISBN 9781472805843.

Hitler split Army Group South into two elements: Heeresgruppe A and B. The Caucasus operation necessitated a major offensive by Heeresgruppe A towards Stalingrad and the Volga to hold up Soviet reserve forces from reaching the German invaders towards the south.(Tooze, p. 610)

This aligns with an earlier study:

"The main objective of Fall Blau was the seizure of the Caucasian oil-producing regions. While Army Groups North and Center stood on the defensive, a reinforced Army Group South would be split into two separate maneuver elements Army Group B, the more northerly fragment, would drive forward south of Voronezh, extending the German defensive front along the Don River. Its eastern terminus anchored at the Volga River industrial city of Stalingrad, Army Group B's lines would face generally northeastward, protecting the flank and rear of' Army Group A's operations. Army Group A, in turn, would attack due east as far as Rostov on Don and then wheel southward toward the prized oil fields (see [illegible] map 8)."

The plan for Operation Edelweiss was for Heeresgruppe B to cross the River Don at Rostov, strike almost due south to Maikop with a westwards drive towards the naval bases at Novorossyisk and Kerch in Crimea, with the main thrust continuing south-east to Grozny and possibly even Baku, only about 180 km from the Iranian border. Hitler said that if he couldn't get the oil from Maikop and Grozny, he would have to liquidate the war. Germany had imported 912,000 tons of oil from the Soviet Union during the 18 months of the economic pact, which had powered the victories of 1939–1940, and the attack on the Soviet Union itself in 1941. Commonwealth and Soviet forces invaded Iran to establish the the Persian Corridor in August 1941. The British started sending aircraft and tanks through to Baku by November 1942.

Operation started in July 1942, and Krasnodar and Maikop were captured in August. But the oil wells had been thoroughly sabotaged by pouring concrete down the shafts, and small amount of oil was being produced by November by further drilling and erecting new rigs; but the 6th Army of Heeresgruppe A was encircled at Stalingrad a few days later. By 1st January 1943 the Germans were retreating from its gains and abandoned Maikop by the end of the month. All mostly over by February except for retiring back to Rostov by October 1943. Edelweiss was a complete failure. The Germans never reached Grozny, and only around 1,000 tons of oil were extracted at Maikop which were used by the invading forces. Wilhelm List failed to concentrate on the strategic targets of the oilfields, allowing himself to mount secondary attacks on unimportant objectives. There was a constant lack of fuel and spare parts for the motorised divisions. By the time the 6th Army was defeated at Stalingrad, Hitler should have realised that the campaign was failing and used the armies of Heeresgruppe B to relieve it.

I hadn't realised how the effort to keep Stalingrad supplied by air destroyed the bombing capabilities of the Luftwaffe, and caused a severe petrol/aviation fuel shortage. Basically the entire transport and bomber capabilities of the Luftwaffe in the whole of Europe were used from November 1942 to February 1943 to keep the airlift going. See eg Irving 1973, Milch bio. Many experienced bomber crews were wiped out in this way, and production would never recover, since the 4-engined designs were far too late in arriving, and the outdated Ju 88 (first designed in 1936?) was never designed to be a strategic bomber.

The reserve and training squadrons were also raided for aircrew, many of whom were lost, and the specialised bomber training programme never recovered. The supply of fully-trained crews from the advanced training schools to the reserve training units dwindled, and up to 50,000 ground crew were detailed to fight as infantry in the Luftwaffe Felddivisionen. The High Command never appreciated the need for a genuine strategic bomber force. Göring was unbelievably optimistic about the Luftwaffe's capabilities, even after it had suffered defeats like the Battle of Britain and Operation Barbarossa. (Rise and Fall, pp. 204-5) But both Hitler and thus Göring were obsessed with offensive bomber capability and not fighters for the coming Defence of the Reich; it wasn't until July 1944 that fighters were given top priority.(Rise and Fall, p. 207)

"The almost incredible optimism which prevailed in Air Staff circles is typical of the Nazi indifference to Germany's mounting air problems during the war." (Rise and Fall of the German Air Force 1933-1945, p. 28)

NB Story of Milch's fall from power in 1937-8 is told on (Rise and Fall 1948, p. 12)

List of all German aircraft production by model from September 1939-December 1942: (Rise and Fall, p. 209)

David Irving oops

NB The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force 1933-1945 (Anon., 1948), reffed immediately above, is not to be confused with Irving's The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch (1975). I have quoted Irving's book (as eg Rise and Fall Irving/Milch) several times further up. This was before I realised that Irving's writings are emphatically not seen as WP:RS, although I knew him to be somewhat dodgy. See eg Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 430#David Irving and various other posts. He was adjudged in court to be a writer, not a historian, in addition to his outspoken views as a Holocaust denier.

More Speer, and Udet/Milch

Tooze is relatively dismissive of Speer's initial changes at the Armaments ministry when he arrived in early 1942, showing that many changes had already been initiated. Along with the 'Zentrale Planung' (Central Planning) committee, one of his innovations was to create five 'Rings' which co-ordinated production of iron and steel, iron and steel processing, non-ferrous metals, engineering components and electrotechnical equipment.(Tooze, pp 588-9) These, unsurprisingly, depended on the old underlying basis of German industry: raw materials.(Tooze, p. 594) Ammunition remained the biggest consumer of steel for the army, taking half of its allocation, with only 15% going to tanks and weapons. Specific types of steel were still being produced for plans dating back to 1939–40 which had been cancelled, and were useless. Export orders were still being fulfilled to generate foreign exchange. Manufacturers were ordering more steel than was possibly going to be available, and could choose what types of steel they were going to make: high-priority armaments production programmes were stalled for lack of components.(Tooze, p. 595)

An organisation was needed similar to Paul Pleiger's Reich Coal Organisaton (RVK), set up to solve the coal shortage in early 1941. Thus the creation of the Reichsvereinigung Eisen (RVE) in June 1942 under Hermann Röchling.(Tooze, pp. 443-4, 596). The backlog of orders for steel was to be cancelled; production would be limited to 90% of total capacity to create a reserve for high-priority orders; rolling mills were not to take on more orders than could be completed within a sensible time frame; and the total allocation of steel for the military was cut by 7% and for the export sector by nearly 25%.(Tooze, pp 597-8) Röchling proposed a rise in steel production from 31 million tonnes per year to at least 36 million tonnes. But this would need an extra 400,000 thousand tons of coking coal per month, or 4.8 million tonnes per year.(Tooze, pp. 598-9) Coal output had actually fallen throughout the war, and Pleiger was adamant by August 1942 that this figure could not be met by the unskilled foreign and conscripted workers who made up a large proportion of the mining workforce. But instead of delivering 2.1 million tonnes of coal per month, only 1.4 were mined in October 1942, and Pleiger proposed a further cut to under 1 million tonnes. Steel producers who owned their own coal mines were forced to pool the coal for general consumption, and steel output rose to a record 2.1 million tonnes per month for pre-war Germany, and 2.7 million tonnes for Greater Germany. The increased allocation of steel allowed ammunition production to rise, providing Speer's 'armaments miracle'. Tooze claims that this huge increase was not down to rationalisation, but to "a dramatic mobilization of raw materials."(Tooze, pp. 600-603)

And at last, aluminium again, as promised much earlier on.

Between early 1942 and early 1943 the monthly output of aircraft more than doubled. Tooze says that this would indicate very considerable efficiency gains, since the labour force only increased slightly, and there was no increase of raw aluminium at all.(Tooze, pp. 604-605) But see the end of the #Germany section, where the Minerals Yearbook figures show an increase in Al production from 1940–1942 of over 20,000 tonnes.

By May 1941, the aircraft industry had suffered a number of technical failures. BMW's attempts to make radial engines had come to grief Which ones? (probably the air-cooled BMW 139, predecessor of the BMW 801 which had failed by early 1939 - the first 801s ran in July 1939); only 90 Messerschmitt Me 210s, in development since 1939, had been produced; and ending advance payments to manufacturers before delivery produced a financial crisis at Heinkel; and at Junkers Koppenberg was retired (what about Norway?) and the firm was subjected to severe financial oversight. All three major aircraft producers were brought under Air Ministry control by Milch in summer 1941.(Tooze, pp. 604-5)

In fact, a decision had been made in late 1930s to cut the normal development time of new aircraft from four to three years. The Junkers Ju 88 just managed to get produced in large numbers, but the Me 210 was cancelled in 1942, and only around 1,200 Heinkel He 177 were made. The inventory of the Luftwaffe was becoming obsolete: the He 111 was first tested in 1934, and the Me 109 got its first combat experience in the Spanish civil war. But the production costs of the Me 109 had fallen by 600% from January 1939 to April 1944.(Tooze, 607-9)

Hmm, Milch

Very interesting and well-written book, examining why the Luftwaffe was defeated, with beginning with the personalities and defects of Göring, Milch, Jeschonnek and Udet, the four chief culprits.

• Suchenwirth, Richard (1959). Kennedy, Edward P. (ed.). Historical Turning Points in the German Air Force War Effort (PDF). USAF Historical Studies No. 189. USAF Historical Division, Air University.

Walter Wever was the only proponent of 4-engined strategic bombers in the Luftwaffe, and after he died in 1936 Jeschonnek was promoted, who was good friends with Wolfram von Richthofen - both of them were dive-bombing enthusiasts, alomg with Göring - so no Ural bombers were ever reaached production. Plus the Junkers Jumo 222, the intended power plant, was a disaster as well.

Irving says that the above mess [the previous section] was all Udet's fault. After the accidental death while flying of Walther Wever in June 1936, Göring had replaced the head of the Air Ministry's technical department, General Wilhelm Wimmer (General) and two of his assistants, Colonel Loeb and Col. Wolfram von Richthofen - another hugely capable man - with Ernst Udet, also a favourite of Hitler's. Udet was simply not the right man for the job - a hugely capable pilot, but not one for organization.(Irving pp. 55-56)

As head of the Luftwaffe's Technical Department beginning in 1936, Udet had "reorganized its simple horizontal structure (research, development, procurement and budget) into a hopelessly complex vertical structure (airframes, aero-engines, etc.); but with this new post of GL (General-Luftzeugmeister of the Office of Air Armament) came five research establishments like Rechlin and Peenemünde and a host of other offices. Udet would now control directly twenty-six subordinate offices. Even Milch, who positively relished desk work, had never tried to control more than four. Göring exercised no supervision, either: when inevitably the whole fragile structure crashed in 1941, the legal officers appointed to investigate established that with Göring, Udet talked only of old times."(Irving, p. 77)

For the Luftwaffe's original fleet, such as the Me 109, He 111, Do 17 and Fw 200, a three-year sequence had been used to bring a new plane to production; including carefully-timed stages of design & construction of the prototype, test flying, preparation for series production, and pilot pre-series. Udet had shaved an entire year off this process, with the terminal result that the Ju 88 was already in mass production before test-flying was even complete. By early 1941 the same fate had befallen the Me 109F, the Me 210, the He 177 and the Fw 190.(Irving 1973, p. 133). In May 1941 Milch learned that Udet had no fewer than twenty-six departmental heads reporting directly to him.(Irving p. 136). He and his department been practising large-scale self-deception and fantasy." And Göring shared his mistrust: 'if they come to, me with graphs, then I know from the outset that it’s a swindle; and if they want to multiply the swindle, they do it all in three colours!' " (Irving p. 136)

Goebbels even was scathing about Udet in May 1943: "The technical failure of the Luftwaffe results mainly from useless aircraft designs. It is here that Udet bears the fullest measure of the blame. Well may he have tried to expiate this by his suicide, but this has not helped our situation very much. Speer is very disturbed by all this, but believes that Milch will probably succeed in leading us out of the woods. The public shows its common sense when they rumour that it is Göring himself who is to blame. Göring has put his old First World War comrades too much to the fore, and these are obviously not equal to the burdens of leadership that war places on them." (Irving, pp 240-41)

Hans Jeschonnek, another favourite of Hitler's, was equally to blame. Jeschonnek replaced Hans-Jürgen Stumpff in February 1939 as the Chief of the General Air Staff (Chef des Generalstabs der Luftwaffe). He was a proponent of Blitzkrieg warfare, and failed to prepare for the forthcoming defence of the Reich. German blitzkrieg strategies in the Soviet Union failed from winter 1941 onwards. Göring, influenced by people like Bernd von Brauchitsch, started by-passing Jeschonnek, who eventually shot himself on 18 August 1943.

Hitler, anticipating a swift war with the Soviet Union, ordered less production for the army and much more for the Luftwaffe which was next going to take the fight to Britain. Milch was to discover from Udet in June 1941 what the true state of production was. It was bad. Göring appointed Milch to an all-powerful position where he could summarily request almost any building, company, or resource.

Milch gathered around him successful industrialists he had known from the Lufthansa days, and pooled the entire industry's resources. For example, all aero-engine crankshafts were produced in numerous factories (a 'ring') all under the control of one man. The loss of trade secrets was compensated for by increased efficiency.(Irving p. 141)

Milch also organised more manpower, and rationalised aluminium use. Better machining techniques would save 1,500 lbs of aluminium in one aero-engine alone: also at Messerschmitt's factory workmen were making tropical aluminium huts for a colonial navy contract, and making aluminium ladders for vineyards. Other hidden stocks came to light.(Irving p. 142) According to Irving, Milch also made huge savings with copper: in 1941 it was calculated that the aircraft industry would need 16,000 tons of copper a month in order to manufacture 800 aircraft - in August 1943 he said they were only using 4,000 tons, but making not a single plane less.(Irving p. 143) And then the Bomber B to replace the Heinkel 111 and Ju 88 fiasco - neither the Junkers Ju 288 nor the Focke-Wulf Fw 191 were remotely ready. Plus the Me 109 with the non-ready over-heating DB 605 engine, and the Fw 190's unready BMW 801 radial. Almost no fighters were being made at all in summer 1941.(Irving p. 144) The engine problems weren't solved until around June 1942.(Irving pp. 183-4)

Milch then flew around the airfields of the Eastern Front, assessing the hundreds of planes unserviceable for lack of spares. He organised squads of engineers to fly round after him, cannibalising damaged aircraft to fix the repairable ones. If the undercarriage needed replacing on a Junkers Ju 52, the complete set of spares for the entire aircraft needed to be ordered, costing 120,000 marks. (Irving p. 147-8) Udet shot himself in November 1941, and Milch, having been a somewhat powerless state secretary in the Air Ministry, also became Director of Air Armament.

Of the founding of the Luftwaffe, and Udet's part in it, a German wrote in 1944:

"Were one to pen a faithful account, an objective history of the Luftwaffe’s technical development since 1934, then any outsider today—or better, any of our descendants—would take the whole thing as satire, dreamed up by some diseased imagination. Who could seriously believe that in real life there would be so much inadequacy, bungling, entanglement, misplaced power, lack of appreciation of the truth and overlooking of intelligent ideas?" (Irving p. 156)

Milch once calculated that besides the huge and costly ground organization it had taken on average 2,313 rounds of heavy flak and 4,258 rounds of light flak to bring down each aircraft they had claimed up to the end of November 1940.(Irving p. 171)

Compare Salavrakos "...the mass production of Α/Α guns should have been focused, to the best type: that of the 128mm gun with a range of 35,000 feet and an average consumption of 3,000 shells per 1 shoot down. Contrary to this the well-known 88mm gun (Μοdel 36-37) needed 15,000 shells / 1 shoot." In 1944 only 5% of Flak was the 128 mm gun, most were 88mm.

"When Keitel curtly wrote to [Milch in January 1942] protesting that the Luftwaffe was not supplying army factories with enough copper for the Führer's flak programme to be carried out, and that Hitler had therefore decreed 'that the raw materials are to be made available', Milch replied to Keitel with heavy sarcasm: 'The entire Luftwaffe copper quota would suffice to cover 74 percent of the flak programme—provided, of course, that all aircraft production ceases.'"(Irving, p. 171)

"Compared with twenty-eight thousand aero-engines turned out in 1941 Milch’s factories were to manufacture fifty thousand in 1942."(Irving, p. 171) Nevertheless, Göring realised that the mess was Udet's fault, and blamed himself for having overburdened Udet.(Irving, p. 172)

Speer, Milch, and a Göring crony made up the Central Planning.

The same sort of coal shortage as in 1940 re-appeared in April 1942. 150,000 trucks, many of them special flatbeds, were stuck in Russia, since no-one had bothered to send them back. They were blocking the line and new supplies couldn't get through. OKW ordered had that tens of thousands of coal trucks were to be converted to flatbeds to replace the missing ones. At least 70,000 coal trucks were needed to sustain capacity.(Irving, p. 172)

By late 1943 the cause of another aluminium shortage became apparent: the worst drought for 90 years in Germany. The loss of hydroelectric power meant the loss of nitrogen, high-grade electro-steels, synthetic fuel and aluminium. The Danube was so low that oil barges could only carry 300 tonnes instead of 700. Reich aluminium production estimated at 40,000 tonnes per month would be rationed to the Luftwaffe at 22,000 tonnes per month.(Irving, p. 286)

NB! Note that Irving is not a WP:RS and all these above cites are invalid. See #David Irving oops above. MinorProphet (talk) 14:54, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

End of Tooze

Nevertheless, the huge increase in armaments production in the Urals meant that the real 'armaments miracle' had taken place in the Soviet Union. Soviet small arms and artillery in 1942 outnumbered German figures by 3:1, tanks by 4:1, and even aircraft by 2:1. This was achieved with a quarter less total national product, due to the loss of territory and factories.(Tooze, p. 614)

"The answer [to what? A need of Hitler and Speer for a 'big propaganda story'] was the Adolf Hitler Panzer Programme, announced to enormous fanfare on 22 January 1943." (Tooze p. 620)

"There can be no doubt that the Wehrmacht needed more tanks. By the last week of January 1943, the Ostheer had been battered to the point where it had only 495 Panzers on its books, not all of which were in working order.19 Nor can there be any argument with the effectiveness of the Adolf Hitler Panzer Programme. The number of tanks produced in May 1943 was more than twice the number produced in the autumn of 1942. Measured by weight, the introduction of the new heavier models meant that total production increased by as much as 160 per cent. However, the extraordinary propagandistic emphasis given to the Adolf Hitler Programme and the extraordinary powers granted to Speer to implement it, were out of all proportion to the significance of the tank in the overall war effort. Even at the height of the Adolf Hitler Programme, the share of tanks in total armaments production did not exceed 7 per cent. Meanwhile, other sectors were severely disadvantaged, both in practical and symbolic terms.20 Speer’s tank propaganda had its intended effect in focusing every German industrialist on the new top priority. Even if other programmes had high-priority rankings they found it hard to get the attention of key sub- contractors. The Luftwaffe, in particular, found it virtually impossible to get prompt delivery of crankshafts for aero-engines, given the priority now enjoyed by the Maybach tank engine factory. The Adolf Hitler Programme also hogged more than its fair share of freight capacity, holding up critical deliveries." (Tooze pp. 621-2)

Well, this was the drive to produce the new Tiger and Panther tanks - series production of the first Pz.Kpfw. V Panthers (Ausf. D) began in January 1943, but when they arrived in Russia in the spring the faults (including the steering and leaking engine gaskets) were so egregious that the entire batch had to be returned to Germany. See List of WWII Maybach engines#Development of the HL210 and HL230

Yet as Tooze finally admits on p. 660, Speer himself says that both the increased Panzer production figures of 1943 and the aircraft drive of 1944 were only made possible by extra allocations from a 'slush fund' of materials previously secretly stashed away, and unknown either to the Armaments Ministry planning office of Hans Kehrl, or to Central Planning. Which is a bit of a cop-out, if you ask me.

It seems this wasn't unusual. As the BIOS reports on the logistics of the aircraft industry and the Luftwaffe show, huge stockpiles of materials and finished spares were secretly amassed in the hope that people could later magically pull a rabbit out of the proverbial hat and save the game. Milch/Irving complains how the Italians had vast stocks of raw materials while complaining they never had enough. Oi, refs pls!

At El Alamein the woefully under-supplied Rommel only had 123 Mark III and IVs, and the DAK rarely had more than 500 tanks total. The 8th Army had over 1,000 tanks.(Tooze, p. 614) 'Tunisgrad' in May 1943 cost 290,000 men. At the same time the U-boat wolf packs were losing one boat and crew per day in the Atlantic, and US shipyards were turning out a million tonnes of shipping per month. Dönitz withdrew his submarine fleet in May 1943.(Tooze pp. 618-9)

And then Operation Zitadelle in June, and then Kursk, and the sequence of Soviet successes on the Eastern Front.

In many ways 1943 was when German industry somehow really got going (the sort of timescale which far-sighted planners like Milch—I'm sure there are others—had been looking towards), only to be slowly crushed during the relentless bombing of Germany in 1944.

Summary

And now we are into 1944, but the mystery of the supposed aluminium shortages of 1942-43 which are the cause of this entire #Modern economic thinking section may have not been adequately addressed.

Hmm, thinking about it, I may have identified many of the causes, although they are so bound up with every other reason for the almost permanent shortages of everything that it seems difficult to disentangle them satisfactorily. As I said at the beginning, "Blimey, it's complicated." Rationing and allocation of raw marerials - coal, iron ore, bauxite, chromite, copper... iron, steel, aluminium, ammunition, explosives... steam, electricity, railways, labour... short-term reactions of leadership/planning to the upsets of war which could easily have been foreseen by the ousted far-thinkers, and often were... the whole disastrous compulsion of the NS-regime... profiteering nincompoops in charge, jealousy, favouritism, industrial competition, profound mistrust at all levels... drought, food, clothing... Generals who wouldn't follow orders, like von Kleist in the Caucasus... even Guderian was not seen as reliable at all by the OKH, a bit of a loose cannon... top-level changes in strategy made far too late for it to make any difference... the wholly unexpected resistance of Britain and the Soviet Union, the wholly expected alliance with the US - which really made all the difference.

The bombing campaigns of 1944 by the USAAF and RAF were (given the constraints of the technology) mostly incredibly effective: destroy the manufacturing plants and the transportation system, the factories, railways, canals and rivers - with not enough fighters, and no way of taking the fight to the enemy (no long-range 4-engined bombers thanks to Göring and Udet back in c1937-38), Germany's fate was sealed. Only the tenacity of the German armed forces and of the workers to keep them supplied kept the war in Europe going.

There's little I need to add to the earlier #Mini-summary.

The entirety of the German economy was gradually hijacked by the Nazis in order to prepare for war. Hitler originally intended to expand eastwards only, and it wasn't until around 1937 that he realised that his highly aggressive foreign policy meant that he was going to have to take on and defeat Western Europe before he could continue the Lebensraum project.

The victories in the Low Countries and France were a complete surprise to the German High Command, and it wasn't until Operation Barbarossa that a fully-fledged 'Blitzkrieg' plan was deliberately put into action. This was another gamble, that the Soviet Union could be defeated in six months from June 1941, and Britain could then somehow be pacified before the United States joined the war. The gamble failed horribly, since the real might of the Soviet Union with its vast resources of raw materials, labour, and manufacturing capacity was suddenly exposed. If Stalin hadn't purged the Soviet army of nearly all its officers in 1937, he would probably have had a much better chance of countering the German invasion in 1941.

The wildly over-ambitious Nazi plans for armaments production meant there was a constant lack of everything. Constant re-allocation of resources and materials gave rise to permanent shortages. The bombing of Berlin in 1944 was a mistake - the Ruhr was much more important. And yet although the Germans managed to keep up production of aircraft eg Fw 190 until 1944, it they were never, ever going to defeat the combined might of the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union.

Cost-effectiveness of different types of weapon

Also, what was more cost-effective, a tank or a plane? What sayeth Salavrakos? In 1940–1943, almost exactly the same numbers of medium tanks and fighters were produced:

              1940   1941   1942   1943   1944 
Medium tanks  1,359  2,875  5,595  9,398  12,096 
Single-engine
fighters      1,870  2 852  4,542  9,626  25,860 

A re-assessment of the German armaments production during World War II, p. 115
Ioannis-Dionysios Salavrakos
Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies, Vol 44, No. 2, 2016, pp. 113–145. 
doi : 10.5787/44-2-1178 

"During the years 1939-1945, the following types were procured: 31,898 Me-109 fighters; 16,911 Ju-88 planes; 7,647 FW-190 fighters; 6,247 Me-110 night fighters; 5,678 He 111 bombers; 4,890 Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers; 2,804 Ju-52 transport planes. The figures the number of tanks produced was 23,181 units, the number of armoured vehicles was 14,162 and the number of S/P guns was 5,335 units. The study differentiates between different types of tanks such as light Mark-I and Mark-II types (1,168 and 632 respectively) [NB many more had been produced before the war] versus the medium Mark-III and heavy Mark-IV types (5,672 and 8,168) and the super-heavy Tiger I (1,398 pieces) and Tiger II (379) types and the Panther S/P guns (5,814 pieces)."(Salavrakos, pp. 115-6)

"According to Ranki (1993) the increased armaments production is associated with massive investments in machinery until 1942. Between the years 1939-1941, the annual machine tools production was 195,000–200,000 tools. In 1942 it was 162,000 tools, in 1943 it was 140,000 and in 1944 it was 110,000."(Salavrakos, p. 116)

(Salavrakos, p. 117-8) points out that there are considerable differences between authors.

Tank production from the History of the Second World War by the German Institute for Military History: "Tank and armour vehicle production during August–December 1939 was 790 tanks and vehicles. In 1940 total production was 2,808 tanks and armour vehicles, in 1941 it was 6,008. 32 In 1942 the production increased to 9,278 in 1943 to 19,824 and in 1944 to 27,340. Thus an aggregate production of 66,048 tanks and armour vehicles took place during the war.(Salavrakos, p. 119-20)" S. says that these figures are the most reliable.

Aha! (Salavrakos, p. 122) gives the cost of all the German tanks: for example a Sd.Kfz. 9 cost 60,000 RM: and a Panzer IV Ausf. G with the ΚwK 40 L/43 gun cost very nearly 116,000 RM, and used 39,000 kg of steel, 238 kg of aluminum, 195 kg of copper, 116 kg of rubber, 66 kg tin, 63.5 kg lead, 0.23kg magnesium. A Panther cost not much more, 117,000 RM (NB minus the gun!), but the Tiger I would set you back 300,000.

As for guns, a 10,5cm leFH 18 cost 16,400 RM, and the 15 cm K 18 was 108,000 RM; the 3.7cm Pak 35/36 cost 5,730 RM, and a Pak 41 cost 15,000 RM (Salavrakos, p. 123)

Aircraft: (Salavrakos, p. 123) Total nos. of each type of German aircraft, p. 134

         Basic   w/engines
Me-109E   58,800   85,970 
Ju-87 B  100,300  131,175 
Ju-52    125,000  163,000
Ju-88 A  245 200  306,950 
He-111 H 203,900  265,650 

So, a Stuka cost 100,300, a 15 cm K 18 was 108,000, and a Panther cost 117,000 RM, all pretty the same sort of price. Which was more effective, though?

Hmm, studies of the Lufwaffe on the Eastern Front (such as Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe 1933-1945 by Williamson Murray. Air University Press, Alabama, January 1983) show that Stukas were hugely influential in assisting the victories of Panzer divisions. The Luftwaffe achieved air superiority very early on in Op. Barbarossa, and maintained it right up to 1943 at least. Neither Germany nor the Soviet Union developed significant 4-engined strategic bombers.

Gigantic expenditure of ammunition by the Heer, (Salavrakos, pp. 129-30) Copy some figures! (Salavrakos, pp.135-6) shows the vast range of ammo developed by different ammo makers.

(Salavrakos, p.135) shows that the war vs Soviet Union in the East was mostly land-based, and in the West vs Britain was typically air- and sea-based.

More prices (in US dollars): I ask that cost of weapon

Combat aircraft versus armour in WWII has a go, but it's not ideal, since there was considerable doubt about claims of both the Soviet air force at Kursk and eg Typhoons in Normandy in 1944. Tank-busting planes carries very little ammunition, and 37mm shells were not much good against even Panzer IVs and certainly not Panthers. Bomb damage against tanks was often not effective - compare USBS reports on bomb damage to the Tiger and other factories - v. few tanks were destroyed, it was loss of production that was more effective.

More literature...

Alfred C. Mierzejewski: The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944-1945: Allied Air Poweer and the German National Railway (Archive.org to borrow) The University of North Carolina Press-Chapel Hill, 1988

Very interesting and detailed take on how important the DRB (Deutsches Reichbahn) was to the whole economy. Mostly concentrates on coal and steel. Lots of figures. Production figures for the Panther, 88 mm and 105mm Flak guns and the K98 carbine reached their highest level in March-July 1944.(p. 93)

Haha lol, Derek Ezra (See #BIOS reports above) at the time only a Major, had gone to France and searched for info on the effectiveness of bombing the French marshalling yards, and how it affected production in the Saar and Ruhr. Essentially, deliveries of coal, coke and Minette (ore) iron ore had shrunk to a trickle or completely disappeared: "Coal famine had swept the country." Ezra returned with a vast chart of French railway statistics. He called Solly Zuckerman, to whose team Ezra had been attached, who showed AVM Tedder (Bomber Command were previously in favour of bombing railway bridges): who persuaded the air commanders to begin bombing the marshalling yards in earnest. (pp 99-102). (e-book pp. 114–7) This approach was very slowly and reluctantly adopted as a 3rd-line strategy by the USAAF in Europe.

See also The German National Railway in World War II by Janusz Piekallkiewicz.

György Ranki: The Economics of the Second World War, Vienna, Böhlau Verlag, 1993,

Knittel, Hartmut H. (1988)
Panzerfertigung im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Industrieproduktion für die deutsche Wehrmacht. 
Zugl.: Hamburg, Hochschule der Bundeswehr, Diss. 
Herford, Bonn: Mittler (Wehrtechnik und wissenschaftliche Waffenkunde, 2).
ISBN / EAN 3813202917

Müller, Werner (1993)
Die Schwere Flak 1933-1945. 8,8 cm, 10,5 cm, 12,8 cm, 15 cm; mit den Ortungs- und Feuerleitgeräten. 
Nachaufl. Friedberg/H.: Podzun-Pallas.
ISBN / EAN 3790902306

Also as The Heavy Flak Guns 1933-1945 (Schiffer)

Other misc. tank info

• Jentz & Doyle (2011). Panzer Production 1933-1945. Panzer Tracts 23. Boyds, MD.

This final volume gives a complete and comprehensive summary of every type of Panzer ever made, including corrections of mistakes made through understandable ignorance in their earlier volumes. As usual there is an excess of bold type to highlight EVERY SINGLE GERMAN BLOODY NOUN however many times it appears, and a lack of proper sub-headings in the text, which makes the reading experience unbelievably wearing, but the tables are clear and well laid out. This is the definitive list and should be quoted for every tank article on WP. Another challenge? Sadly, they never wrote the 12 and 18-ton halftrack books, or the production figures. Ah well.

German Motorized Artillery and Panzer Artillery in World War II by Fleisher and Eiermann does mention some production figures for half-tracks. Maybe the Waffen Arsenal books have them...

Ha! Yep, Fred Koch has loads of figures: see User:MinorProphet/Draft subpages/WW2 German Army workshop companies and tank maintenance.

• Koch, Fred (2001). Zugfahrzeuge für Geschütze der Wehrmacht 1935 - 1945. Waffen-Arsenal 189 (in German). Wölfersheim-Berstadt: Podzun-Pallas Verlag. ISBN 3790907340.

Supply and logistics

Main page: User:MinorProphet/Draft subpages/German logistics on the Eastern Front in WW2

It's only over the last couple of years that I have really begun to understand the vastness of the German war effort against the Soviet Union. Being interested in British forces, the Battle of Britain in 1940, the naval war in the Atlantic and the North African campaign, plus Norway and Burma were my previous main interests.

The entirety of this current draft is an attempt to disentangle just one aspect of the German side of things, namely shortages of various kinds, my first appreciation of how complex the whole business was. Reading Barbarossa Derailed - The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941 atm.

Russian/Soviet campaign: The original plan of the German Army generals (Brauschitz? Bock? Leeb?) was to go straight to Moscow, but the battles of Bryansk and Smolensk proved hugely costly. After Barbarossa had stalled by August 1941(!) [and where else did the Germans grind to a halt in the N. & S?], Hitler & his advisors (who apparently had been stalling about the ultimate objectives of the entire invasion, since it was already meant to be over and done), decided that military victory was going to take second place to economic domination, the whole point of the Caucasus operation. Hayward 1996, p. 25 says the actual decision was made in Winter 1941/42, but it had been part of the overall plan from before Barbarossa began.(Hayward Ch. 1)

Find the passage in Overy's Goering where "der Dicke" tells Herr H. that unless there was going to be oil, his Luftwaffe planes weren't going to be able to fly. Somwhere above I wrote that it was H. who said this: but in Overy's curiously bland volume, this comes across as one of the few times when G. persuaded his boss about anything important: that oil really was the key to winnning (or even continuing) the war.

So, although [the] Ukraine was desirable anyway for its grain & agriculture, coal, industry, etc., it turned out to be on the way to the oil: thus - perhaps? [deffo WP:OR here]citation needed - the removal of the armoured divisisions from Army Group Centre to reinforce the south-eastern thrust towards the the Caucasus in summer 1942...? and even then 2 Panzer divisions earmarked for the 4th Army (Hoth's 4th Panzer Army) were diverted to Stalingrad and the fated Sixth Army. And H's obsession with wiping Leningrad, the home of Bolshevism, right off the map.

H's excuse (it seems) was to neutralise potential threats to the Centre from both flanks. Army Group Nord's area was very unsuited to tanks, being heavily forested, and in fact the northern armoured divisions (i fink) were pulled out to AG Mitte while Guderian and Hoth zoomed towards Smolensk in July. Then both Leningrad and Kiev became the primary targets, and all the armour was diverted north and south again. This was definitely on 21 August 1941. Hmm, some chronolgy needs sorting...

Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton by Martin van Creveld is really interesting, because it shows how the stunning advances made by German troops, especially the Panzer divisions of AG Mitte, were fated to grind to a halt because of the totally inadequate systems of supply. eg the German army took over 2,000 different types of vehicles into the Soviet Union in 1941. As usual, it took ages for both OKW (High Command Wehrmacht) and OKH (High Command Army) to understand the urgency of maintaining supplies, and the responsibility was fatally split between them.

The few decent roads were often blocked with infantry trailing after the tanks, and anyway there were far too few transport vehicles in the Grosstransportraum (Army group-level Motor Transport regiments, or supply columns) to maintain the necessary volume of supplies: even if enough fuel and ammunition for the Panzer divisions in AG Mitte could have been delivered, that would have denied supplying the whole of the rest of the armies. Or something. It was utterly impossible that Bock could have got any further than Smolensk even if he had wanted to. There simply wasn't the rail capacity to supply even the armoured divisions alone, and the railhead was some 200 miles? behind the front. Everything that could have gone wrong, did. Hopeless over-optimism that the Soviets could be totally beaten in 6 months, the Germans were completely under-supplied with everything.

This supply crisis matches up with Barbarossa Derailed, p. 199 etc.

The Logistics That Support the Blitzgrieg - really quite well written with a decent flow chart of how supplies were intended to get from Germany to Kiev.

Once again the sheer doggedness of the German forces faced with almost insuperable difficulties imposed by the lack of foresight and planning on the part of their own side is almost overwhelming. The total lack of preparedness of the Soviet forces is likewise almost unbelievable - only the ability to throw hundreds of thousands of almost completely untrained troops into battle seems to have to saved the regime from total collapse.

Refs

Notes

Citations

Sources

+ obviously many more in text body which need moving down here...

• Kaufman, J. Gilbert (2000). "Chapter 3: Understanding Wrought and Cast Aluminum Alloys Designations" (PDF). Introduction to Aluminum Alloys and Tempers. doi:10.1361/iaat2000p023.
• Ritter, Franz (1937). Korrosionstabellen metallischer Werkstoffe: geordnet nach angreifenden Stoffen. Vienna: Springer Verlag.
• Spielberger, Walter (1993b). Panther & its variants. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military/Aviation History. ISBN 0887403972.
• United States Foreign Economic Administration (1945). The Light Metals Industry in Germany. War Department pamphlet, issue 31-131. Military Government Guide, United States Provost Marshal General's Bureau. Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
• Wisniewski, Jason R. (2013). Powering the Luftwaffe: German Aero Engines of World War II. Friesen Press. ISBN 9781460215845.