Germany entered World War II with an economy smaller than its adversaries’ combined, yet it fielded jet fighters, ballistic missiles, synthetic fuel plants, and tank designs that would influence military engineering for decades. New analysis of the industrial and tactical record between 1933 and 1945 reveals a nation that lost the war while leading the world in multiple fields of applied science and engineering.
The paradox is stark. American industrial production in 1940 was four times greater than Germany’s, according to the Reich’s own Ministry of Economics calculations. The Soviet Union, even after catastrophic losses in 1941, produced more tanks in six months than Germany produced in a year.
The British Empire commanded the resources of a quarter of the planet.
Yet Germany conquered most of continental Europe in eighteen months, held three industrial giants at bay until 1944, and produced weapons systems that were generations ahead of anything the Allies fielded at the moment of their introduction.
The explanation begins not with factories but with doctrine. Before the first German tank crossed the Polish border in September 1939, IG Farben’s engineers were already producing synthetic petroleum from coal. Before the world understood what a ballistic missile was, technicians at Peenemunde were launching rockets to an altitude of sixty miles.
Before any Allied pilot had heard of a turbine jet engine, Messerschmitt’s mechanics were calibrating powerplants that would render obsolete everything that flew in 1940.
The foundation was laid in the ruins of 1919. The Treaty of Versailles imposed war reparations estimated at 132 billion gold marks, surrendered more than 15,000 aircraft and 27,000 aviation engines to the Allied powers, reduced the German army to 100,000 men, and expressly prohibited maintaining a military air force.
But the drafters made a critical error. They did not prohibit civil aviation. General Hans von Seeckt, chief of the German army command from 1920, saw that crack and turned it into a highway.
Within his defense ministry, he created a clandestine group of officers dedicated exclusively to aviation matters.
From those men would emerge Hugo Sperrle, Walter Wever, and Albert Kesselring, who decades later would command the most complex air theaters of the Second World War. In 1924, von Seeckt placed one of his collaborators at the head of the civil aviation department of the Ministry of Transport so that development would remain under covert military control.
In 1926, Deutsche Lufthansa was founded. Its president was Erhard Milch, who years later would become the chief official responsible for Luftwaffe production during the war. Under Milch, Lufthansa developed the first instrumentation systems for night flight and the first radio navigation networks in Europe.
Its pilots and navigators would form the core of the training organization of the new German air force. Meanwhile, the Deutsche Luftsportverband, an air sports association with more than 50,000 members, trained pilots in gliders and light aircraft with the silent approval of the Ministry of Defense.
At the Lipetsk base on Soviet territory, through a secret agreement with Moscow, German officers received military flight instruction that the treaty forbade them from receiving on their own soil. When Hitler came to power in January 1933, the Luftwaffe already existed in all but name.
In 1935, barely two years after the seizure of power, Hitler publicly announced rearmament and the existence of the new air force. By that year, Germany already had eight combat line squadrons, three of fighters and five of bombers, all illegal under the terms of Versailles.
The air parades over Nuremberg showed those aircraft bearing the black cross of the Luftwaffe before the entire world. The message was deliberate. Germany had returned.
What the world did not know was that those aircraft were not the old obsolete designs of the Great War.
They were metal monoplanes of advanced aerodynamic design with fuel injection engines. While the United Kingdom was still studying its Gloster Gladiator biplanes and France was tweaking its Dewoitine D. 501, the engineers at Bayerische Flugzeugwerke were working on the prototype of a fighter that would change the history of aerial combat.
The Messerschmitt Bf 109 would become the backbone of German fighter aviation. But the true laboratory for German tactical doctrine was Spain. On April 14, 1938, at the port of Cadiz, a young German officer disembarked with a cardboard suitcase.
He wore civilian clothes.
His documentation identified him as a tourist on the Strength Through Joy travel program. His name was Werner Molders and he was twenty-two years old. He had come to learn to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 in the air.
The Spanish Civil War was for the Luftwaffe what no drill could ever have been.
It was a real testing ground with real ammunition against pilots who were genuinely trying to shoot them down. Germans like Adolf Galland, Gunther Lutzow, Eduard Neumann, Wilhelm Balthasar, and Molders himself amassed in Spain a combat experience that their future adversaries simply did not have.
Molders achieved fourteen aerial victories in Spain, more than any other German pilot in the conflict. But his most important legacy was not the number of aircraft shot down. It was a formation.
In the First World War and the interwar years, the basic fighter formation was the three-plane V called the Kette by the Germans.
All aircraft flew close together, which demanded the pilot’s constant attention to avoid colliding with his comrades. Watching the sky became almost impossible. Spotting an enemy attacking from behind was pure luck.
Molders saw the problem and solved it.
First, they began flying in pairs called the Rotte. Then he put two pairs together in what he named the Schwarm. The distance between aircraft was wide, each at a different altitude step, with the two leaders looking forward and the two wingmen watching behind and to the sides.
The visual alignment of the four aircraft reproduced the position of the fingertips of an outstretched hand. English speakers would call it the finger-four formation. Fifty years after the war, the United States Air Force was still using this formation.
It called it the double attack system.
Today it is the universal standard in combat aviation for practically every military in the world. Molders invented it in 1938 in the dusty sky over Aragon with a biplane fighter and a short-range radio. The weapon that opened Europe on May 10, 1940, when German tanks crossed the Ardennes and Luftwaffe fighters swept the airspace over the Netherlands, had been forged in that crucible.
Werner Molders had already spent nine months in the Second World War. He had shot down his first aircraft of the conflict, a French Curtiss 75A, on September 21, 1939. On May 27, 1940, when he scored his twentieth victory over another Curtiss 75A southwest of Amiens, he was promoted to Hauptmann and received the Knight’s Cross.
Adolf Galland achieved his first aerial victory on May 12, 1940, over the skies of Liege, Belgium. There were three that day. Three Hawker Hurricanes shot down during the first hours of the advance through Belgium.
In his book, The First and the Last, Galland wrote with a coldness that precisely portrays the technical gulf separating the Messerschmitt Bf 109E from the Allied equipment.
His pilots had come out of the Lufthansa training school in Brunswick. Only twenty out of hundreds of applicants had flown in Spain, had trained in an environment that prized individual tactical initiative. The Hurricanes he attacked that day, in his own words, flew below them in speed, climbing ability, armament, and flying experience.
We outclassed them in speed, in climb, in armament, and above all in flying experience and training, he recalled. In the following months, the Battle of France lasted barely six weeks. On June 22, 1940, France signed the armistice in the same railway carriage at Compiegne where Germany had signed its own in 1918.
Molders reached forty-five victories on October 12. On October 22, he became the first Luftwaffe pilot to reach fifty aerial victories in the Second World War, shooting down three Hurricanes in a single day. But the Bf 109 was not just technology.
It was doctrine.
Molders’ finger-four formation allowed four pilots to control a stretch of sky that the three-plane V formation, which the British were still using in 1940, could not cover. When the RAF entered combat over Dunkirk and later in the Battle of Britain, its pilots discovered something unsettling. The Germans always seemed to appear from where no one expected them.
It was not magic, it was tactics. The Bf 109 also had mechanical advantages that its adversaries were slow to match. The Daimler-Benz DB 601 engine used direct fuel injection, which allowed it to maintain power in dives or negative gravity maneuvers.
The Spitfire’s and Hurricane’s Rolls-Royce Merlin engine used a float carburetor.
The moment the pilot pushed the nose down to dive, the carburetor flooded and the engine coughed, sputtered, and took several seconds to recover. In those seconds, the Bf 109 had already escaped. This advantage was so pronounced that English pilots were instructed with the following practical rule for 1940.
When a 109 dives, do not try to follow it. Break upward in the opposite direction. The man no one could shoot down was born on April 19, 1922, in Weissach, Württemberg.
His mother taught him to fly. Her name was Elisabeth Hartmann. It was she who piloted, who kept the family biplane going when prosperity allowed it, who planted in her son the conviction that the sky was where he belonged.
Her son’s name was Erich. Erich Hartmann finished the war with 352 confirmed aerial victories. It is the record of all time.
No pilot from any country in any war in history has shot down more aircraft than Erich Hartmann. He arrived at his first combat squadron, JG 52, on the Eastern Front in November 1942.
He was twenty years old. His comrades called him Bubi, the Kid. In his early missions, he made every mistake possible.
In one, he strayed from formation to attack what he thought was an easy target and ended up surviving a forced landing crash under Soviet fire. In another, a Soviet Il-2 filled his engine with shrapnel before he could react.
But he learned, and what he learned surpassed nearly everyone who flew with him or against him over the following two and a half years. His method was radical in its simplicity. Hartmann never maneuvered in combat if he could avoid it.
While other aces sought the dogfight, the vertical dance of two fighters chasing each other for minutes at a time, Hartmann waited.
He watched. He closed in from a blind angle until the enemy aircraft literally filled his windscreen. Then he fired one burst, short and precise, from under a hundred meters, and the enemy aircraft fell.
General Gunther Rall himself, credited with 275 victories, the third-ranking ace in history, upon reviewing Hartmann’s combat reports as part of Adolf Galland’s general staff, found something unprecedented in the military records.
Hartmann needed an average of fifteen rounds per victory. Fifteen. The average for the rest of JG 52’s pilots was ten times higher.
He was the best marksman in the Luftwaffe, Rall said. No other pilot came remotely close to those figures. On August 17, 1943, Hartmann scored his eightieth victory.
He tied the First World War’s Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen. On June 30 of the previous year, Molders had already surpassed that record, and he did it by shooting down five Soviet bombers in a single day. But Hartmann went further still.
On October 29, 1943, he reached 150 victories.
He was promoted to commander of the 9th Staffel. On the nose of his Bf 109, the Karaya 1, they painted a black heart. The Soviet pilots who survived encountering him began calling him Schwarzer Teufel, the Black Devil.
On July 5, 1944, in a single afternoon, Hartmann shot down eleven Soviet aircraft in three missions.
He ended the day with 301 victories. That specific single-day record was already unreachable. What makes Hartmann a phenomenon is not just the number, it is the context.
He flew 1,425 combat missions. He was shot down or forced to land sixteen times. Captured once by Soviet forces, he escaped on foot in temperatures of minus twenty degrees Celsius.
He never lost a wingman. The most important message he gave his pilots was this, Rall recalled. The most important thing for a fighter pilot is to get his first victory without too much shock.
If you get scared the first time, you may never get over it. If Hartmann was the master of calculated precision, Hans-Joachim Marseille was his exact opposite.
Where Hartmann waited, Marseille attacked. Where Hartmann fired once, Marseille improvised. The two were the same phenomenon expressed in different languages.
Marseille was born on December 13, 1919, in Berlin. He was the son of an army officer and a French mother. As a teenager, he joined one of Lufthansa’s flying clubs and learned on gliders before entering military pilot school.
When he arrived in Africa with JG 27 in 1941 to support Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, he already carried a disciplinary file several pages long. Unauthorized absences, disobedience to superiors, late arrivals to formations. He was, according to his own comrades, a mixture of the fresh air of Berlin and the scent of American jazz.
In the desert, Marseille transformed. The sky over the eastern Mediterranean has unique characteristics. Brutal light, dust that blurs the horizon, brutal thermals at midday.
In that sky, Marseille developed a shooting technique that no instructor could teach because no one had thought of it before.
Fighter pilots, when attacking a maneuvering aircraft, calculate its deflection angle, where the target will be by the time the bullets arrive. Since they take time to cross the distance between the gun and the target, the vast majority of pilots seek to simplify it, chase the enemy until it flies straight, fire directly.
Marseille attacked from angles that made the deflection calculation nearly impossible for anyone but him. On June 6, 1942, Marseille attacked a formation of sixteen Curtiss P-40 Tomahawks. In eleven minutes, he shot down six.
Five of them in the first five minutes. The ammunition consumption per victory, according to the combat analysis Rall would later carry out, was fifteen rounds, the same figure as Hartmann.
Two completely different ways of reaching the same result. But his most extraordinary day came on September 1, 1942. That dawn over El Alamein, the sky was blue as enamel.
At 7:30 in the morning, when Captain Marseille arrived by car at the parked aircraft, there was nothing to suggest that day would be different from the others.
The squadron had orders to escort a Stuka mission south of Imayid. By 7:50, they were already airborne. In the day’s first mission between 8:20 and 9:14, Marseille shot down four British aircraft.
First a Curtiss from 100 meters at 8:20. Three seconds after he announced it over the radio, his wingman saw the enemy plunge toward the ground.
At 8:30, a second Curtiss, flames on its wing, crashed 200 meters from the first. At 8:33, a third, this time intercepting an aircraft attacking the Stukas that were already returning. At 8:39, after maneuvering against six Spitfires coming in tight formation from 6:00, he banked sharply left.
The Spitfires flew over his aircraft at high speed.
And in the second, the last Englishman was eighty meters behind him. He fired. The Spitfire burst into flames.
When he landed, the mechanics and armorers checked the ammunition belts. He had used twenty cannon shells and sixty machine gun rounds for four victories. But the day was not over.
In the second mission at midday near Alam el Halfa, Marseille with a single wingman faced two formations of British bombers between fifteen and eighteen aircraft in each and two escort formations of twenty-five to thirty aircraft each. He simply waited for eight Curtiss P-40s to break from their escort to chase the Stukas.
He intercepted them. The P-40s formed a defensive circle, the standard tactic for outnumbered aircraft. In the defensive circle, the aircraft turned tightly with one another, making it hard for an attacker to get into firing position.
No one could break out of that kind of formation without exposing their tail. No one except Marseille.
He cut his speed, entered the center of the circle, turned left inside the enemy merry-go-round, and from fifty meters fired at one, half a minute later at the second. The circle broke. Eight aircraft shot down in ten minutes.
The times noted in the official record. 10:55, 10:56, 10:58, 10:59, 11:01, 11:02, 11:03, 11:05.
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was on the ground when Marseille landed and reported twelve victories for that flight. Kesselring asked him how many of those twelve were his. Marseille answered, All twelve, sir.
Kesselring sat down. He said nothing. In the day’s third mission at dusk, Marseille added five more.
Seventeen aerial victories in a single day.
It is a record that has never been matched in the history of combat aviation. Over the course of September 1942 as a whole, Hans-Joachim Marseille shot down sixty-one enemy aircraft. His career total was 158 victories, all of them on the Western Front against the British and Americans.
Molders, Hartmann, and Galland all flew mainly against the Soviets in the east.
Marseille never did. His 158 victories are probably, in terms of the relative difficulty of the opponent, the most remarkable individual record of the entire war. On September 30, 1942, during a Stuka escort mission over Egypt, his Daimler-Benz engine began pouring black smoke.
Over the radio, his voice was heard.
There’s smoke in my cockpit. A pause, then, I can’t see. I can’t see.
His comrades asked him to hold on a few more seconds to cross back into German territory. He tried to leave the aircraft by rolling it upside down and jumping, but the airstream pinned him against the fuselage. When he finally managed to get out, his body, unconscious, struck the tail plane.
He fell into the desert with his parachute unopened. They buried him where he fell, seven kilometers south of Sidi Barrani. His epitaph: undefeated.
In February 1942, Albert Speer was thirty-six years old and had just been named Minister of Armaments of the Reich, replacing the mysteriously deceased Fritz Todt, whose plane exploded in midair two days after a tense meeting with Hitler in Rastenburg on February 8.
Speer was an architect. Hitler was his most important client. The obvious question is what was an architect doing directing the war production of the most industrially demanding country in the world.
The answer is complex and simplification destroys it. Speer used what no pure technocrat could use, his direct access to Hitler.
And what Hitler had at that moment was an army freezing on the outskirts of Moscow, 700,000 casualties in the winter of 1941, and generals telling him quietly that the war could no longer be won. The first thing Speer did was what economists call resource rationalization, but under conditions that would have paralyzed any normal management committee.
In August 1942, according to his own ministry’s records, production had risen twenty-seven percent in artillery pieces and twenty-five percent in tanks. Ammunition production nearly doubled with a ninety-seven percent increase. Total armaments productivity rose fifty-nine point six percent in six months.
Adam Tooze in his exhaustive analysis of the Nazi economy notes that part of those figures need qualifying.
The increase was not solely Speer’s doing. Capital investments begun between 1940 and 1941 in engine factories, aluminum smelters, and chemical synthesis plants were beginning to bear fruit precisely in 1942. Speer himself would later acknowledge it.
I was no genius. Many of the technicians in my office would have been more suited to the job, but none of them could put Hitler’s influence on the scale as I could, and that made all the difference.
But the numbers do not lie in their trend. In the period between 1941 and the summer of 1944, total German armaments production rose from a reference index of ninety-eight points, the 1941 average figure, to a peak of 322 points in July 1944. The workforce grew by only thirty percent over that same period.
Germany, in the midst of total war, with growing Allied bombing and an Eastern Front consuming men at a rate of 60,000 dead per month, doubled productivity per worker. To achieve this, Speer wove a network of 249 industrial committees and subcommittees, the Ausschuesse and the Ringe, that brought the Reich’s largest companies together under centralized direction to cooperate.
Krupp, AEG, Siemens, MAN, Daimler-Benz, IG Farben, Carl Zeiss oversaw precision optics from Jena, Bosch was responsible for fuel injection, Blaupunkt managed electro-acoustic equipment, Mahle manufactured the pistons, Kugelfischer the bearings, Behr the radiators. Sixty years later those same names remain the pillars of high-quality German manufacturing industry.
The Zentrale Planung, central planning, the committee created in April 1942, was probably the most important institutional innovation of the period. It met roughly once every ten days. In total, it held sixty-two sessions between its founding and the end of the war, of which fifty-two took place in the first twenty months.
Thirty of those sessions were devoted exclusively to steel, eleven to coal.
Coal was the base of everything. In mid-twentieth-century Germany, ninety percent of the country’s energy needs came from lignite, brown coal, or anthracite. That coal fueled the blast furnaces that produced the steel that made the tanks, the guns, the shells, the helmets, the engines.
A disruption in coal transport, and there were serious ones in the winter of 1939 and again in 1942, turned within months into a steel shortage and within further months into lower weapons production.
Speer understood the chain and managed it with unsentimental brutality. When he needed more steel, he cut the civilian ration. When he needed more manpower, he turned to the foreign workers whom Fritz Sauckel, his institutional nemesis and his involuntary partner, tore from across occupied Europe.
By the autumn of 1944, more than 7. 9 million foreign workers were working in German factories.
In Luftwaffe plants, the percentage of foreign workers frequently exceeded forty percent. In some specific production lines, it was higher. State Secretary Milch boasted in June 1943 that the Ju 87 Stuka was being manufactured eighty percent by Russians.
Those numbers are the other side of the armaments miracle. The German productivity that astonished the world between 1942 and 1944 rested in a proportion that management textbooks omit to mention on forced labor.
There is a building in the Polish city of Oswiecim called Auschwitz in German that tourists do not visit. It stands east of the concentration camp, barely a kilometer from its fences. It is a former chemical synthesis plant.
It was in 1944 one of the most advanced industrial facilities that existed in the world.
To understand how Germany was able to wage a six-year war without its own oil wells, one must understand coal hydrogenation. In 1913, the chemist Friedrich Bergius developed a process for converting coal into liquid fuel using pressure and hydrogen at high temperature. IG Farben, the largest chemical company in the world in the 1930s, a consortium that included BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst among others, acquired the patent and developed it industrially.
The Bergius process made it possible to produce synthetic gasoline, synthetic diesel, and synthetic aviation fuel from the one mineral resource Germany had in abundance: coal. Carl Krauch, chairman of IG Farben’s supervisory board and commissioner for chemical production within the Four Year Plan, oversaw the expansion of these plants from 1936 onward.
In 1941, his projections anticipated raising German synthetic oil production from 4. 3 million tons annually to more than six million by 1943, with a long-term goal of more than ten million tons by 1945. The fuel that kept the Messerschmitts, the Focke-Wulfs, and the Junkers flying came from IG Farben’s plants in Leuna, at Hydrierwerke Politz, in Brix.
When in the summer of 1944 American bombers began systematically attacking those facilities, the campaign that the historian of the Strategic Bombing Survey would later call the most important tactical decision of the war in the west, German aviation fuel production fell from 175,000 tons in April 1944 to 52,000 in June and to less than 10,000 in September.
But there is something more to German chemistry than fuel. Synthetic rubber, Buna, was IG Farben’s other strategic bet. Germany had no tropical colonies with rubber plantations.
Without rubber, there are no tires, gaskets, hoses, insulated cables, gas masks. In 1938, Krauch proposed to the Four Year Plan the construction of a Buna plant in the coal region of Upper Silesia.
The location chosen was Auschwitz, flat ground near the coal fields of Krawow with abundant water and excellent rail connections. The final budget for the Auschwitz-Monowitz plant was 776 million Reichsmarks, the single largest investment of the Four Year Plan. By 1944, although the plant never produced rubber, the deadlines were systematically delayed, it did produce methanol, a vital component of aviation fuel and explosives.
According to the 1945 United States Strategic Bombing Survey, the Auschwitz and Heydebreck plants saved German chemical production when the bombing devastated Leuna. Dr. Jan Gizen, head of the fuel program at Auschwitz, was appointed by Speer’s ministry as director of the methanol sector for the entire Reich.
A silent acknowledgement that this plant, built with slave labor and at the center of one of the greatest crimes in history, was also one of the most sophisticated industrial complexes of its time.
The total investment of the Four Year Plan in Krauch’s chemical projects during 1940 and 1941 amounted to 2,500 million Reichsmarks. The Buna plant at Oswiecim, as it is called today, survived both communism and capitalism. Today it is the third largest producer of synthetic rubber in Europe.
Several of the world’s largest tire manufacturers source from there. The foundations were laid by Krauch in 1941.
On September 15, 1940, the RAF mounted its greatest defensive effort since the start of the Battle of Britain. That day, the German fighters, mostly Messerschmitt Bf 109E, discovered something Werner Molders had pointed out in a report submitted to Luftwaffe headquarters weeks earlier. The British had radar.
The British coastal radar network, the so-called Chain Home, had been operating since 1937.
By the summer of 1940, it covered the east and south coasts of England with a web of towers that could detect aerial formations 180 kilometers away and at altitudes down to zero meters. The data was transmitted in real time to a network of control rooms where controllers, many of them women of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, moved markers across a giant table and coordinated interception.
On December 18, 1939, eighteen Vickers Wellington bombers of RAF Bomber Command attacked German ships in Heligoland Bay. An experimental Freya radar, the Luftwaffe’s first operational radar system, detected them as they approached. The response was an ambush.
Twelve of the eighteen bombers were shot down. The Germans had radar. What they lacked was the systemic integration the British had built around theirs.
In the Luftwaffe, radar was a warning system. In the RAF, it was the axis of the entire command and control system. Every pilot in a Spitfire or Hurricane knew the ground controller could see him, knew his position, knew where the enemy was, and could guide him to the exact interception point without the pilot wasting fuel searching.
Molders in his reports on the Battle of Britain was the only German commander to explicitly point out this disadvantage. He and Galland debated at length at the famous Luftwaffe headquarters in Calais where Goering summoned them in the summer of 1940 to ask what their squadrons needed. Galland’s answer is one of the most quoted of the war.
I would like a squadron of Spitfires.
Goering was outraged. Molders was more diplomatic. He asked for a new fighter.
He was not given one. The Focke-Wulf Fw 190, the only German fighter aircraft of the period that in certain respects technically surpassed the Spitfire, did not reach the front until 1941. Its BMW 801 engine, an air-cooled fourteen-cylinder radial, was more rugged than the Bf 109’s liquid-cooled Daimler-Benz, tolerated combat damage better, and the aircraft as a whole was more stable on takeoff and landing.
Its top speed, 655 kilometers per hour, exceeded that of the Spitfire Mark V, the model then in service, by about fifty kilometers per hour. There was an institutional catastrophe that delayed this aircraft’s deployment. The Fw 190’s technical developer, Kurt Tank, had for years been ignored by the Luftwaffe general staff, dominated by Willy Messerschmitt’s influence.
The Fw 190 was nearly cancelled several times before 1941.
When it finally reached the Western Front in 1941, its impact was immediate. RAF pilots flying the Spitfire Mark V, which had already surpassed the Bf 109E, suddenly found that the new German aircraft outperformed them in speed, climb, and firepower. RAF Fighter Command had to temporarily withdraw the Spitfire Mark V from offensive operations over the continent until the Mark IX with the two-stage Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine became available in 1942.
But the greater irony of the Battle of Britain is not the radar or the tactics. It is something else. At the end of 1940, the monthly production rate of the Bf 109 was around 125 aircraft.
By 1942, it had risen to 300. In 1943, it reached 1,000. In 1944, under Speer’s system, it reached 2,500 a month.
Galland noted after the war that if the 1944 production level had been reached in 1940, the Luftwaffe would have achieved air superiority over Great Britain and the course of the war would have been radically different. It had not been achieved due to a combination of planning errors, shifting priorities, and Hitler’s conviction that the war would soon be won.
On June 13, 1942, Albert Speer flew to Peenemunde. He was accompanied by Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Admiral Witzell, and General Fromm. They were going to see something that had never been seen before.
In a clearing among the pines of the Baltic coast, a missile four stories tall waited on its launch platform. The technicians called the project the A4.
Colonel Walter Dornberger directed the operation. Beside him, the man who had conceived the liquid fuel combustion engine meant to power it. Wernher von Braun, twenty-seven years old, born in Wirsitz, Pomerania, the son of a Prussian nobleman.
The steam showed that the fuel tanks were being filled. Speer described it in his memoirs.
At the predetermined split second, at first with a hesitant movement, but then with the roar of an unleashed giant, the rocket slowly rose from the platform, seemed to hang over its jet of flame for a fraction of a second, and then vanished with a howl into the low clouds. Von Braun smiled. Speer was stunned by this technical miracle.
The rocket landed 800 meters from the platform.
The guidance system had failed, but the hardest part, liftoff, had been solved. On October 14, 1942, the second launch was a success. The A4 flew its preset course of 120 miles and landed less than four kilometers from the target.
For the first time in human history, an object built by human hands had crossed the boundary of outer space, reaching an altitude of ninety-six kilometers, almost double what conventional aviation could achieve, at speeds exceeding 5,000 kilometers per hour.
Speer reported to Hitler, and Hitler, who had ignored the project for years, dismissing it as a space age invention, became excited. He declared the A4 the decisive weapon of the war. He demanded its immediate mass production.
He wanted 900 a month. The arithmetic was devastating. In 1944, the Allied bombers were dropping an average of 3,000 tons of bombs a day on Germany.
Nine hundred V2 rockets a month carried in total about 540 tons of explosives per month, roughly the load of twelve Flying Fortresses in a single raid. Speer knew it. The idea was absurd, he admitted later, but I supported it.
It was probably one of my most serious mistakes. Instead of continuing development of the Wasserfall rocket, a surface-to-air missile capable of reaching altitudes of 50,000 feet with a warhead of 300 kilos of explosive intended to shoot down the Allied bombers, Peenemunde’s resources were poured into the offensive V2.
On January 1, 1945, the Peenemunde Development Center employed 2,210 engineers and scientists on the long-range A4 and A9 rockets, but only 220 were assigned to the Wasserfall and 135 to another anti-aircraft project. I believe that defensive rocket combined with jet fighters would have repelled the western air offensive against our industry from the spring of 1944 on, Speer wrote in his memoirs.
Instead, we spent the gigantic effort of producing the offensive weapon that turned out when it was finally ready in the autumn of 1944 to be an almost total failure. Production of the V2 took place at the Mittelwerk, a complex of tunnels beneath the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen, using slave labor from the concentration camps. Speer visited it on December 10, 1943.
Expressionless, they looked through me, he wrote of the prisoners, mechanically removing their blue denim caps as our group passed. He acknowledged in his memoirs that mortality among the forced laborers was extraordinarily high. The first V2 was launched against London on September 8, 1944.
Not 5,000 at once as Hitler had demanded, but twenty-five in ten days.
But the V2 had demonstrated something no conventional weapon could demonstrate. That it was possible to launch a projectile from the ground into outer space and bring it down on a target 300 kilometers away, unmanned, with no possibility of interception. The program Wernher von Braun inherited at Peenemunde and which the United States inherited along with von Braun in 1945 through Operation Paperclip became directly the Saturn V rocket that in July 1969 carried man to the moon.
In the autumn of 1941, still an architect with no official position in the German war machine, Albert Speer visited the Heinkel plant in Rostock. What he heard there, the deafening roar of a turbine engine on a test bench, left him speechless. The designer, Professor Ernst Heinkel, explained to him that the sound came from an engine with no pistons and no crankshaft.
It was a jet engine and it could propel an aircraft to speeds no piston engine could ever reach. The Messerschmitt Me 262 had two of those engines, a radically advanced aerodynamic design, and a top speed of more than 800 kilometers per hour. Against the best Allied fighter available in 1944, the North American P-51D Mustang with a top speed of about 700 kilometers per hour, the Me 262 was 100 kilometers per hour faster.
Against the bombers destroying German cities, the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator, which flew at about 470 kilometers per hour, the Me 262 was nearly twice as fast. Adolf Galland was one of the first combat pilots to fly the Me 262. In his own words, it was as if he had been anointed.
The fighter was completely different from anything that had existed before.
Four 30 mm cannons in the nose, a speed that rendered most Allied tactics useless, and the ability, if used correctly, to enter and exit Allied bomber formations before the gunners could swing their turrets around. But then Hitler intervened. In January 1944, he summoned Speer and Milch to inform them that he wanted the Me 262 produced as fast as possible.
Good.
But he then declared that the aircraft designed as an interceptor fighter must be used exclusively as a fast bomber. The guns would be removed so it could carry a greater bomb load. Pilots were to fly in a straight line without maneuvering so as not to stress the engines.
The Luftwaffe’s specialists were baffled. Speer tried to reason with him. Galland tried.
General Jodl tried. Goering tried.
Even Field Marshal Model tried. Hitler refused to listen. When in the autumn of 1944 he tried to forbid any further discussion of the matter, the Me 262 had already lost two crucial years of operational deployment as a fighter.
The effect of using the Me 262 as a bomber was, according to Speer, ridiculously insignificant. A Me 262 could carry about 500 kilos of bombs, less than a conventional medium bomber, with a primitive sight lacking any precision capability.
As a fighter, each Me 262 could have shot down several of the large American bombers on every mission. Galland, who ended the war commanding JV 44, the squadron of experts formed in the war’s final months with the Luftwaffe’s best aces flying Me 262s, scored seven personal victories in the jet. Other JV 44 pilots shot down dozens of bombers with it in the few weeks of operations they had.
Johannes Steinhoff, born September 15, 1913, in Bottendorf, Thuringia, was the commander Galland appointed for JG 7, the first operational jet fighter unit, with 176 aerial victories in 993 missions, shot down twelve times, wounded once. Steinhoff was one of the few Luftwaffe pilots who had flown from the first day of the conflict to the last. On April 18, 1945, during takeoff at Riem Airfield near Munich, one of his Me 262’s turbine engines exploded in flames.
The aircraft crashed. Steinhoff survived with burns that completely disfigured his face. Doctors said he would not survive.
He survived. In the postwar years, he would become inspector general of the new German Luftwaffe. About 1,433 Me 262s were built in total during the war.
Fewer than 300 ever flew operationally in combat. Had they been deployed as fighters from 1943, when the prototypes were already ready, instead of 1944 and 1945, and had production reached the level Speer had planned for January 1945 of 210 units a month, the Allied bombing offensive would have run into an obstacle that no piston-powered aircraft could have overcome.
On June 9, 1942, at Harnack House, the seat of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Berlin, Speer, Field Marshal Milch, Admiral Witzell, and General Fromm met with a group of physicists. Among them were Otto Hahn, who in 1938 had discovered the nuclear fission of uranium, and Werner Heisenberg. Speer asked directly, could an atomic bomb be built.
Heisenberg answered with scientific precision. The theoretical solution already existed. Technically, nothing prevented building it.
But it would take at least two to three years and an investment of resources, materials, scientific personnel, facilities that Germany could not afford at that moment. The only cyclotron available in Europe was in Paris. It had minimal capacity.
The United States, according to excerpts from American technical publications the German scientists could see, had cyclotron facilities vastly superior. Speer proposed building cyclotrons the size of the American ones. Heisenberg replied that Germany lacked the technical experience to build them from scratch.
The meeting ended with a budget allocation of several hundred thousand marks, which Speer tried to raise to one or two million to continue the research.
The atomic bomb project was formally cancelled in the autumn of 1942. In its place, development of a uranium engine was authorized, a fission reactor to power submarines. But the decision not to develop the atomic bomb was, according to Speer’s own analysis after the war, partly ideological.
Hitler had inherited from Philipp Lenard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from 1920 and one of the earliest Nazis among scientists, the conviction that nuclear physics was Jewish physics, contaminated by the foreign minds that had developed the theory of relativity.
Albert Einstein, Max Born, Niels Bohr, all Jewish, all exiled, all now working for the Allies. Heisenberg himself had stayed and was loyal. But the Ministry of Education under the influence of that ideology did not fund fundamental research.
The physicists who remained in Germany had no equipment comparable to that of the Allies. Perhaps it would have been possible to have an atomic bomb ready by 1945, Speer wrote.
But it would have required mobilizing all our technical and financial resources toward that end. It would have meant abandoning every other project, including development of the rocket weapons. The irony is that the decisive factor was not the brilliance of the scientists.
The Germans had Heisenberg and Hahn, probably the best in the world in nuclear fission in 1938, but industrial scale was another matter.
The Manhattan Project would cost two billion dollars and mobilize more than 130,000 people, building facilities the size of cities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Germany in the midst of a war of attrition with all its resources consumed by the fronts simply could not compete at that scale. Speer was right about one thing.
If Germany had concentrated all its resources on the atomic bomb in 1942, it would have had to abandon the V2 rockets, the Me 262, the Type XXI submarines, and the mass production of Tiger and Panther tanks. The bomb probably would not have arrived before 1947, by which time the Reich had already ceased to exist. On July 30, 1944, with the tungsten shortage caused by the cutoff of imports from Portugal, Speer ordered the use of uranium cores for armor-piercing ammunition.
It was the tacit acknowledgement that the Reich no longer planned to make a bomb with that material. In total, about 1,200 metric tons of uranium were used in that way. At a plant in Kassel in the autumn of 1941, the firm Henschel and Son added almost 100,000 square meters of new production facilities.
In Sankt Valentin, Austria, the gigantic new Nibelungen plant opened. In Plauen, the Vomag was converted. In Hanover, the Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen.
Germany was investing hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks in a new generation of tanks. In June 1941, the German armored forces had crossed the Soviet border convinced of their technical superiority. They had not counted on the T-34.
The Soviet T-34 tank, with its sloped 45 mm armor that deflected shells from the Panzer III and Panzer IV, with its wide tracks that let it move through mud and snow where German tanks got stuck, with its 500 horsepower diesel engine, hit the reports of the German commanders like a physical shock.
Walter Rohland, head of the main committee for tank production, traveled to the front in November 1941 to visit General Guderian at his headquarters in Orel. He came back with a blunt diagnosis. Our troops were too lightly clothed, in some cases wrapped in blankets.
The tanks could not be used. Even where the engines and gearboxes still worked, the guns failed from freezing.
The technical response was twofold. The Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger, Tiger I, was the first German tank capable of destroying the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 at long range. With an 88 mm gun that penetrated any known Allied armor in 1943 and 100 mm of frontal armor, the Tiger was the king of the battlefield when it had open ground.
Its problem was its weight, fifty-seven tons in the final version, and its complex mechanics.
A Tiger’s engine needed overhaul after 400 to 500 kilometers of travel. In a fast-advancing campaign like Barbarossa, that was a critical problem. Speer discussed it with Hitler on numerous occasions.
In one of the most remembered, in the autumn of 1942, Hitler displayed the model of the new Tiger with an almost childlike delight, exclaiming, What an elegant gun! And what a beautiful line it has.
Speer proposed increasing production of lighter, faster, medium tanks to make up losses through greater numbers. Hitler listened but always returned to the heavier tanks, the bigger ones, the more heavily armored ones. The Tiger II, Koenigstiger, or King Tiger, weighed 68.
5 tons in its final version. It was virtually invulnerable frontally. Its gun could destroy any Allied tank at 2,000 meters.
But its fuel consumption was enormous, its top speed only thirty-eight kilometers per hour, and its maintenance required specialized heavy equipment. The ratio between what it delivered tactically and what it consumed in logistical resources was unfavorable. The Panther, Panzerkampfwagen V, was the tank Germany needed.
Designed specifically as a response to the T-34, hence its name, the Panther combined the sloped armor that made the Soviet tank effective, a high-velocity 75 mm gun, and a weight of forty-four tons that while considerable was manageable.
In terms of protection per kilowatt of engine, it was the most efficient design Germany produced. But it arrived late, was sent into combat at Kursk in July 1943 with serious unresolved mechanical faults, oil leaks, spontaneous engine fires, and mass production only arrived once Allied numerical superiority in tanks and fuel was already unreachable. German tank production in 1944, 8,328 units including all types, was impressive compared with 1940.
But the USSR produced 29,000 tanks that same year. The United States 17,500. Great Britain 5,000.
The axis of the German defeat was not quality. It was quantity. And behind quantity lay oil, steel, and a workforce that Germany simply did not have.
In December 1942, Albert Speer met in Paris with Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of the German submarine fleet. Doenitz received him in an apartment overlooking the Boulevard de Bologne.
He was a hard, cold man, intensely focused. The problem was this. The U-boats were losing the Battle of the Atlantic, not because their crews were inferior.
The pilots of the German submarine arm were probably the best trained in the world in tactical submarine warfare, but because the Allies had developed anti-submarine technologies that the Type VII U-boat, the fleet standard, could not evade.
ASDIC, active sonar, allowed Allied destroyers to detect submerged submarines. Centimetric wave radar, developed by MIT’s Radiation Laboratory in collaboration with the British Telecommunications Research Establishment, could detect a submarine’s periscope in the dark. And long-range aircraft, Consolidated PB4Y Liberators, modified for twenty-four-hour range, closed the Mid-Atlantic gap that until 1943 had lain beyond the reach of Allied air cover.
Doenitz wanted something completely different. The Type XXI submarine was the technological leap submarine warfare needed. Its concept was radically different from every previous submarine.
Instead of a ship that could submerge, the Type XXI was a submarine that occasionally surfaced. It had batteries three times larger than the standard Type VII, allowing it to stay submerged for entire days.
Its submerged speed, 17. 2 knots, was faster than many escort destroyers. It had a snorkel system that let it charge its batteries at periscope depth without needing to fully surface.
Speer backed it enthusiastically. Naval engineers developed an unprecedented modular construction method. The Type XXI hull was built in eight sections at shipyards in inland Germany away from Allied bombers and then transported by barge along rivers and canals to the coastal shipyards of Hamburg, Bremen, and Kiel where it was assembled.
Construction time per submarine fell from seventeen months to six. The first Type XXIs became operational in 1944. A total of 119 were produced, but the war ended before they could be deployed in numbers sufficient to alter the outcome of the conflict.
The U-2511, the first Type XXI deployed operationally, completed its training mission in April 1945 and returned to port without having fired a torpedo.
Its commander, Korvettenkapitaen Adalbert Schnee, reported that the submarine’s acoustic torpedo system and high-sensitivity sonar had allowed him to detect an Allied battle group sixty kilometers away and approach within 500 meters of a heavy cruiser undetected. He fired a simulated launch and withdrew. The cruiser never knew it had been there.
Allied naval designers captured the Type XXI’s blueprints in 1945 and used them as a model for the next generation of conventional submarines in their own navies. The Soviet Navy built Project 613 directly based on the Type XXI and mass-produced it. During the 1950s, the American Navy developed its GUPPY program, Greater Underwater Propulsion Power, to modernize its own submarines using the lessons of the German design.
In the autumn of 1942, Herbert Backe, the agrarian technocrat who managed the Reich’s food supplies, and Heinrich Himmler agreed on the quantities of grain, meat, and fats that the occupied territories would deliver to Germany. The figures were staggering. In the 1942-43 harvest year, occupied Europe supplied Germany with more than five million tons of grain, compared with two million the year before.
Meat and fats also doubled.
Total deliveries of grain, meat, and fat from France and the occupied Soviet territories rose from 3. 5 million tons in 1940-41 to 8. 78 million in 1942-43.
In that harvest year, occupied Europe provided Germany with more than a fifth of its grain, a quarter of its fats, and nearly thirty percent of its meat. Of those imports entering the Reich, the General Government, occupied Poland, supplied fifty-one percent of Germany’s rye imports, sixty-six percent of its oats, and fifty-two percent of its potatoes.
Speer’s armaments miracle rested on another darker miracle, the systematic extraction of human and food resources from all of the Europe the Reich had conquered. Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia appointed in March 1942 as General Plenipotentiary for the Mobilization of Foreign Labor, delivered 2. 8 million new foreign workers to German factories between January 1942 and the end of June 1943.
The pace was 34,000 workers a week for seventy-eight consecutive weeks.
By August 1944, the total number of foreign workers, civilians, and prisoners of war in Germany had reached 7. 9 million, representing more than twenty percent of the entire Reich workforce. At the most important production plants, the foreign presence was overwhelming.
At BMW’s facilities in Munich in September 1944, more than 16,600 foreign workers were employed, housed in eleven separate facilities that included a prisoner of war camp and a particularly notorious subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp at Allach.
What military history often omits to mention when speaking of the German industrial miracle is that this miracle was possible in part because the Reich had coercive access to the labor of nearly an entire continent. In September 1943, Speer and Field Marshal Milch called a conference at the aerial experimental center at Rechlin am Mueritz. Before the heads of armaments production, the experts on enemy aviation presented charts type by type of Allied aircraft with special emphasis on the future increase in four-engine heavy bombers.
The American production curves were nearly vertical. What alarmed those present most was the projection for 1944. The United States would be producing more B-17s and B-24s in six months than the entire German bomber production to date.
And each of those aircraft could carry four tons of bombs. Milch told Speer he had spent months trying to get his experts on enemy weaponry to present that report to Goering. The Reichsmarschall refused to receive them.
Hitler had told him it was all propaganda and Goering simply held that line. The most memorable scene of that period was the confrontation between Goering and General Adolf Galland in the spring of 1944. Galland had reported to Hitler that American fighters had been shot down during the raids over Aachen and that soon those fighters would be escorting the bombers into the heart of Germany.
Goering called him to order on the platform of his special train as it departed for his hunting grounds at Rominten.
What is this idea of telling the Fuehrer that American fighters have penetrated into Reich territory? Galland, his mustache askew, a long cigar between his teeth, answered calmly, Herr Reichsmarschall, soon they will fly even further in. Goering accused him of inventing fantasies.
Galland insisted the downed aircraft were at Aachen. He could go see them. Finally, Goering declared, I hereby give you my official order that American fighters were not there.
Understood? American fighters were not there. And he walked off down the platform.
Galland’s reply to the Reichsmarschall’s back as he walked away. Orders are orders, sir. By the summer of 1944, Allied bombers were attacking in formations of more than a thousand aircraft.
Their escorts, the long-range P-51 Mustangs with extra fuel tanks, accompanied them to Berlin and back.
Luftwaffe fighters had to choose between trying to down bombers through a wall of machine gun fire while the Mustangs fell on them or ignoring the bombers and fighting the escort fighters. By July 1944, the armaments production index reached its historic peak, 322 points against ninety-eight in 1941, and then began to fall. The bombing had reached the fuel synthesis plants.
Without fuel, tanks sat stranded kilometers from the fronts.
Aircraft could not take off. The new Me 262 sat on the ground with empty tanks. On July 7, 1944, the JV 44 squadron of experts, Galland, Steinhoff, Lutzow, the best pilots left in the Luftwaffe, took up their Me 262s to prove the jet could change the war.
It proved it. But there were thirteen Me 262s against 1,200 bombers that day.
In the memoirs Speer published in 1969, there is a line that sums up the state of mind of the Reich’s leadership in its final months. Of the twenty-two points recorded in my conferences with Hitler, nuclear fission appears only once and then mentioned with extreme brevity. The capacity for strategic focus that had produced the technical advances of the war’s early years had been replaced by defensive improvisation and denial of reality.
In May 1945, when American troops crossed the gates of the research facilities at Peenemunde, at Nordhausen, at the BMW and Daimler-Benz plants, at the IG Farben laboratories in Leverkusen and Ludwigshafen, what they found left them speechless. The American State Department launched Operation Paperclip. The goal: to bring the German scientists and engineers to the United States before the Soviets could capture them.
Wernher von Braun, the twenty-seven-year-old man Speer had watched launch the first A4 from Peenemunde in June 1942, was one of the first. He was joined by Walter Dornberger and more than a hundred technicians from the rocket team. In 1958, von Braun would lead the team that developed Explorer 1, America’s first satellite.
In 1960, he was named director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
In 1969, the Saturn V, his design, carried Neil Armstrong to the moon. The jet turbine that powered the Me 262 was studied closely by Pratt and Whitney, Rolls-Royce, and Soviet designers. The first postwar commercial jet engines, the de Havilland Ghost, the Rolls-Royce Nene, the Pratt and Whitney J42, incorporated direct lessons from the German Jumo 004 and BMW 003.
IG Farben’s synthetic rubber process was adopted by the American and Soviet petrochemical industries. Buna SBR, styrene-butadiene rubber, which today equips the tires of more than seventy percent of the world’s vehicles, is the direct descendant of the process Krauch and his teams developed in the 1930s. German aerodynamic techniques, the swept wing of the Messerschmitt P.
1101, the NACA 65 family’s airfoil profiles based on research from the German DVL, the high-speed wind tunnel techniques of the AVA at Goettingen, were incorporated directly into the design of the F-86 Sabre and the MiG-15, the first two jet fighters to enter mass combat in Korea in 1950.
Two aircraft that faced each other in battle, inspired by the same source. And the finger-four formation of Werner Molders, invented in the dust of Aragon in 1938, remains the basic combat formation of every air force in the modern world. In the winter of 1941-42, when German Army Group Center froze in the suburbs of Moscow and General Fromm visited Speer to speak to him about the weapon that alone can save Germany, the atomic bomb, the war’s final outcome had already been decided.
Fromm knew it. Thomas of the OKW knew it. Todt himself had known it before he died.
Germany entered the Second World War with an economy inferior in scale to that of its adversaries combined. United States industrial production in 1940 was, according to the Reich’s own Ministry of Economics calculations, four times greater than Germany’s. The USSR, even after the devastating losses of 1941, produced more tanks in six months than Germany did in a year.
The British Empire had at its disposal the resources of a quarter of the planet. The question that persists and one historians do not always ask directly is this. If Germany was so disadvantaged from the start, how was it possible for it to hold out for six years, to conquer most of continental Europe in eighteen months, to keep three giant industrial powers in check until 1944.
The answer has several layers.
First, doctrine. Molders’ finger-four formation, the air-ground coordination blitzkrieg that Galland had rehearsed in Spain, Doenitz’s submarine wolfpack tactics, the armored warfare of maneuver that Guderian and Rommel turned into an art form. Germany did not win its initial victories through superiority in numbers.
It won them through superiority in concept.
Second, chemistry. IG Farben’s fuel synthesis, Buna rubber, ammonium nitrate explosives, nerve gas, the Tabun and Sarin nerve agents which Germany discovered and produced but decided not to use, partly out of fear of Allied retaliation and partly because the Germans themselves lacked adequate individual defense against them. German chemical industry was without any possible comparison the most advanced in the world.
Third, weapons systems. The Tiger, the Panther, the Me 262, the V2, the Type XXI. None arrived on time or in sufficient numbers, but all were generations ahead of the Allied equivalent at the moment of their introduction.
And fourth, organization. Speer’s system between 1942 and 1944 showed that a war economy could keep growing in productivity while being bombed, while losing territory and resources, while its cities burned.
What Germany lacked was enough oil of its own, enough territory, and the political will to use its most sophisticated resources rationally. Hitler decided the Me 262 would be a bomber. Hitler decided the V2 mattered more than the Wasserfall.
Hitler decided the Tiger tanks should be heavier when they needed to be more numerous. Hitler decided the nuclear scientists would receive several hundred thousand marks when they needed billions.
And within those decisions, the same decisions that had produced the war’s most extraordinary technical advances because they too answered to the personal will of a man accountable to no one, lay the seeds of the collapse. In July 1944, when German armaments production hit its peak, the Reich had already lost the war.