As this book will show, Hitler’s regime after 1933 undertook a truly remarkable campaign of economic mobilization. The armaments programme of the Third Reich was the largest transfer of resources ever undertaken by a capitalist state in peacetime. Nevertheless, Hitler was powerless to alter the underlying balance of economic and military force. 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.
