So I read that Germany hadn't fully mobilized until a lot later in the war, and women weren't working in factories, rations weren't controlled .... etc. So can I, having the knowledge of hindsight, full mobilize Germany earlier than what was historically done or will there be some kind of ideological barrier to doing that?
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Well, if you enacted all economic laws the moment they became available in HOI3, you were already doing that. You can always choose to NOT go to a higher law if you want. You can also produce more consumer goods if you want. The game automatically assumes you impoverish your people at a certain point with the reduction of consumer goods upon declaration of war.
I imagine that things will be more nuanced in HOI4, since there will be civilian IC.
I'm personally hoping that different regimes in different situations have a reason to not fully mobilize for war just because they DOWed Luxembourg.
I imagine that things will be more nuanced in HOI4, since there will be civilian IC.
I'm personally hoping that different regimes in different situations have a reason to not fully mobilize for war just because they DOWed Luxembourg.
It will probably cost political points or something to mobilize your industry, maybe you also can spend political points to keep your occupied and annexed areas calm which may make it hard for an aggrsive germany to convert to military ic, not to say that maybe occupied areas demand more consumer goods which would also make it harder to convert industry.
Also civilian ic is used to build all? improvements, which importance we yet little knowledge about, maybe not mobilizing early will allow for potentialy better stronger militray.
Also civilian ic is used to build all? improvements, which importance we yet little knowledge about, maybe not mobilizing early will allow for potentialy better stronger militray.
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Or Poland. Or France. Or Norway. Or Denmark. Or Yogoslavia. Or Netherlands. Or Belgium.
I hope so too. Even though Hearts of Iron is a war game, it would be good for there to be features ensuring peace has its own benefits.
I think that some mobilization laws were only unlocked after a certain ally/enemy IC ratio.
Oh yes, a HoI3 feature. Well hopefully that's kept in- but also removing the CG benefit for DoWing on minor nations would be good to see.
Yes, that was added in TFH, but you are missing the most important thing: consumer goods.
No matter what country you DOW, consumer goods would be reduced to war time levels. Without posting 12 different threads where I measure and discuss this issue, the short version is that you automatically impoverish your people to Soviet Union 1942 levels upon going to war. This means that even if you can't engage the best laws, you are still freeing up tons of IC to put into the war machine. For countries with certain government forms (I'm looking at you, Soviet Union), the reduction in consumer goods demand reaches the point where HI, which the Soviets can enact even at peace, becomes hyper efficient.
Adam Tooze's excellent book Wages of Destruction on the economy of the Nazi's shows, that:
- There was a full war economy in Germany from 1933 on-wards.
. Production hit limits in the early years by shortage of foreign exchange which limited raw material inputs.
. Factories needed to be built up and organised and were sometimes nationalised.
. Later on production was limited by availability of , steel, then coal, then labour.
. From the early days consumer goods were secondary to re-armament and cut back.
. There wasn't that many consumer cars made anyway so cutting them back wasn't noticed much- apparently only a tiny % of the population in Germany could afford one.
. The % of women active in employment during the war was actually higher than UK - lots were the back bone of the farm sector which in Germany was in efficient due to the small peasant type holdings that used more labour per hectare than large farms. They were not encouraged off the farms to factories because there was a real fear of food shortage could lose the war.... like the situation in the 1st World War.
- There was a full war economy in Germany from 1933 on-wards.
. Production hit limits in the early years by shortage of foreign exchange which limited raw material inputs.
. Factories needed to be built up and organised and were sometimes nationalised.
. Later on production was limited by availability of , steel, then coal, then labour.
. From the early days consumer goods were secondary to re-armament and cut back.
. There wasn't that many consumer cars made anyway so cutting them back wasn't noticed much- apparently only a tiny % of the population in Germany could afford one.
. The % of women active in employment during the war was actually higher than UK - lots were the back bone of the farm sector which in Germany was in efficient due to the small peasant type holdings that used more labour per hectare than large farms. They were not encouraged off the farms to factories because there was a real fear of food shortage could lose the war.... like the situation in the 1st World War.
Good to see more people reading Tooze to dispel these "unmobilized" Nazi Germany myths. As it was the Nazis were pretty much blowing up their own economy all for the sake of gambling it on war.
Any other interesting/relevant (for this topic) points in the book? If Germany had mobilized fully before the war how come they managed to increase the output of war material after 1942? Was this done at the expense of some other industrial products? Also one common criticism of Nazi war production is that they failed to implement true mass production and instead opted for more labour intensive production. If they hit the cap of raw materials before that was this really a problem? Is this just a case of over fixation on tank and submarine production?
Can it be that the persons that was leading their war industries was quite incapable because of political appointments that their fully produktion was not god? The same thing how could they raise 21 useless Luftwaffe Feldt Divisions.It would have been better to
give the soldiers and brand new weapons to existing understrenght divisions instead.
This has already been debunked in multiple other threads.
Mainly: 1940 and 1941 Germany built at least 40,000 km of rail lines in poland and eastern Germany. They most likely built more in other places but it is not recorded as how much. For example one of the army rail groups initially assigned to Barbarossa got reassigned to Yugoslavia and Greece for the invasion, requiring an unknown amount of rail. This continued until 1942 when Germany stopped gaining territory and in which Germany laid another 20,000 km of rail in USSR, Romania and Hungary.
On top of that German tank and essentially all land factories switched from a "pay for cost" to a fixed priced per tank. This lead to something like a 4 fold increase at least in production as it lead to massive drive to increase inefficiency. This had already happened in the air factories since 1936.
There is other things, but those are probably 2 of the biggest.
Also, the big boost in production post-42 was due to the investments in production in the preceding decade finally coming online. Fact is, the German economy was not prepared for war in 39, it was not really prepared for war until sometime around 43-44.
The book explains your questions well, as to why output of war material / tanks increases after 1942. It was priority of resource allocation, factory organisation and labour organisation put in place a year to 6 months before Speer, that allowed for the ramp up in the specific areas you mention.
In the early years of the Third Riech, tanks were not the priority - ammunition shells and guns were, and the Navy had quite a big share of the steel initially, along with infrastructure ... the motorway and the fortifications of the west wall. The point the book is making is that in the build up 1933 to 1939 Germany couldn't have made more military stuff than it did, it could have prioritised differently and certainly had more tanks, but at the expense of something else that used the same resources.
Production was certainly impacted adversely on mobilisation as labour was lost to armed forces, later in the war, huge numbers of foreign workers from occupied territories were co-opted to increase production.
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By mid-1938, the German forces had grown much too large to sustain at peace. The German leadership essentially faced a choice between partially demobilizing or creating further provocation to justify continued growth of the military. We all know what choice was made. After 1940 Germany had a de facto empire in Europe, which it squeezed thoroughly for every kind of resource. Strategic priorities during Operation Barbarossa and 'Fall Blau' were to secure resources to continue the fight. Germany's empire essentially was trapped in an economic situation where it had to expand and take more resources or collapse. At no point after 1938 was Germany's focus elsewhere.
So you are right that Germany did continue expanding military production until it was defeated, but there was no sudden or even discernible shift in the mobilization level of the nation as a whole except a steady increase in mobilization level as the war dragged on. As the industrial weight of the British Commonwealth, the Soviet Union, and the United States continued to build against Germany, the German armaments industry became intensely focused on maximizing their immediate output in reaction to a dire strategic situation. This by itself does not indicate higher mobilization, but merely a focus on immediate production numbers. For example the Me 262, first flown in 1942, was the only air superiority fighter capable of inflicting losses upon the Allied Air Forces at a rate (5 to 1) which would've been favorable to Germany given the numerical superiority of RAF and USAAF. However due to the fact that the German economy was already incredibly mobilized by 1942, shifting production to a new resource and labor intensive model was unfeasible. The decision was made to focus late-war interceptor production on the BF 109, not a bad plane during the early war, but with a 1936 chassis that was outclassed by the P-51 and other late-war enemy fighters.
During the late war Germany produced some models which were qualitatively inferior to previous models (Panzer IV Ausf. J). Shifting to a more advanced model (Me 262, Panther, MP44/Gewehr 43) would've interrupted supply at a critical time so older, increasingly inadequate, models (BF 109, Pz4, Karabiner 98k) continued to be produced in greater numbers. A lot of the late war increase in numbers can be attributed to experience gained producing the same model. Production numbers alone do not tell the complete story in regard to mobilization of Germany.
The entire rearmament process which Germany undertook was largely at the expense of it's civilian sector. Shortly after the Nazi party took power, the living standard for Germans recovered to 1929 levels (also not very high compared to the Western Democracies) but didn't increase much after 1935. Pre-War prices for civilian items in Germany were relatively much higher than in France, UK and USA. For example much hoopla is made about the Volksempfänger program, which was the government's plan to make civilian radios affordable to the German general public. It is interesting to note at the height of the Volksempfänger program, consumers in the United States had access to higher-quality radios that were also less-expensive.
The fact that German manufacturing was less efficient than the USA and Britain doesn't have much to do with relative mobilization, and more to do with relative industrialization. Germany didn't "opt" to have a smaller industrial base, certainly if they had a choice they would opt out of this.
So as soon as the United States entered the war, it could convert it's massive automobile factories to war production. Germany had the beginnings of an automobile industry in 1939, but in order to achieve the numbers it did late-war it had to first build the factories and also train the metalworkers to work in them. The German leadership wanted to emulate the United States in this regard, "Fordist" was literally a buzzword for Germany while it was rearming, but it could not realize the kind of efficiency the United States was able to achieve simply due to economies of scale. For Germany it proved almost impossible to create a modern efficient automotive industry in less than a decade from virtually nothing and a consumer base which largely couldn't afford to buy it's automobiles. But because Germany was mobilizing in the 1930s, it tried really really hard.
Today it is ingrained in our collective consciousness that Germany is a rich country with a highly advanced industrial base (with especially swanky automobiles), but this was not the Germany at the time of HoI. In the Germany of the 1930s, on one hand you had internationally competitive companies with very advanced laboratories (IG Farben) and sophisticated machinery (Siemens and BMW) but then on the other hand, you had the majority of Germany's population working on small subsistence farms with a median living standard similar to that of it's central European neighbors. Our modern conception of what the German economy is capable of came about through the Wirtschaftswunder in West Germany of the 50s and 60s, but back in the 30s Germany was very much one nation with two very different economies.
And finally, Germany faced an acute manpower shortage through the entire war. Labour might not have been as intense a resource bottleneck as fuel or tungsten, but it definitely was a huge issue. One example I am actually allowed to cite would be that in July 1944 the Ministry of Armaments mandated a 72 hour work week for workers in tank factories. A craftman in a factory = one less soldier. Raw materials, no matter what they are, also require manpower to obtain. A miner in a coalmine also = one less soldier.
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Germany did have a large part of its people working in industry but a large share of that part was working with craftsman
conditions in smal factories.
In contrast this part of the industry was far smaller in Soviet Union and it did not help that nations such as US and Soviet made large use of things like assembly lines and large casting which cuts the production time dramaticly was much less used by the germans.
Germany needed basicly an great industry reform, not only mobilization.
Not to say about lack of reasources.
conditions in smal factories.
In contrast this part of the industry was far smaller in Soviet Union and it did not help that nations such as US and Soviet made large use of things like assembly lines and large casting which cuts the production time dramaticly was much less used by the germans.
Germany needed basicly an great industry reform, not only mobilization.
Not to say about lack of reasources.
"Full war economy" in 1933 is one perspective. Many scholars would disagree with him, I've cited many of them in several threads.
That's one side of the story. The main reason is of course that Nazi Germany increased military spending massively around 1942/43
Much too large but still much smaller than France's and Soviet's armed forces.
Production numbers alone do not tell the complete story for any country and that is something everyone understands. Moreover, production of expired tank designs etc alone, does not tell the complete story of German increases in production through the war.
Claiming that it proved almost impossible to create a modern efficient automotive industry for the country with the second largest automobile industry in the world at the time
Germany was the third largest economy in the world after the US and the Soviet Union in 1939 and one of the richest countries in the world measured in GDP per capita (higher than countries like France, Norway and Belgium). This is stuff you are making up.
Have you got any data on this? I'd have expected the UK's auto industry to still be larger than Germany's prior to the outbreak of WW2, and from random Googling have only found data that supports this, and none to refute it. Random Googling is hardly a great source, and very happy to be corrected, but what I could find didn't point to a particularly large or efficient auto industry in Germany pre-war.
Most of the stuff my Random Googling could find supports this (and points to Germany have the second largest economy in the world in 1939, although some of this will have been helped by swallowing Austria and half of Czechoslovakia, with the second-highest GDP/capita. It also did a lot of industrialising prior to the outbreak of WW1 (one of the reasons it was so powerful in that war relative to UK/France was its strong industrial base then). That said, cars were not big in Germany, while in the US they were huge - the gap between the US and whoever was second was likely huge, whether it was Germany (I couldn't find any support for this), the UK (I could find some support, but not enough to get excited about) or anyone else (highly unlikely!)
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