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The numbers in that link include factories in occupied lands. The Czech Republic in particular was very industrialized. E.g. France was making 1400 planes/month for Germany: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft9m3nb6g1&chunk.id=d0e5350&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e5350&brand=ucpress This is obvious when you notice the Czechs continued operating the same factories, exporting thousands of BF 109s.
Wikipedia shows the same numbers in more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_production Note how in 1941 the UK had almost 2x the production.
Germany couldn't mass produce a 4 engine bomber; even their larger 2 engine bombers like the He 177 had tortured developments. The UK made at least 20k. Why did Germany's 1944 aircraft production soar to 40k while the Western allies lowered production? Germany had been retooling captured factories, moving facilities around etc.
So when you talk in another thread about "Potemkin" production, you are making the mistake of equating single engine fighters with 4 engine bombers with far more advanced engines etc. Germany was never able to even replace the BF-109 (40,000 built) and couldn't retool existing factories to e.g. the FW 190, which struggled at altitude. The Ta 152, with an engine capable of bringing it up to the Western bombers was only produced 69 times. Britain continuously created new planes (e.g. the Firefly) and phased out older types (e.g. the Defiant) besides the famous Spitfires and Huricanes.
More damning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Land_forces
Although this conflates Canada etc. with Britain, 10x "other vehicles", 1.5 million compared to 150k for Germany. 3x the artillery...
Thanks for addressing my argument directly. While that does force me to readjust somewhat, I'm not sure it's enough to go all the way and vindicate the portrayal of Germany that the other posters have put forward. So before we continue I just want to make clear what I am, and am not arguing for.
What I'm NOT saying: Germany was Aryan Wakanda, the most advanced nation on Earth that only lost because they were outnumbered.
What I AM saying is: Germany was not a backwards and low-tech economy. While not the most advanced in the world, it was easily in the top 10, if not the top 5 most advanced nations on the planet. I don't think this is particularly due to the Nazis coming up with some brilliant formula to manage their country, quite the opposite in fact, I think national socialism was quite a bit of a clusterfuck. In fact I'm somewhat bemused at the idea that Tooze discovered something new, or cleared up some misconception, when these arguments were being made since the war started. The Nazis simply inherited way too much capital for the portrayal as backwards, low-tech, and Potemkin-industrialized to stick (in fact, I'll take a wild guess that that Czech industrial infrastructure was largely built by Germans as well).
I accept that the numbers I gave conflated the quality of the equipment being produced, and that the UK and US advanced quicker and performed during the course of the war, but I don't think that's relevant to the arguments being made in the course of this conversation. Achieving the level of production for even these simpler aircraft would have been impossible without a strong industrial base. If you could pull that off while being backwards and low-tech, Poland would have boasted of a similarly-sized and equipped air force.
I concede that the numbers also included external territories, and thus overestimated German performance. It was, after all, a simple sanity check. But if we drill down, do you think we'll find a backwards and low-tech country, or one of the most industrialized ones at the time?
Oh, definitely. It was tied for 2 when the war started: https://i.redd.it/wyaw5ffttz871.jpg or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)#1830%E2%80%931938_(Bairoch)
Or per capita: between 10th (1929) 6th (1937) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Here's some rambling detail:
Really, everything's a comparison to the US with its cartoonish relative economic strength. My personal takeaway of their economy: Germany took out massive loans, made fake money (Mefo bills etc.), invested almost everything into the military and were forced to start the war early, lest they default.
I have seen cool figures for this, but don't want to dig now, here's a video-graph: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UrUp5Rm_Ncw?si=bgnTAdqvsmnJ6S9v&t=227 I don't quite trust those numbers, but meh. They suggest Germany'd have massive overmatch in Europe (or a lot of embezzlement), which makes sense (since they steamrolled everyone). I'm unsure to what extent it presents/exposes difficult issues like training etc. where longer investments pay off (vs. just buying a bunch of equipment today.) On the other hand, it shows the German citizens were using less of their productivity for themselves, such that life in the UK was perhaps 40-60% "richer". This can make sense in some ways, perhaps exposing the huge infrastructure projects which didn't have civilian use (road network but no cars...)
I dug into this some years, ago, and learned German industry largely rejected assembly lines, struggled to make interchangeable parts (thus making new vehicles to arm new units, instead of supplying veteran units, though weak transportation infrastructure also played a role), wouldn't share designs such that each company would build its own model and its allies would have to develop their own equipment from scratch. And yet, that was still better than most. It's really a world away from our ideas of modern industry or what the US was doing. It's hard for many to realize how close we are to the drudgery of subsistence farming most of our ancestors did in the last 1-200 years.
This is a big topic. Short summary: The main industrial centers were in Czech lands with fewer Germans (the Sudetenland was mountainous and poor.) However those Czechs had largely German speaking ancestors 100 years prior. The national revival saw the language spread in the cities etc. Czech leadership in Austria(-Hungary) drove industrialization harder than in Austria itself! Austria, for whatever reason, got stuck in the first industrial revolution (steam and water power etc.) but was behind even Hungary by 1880 in the second industrial revolution (electrification, trains, standardization). In 1918, Czechoslovakia had 3/4 of the former empire's industrial capacity. Slovakia was extremely poor, however; driving the statistics down. To accentuate the issue of identity, though German townfolk became Czech over time, rich Czechs became Germans. Škoda was born to well to do (Czech) peasants (doctor and politician), founded a huge factory, but his son identified as German! Indeed, as Germany in WWII, so Austria-Hungary in WWI. Why is Austria-Hungary, a more industrialized country than France, considered so backwards?
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