So in most strategy games, there is some concept of economy where you can conquor territory and set up some sort of resource extraction apparatus. It depends on the game, but in Civilization you could conquer a city and get it to pay taxes to you. In Starcraft or Total Annihilation there were crystal/metal deposits. In RISK I think you get more dice.
So at least in the game world, taking more land almost instantly means more income which almost instantly means a greater ability to fight.
So by this logic, since the Nazis controlled the bulk of Europe, it should have provided a huge boost. All those extra people they could conscript and put to work in the munitions factories, all that extra territory to extract war materials from, and so on.
But unlike the video games, people rebel and do a shitty job and in the mechanized age of warfare in ww2, quality was starting to matter a ton more than it probably did in the past. Sabotaged or mediocre tank and aircraft parts were possibly worse than useless. Conscripts who don’t support your side and are waiting for their moment to defect are probably worse than no conscripts at all.
So what’s the historical dope on this? Did the Nazis gain a net benefit (extra military forces in excess of the costs to occupy it), and if so, was it very much?
If they had 5 or 10 years to consolidate, would it have been very much?
I wonder why Britain had so many problems, especially postwar. Shouldn’t they have been rolling in the dough, controlling all of India and a substantial fraction of the land area of the Earth? I never really understood this.
I don’t think they got conscripts, except slave labor for their factories, for the reasons you mentioned, but they did get volunteers. I don’t know how much resources went to occupation because even if I had them I don’t know how to break that out from what they would have had to post there for logistics purposes anyway since they were going to attack the Soviet Union anyway.
Despite what movies would have you believe, the Germans didn’t actually have to expend many resources fighting partisans. Partisan warfare in most parts of occupied Europe was of no real consequence; the outlier was, of course, Russia.
The occupied parts of Europe and the lesser fascists countries provided significant benefit to the Nazi war effort through the use of resources. Germany needed the food, minerals, oil and such they either got from allies or looted from the conquered.
There is little doubt that the industrial capacity of countries like France and Belgium was really never used, though. Germany itself was not fully ready for war, from an economic point of view, and throughout the war the German approach to using their ill-gotten gains was basically to steal things and ship them back to Germany. Materials, machines, oil, minerals, and slave labor were hauled back to Germany to increase its own industrial capacity. Food was looted by the ton and brought back to feed Germans; Germany was not remotely close to self-sufficient in food production. The nature of the looting differed from place to place; in France is was just a straight up heist, in places like Poland it was a sociopathic murder spree, and in lesser Axis countries like Romania it was an offer they could not refuse.
The Food helped the Nazis immensely, and was factored in from the beginning: because the Nazis prepared the war in advance, they did Impact studies on how Long and how much the Reich could feed its own citizens, and how much it relied on imports. Same for raw materials: capturing one part of the Sowjetunion with oil fields was very important to get gasoline for the vehicles. They also tested replacements, like Margarine for Butter, or how to run cars on Wood gas instead of gasoline, before the war started.
This was immediately obvious at the end of WWII, when the Food Situation in Germany turned much much worse before, since there was no more plundering.
During the War, the Netherlands resorted to eating tulip roots because Food was so scarce because of the plundering.
A lot of slave labour was from the concentration camps, and was not used directly in the Munition or steel industry, but rather for pure grunt work - digging a huge Underground cavern in North Germany to protect development of the V rockets from Allied bombing raids, for example. Working in moors or quarries.
There was also not a lot of opportunity to rebel or Sabotage: those who worked were fed at the end of the day, those who didn’t, weren’t. Those who were suspected of Sabotage, or rebelled, were shot. The guards were SS or similar.
Also, putting 50 or 100 slave workers or kidnapped Russians into a big factory of a 1 000 workers meant that no single Person could effectivly Sabotage anything, but any attempt would quickly be found out.
In many countries, from the Netherlands to Ukraine, a part of the Population was full on board with the Nazi idea of supremacy, had their own Fascist parties before*, and voluntarily joined the SS as guards or otherwise collaborated. The Nazis encouraged this, because having a national government in Charge lends much more authenticity to it towards the rest of the world than a full occupation where a German is put in Charge.
Even in Britain there were the black-shirts.
There was a book several years ago where a Young Student wrote their Thesis on the often-touted Efficiency of the Nazis and found out that despite first plundering German Jews, then the occupied countries, Nazi economy was very very inefficient. Like Mussolinis “Trains on time” it was mostly Propaganda. Hitler famously encouraged different departments with overlapping responsibilities, leading to in-fighting and duplication, because he was afraid of any one department having too much power and influence, thus displacing him.
The Germans really liked one Škoda tank: “The Panzerkampfwagen 38(t) was originally a Czechoslovak tank of pre-World War II design. After Czechoslovakia was taken over by Germany, it was adopted by the German Army, seeing service in the invasions of Poland, France and the USSR.”
The Germans built over 1000 of these in Czechoslovakia. They aided the war effort quite a bit.
Also food from France was a big help. The French provided a entire SS division of volunteers.
40000 Belgians served, 80000 Latvians (who had good reason to hate the USSR), etc
Nazi Germany used ***15 million ***imported slave laborers during the course of the war. There were ***11 million ***displaced persons at the end of the war in Germany who had been used for forced labor. Per wiki:
There are two books you need to read about this, which, I think, between them, answer your question; Mark Mazower’s “Hitler’s Empire”, and Adam Tooze’s “The Wages of Destruction”.
The Final Solution was certainly a drain; signficant resources had to be put into operating it, and it produced next to nothing. But the Nazis knew that from the outset; their motivation was ideological and political, not economic.
But the Final Solution was only a very small part of the overall war effort. As others have said, the Nazis basically supported their war effort by looting conquered, occupied and reluctantly-allied territories, which meant that they could get away with doing much less to put the domestic economy on a war footing than, e.g,. Britain did. Domestic production in Germany continued to rise throughout the war and in fact didn’t peak until February or March 1945. What this suggests is that for much of the war output was well below what it might have been.
One one view, the Nazi war model relied on continuous expansion and conquest, so that more and more resources became available for looting. Once the tide turned this model was of course no longer functional, and the wheels started to come off. It was only then that Nazis set about mobilising the domestic economy more effectively.
I’ve read that they set up huge slave labor camps near vital factories and when the Allied bombers destroyed a factory thousands of slaves were swarming the site to clean it up even before the planes got back to base, often getting production restarted in a few days. Germany occupied an even larger area of East Europe and Russia during WW1, I’ve often wondered how they would have faired if they hadn’t pissed their last army away in the 1918 Luddendorf offensive, they could have entrenched closer to home and perhaps held out long enough to take advantage of the new resources they controlled in the East, avoiding the complete economic and agricultural collapse that ended their war. Britain conquered an empire to exploit it economically, and succeeded wonderfully. The Germans just seem to have been in it for the fight, happy just to spoil the other’s milk. Funny how they dominate the Euro economy these days.
Yes and no - deporting Jews to the concentration camps was a waste of Trains that could’ve transported Army stuff to the Eastern Front, instead.
Whether the SS rounding up the Jews would’ve been better used at the front instead - not all of them were the fittest or youngest People. Rounding up civilians when armed is different than fighting Russian soldiers.
And slave labour was partly used instead of heavy machinery, so there was some saving of fuels or steel / machines.
Also, cleaning the ghettos by deporting the Jews meant plundering their possessions, too.
Also note that Germany knew it needed to import food and raw materials so much that after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 they signed credit and trade deals with the USSR. One of the things the Soviets got in return was German military equipment! That was how desperate Germany was for resources.
As the Soviets retook Ukraine and such, the food situation got worse and worse in Germany.
I am in the middle of Japan Prepares for Total War. It reinforces my impression that it is hard to make money stealing stuff. China cost a lot more than it provided in return.
The German economy in the late 1930s was a complete mess on the verge of bankruptcy, and was running out of hard currency to back its trades for raw materials. Hitler absolutely didn’t want to go into any sort of ‘war economy’ measures since, aside from not being at war yet, reducing the standard of living would likely lead to revolt. Seizing first Jewish property, then the treasuries of Austria and Chzechoslovakia helped keep it afloat for a bit, and the Molotov-Ribbentorp pact helped with raw materials, but this still wasn’t enough. Looting all of the countries conquered in 1940 is what gave the currency to let Germany’s economy keep chugging along until 1942, when the first big hits to the consumer economy happened.
This was all entirely short-term, though - Germany would have had severe economic problems even if they somehow managed to get a peace treaty that let them keep the occupied territory. The 5-10 years wouldn’t really be a chance ‘to consolidate’, but would instead require either a massive reworking of the economy and significant reduction in either military spending or German civilian standard of living, or a series of increasingly more desperate short-term measures. Cutting the military when you’re occupying a lot of land and have most of the world pissed off at you isn’t a great idea, but cutting the civilian standard of living leads to lack of support for your government. The increasingly dismal lifestyle for occupied Europe would also lead to more problems and more expenses.
What you gain by stealing people’s personal property, as a percentage of the material needed to fight a world war, is statistically next to zero.
The Nazi murder of six million Jews and millions of other people was not economically productive, but it was of course the central point of Nazism. The Nazis were not murdering people to help fight wars. The Nazis were fighting wars so that they could murder people.
Clearly not; the Nazi use of imported forced labor had very little to do with the Final Solution, they are at best tangentially related. The Holocaust involved deporting Jews from the rest of Europe to be killed in extermination camps set up in Eastern Europe, or being rounded up and shot by Einsatzgruppen in the wake of Barbarossa, or the murder of Soviet POWs through starvation and neglect while they were still in Eastern Europe. Nazi use of slave labor involved abducting 12 million people from 20 European countries to be imported into Germany proper for use as slave labor. That was 20% of their economy, and 12 million warm bodies freeing up men for military service. So to answer your question, yes, it was of enormous economic benefit to Nazi Germany to use 15 million forced laborers over the course of the war.
The net economic benefit of occupied Europe and the net economic benefit of the final Solution are two different things.
One could argue that the systematic hunting, transportation and killing of 6,000,000 people was not an economic benefit.
And while I believe that the myth of Nazi Germany being a finely tuned, well oiled machine is just that - a myth, it’s hard to argue that slave labor in the millions and the theft of the natural resources of Europe wasn’t a net benefit.
Freeing up men for the front was important enough that later in the war, women were “encouraged to volunteer” to work in factories; since child-care was state-organized anyway for indoctrination, this made it easier. Also, 1 000 People eating warm Food at work saved energy compared to 1 000 People all cooking at home.