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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28506 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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The frustrations of the housing shortage were no doubt acute. But, more worrying for the Reich authorities was the impact of underinvestment on the German railway system. By 1938 the Reichsbahn was increasingly unable to cope with the combined demands of the Wehrmacht and a booming economy. Rail investment had been badly squeezed by the steel shortage. In 1938 the Reichsbahn was not able to obtain even half the steel it needed to maintain its current rail infrastructure and rolling stock. From the summer onwards severe delays affected the entire system. Huge pressure was exerted on freight workers to speed up loading and unloading. But by the last days of September, as the Munich crisis reached its climax, the Reichsbahn was nearing the point of collapse. Less than half the requests for freight cars were being met on time. There was no option but to go over to an overt system of rationing in which priority was given first of all to the Wehrmacht and then perishable foods, coal, sugar beet and high-priority export orders.

Help. My rail industry is getting 50% of the steel it needs and I need to ration who gets transport. Should I start a Great Power conflict against all of my neighbors?

The rail administrators struggled to ease the problems of freight traffic by cutting passenger services wholesale. But even drastic measures could not prevent a crisis. By early 1940, tens of thousands of freight cars were frozen in kilometres of traffic jams. By January, turn-around times had risen to more than a week. The effective carrying capacity of the Reichsbahn's rolling stock plummeted and the immediate result was an interruption to coal supplies. By December, the mines were warning of an impending 'transportation calamity'. In the freezing city of Berlin, coal ran so short that even a leading armaments firm such as Rheinmetall could not protect its deliveries from requisitioning by the desperate municipal authorities. Meanwhile, at the pitheads in the Ruhr, the mountains of undelivered coal reached dangerous levels, forcing the mines to slow down production. In total, in the early months of 1940 almost 10 per cent of German armaments plants were affected by the coal shortages. In the central industrial district around Kassel the figure was as high as 27 per cent. In January 1940 Goering described transport as the problem of the German war economy.

pg343-344

My ideal economy is one where lack of capacity of steel production results in a failing transport network where i have to cut off passenger service and yet still have a shortage of coal. In Germany.

By the late 1930s, virtually every family in Germany held at least one 'savings book' (Sparbuch). The accounts of the Sparkassen thus provide a direct insight into the everyday financial dispositions of German households. In the months immediately preced- ing the war, they showed an unusually large net withdrawal, as millions of families did their best to stockpile necessities. Then, from the first months of 1940 onwards, as rationing began to bite and the shelves of the German shops emptied, the accounts of the savings banks swelled with a completely unprecedented volume of deposits. By 1941, the inflow was running at the rate of more than a billion Reichsmarks per month. Under normal circumstances, these funds would have been put to work as loans to local government, or mortgages for small businesses.

But wartime restrictions not only hit civilian consumption, they also bottled up civilian investment. Whilst construction of new armaments capacity accelerated after September 1939, investment in housing was cut to the bone. In 1937, the peak year for civilian construction in the Third Reich, a total of 320,057 apartments were added to the housing stock. By 1939, annual net additions had already fallen to just over 206,000, under the pressure of military construction demands. The year 1940 saw only 105,458 apartments added to the housing stock and by 1942 the annual total came to less than 40,000, a reduction relative to 1937 of 85 per cent."

In 1940 the Sparkassen alone channelled 8 billion Reichsmarks into the war effort. In 1941 they contributed 12.8 billion Reichsmarks. Private investors who held their funds beyond the Reichsbank's immediate reach were directed into government debt through the simple expedient of restricting the issue of any other forms of interest-bearing asset and putting a tight cap on stock exchange speculation. No compulsion was necessary. There was simply nothing other than government debt to invest in.

I'm told that the best possible economy is one where you literally can't do anything with your money except invest in Government debt. It's a good thing the government is propping up my wages. And also propping up prices. But the prices are hidden. But the wages are hidden. But also I can't change jobs.

The disparity with respect to oil was most serious. Between 1940 and 1943 the mobility of Germany's army, navy and air force, not to mention its domestic economy, depended on annual imports of 1.5 million tons of oil, mainly from Romania. In addition, German synthetic fuel factories, at huge expense, produced a flow of petrol that rose from 4 million tons in 1940 to a maximum of 6.5 million tons in 1943. Seizing the fuel stocks of France as booty in no way resolved this fundamental dependency. In fact, the victories of 1940 had the reverse effect. They added a number of heavy oil consumers to Germany's own fuel deficit. From its annual fuel flow of at most 8 million tons, Germany now had to supply not only its own needs, but those of the rest of Western Europe as well. Before the war, the French economy had consumed at least 5.4 million tons per annum, at a per capita rate 60 per cent higher than Germany's. The effect of the German occupation was to throw France back into an era before motorization. From the summer of 1940 France was reduced to a mere 8 per cent of its pre-war supply of petrol. In an economy adjusted to a high level of oil consumption the effects were dramatic. To give just one example, thousands of litres of milk went to waste in the French countryside every day, because no petrol was available to ensure regular collections. Of more immediate concern to the military planners in Berlin were the Italian armed forces, which depended entirely on fuel diverted from Germany and Romania. By February 1941, the Italian navy was threatening to halt its operations in the Mediterranean altogether unless Germany supplied at least 250,000 tons of fuel.

pg 411

In my ideal economy we use the full economic potential of the countries we conquer by reducing their petrol consumption by 92%. Also I have to provide my allies with the fuel they need. Also I'm a net oil importer.

The coal industry, however, had more immediate problems. Even though the German labour market authorities had seen to it that the mining industry suffered no net loss of workers at the start of the war, the Wehrmacht draft had taken the best young men. The result was a steady decline in per capita productivity. In due course, the industry could make up for this with further investment. But in the short term Pleiger needed emergency measures. As of the spring of 1941, Sunday shifts became a normal feature of life on the Ruhr, allowing the men not even a day to recover from their gruelling working week. To restore the quality of the workforce, the Wehrmacht was persuaded to return as many trained mine workers as possible to the mines. As the Wehrmacht office pointed out with remarkable frankness, this concession was necessary above all for political reasons.

when i play nation-state building games this is how I describe my ideal resource economy. First I rob my mines of labor for my armies. Then I make them work without rest. Then send the men I took from the mines to the armies back to the mines. Nothing says sound economics like the necessity of political reasons.

By 1941 there were already signs of mounting discontent due to the inadequate food supply. In Belgium and France, the official ration allocated to 'normal consumers' of as little as 1,300 calories per day, was an open invitation to resort to the black market. Daily allocations in Norway and the Czech Protectorate hovered around 1,600 calories

well that's fine i'll just intensify agricultural production with fertilizers. wait. what's that? The explosive industry needs the same inputs?

But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe- wide agricultural crisis. Danish farmers began systematically to cull their swine herds and poultry flocks. Dutch yields steadily deteriorated in line with the fall in fertilizer supplies. Most dramatic of all was the situation in France, where the grain harvest in 1940 was less than half what it had been in 1938.

This is fine

By the late spring of 1941, stocks of coal in Germany were virtually non-existent and output was well short of requirement. At a meeting of the Four Year Plan at the end of June, General Hanneken reported that the German Grossraum faced an overall coal deficit of roughly 40 million tons. This reflected both the lagging production of the pits and the ever-increasing demands of Ger man industry. As a result, the occupied territories were being supplied at a rate of only 60 per cent of requirement. Within Germany, the steel industry was having its coal consumption throttled by 15 per cent and there was the threat that this might soon be increased to 25 per cent. Even the producers of electricity and gas could no longer be exempt. Cutting the coal allocated to households was not an option, since to ensure the continuity of industrial supplies in the first half of 1941, inadequate preparations had been made for laying in the necessary household stocks for the coming winter

pg 497

Behold. The masterpiece of Nazi Economic Gleichschaltung. The Party will Coordinate the whole economy. Industry and Community will become one. And shortages will become a thing of the past. The stern hand of the Leader will ensure that economic inefficiency, which is only a result of profiteering and sloth, will disappear.

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