Neufeld on Blitzkrieg Economy WKR6 PDF

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Betances 1 Carlos Betances Lloyd Ackert HIST 285 21 February 2019 Neufeld on Blitzkrieg Economy Three Keywords: 1. Blitzkrieg Economy 2. War 3. Germany

The Blitzkrieg a German term for “lightning war,” is a military tactic designed to create disorganization among enemy forces through the use of mobile forces and locally concentrated firepower. Inflation increased during or as a direct consequence of these conflicts right when world war II. The higher levels of government spending associated with war tends to generate some positive economic benefits in the short-term, specifically through increases in economic growth occurring during conflict spending booms. “Hitler, the V-2, and the Battle for Priority, 1939-1943” by Michael J. Neufeld conveys the message on how the Blitzkrieg economy and Hitler impacted. By 1939 as war approached the macroeconomic balance of the major combatants was quite unlike that in 1914. The financial effort involved and the industrial, technological and strategic uncertainties that had to be balanced posed huge new problems for modern government. “Hitler's War and the German Economy: A Reinterpretation” By R. J. Overy illustrated how the Blitzkrieg economy strongly influenced short-term economic and political considerations. There was, in fact, no coherent priority system at all in Germany before the summer of 1940. “The services saw the war as a blank check to speed-up all their own armaments and munitions

Betances 2 programs. At the same time no clear decision-making structure for the war economy existed; it was torn at least three ways” (Neufeld.517). There was confusion in the German military and economy because the decision making was split into three ways through incompetent and stubborn politicians in place of power. “This confused situation resulted in a botched mobilization of the war economy and what Thomas called "a war of all against all." (Neufeld.517). Their concerns were not primarily with the day-to-day problems of economics, living standards, and social peace, as were those of his contemporaries, but with questions of race and foreign policy. “Hitler wanted a healthy and expanding economy so that he could convert it to the giant task of European and Asian conquest. He wanted massive building programmed on an unprecedented scale. Speer calculated the cost of 25 milliard marks. Significantly, the buildings were scheduled for completion by I950 to coincide with the achievement of total victory.” (Overy.275). Many of these ambitions betrayed Hitler’s inability to see the economy as a whole. The Production Plant project became bogged down in a mass of difficulties that were to last the next three years. Many of the conflicts were self-inflected in Hitler’s discretion. The fact that Hitler's wider intentions failed to produce the large-scale armament that he wanted was not because he lowered his sights and chose Blitzkrieg. This was “because of the premature outbreak of a general war in I939 and the difficulties experienced thereafter in mobilizing an economy starved of strategic guidelines and a satisfactory wartime administration.” (Overy.278). This relates to Misa’s portrayal of technological innovation in WWII for various of reasons. Due to Germany's spectacular successes in the early war years, post-war analysts jumped to the conclusion that Hitler's reasoning was part of a well worked-out Blitzkrieg strategy in which everything from weapons procurement, to the economics of armaments planning and diplomacy

Betances 3 was geared towards Hitler's aggression. “That is why the German economy appeared to be prepared for a limited war. It was caught half-way towards the transformation planned by Hitler, with a military base capable of achieving the limited first stage but not the second, more general, one.” (Overy.290). The economy was caught between peaceful economic recovery and programmed war preparations since the beginning of 1936. Hitler's own uncertainty and impulsive strategy created uncertainty among business leaders and his economic panel. “In the end, Germany invested around two billion marks to produce what was, after the atomic bomb, probably the greatest technological achievement of World War II and its most conspicuous waste of advanced scientific and engineering resources.” (Neufeld.538). After the Second World War the idea of restoring a true state of peace as the foundation for a reconstructed world economy slipped away even more quickly and radically than it had done after the First World War.

Works Cited

Betances 4 Overy, R. J. “Hitler's War and the German Economy: A Reinterpretation.” The Economic History Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 1982, pp. 272–291. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2595019. Neufeld, Michael J. “Hitler, the V-2, and the Battle for Priority, 1939-1943.” Journal of Military History, vol. 57, no. 3, July 1993, pp. 511–538. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/2943990....