ABSTRACT
In 1938, the last full year of peace, the total oil consumption of what is Adolf Hitler's Europe amounted to between 200 and 210 million barrels. Of all the liabilities that Hitler acquired when he swallowed Europe at a gulp, by far the most serious was the problem of oil. The European campaign for self-sufficiency was therefore forced to depend mainly on a four-point program of starvation, storage, substitutes, and synthesis. Starvation meant the elimination of all nonessential consumption of oil. What Hitler meant in 1938 was that Germany's reserves and Germany's expanding synthetic and crude production would be sufficient for the blitzkrieg that his generals were then planning. By the end of 1940 Germany had thus reduced oil consumption in Europe to the irreducible, yet was left with the prospect of something like a 15-million-barrel shortage in 1941.
