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My take from Wages of Destruction was that the problem was more short-term. Between war production, the blockade, the bombings, and the linger effects of WW1 and the great depression (plus them just being kind of a backwards low-tech economy to begin with), they were really struggling even to feed their own people. Conquering a bunch of farmland was one of those "yeah, in the long run this will help, but in the long run we're all dead" kind of things. There was so little food to go around, they had to make some hard decisions, and there was a certain cold logic to it. Full rations for the soldiers and key factory workers, half-rations for the civilians and prisoners from the people they liked, slim-to-nil rations for the people they didn't like. But OK, maybe they would have moderated in a hypothetical future where the war was over, the blockade was lifted, and there was plenty of food to go around.
Huh?
Exactly what it says on the tin.
Things like the tiger tank and various "wunderwaffe" get most of the attention but the Wehrmacht and the wider German economy was still very much a horse and mule drawn affair going into WWII and this significantly contributed to thier food shortages.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...
Sure, I can buy the Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector, to the detriment of civilians, but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense. Forget about the Wunderwaffen, tell me how the horses and mules produce, in terms of raw numbers, enough tanks, fighters, bombers, and their respective munitions, to conquer France, challenge Britain, and drive deep into the Soviet Union at the same time!
That's the thing, they didn't. They frequently outran their logistics, had an impossible time recovering damaged tanks, and almost never had enough of them in the first place.
The conquest of Poland resulted in a lot more casualties than normally acknowledged, and the invasion of France was a nearer-run thing than you'd expect. For the first few years of the war they managed to do wonders, but behind the propaganda reels of blitzkrieging tanks those early fights cost them a lot of their best infantry
This is all with the caveat that I barely even have a passing interest in history... but it's just not adding up.
You can tell me all about how they outran their logistics, and couldn't recover their tanks, but I still don't see how we get to a 6 year war, that got as far as it did, if one of the belligerents is an economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case. Either all of them are, and the fight went the way it did, for as long as it did, because they were more or less evenly matched, or this portrayal is itself propaganda.
My understanding is not that Germany was some sort of backwards pre-industrial nation. Germany was a technological innovator in many fields. It was a steel producing giant with a highly industrialized economy. German economy had some unique, and other not so unique, financial issues following WW1 but I don't know quite as much about that.
The German military more heavily relied on horse power due to oil shortages and supply allocation compared to its peers. All nations were limited by fuel to some extent. Germany to such an extent that it structured major parts of its strategy around the acquisition of oil sources and did lots of science to help alleviate fuel concerns. This author has written a dissertation on oil, Germany, and WW2. If Nazi Germany was built on Texas, or modern Saudi Arabia, it would have had lots of more motorized elements and supply. It could have fed its offensive operations for much longer, committed to more of them, and the big picture strategy may have be different.
It would have built a lot more trucks and had less horses. Whether more fuel and trucks wins the war for them is up to whatever fanciful counter-factual you'd like to imagine.
I see nothing objectionable in what you said here, but it doesn't sound to me like this is what the other posters were getting at.
You allude a couple times that you don't believe Germany was an "economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case." I believe you are correct. Oil and fuel shortage is one alternative explanation for "why does this technologically advanced nation still uses horses when its peers do not?" It is one of the most straight forward explanations, even.
Maybe it fits better elsewhere, or nowhere at all, but you say you have no interest in history so you're a juicy mark for information you did not ask for.
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