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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!
...and yet it was so. In 1938 there were an estimated 2.5 million operational motor vehicles (cars, trucks, tractors, locomotives, etc...) in Germany servicing a population of approximately 68 million. IOW a per capita rate of 0.036
Compare that to an estimated 30 million vehicles servicing a population of 130 million people (a per capita rate of 0.230) in the US.
"Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector" doesn't quite capture how heavily skewed it was, or just how hard it ended up screwing them.
Whats that old Napoleon quote? Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
One of several reasons the Germans lost is that they put lots of time and energy into developing fancy toys and a comparatively little energy into developing the ability to produce them and keep them in the fight.
Then please step me through how these horses and mules built something to the tune of 100K aircraft - roughly the same number that the Brits did. Did the Germans use some Aryan über-mules, or were the Brits fake-industrialized as well?
What is there to step through? Nothing in the design of a Messerschmitt precludes fueling it from the back of a horse-cart.
I would imagine that the sheer scale implies the use of some sort of mass transportation system, like a railway, to deliver the raw resources needed for their production. Also factories. But if Tooze says it's mules all the way down, I guess I better trust the experts.
Its not that they didn't have cars, trucks, or locomotives at all. It's that they had so few of them.
And yes a good part of the blame goes to the the steel shortage described by @WestphalianPeace but the simple facts remain.
Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
So I'll go right back to the raw production numbers I cited, and point out they were roughly on-par with Britain. They obviously ultimately lost, but the run for the money that they gave to Europe + US would indicate that they weren't backwards or low-tech. Either that, or everyone else was as well, which makes those descriptors meaningless.
Also re: locomotives in particular, you can tell where Prussia used to end, and where the Russian Empire began, just by looking at the railway map of Europe. To be clear: not the 1930's and 40's map - the one from current year. Like, I don't know if you realize how tall the order of "Germany was a backwards low-tech economy" is.
Britain was also very primitive. They were still eating their old mine and shunting ponies in the 50s, because all through the war all their railyards were using horses. (They also didn't get the post-war infrastructure rebuild that Europe got, which accelerated their decline.)
Germany was in the situation where the vast majority of their divisions were exactly as maneuverable as in WW1 the second they got off trains and hitched their anti-tank guns to the horse teams.
My dad had an older artilleryman friend who said they were jealous of the panzer units heading east, but very grateful for the horses on the way back west because you can't eat a tank.
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