Industrial Output
The Soviet victory owed a great deal to the ability of its war industry to outperform the German economy, despite the enormous loss of population and land. Stalin's five-year plans of the 1930s had resulted in the industrialization of the Urals and central Asia. In 1941, the trains that shipped troops to the front were used to evacuate thousands of factories from Belarus and Ukraine to safe areas far from the front lines. Once these facilities were reassembled east of the Urals, production could be reassumed without fear of German bombing.
As the Soviet Union's manpower reserves ran low from 1943 onwards, the great Soviet offensives had to depend more on equipment and less on the expenditure of lives. The increases in production of materiel were achieved at the expense of civilian living standards – the most thorough application of the principle of total war – and with the help of Lend-Lease supplies from the United Kingdom and the United States. The Germans, on the other hand, could rely on a large slave workforce from the conquered countries and Soviet POWs.
Although Germany produced many times more raw materials, it could not compete with the Soviets on the quantity of military production (in 1943, the Soviet Union manufactured 24,089 tanks to Germany's 19,800). The Soviets incrementally upgraded existing designs, and simplified and refined manufacturing processes to increase production. Meanwhile, German industry engineered more advanced but complex designs such as the Panther tank, the King Tiger or the Elefant from a 1943 decision for "quality over quantity".
| Year | Coal (million tonnes, Germany includes lignite and bituminous types) |
Steel (million tonnes) |
Aluminium (thousand tonnes) |
Oil (million tonnes) |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German | Soviet | German | Soviet | German | Soviet | German | Soviet | Italian | Hungarian | Romanian | Japanese | |
| 1941 | 483.4 | 151.4 | 31.8 | 17.9 | 233.6 | – | 5.7 | 33.0 | 0.12 | 0.4 | 5.5 | - |
| 1942 | 513.1 | 75.5 | 32.1 | 8.1 | 264.0 | 51.7 | 6.6 | 22.0 | 0.01 | 0.7 | 5.7 | 1.8 |
| 1943 | 521.4 | 93.1 | 34.6 | 8.5 | 250.0 | 62.3 | 7.6 | 18.0 | 0.01 | 0.8 | 5.3 | 2.3 |
| 1944 | 509.8 | 121.5 | 28.5 | 10.9 | 245.3 | 82.7 | 5.5 | 18.2 | - | 1 | 3.5 | 1 |
| 1945 | – | 149.3 | – | 12.3 | – | 86.3 | 1.3 | 19.4 | - | - | - | 0.1 |
| Year | Tanks and self- propelled guns |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soviet | German | Italian | Hungarian | Japanese | |
| 1941 | 6,590 | 5,200 | 595 | - | 595 |
| 1942 | 24,446 | 9,300 | 1,252 | 500 | 557 |
| 1943 | 24,089 | 19,800 | 336 | 558 | |
| 1944 | 28,963 | 27,300 | - | 353 | |
| 1945 | 15,400 | – | - | - | 137 |
| Year | Aircraft | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soviet | German | Italian | Hungarian | Romanian | Japanese | |
| 1941 | 15,735 | 11,776 | 3,503 | - | 1,000 | 5,088 |
| 1942 | 25,436 | 15,556 | 2,818 | 6 | 8,861 | |
| 1943 | 34,845 | 25,527 | 967 | 267 | 16,693 | |
| 1944 | 40,246 | 39,807 | - | 773 | 28,180 | |
| 1945 | 20,052 | 7,544 | - | - | 8,263 | |
| Year | Industrial Labour | Foreign Labour | Total Labour | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soviet | German | Soviet | German | Total Soviet | Total German | |
| 1941 | 11,000,000 | 12,900,000 | - | 3,500,000 | 11,000,000 | 16,400,000 |
| 1942 | 7,200,000 | 11,600,000 | 50,000 | 4,600,000 | 7,250,000 | 16,200,000 |
| 1943 | 7,500,000 | 11,100,000 | 200,000 | 5,700,000 | 7,700,000 | 16,800,000 |
| 1944 | 8,200,000 | 10,400,000 | 800,000 | 7,600,000 | 9,000,000 | 18,000,000 |
| 1945 | 9,500,000 | – | 2,900,000 | - | 12,400,000 | - |
It should be noted that the Axis allies Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria added to the German numbers. Two-thirds of Germany's Iron ore, much needed for her military production, came from Sweden. Soviet production and upkeep was assisted by the Lend-Lease program from the United States and Britain. After the defeat at Stalingrad, Germany geared completely towards a war economy, as expounded in Goebbels' Sportpalast speech, increasing production in subsequent years under Albert Speer's astute direction, despite the intensifying Allied bombing campaign.
Read more about this topic: Eastern Front (World War II)
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