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

by Adam Tooze

far the largest industrial challenge facing the German economy in World War II. Not for nothing were shell factories amongst the iconic images of 1914–18. Though less prominent in the visual repertoire twenty-five years later, in industrial terms they were hardly less significant. Ammunition was voracious in its appetite for raw materials. In the final year of World War I, no less than 400,000 tons of steel per month was consumed by the ammunition factories. That was a quarter of Germany’s total output of steel in the autumn of 1939. Shell cases and cartridges also consumed critical quantities of copper, which was in particularly short supply. With Hitler insisting on a major offensive in the West at the earliest possible opportunity, urgent action was clearly needed to make good Germany’s inadequate stockpiles. To further complicate matters, the army procurement office, in managing ammunition production, was not dealing with the kind of dependent producers clustered around the Reich Air Ministry. The main suppliers of ammunition were the giants of German heavy industry, firms such as the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, Krupp, Kloeckner or the Reichswerke Hermann Goering. By the autumn of 1939, after three years under the haphazard steel rationing system, these firms had built up a head-steam of frustration that now vented itself on the army procurement office.