ISBN 0-19-820873-1
xxxix + 1142 pages

Notes on the Authors; Note on the Translation; Abbreviations; Glossary of Foreign Terms; Introduction; charts; tables; diagrams; maps; Footnotes; Bibliography; Index of Persons

   Precise and clinical as a coroner's report, the latest volume of Germany and the Second World War slices open the German war effort and examines the inner workings of "war administration, economy, and manpower resources, 1942-1944/5." The authors give us a complete record on how the Reich obtained its raw materials, produced its weapons, provided men to industry and the military, and managed to keep its fighting machine in action under the hammer blows of a two-front war and the non-stop bombing offensive. This is a book of statistics and tonnages and data and budgets and production goals and bureaucratic squabbling without a single sexy photograph of panzers or SS troops.
   Thank goodness.
   In the years following the Second World War, the governments of many nations with military forces engaged in the conflict produced a series of official history volumes. Of those, the American official history series and the British official history series are probably the most extensive, but equally useful volumes have been produced by more than a dozen other nations. Of all the major combatants, only the divided post-war Germany failed to publish a comparable set of works. Although not technically an "official" history in the same sense as the British and American books, the Germany and the Second World War series is likely the closest we will come to an official German perspective on World War II. That alone makes the series worth noting. The excellent job performed by the team of researchers and writers at the Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt makes this series all the more worthwhile.
   Like other sets of official histories, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg has been produced book by book over a long span of years, and the original German work remains unfinished:

• Volume 8: Germany on the Defensive, continued -- Due September 2003
• Volume 9, part 1: State and Society at War -- Due September 2005
• Volume 9, part 2: State and Society at War -- Due September 2005
• Volume 10: The End of the Third Reich -- Due September 2006

   Unlike most other sets of official histories, the German series is being translated into English. (No such luck with the Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, Soviet, or other official volumes!) Oxford University Press, known the world over for some of the finest scholarly publications on the planet, has undertaken this mammoth task. Volumes one through six, including both parts of volume five, have now been translated and published. (Volume six preceded part two of volume five.) Volume seven is now (or soon will be) in preparation, and English translations of the four German titles not yet published can also be expected in due course.
   In due course? Given the magnitude and complexity of these volumes, it seems to take nearly as long to translate them properly as it does to write them in the first place. (The time-consuming and expensive process of translation might also be the reason why the English editions typically cost four to five times as much as the original German versions.)
   In any event, part two of volume five, published by OUP at the beginning of the year, recently arrived here for us to review. Like previous volumes, this one's no lightweight, and every page is packed with a dense compilation of information and analysis. While most of the others focus on military planning and strategy and operations, this volume—like part one of number five—looks at the political organization and war economy of German-controlled Europe.
   The second book of volume five is itself sub-divided into three major parts. The bulk of Part One reviews German administration in occupied and "allied" nations:

• Bohemia and Moravia
• Polish Government-General
• Denmark
• Norway
• The Netherlands
• Belgium and northern France
• France
• Serbia
• Greece
• Occupied Soviet territory
• Italy
• Hungary
• Slovakia
• Croatia
• Montenegro and Albania

   Part One also deals separately with a number of important issues in the German-occupied sphere of influence: economic exploitation, "the conflict between dogma and usefulness" (which meant that in some cases local authorities were willing to ignore or soften directives from Berlin in order to increase the flow of useful resources to the Reich), deportation of manpower to the Reich, starvation of local populations, ethnic resettlement, collaboration and resistance, and genocide.
   The second part of the book (with five long chapters amounting to over 500 pages) covers underlying economic conditions, armaments policy, and war production. Various sections and sub-sections examine a wide range of specialized topics such as power, transport, agriculture, rationing, the black market, coal, iron and steel, propellants and explosives, chemical warfare agents, fuels, synthetic rubber, and more. About thirty pages are devoted to Germany's wartime foreign trade, and larger sections deal individually with Army, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine armaments. Text and numerous tables track armaments production from 1942 through 1944: infantry weapons, mortars, anti-tank weapons, artillery, and armored fighting vehicles. The section on "miracle weapons," amounting to about thirty-five pages, provides a far more realistic and dispassionate view of Germany's atomic bomb program than some considerably more sensationalized books on the subject. The authors demonstrate that Germany not only lagged far behind in developing atomic weapons, but Hitler's lack of interest, the low priorities afforded to the decentralized projects, wrong turns taken by German scientists, and the unpromising conditions in which research was conducted all meant that creation of this particular miracle weapon was never imminent. Not only that, but the British were fully aware of the lack of German progress.

   In the spring of 1944 the Americans were once again displaying serious concern that the Germans might use radioactive poison against an invasion, since they themselves had conducted experiments on those lines. The military chief of the American uranium project expected the use of ordinary bombs filled by the Germans with radioactive material, as well as similar barrier areas along the invasion front that ground troops would not be able to cross without devastating casualties. If necessary, he believed, the Germans might employ radioactive material in bombs and create panic in England. In Germany, the idea of a 'radiation war' had occurred to some experts, but no preparations had been made for it.
   British intelligence, on the other hand, remained firmly convinced that the Germans neither had an atom bomb nor would use a poison of this kind. They had good reason to be so certain. For years they had been kept informed on the progress of the German uranium programme. Their secret informer was Paul Rosbaud, a physicist and scientific journalist with Springer-Verlag in Berlin. He was a close friend of several German uranium researchers and the author of the Oslo Report which, towards the end of 1939, had drawn the Allies' attention to Germany's most important weapons developments. Thanks to his many contacts Rosbaud supplied the British secret service during the war with important technical information on German armaments. His reports gave the British, by 1943, the certainty that the Germans were not going to succeed in building an atom bomb.

   Despite the German failure to develop atomic weapons, the "miracle" of the Third Reich's armaments production under Albert Speer remains one of the war's most enduring success stories. Much of this part of the book concerns Speer's transformation of the German war economy to "total war" footing, and the fourth chapter in Part Two pores over the records of the so-called "armaments miracle" from 1942 through 1944 when German production soared to unprecedented levels. The story of how Speer managed all this makes for one of the most interesting parts of the book. However, as the authors point out, some aspects of Speer's success under close examination turn out to be partly myth and propaganda. Here's a revealing excerpt, titled "A Questionable Climax," about the spike in weapons production during the summer of 1944. Note also the last sentence about the "principal contribution to the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition."

   The absolute climax of German armaments output was reached in July 1944. The overall index of finished armaments had risen from 100 in January- February 1942 to 322. After a big leap from February to March 1944, followed by a much smaller monthly increase until June, there was once more a major increase from June to July. Perhaps deliveries of pre-produced war materiel had been accelerated at the beginning of the battle; perhaps output of basic materials and non-vital products had been heavily cut back in favour of finished armaments. August already showed a decline back to the June level. After that the graph, despite a brief recovery in September, steadily declined to the end of the year, down to the level of March 1944.
   Was the German war industry in mid-1944 really 'at the peak of its strength and performance'? Such a positive assessment, propagated by Speer too in his speeches, suggests optimum management and a performance capacity that could have been maintained at this level for quite some time had it not been for the extraneous effects of the war going badly. Speer subsequently estimated that if the bombing raids had ceased in September 1944, the point when the jet fighters were supposed to bring about a turning point in the air war, the performance of the armaments industry might have been sustained until the beginning of 1946.
   Speer did not, however, disclose that with his armaments figures for July 1944 he had performed a daring sleight of hand. He had presented the total output from 1 July to 5 August to the Fuhrer as the result for 'July'; in other words, he had falsified the monthly performance by an additional week. The ordnance office was obliged to use that figure too in its 'survey of the state of armaments' of 1 August 1944. Thus the minister's figure and the Wehrmacht's figure were identical, a manipulation regarded by the reception agencies as 'a one-off measure' in the context of 'German industry's declaration of loyalty to the Fuhrer'. An internal comparison with the preceding months' results shows that manufacturing levels were generally no more than being maintained, even though a number of the most important weapons did record increases, which were further enlarged by Speer's falsifications.
   This was evidently just the final spurt of a marathon runner at the end of his strength, a last upsurge of the German war industry that could only be followed by a decline.
   A glance at the course of the war reveals that at the peak of the armaments output, the Wehrmacht was also suffering its highest losses and, defeated, having to start its retreat in both the west and east. Speer's factories 'nourished' the battle without being able to decide it. There was no way of compensating for the material superiority of the enemy.
   The position in air armaments, on which Speer's and Hitler's hopes were riding, was of particular interest. July 1944 saw the largest monthly output figure for aircraft manufactured in Germany in the Second World War— 4,075 machines. Over the same month, however, a total of 4,243 aircraft were lost, either damaged or totally, 2,083 of them not through enemy action (see Diagram II. IV. 7). Just over half of the aircraft newly delivered by Speer's factories were flown straight into the scrapheap by Goring's Luftwaffe— a result for which inadequate training due to meagre fuel allocations was largely responsible. The psychological stress on pilots at the climax of the air battles over Germany was probably also a major factor.
   The armaments output in July 1944 was nevertheless an astonishing achievement, as was perhaps even more so the only slight decline over the next few months. Work was proceeding then under difficulties unprecedented during the five years of the war, such as none of the other powers had to suffer. The most significant aspect of the performance capacity of the German war economy was its race against the Allied air forces' growing capacity for destruction which, in 1944, made the principal contribution to the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition.

   The third and final part of the book, "Management of Human Resources, Deployments of the Population, and Manning the Armed Forces in the Second Half of the War (1942-1945)," comprises two chapters in about 200 pages. In a book not exactly overflowing with excitement, these in particular are chapters that few readers will want to curl up with in bed, but they measure and analyze in painstaking detail how Germany struggled to gain every last dollop of value from almost every imaginable source of manpower. For agriculture, industry, and the armed forces the authors cover the mobilization of foreign nationals, POWs, convicts, disabled servicemen, women, old men, and young boys and trace the policies by which the Reich organized, prioritized, combed out, reorganized, and re-prioritized manpower throughout the entire economy and the armed forces. Like those covering production, these sections are filled with charts, tables, and diagrams. With titles such as "Loss of Production as a Result of Design Changes," "Increase in Production Resulting from the Employment of Older Workers, Foreign Workers, and More Women," and "The Disempowerment of the Military Control Authorities: Defeat of the War Economy and Armaments Department," the sections in these two chapters are not going to keep anyone awake at night. Nevertheless, Part Three surely stands as the best available English-language treatment of this aspect of Germany's war.
   It's also worth noting that while the unglamorous nature of the subject and the methodical, no-nonsense approach of the authors do not give rise to a scintillating, thrill-a-minute page-turner, the overall level of writing and/or translation seems to have improved since the earlier volumes. In comparison to what we termed the "illiquid" text of volume four in our review several years ago, the sentences flow much better in this volume and the reading is for the most part far easier. (And this seems, thankfully, to have been a conscious decision of the new translation team.)
   Despite this heightened readability and despite the importance of the topic, Organization and Mobilization in the German Sphere of Power cannot be destined to reach anyone's best-seller list, and it won't even—by a lot!—become the most popular volume of the Germany and the Second World War series. Be assured, however, that this book is a rigorous, academic analysis packed with information impossible to find elsewhere in English, and it also forms an integral part of an exceedingly important series of books about Germany's role in the world conflict. We can't recommend it to the casual reader, but it certainly belongs on the shelf of every serious historian of World War II as part of the ultimate autopsy of the German war effort.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Oxford University Press.
   Thanks to OUP for providing this review copy.