Could the Nazis have Better Utilized French Industries?

So if I'm not wrong, France at the time of 1939-1940, had the largest, most productive industrial capacity in Europe.
Though Fall Gleb did some damage, full scale repair of demolished industrial centers near the Rhineland and Paris was surely possible...and that's not even mentioning the nearly untouched south and south western regions

The being said, what if the Germans had better utilized said industries, instead of just plundering everything in sight.

Might a stronger, integrated Franco-German military industrial complex be able to out produce, or at least compete with the Soviet Union during Barbarossa?
 
The Germans did leverage the maximum short-term industrial gain they could have out of occupied France. And yeah, this might have been at the expense of sustainability, especially with the Anglo-American blockades and de-facto embargos constricting German access to raw materials, but without squeezing France for all they were worth then Barbarossa won't be adequately equipped and supplies to be as successful enough to penetrate into the Soviet heartland and do the same amount of damage to the Red Army and Soviet industry as OTL... in which case the improvement of long-term sustainability becomes immaterial. Germany needed everything France could provide it in 1941, not 1945 or so.

The German "smash & loot" economy was driven just as much by the necessity of the tight timetable the Nazi strategy was operating under as it was by the Nazi ideology's extremely crude understanding of economics which distrusted trade (since the international markets were part of the capitalist arm of the International Jewish Conspiracy (TM)) and advocated direct control.
 
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Might a stronger, integrated Franco-German military industrial complex be able to out produce, or at least compete with the Soviet Union during Barbarossa?

Yes, but the punch line is the folks running this would not be the nazis.

A organized plan for maximum effciency would require also:

..combing skilled workers out of the ranks of the Wehrmacht, to get German industry back up to its potiential. Slave labors and 'Guest Workers' were not nearly as productive as well paid German workers had been.

.. returning French & Belgian PW to their homes to work again in their prewar jobs, vs keeping them in Germany as ultra low cost labor there.

..somehow compensating all the industrial and agricultural labor enough to motivate them. this is tough in a occupied Europe experiencing growing food shortages, and extreme shortages of consumer goods. Looted consumer goods from occupied Europe kept loyal nazis & skilled German tradesmen happy until such things ran completely out in 1942-43.

..provide auto and rail transport to prewar levels for industrial/agricultural use, without reducing that used for attacking the USSR.

The really insurmountable problem was the shortage of raw materials, like metals for alloys, Nickle, Colbalt, Wolfram or Tungsten, Aluminum were several that were never in suffcient quantity.
 

RousseauX

Donor
So if I'm not wrong, France at the time of 1939-1940, had the largest, most productive industrial capacity in Europe.
Though Fall Gleb did some damage, full scale repair of demolished industrial centers near the Rhineland and Paris was surely possible...and that's not even mentioning the nearly untouched south and south western regions

The being said, what if the Germans had better utilized said industries, instead of just plundering everything in sight.

Might a stronger, integrated Franco-German military industrial complex be able to out produce, or at least compete with the Soviet Union during Barbarossa?

The problem with using industries outside of Germany is among other things the fuel cost of transportation. Because of the lack of oil coal etc it means that the longer supply chains isn't possible since you need to ship stuff around to make it work and you don't have the fuel to run as many trucks/trains as you needed. The logical organisation of industries is basically what you had in Germany OTL: concentrate production in a geographically centralized area to minimize cost of transportation while shipping in labor from across Europe to said production area.

There's also the fact that Germany's lack of raw material renders more industries moot, what's the point of having more factories without say, rubber to produce tanks? If western Europe had lots of natural resources like the USSR it might be fine but it doesn't.
 
The problem with using industries outside of Germany is among other things the fuel cost of transportation. Because of the lack of oil coal etc it means that the longer supply chains isn't possible since you need to ship stuff around to make it work and you don't have the fuel to run as many trucks/trains as you needed. The logical organisation of industries is basically what you had in Germany OTL: concentrate production in a geographically centralized area to minimize cost of transportation while shipping in labor from across Europe to said production area.

There's also the fact that Germany's lack of raw material renders more industries moot, what's the point of having more factories without say, rubber to produce tanks? If western Europe had lots of natural resources like the USSR it might be fine but it doesn't.

In fact what the French industry needed to retain effectiveness was coal and what the French agriculture needed was fertilizer.

Both of these are transported by rail and barges and that turned into a major bottleneck as well. You'll need to increase hydrogenation capacity for fertilizer (this is competing with ammunition), coal production for transport and for export to France and a surpluss transport capacity + orders for the
French industry instead of pillaging.

It happens in my signature TL although its impact is not really understood by the readers
 
..combing skilled workers out of the ranks of the Wehrmacht, to get German industry back up to its potiential. Slave labors and 'Guest Workers' were not nearly as productive as well paid German workers had been.

Which deprives the Heer of manpower which even OTL proved to be inadequate. Enemy breaks through the inadequately manned front-lines and overruns Germany. War lost, hypothetical production increase rendered irrelevant.

Slave labour allowed the Nazis to go well beyond what they would otherwise have been capable of through the ruthless expenditure of human life. This conclusion is unsettling to us, since we like to have what is evil also be what is ineffective, but the unfortunate fact is that foreign slave labour allowed significant increases in Nazi productivity at a time what the Germans simply had no other viable labour source. Their women were out farming and their men were off fighting. There was ultimately no other option. So although foreign labour was never as efficient as German workers, the Nazis literally worked them to death for nothing.

...provide auto and rail transport to prewar levels for industrial/agricultural use, without reducing that used for attacking the USSR.
Which is impossible. The Germans can either loot france for the trains and trucks to support Barbarossa or they can watch their advance collapse before it penetrates the Soviet heartland and then watch as the largely unharmed Soviet military-industrial base buries them in even more massive quantities of armaments and troops compared to OTL.

In fact what the French industry needed to retain effectiveness was coal and what the French agriculture needed was fertilizer.

Both of these are transported by rail and barges and that turned into a major bottleneck as well. You'll need to increase hydrogenation capacity for fertilizer (this is competing with ammunition), coal production for transport and for export to France and a surpluss transport capacity + orders for the French industry instead of pillaging.

It also requires sufficient stocks of coal and fertilizer to exist in the first place. As it was, German stocks of these materials were inadequate to support their own industry... so how the hell are they going to get enough to support an entire other nations industry?

It happens in my signature TL although its impact is not really understood by the readers
Largely because you just magic up the required production of coal and fertilizer, ignoring that the Germans were pushing the limits as hard as they could have OTL without derailing their war effort. Hell, if you look above, you'll note that you had inadvertently admitted that the only way the Germans could get more fertilizer is by sacrificing ammunition production. Which, I once again am forced to reiterate, was inadequate as it was.

The bottom line is in order to help the occupied territories industry, the Germans have to hurt their own war effort. There would be few if any real savings if those occupiers operated more humanely and with an eye for long-term sustainability... and many economic losses compared to what the Nazis were historically able to wring out of the conquered economies. The brutality of the Nazi policies often hides the threadbare shoestring Germany waged WWII on. They had to export the hardship onto their conquests in order to keep it going as long as they could.
 
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It happens in my signature TL although its impact is not really understood by the readers
If you have a few people who don't understand what you wrote, you are dealing with some people who have comprehension problems. If almost everybody doesn't understand what you wrote, then you wrote something that doesn't make sense. Germany simply doesn't have the ability to have a powerful army, a powerful navy, a powerful air force, and a successful economy. Even if Hitler's government was composed of brilliant military leaders and Nobel Prize-winning economists he would still have to make some trade-offs, which are completely absent in your TL.
 
Hell, if you look above, you'll note that you had inadvertently admitted that the only way the Germans could get more fertilizer is by sacrificing ammunition production.

I wonder how much could be saved up by severely limiting production of AAA shells. Those things were horribly wasteful, and in the early years the RAF had real trouble hitting anything with their night-time bombing.
 

Deleted member 1487

So if I'm not wrong, France at the time of 1939-1940, had the largest, most productive industrial capacity in Europe.
Though Fall Gleb did some damage, full scale repair of demolished industrial centers near the Rhineland and Paris was surely possible...and that's not even mentioning the nearly untouched south and south western regions

The being said, what if the Germans had better utilized said industries, instead of just plundering everything in sight.

Might a stronger, integrated Franco-German military industrial complex be able to out produce, or at least compete with the Soviet Union during Barbarossa?
No, France did not have a particularly large industry for their size, they were somewhat had of Italy, but IIRC had less than half the industry of the Reich by the start of WW2.

IOTL when the Germans tried to use French industry there was widespread sabotage and worker strikes, so that was a bust and the resources spent on the French factories ended up largely a waste. Due to the limited resources available to Germany they'd have been better off spending them on allied industries to enhance their production.
 
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