It is amazing how little the German economy was geared towards war when you compare it to Britain in 1941. With the resources and slave labor available to it in 1941, Germany should have been producing twice as much. Now If Speer had been apointed earlier and given full power that probably would have happened.
great potential from WW1???
They have been kicked off the continent and this time a hunger blockade won´t work, so there is little they can do on their own.
And why put the industry on a higher war footing, when you defeated a seemingly stronger power with the current level of production?
Britian didn't get kicked off the Continent for 9 months after the war started, so that's no excuse for moving toward greater production. And after they were ejected from the Continent they were still undefeated; they fought off the BoB and BoA, conducted peripheral campaigns in Africa, the Med and Greece. All the while Hitler was thinking of destroying the SU, so there really is no excuse for complacency in German war production.
They'd end up with an unbalanced Luftwaffe, and lose the war sooner perhaps. Germany's best bet to win WW2 lies in going to British-style total war producition in a similar timescale as the Brits. If German war production in all things peaked in 1941-2, and plateaued through 1943 they would win the war to all intents and purposes.
... even after France and the Balkans Hitler wanted to smash the SU but didn't make a concerted effort to have war production progressively increased.
Markus, events proved that idea was wrong, that Germany should have been striving for ever greater war production in the first 3 years to ensure they had enough materiel to defeat the SU.