This chapter examines the rapid mobilization and almost complete militarization of the German economy long before Goebbels called for total war, and even before Albert Speer arrived on the economic scene to engage in the mythification that long has surrounded studies of Germany’s economic war effort. Just as the insufficiency of the nation’s resources made achieving Hitler’s territorial aspirations ultimately impossible, that insufficiency drove production efforts that increasingly alienated executives but also induced them to participate in crazed and costly schemes to save themselves and their firms.

The output of large parts of the German war economy was, if not quite in crisis, then certainly lagging by the autumn of 1941. It had reached a point where it was struggling to meet the current demands of the field army in Russia fighting in Russia, let alone those raised by the planned large-scale expansion of the Luftwaffe. Against such a backdrop, the idea of escalating the war by dragging another great power into it gives legitimacy to the view put forward by some historians that Hitler was seeking his self-immolation.

A close examination of the sources, however, indicates that Hitler had reached the conclusion that far from having hit a glass ceiling the German economy still possessed considerable slack which could be mobilised by rationalising designs and optimising the allocation of labour and raw materials. As a precedent, he could point to the months of January-April 1940 where a last-minute spurt in productivity had provided much of the ammunition and tanks needed for the campaign in the West. It goes without saying that this forecast mistakenly assumed a marked decrease in the intensity of the fighting in Russia on account of the fall of the Donbass industrial area.