Did Hitler have a chance Against USSR

emperor of seleucid said:

Book are subject to personal bias. You don't debate by linking a book that deals with the subject. In school, they should have taught you how to present your information and then cite them.

My numbers are accepted numbers. If you want source, ask for it: The production numbers are from The National WWII Museum.

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Books can carry biases, but they will generally use the same primary sources you're saying you're using. The bias is in the historians interpretation of the facts, not the facts themselves...

And even WITH the bias, this does not make secondary sources automatically invalid.

Can we move forward on this discussion? The question was asked "How many Divisions could Hitler have created from the captured Soviet soldiers and Baltic volunteers. "

As I remember it Emperor of Seluecid was saying that there was no shortage of manpower but a shortage of resources. Iron1 seemed to disagree with that, saying that Germany was short of skilled labour.

On the topic of oil Seleucid said that the Germans were using up far more oil than they could produce.

Now, as to the actual question quoted above, it does seem apparent to me that the use of Soviet prisoners as soldiers, even if their loyalty could be relied upon, would not have made a significant difference, as the German economy would have been unable to provide the guns and ammunition, and all the need transport and supplies, such divisions would need.

So do we all agree that the answer to the original question is that, no, the deployment of Soviet prisoners as soldiers would have made no significant difference?

On the specific issue of oil, presumably those prisoners could not have been deployed en masse to give a boost to the oil industry because the oilfields that Germany had were running to full capacity anyway (until they were bombed out then run over of course).

We all concur, do we not, that Germany was able to increase hugely their oil output, right up into late 1944? Now Seleucid is saying that the oil production was not enough to provision the German armed forces. I am not clear if Iron disagrees with that or not

The German war economy faced a number of constraints (i) oil (ii) steel (iii) transport chiefly rail (iv) manpower. Increasing one aspect runs afoul of other constraints. (hmm could add (v) food supply)

More divisions means rail capacity for logistics has to be increased which directly competes with rail capacity for the war economy, increasing overall rail capacity means investing steel allocations years ahead reducing production in other areas. Another example is the sharp reduction in occupied french dairy production, before the occupation the milk was picked up in trucks, but the french economy was running on about 8% of it's prewar oil, the milk simply spoiled. The Germans also took most of the french railway rollng stock as they had real shortages themselves with massively reduced oil supply, and much reduced rolling stock teh occipied french economy was a shadow of it's prewar self.

The 1941 massive Russian prisoner take was more or less deliberately starved to death (1.5 million! Though there would have been huge problems feeding them even if there was a real effort to keep them alive, the Russian POW could have been used to fix a some of the manpower shortage the overall food supply was pretty stretched. ), later Russian POW labor became valued but still much reduced productivity due to poor diet. In this 1941 the German war economy was short around 1.5 million workers, of course there is an overhead for using POWs (guards and stuff) and it's not skilled labour.

Wikipedia on Russian POWs
"Between 1941 and 1945, the Axis powers took about 5.7 million Soviet prisoners. About one million of them were released during the war, in that their status changed but they remained under German authority. A little over 500,000 either escaped or were liberated by the Red Army. Some 930,000 more were found alive in camps after the war. The remaining 3.3 million prisoners (57.5% of the total captured) died during their captivity"

Russian treatment of German POWs (wikipedia)
"According to some sources, the Soviets captured 3.5 million [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_powers_of_World_War_II"]Axis[/ame] servicemen (excluding Japanese) of which more than a million died"

Prisoner of war - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of course with the early 1941 campaign going so well the need to prepare the German economy for a war of attrition wasnt on the Nazi minds, the war would be won soon, long term problems in the economy were not a factor in their planning such as it was.

I think Tozer's book is a good read, (though I would have preferred a more comprehensive statistical approach, he just tends to quote and example stuff that supports his narrative , of course it would have reduced it;s readability and wider appeal and made it more bulky). It's a relatively readable and breif approach to the overall German war economy. As always any particular book is never going to be the whole story. It's good, but really mainly overview stuff and no in depth analysis of the statistics.(which is want I personally am still keen to read about) It's more a start, if you want a deeper understanding you going to have to get something more detailed and analytical rather than narrative.

And when talking statistics it's not enough to just present figures, without a commentary of how they were complied (by who for what purpose under what pressures/constraints) to give (a) a feel for their accuracy (b) an understanding of any assumptions about the data the author is taking, (c) where to look for the data.

(sigh, my monolingual-ness irks me sometimes, but I not good with languages, I'm sure English isnt my native tongue but it's all I got)

fascinating said:

The question was asked "How many Divisions could Hitler have created from the captured Soviet soldiers and Baltic volunteers. "

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The Germans used hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens in auxiliary roles and police/ anti partisan units. Their performance was all over the place with some units being experts in anti-partisan warfare while others killed their German officers and defected to the Soviet side.

The problem is not ‘How many Divisions could Hitler have created’ but that people weren’t going to fight for the Germans. Especially not after the disaster of Stalingrad.

emperor of seleucid said:

Only 800,000 soviets fought for Germany in the war. Germany had no real oil supply after Barbarosa.

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The Germans also used expensive synthetic oil for most of the war and it was not until 1944 that damage to those facilities started to bite. The last year of the war Bomber Command and the US Army Air Force managed to cripple synthetic oil production. This led to irreversible loss of war production and the defense capabilities of the Third Riech.

Opinions on outcome

The Oil Campaign was the first to accomplish these goals.[31] The US strategic bombing survey identified "catastrophic" damage.[20] Several prominent Germans described it as critical to the defeat. Adolf Galland, of the Luftwaffe, wrote in his book "the most important of the combined factors which brought about the collapse of Germany,"[32] and the Luftwaffe's wartime leader, Hermann Göring, described it as "the utmost in deadliness." [19]:287 Albert Speer, writing in 1970, said that "It meant the end of German armaments production."[4]:412-4 It has been stated to have been "effective immediately, and decisive within less than a year."[33]

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[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_Campaign_of_World_War_II]Oil Campaign of World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]