German war production without war with West

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Of the nearly 6 million Russian prisoners of war held by Germany between a half and two thirds of them died in captivity, from recollection the majority of these died through starvation, epidemic and exposure to the elements. During the German occupation of Crete there was a policy that for every German soldier killed a number of civilians would be killed as a reprisal, the number varied. At times German forces would seal off an area, destroy every village and kill everyone found within that area, a favourite way of killing large amounts of people at once was to lock them in buildings and burn them down. There were no SS units present in Crete, this was done by the German army.
I understand that this thread is basically asking whether forum members believe that Germany and it's Allies could have defeated Russia in a situation where Russia stood alone against them. I can't see how this situation would ever have occurred but if it had then I believe that Germany would of beaten Russia and have occupied all the lands that they were interested in and that any opposition within those lands would have resulted in the extermination of the population. Like with the Russian prisoners of war starvation, epidemic and exposure to the elements would likely have played as bigger part in these peoples deaths as direct killing. I think this because this was how he Nazis did things wherever they were. There are lands further east in the old USSR that were part of the Russian Empire but not themselves Russian, because these were poor countries with little to offer Germany then probably they would have been left to their own devices so long as they caused no trouble.
 
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Yeah, we've strayed very far OT. The thread is about production, not even the outcome of a potential Axis vs. USSR showdown. Unlike Dave Bender, I think the campaign would be a long one, so long term production comes into play; what could Germany produce without the pressures of wars on other fronts? That means no Uboat war, no need for home aerial defense production (beyond the minimum), no diversion of resources to other theaters like Africa (does anyone have information about what equipment and how many men were sent to Africa from 1941-43?), and no bombing campaign disrupting production. There are of course political issues in this, like whether Germany would have enough money to purchase from abroad and how the West would react. But fundamentally this thread is about production output at its core, not politics.
 

The North Africa campaign cost the Germans roughly 150,000 killed and captured (all highly trained and experienced). I'm not finding a breakdown of Axis material losses by nationality but in total there were approx 800 planes, 6,200 guns (including lots of 88s), 2500 tanks (mainly Pz II-IV, and - IIRC - a Tiger heavy battalion, along with Italian armor), and 70,000 other vehicles.

Good call on the political issues.
 
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Thanks! I thought that Germany sent a disproportionate share of its trucks to the North African theater, which had a negative impact on the Eastern Front. Any idea how much was lost during shipping to Allied naval attacks?
 
The Germans used lots of captured British lorries in North Africa, I have no idea how many but it was enough for them often to be common in pictures. The Germans should have made more winter clothes, I read somewhere that there was plenty of captured French winter clothing that could have been issued but wasn't. The Germans actually cancelled armament programmes rather than started new ones in 1941, this was because they wanted to produce more of what they were already making rather than use their resources on new stuff. So what would have happened did happen, they just carried on with old designs and no winter clothes because they expected to have the whole thing wrapped up before winter
 
What I get from this thread is:
Firstly that industrial capacity in Germany including its potential to grow was unaffected by war in the west in the early years.
Secondly that besides not having to make good the losses in the west in the OTL the size and character of production in the scenario are nevertheless indeterminate.

It seems to me that we keep bumping up against some variant of the background question of how would the strategies and political positions and therefore military dispositions of all nations have changed if Britain sued for peace in 1940. And that appears to be a problem in a way that any single military 'what if' does not (for example what if Italy did not invade Greece or in North Africa).

So tentatively maybe a WW2 in which no country 'defied and survived' is such a completely different item that nothing can be said for sure - even about such an apparently independent thing like industrial production. Not even up, down or about the same without a whole cloud of subsidiary what ifs being fixed first. That's how the very expert statements here look to me so far.

If so, if the answer to the thread is indeterminate, that's weak evidence that events in Downing Street/Parliament,the UK and CW in April May 1940 were crucial. Churchill or Halifax basically. And that was a close enough contest to make the scenario very realistic. And an example of a very good and productive 'what if'.

Or none of those things? I've been wrong many times before.
 
bbear said:
If so, if the answer to the thread is indeterminate, that's weak evidence that events in Downing Street/Parliament,the UK and CW in April May 1940 were crucial.
Click to expand...

A lot of Germans thought that the those events were crucial, at least they said so post war. Germany was forced to fight on two fronts and these German commanders felt that had they had a freehand in the East, with Britain in a state of "armed neutrality" following negotiations, they would have defeated the Soviet Union in 1941/2.

Cheers

Steve
 
I'm reviving this because I was looking into the production of the Jumo 004 and came across some relevant figures related to the allied (RAF/USAAF) bombing of the various Junkers plants.

Junkers estimated that allied bombing cost the company 300,000,000 RM in damage. To put that in perspective the company was capitalised to the tune of 240,000,000 RM in 1941. That is a substantial loss.

During 1944 alone 540 machine tools were destroyed (something that the "anti-bombers" say is not possible) and a further 1,500 damaged but repairable.

The details of lost production and plants off line for days, weeks, and rarely months makes for depressing reading. It is difficult to quantify exactly what effect this had on production of aircraft (more than 30,000 between 1933 and 1945) or aero engines (more than 82,000 between 1939 and 1945) but to imagine it had no effect is ridiculous. Those numbers could have been substantially larger.

Junkers is not alone. Other sectors and companies within the aviation industry were also bombed.

There were also indirect effects. Facilities were dispersed or forced underground. The head of Junkers' aero engine development division reported that the results of moving the Kothen and Magdeburg workshops into the underground tunnels at Nordhausen was "great confusion." An estimated three months output was lost between May and August 1944.

The question, as Overy posed it, is, how much more would Germany have produced had there been no bombing? Without a war in the West all this would have been avoided.

Cheers

Steve
 
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Not to mention the effects on transportation; German production wasn't centralized like the Soviets or US was, so relied heavily on prompt shipping of components from subcontractors to the assembly centers throughout the Reich. The disruption of the rail networks, especially in 1944, badly degraded efficiency in production, so that even as all the producers had their parts ready, final produce assembly was just not happening in a timely fashion. Add in the bombing of factories and all that entailed, resources spent on dispersal of production (including into underground facilities), building up of underground factories or repairing bomb damage, etc. and its pretty clear that from 1943 on with the Battle of the Ruhr German production was being seriously disrupted.
 
Yes indeed.
It's just that I read posts about the RAF "bouncing rubble" about and wonder if the posters have ever actually examined the available data. I only posted again in this thread because I stumbled across the data when looking for, in the words of Monty Python, something completely different!
Cheers
Steve
 
I'd like to continue the discussion, so feel free to post again if you'd like.
I think there are some serious misconceptions around the strategic bombing campaign stemming from the failure to live up to the, perhaps apocryphal, claim of being able to win the war on its own and the serious moral issues of bombing civilians, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. So people who have a bone to pick over the morality of it or the cost of it to the attacker generally seem to denigrate the effort and its results, in effect throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. I think, as you suggest, the war would have been much more costly if the Germans were allowed to produce uninterrupted by bombing by the Western Allies, something the Soviets would have found out if they fought the war by themselves.
 
I havent read the entire thread, so apologies in advance guys. I just wanted to make an opening point.....German Army Divisions have been caculated they spent up to 80% of their combat time on the Eastern Front. Its a bit of a furphy to claim significantly higher equipment levels or manpower evels with no western front.

However, if there is no western front at all (no air, ground or naval war) then large amounts of German military production used for air defence and maritime warfare would be released. If they can swing the manpower issue somehow, the Soviets are in BIG trouble

If the Soviets dont receive much help from the west, in terms of aid, their manpower levels and equipment falls through the floor.

If you assume greater lend lease, a continued maritime war and air war in the west, Germany would actually be in worse shape
 
I see now (I think I do) what we're getting at.

Is it ok if I interpret the question as what if a defensive posture persisted in the west until DDay and only tactical use of air power in offence (no commando raids, no strategic bombing)? What level would German production have been and how would she use it?

That would help me to eliminate all the political imponderables involved in a British peace deal in March 1941 as I read the thread (would Italy behave better as an axis partner, would Spain, Portugal, Sweden remain neutral, would lend-lease to GB continue, how would GB rearm, what kind of a deal would be made with the soviets, a Japan first strategy?.....).

Is that a smaller Furphy/Water Cooler/Scutlebutt conjecture?
 
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wiking85 said:
So people who have a bone to pick over the morality of it or the cost of it to the attacker generally seem to denigrate the effort and its results,
Click to expand...

This is human nature. Two and a half thousand years ago Euripides wrote "The Trojan Women", a play about how we all barbarise ourselves in the pursuit of our ends through war. It was set in Troy, but the contemporary audience would have had no doubt that it alluded to much more recent events in the Peloponnesian War, particularly the actions of the Athenian expedition to the island of Melos.
Cheers
Steve
 

With no war in the West, there is undoubtedly more equipment for the East; I suggest you read even the last two pages about what bombing cost the German economy, let alone the diversion of resources into the V-weapons program and the Uboats (and their subpens). Manpower-wise, yes, the Germans put the majority of their soldiers into the East, but still by 1944 there were well over 1 million soldiers fighting on other fronts that would have been useful in the East. The Italian manpower used in Africa would have been useful in the East too, not to mention having them fight past 1943. Plus with greater German production the Axis allies in Europe could actually get excess equipment beyond what German troops were using.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Front_(World_War_II)
This shows +800k German casualties in the West from 1941-1945, not including Italy, Africa, or the Balkans.

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According to this by 1944 there were only 40% of German troops on the Eastern Front (all services), with only 57% of divisions and 45% of aircraft.
Not sure if that counts the enormous amount of manpower diverted to air defense by 1944.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_Campaign
Just in terms of casualties and not total manpower committed, Africa cost Germany about 150,000 men and tons of equipment that I'm not going to list by line item.
It cost Italy over 350,000 men.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Campaign_(World_War_II)
Italy cost the Axis nearly 600,000 casualties total, most were German. In terms of manpower, I bet that there was close to 1 million men deployed to Italy at some point.

In terms of men, the other fronts cost Germany serious casualties, not to mention just sheer numbers of men deployed that were not available for the Eastern Front. It also distorted equipment production in directions other than optimizing weapon systems for the fighting on the Eastern Front; without the West the Axis could have focused their manpower and production solely on things that would hurt the Soviets, rather than various systems to fight a variety of enemies on a variety of fronts.

No, the scenario you are proposing is pretty far from the one I am suggesting here. Its still interesting and has some overlap, but is still separate from what I'm getting at.
 
The only scenario where the germans come out worse, is if there is greater support for the USSR from the West. more food in particular. If that occurs, the Soviets can match German increased mapower levels and equipment levels by the Germans. If the Allies retain some kind of pressure or threat in the west, the Germans are in serious trouble.

However, if there is no elevation of support for the Soviets, and/or no retention of threat from the west, then the pendulum swings heavily in favour of the Germans. If they get, for example another million men on the eastern front without counterbalance from the Soviets, especially in 1942, then the Soviets are likley to collapse. Its that simple really
 
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