ABSTRACT
If judged by the success of its military campaigns in the first years of the war, the productive capacity of the Third Reich was quite adequate. With only limited centralized direction of labour and resources by the state, the slowly expanding output of steel, coal, synthetic oil, and other industrial essentials was sufficient to sustain — but not significantly augment — the material needs of the armed forces. German aircraft production, for example, was only 13 per cent greater in 1941 than it had been in 1940, while production of automatic weapons actually fell over the same period.
