Soviet–German War - Industrial Output

Industrial Output

The Soviet victory owed a great deal to the ability of its war industry to outperform the German economy, despite the enormous loss of population and land. Stalin's five-year plans of the 1930s had resulted in the industrialization of the Urals and central Asia. In 1941, the trains that shipped troops to the front were used to evacuate thousands of factories from Belarus and Ukraine to safe areas far from the front lines. Once these facilities were reassembled east of the Urals, production could be resumed without fear of German bombing.

As the Soviet Union's manpower reserves ran low from 1943 onwards, the great Soviet offensives had to depend more on equipment and less on the expenditure of lives. The increases in production of materiel were achieved at the expense of civilian living standards – the most thorough application of the principle of total war – and with the help of Lend-Lease supplies from the United Kingdom and the United States. The Germans, on the other hand, could rely on a large slave workforce from the conquered countries and Soviet POWs.

Although Germany produced more raw materials, it did not equal the Soviets in the quantity of military production (in 1943, the Soviet Union manufactured 24,089 tanks to Germany's 19,800). The Soviets incrementally upgraded existing designs, and simplified and refined manufacturing processes to increase production. Meanwhile, German industry engineered more advanced but complex designs such as the Panther tank, the King Tiger or the Elefant from a 1943 decision for "quality over quantity".

Two-thirds of Germany's iron ore, much needed for its military production, came from Sweden. Soviet production and upkeep was assisted by the Lend-Lease program from the United States and the United Kingdom. In the course of the war the US supplied $11 billion of materiel through Lend-Lease. This included 400,000 transport vehicles, 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks), 11,400 aircraft and 1.75 million tons of food. Soon after the German attack, the British supplied a unit, No. 151 Wing RAF, to defend Murmansk and to train Soviet pilots on British Hurricane fighters. After the RAF personnel left, the British continued to supply aircraft: 3,000 more Hurricanes and 4,000 other aircraft during the war. Five thousand tanks were provided by the British and Canada. As Soviet tank production increased these foreign tanks were used on less important fronts such as the Caucasus. Total British supplies were about four million tons. Germany on the other hand had the resources of conquered Europe at its disposal; those numbers are however not included into the tables above, such as production in France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, and so on.

After the defeat at Stalingrad, Germany geared completely towards a war economy, as expounded in a speech given by Josef Goebbels, (the Nazi propaganda minister), in the Berlin Sportpalast, increasing production in subsequent years under Albert Speer's (the Reich armaments minister) astute direction, despite the intensifying Allied bombing campaign.