The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

by Adam Tooze

Hitler made his first intervention in the ammunition question in October, to insist on the priority of artillery and artillery ammunition.57 In mid-November, as the struggle with Brauchitsch and Halder neared its climax, he demanded ammunition production at three times the level previously envisaged by army procurement.58 By the end of the month this so-called ‘Fuehrerforderung’ (Fuehrer’s Challenge) had begun to take on more concrete form. Based on figures that Hitler had cribbed from the standard history of the Great War, it gave priority above all to howitzers and heavy mortars–the decisive weapons of trench warfare. 59 On 12 December 1939 Hitler personally approved the final version of the Fuehrerforderung, the most dramatic headline of which was the demand to raise monthly production by the autumn of 1940 to 3 million light howitzer shells, 650,000 rounds of heavy howitzer ammunition and no less than 150,000 21 centimetre mortar bombs.60 For the standard 10.5 centimetre howitzer shells of the Wehrmacht, Hitler demanded an almost eightfold increase in production.61 Relative to actual production in the autumn of 1939 measured in terms of weight of shot, the Fuehrerforderung implied a three-and-a-half-fold increase in the next twelve months and a fivefold increase by the autumn of 1941. These figures are important testimony to the kind of war that Hitler expected to have to fight in the coming year. In