The End of the Blitzkrieg

Abstract

G ermany, unlike the United Kingdom, has no official history of the Second World War. On the 'civil' side the original material for such a study, although scattered and fragmentary, is more generally open to inspection than that of the United Kingdom. On the economic history of the war the published material relating to Germany is still sketchy and incomplete when compared with that relating to Britain. The information in print is piecemeal; areas of Germany's war effort are covered comprehensively, others ignored just as comprehensively. The patchwork nature of this material is perhaps due to two great causes, first the diffusion and destruction in I945 of the evidence available for such a study; secondly the fact that historians approaching the problem have required certain particular information to answer specific questions. What were Hitler's intentions in starting the war? Did he even intend to start a war? How far had his economic preparation gone by I940? What effect did Allied intervention in the German economy have? How far was Allied bombing responsible for Germany's collapse? The answers to all these questions have been searched for and in part found. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 1 the fullest and best published source of material on the German war economy, was, for instance, undertaken to answer the last of these questions, and to decide on the relative merits of 'strategic bombing' and 'area bombing', a serious matter of dispute between the American and British Air Staffs during the war. It was the work of a team of economists flown out at the German collapse and given special privileges and facilities. It was the publication of some of their work which first corrected the erroneous impression held in wartime about the development of the German economy, and set out the argument that Germany's failure properly to develop her economy at the outset of the war was her undoing. In demonstrating the inefficiency of the organization before Albert Speer became Minister of Armaments and Munitions in February I942, the Bombing Survey weighed the balance down on the other side rather than corrected it. The Blitzkrieg was good strategy and highly successful. The Bombing Survey paid too little attention to the period immediately before Speer became Minister of Armaments and Munitions and thus presented a distorted picture of German economic development. This picture has not been altered either by Klein 2 or by Webster and Frank-