Level of Industry Plans
The first "level of industry" plan, signed by the Allies on March 29, 1946, stated that German heavy industry was to be lowered to 50% of its 1938 levels by the destruction of 1,500 listed manufacturing plants. In January 1946 the Allied Control Council set the foundation of the future German economy by putting a cap on German steel production capacity: the maximum allowed was set at about 5,800,000 tons of steel a year, equivalent to 25% of the prewar production level. The UK, in whose occupation zone most of the steel production was located, had argued for a higher limited reduction by placing the production ceiling at 12 million tons of steel per year, but had to submit to the will of the US, France and the Soviet Union (which had argued for a 3 million ton limit). Steel plants thus made redundant were to be dismantled. Germany was to be reduced to the standard of life it had known at the height of the Great Depression (1932). Car production was set to 10% of prewar levels, etc.
On February 2, 1946, a dispatch from Berlin reported:
| “ | Some progress has been made in converting Germany to an agricultural and light industry economy, said Brigadier General William Henry Draper Jr., chief of the American Economics Division, who emphasized that there was general agreement on that plan.
He explained that Germany’s future industrial and economic pattern was being drawn for a population of 66,500,000. On that basis, he said, the nation will need large imports of food and raw materials to maintain a minimum standard of living. General agreement, he continued, had been reached on the types of German exports — coal, coke, electrical equipment, leather goods, beer, wines, spirits, toys, musical instruments, textiles and apparel — to take the place of the heavy industrial products which formed most of Germany's pre-war exports. |
” |
Timber exports from the US occupation zone were particularly heavy. Sources in the US government admitted that the purpose of this was the "ultimate destruction of the war potential of German forests." Extensive deforestation due to clear-felling resulted in a situation which could "be replaced only by long forestry development over perhaps a century.".
The first plan was subsequently followed by a number of new ones, the last signed in 1949. By 1950, after the virtual completion of the by-then much watered-down "level of industry" plans, equipment had been removed from 706 manufacturing plants in the west and steel production capacity had been reduced by 6,700,000 tons.
Read more about this topic: Industrial Plans For Germany
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