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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28475 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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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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