SamuelA:
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.
The Nazi’s absolutely gained massive advantage from captured industrial capacity and workforce.
Sabotage and resistance detracted from that a little, but never amounted to much beyond an irritation. A significant irritation that tied down troops and effort, but not enough offset the massive advantage gained from the captured industrial capacity.