Production times for Aircraft in WW2

[Masherbrum]

Gladly, Milch flew out to the Eastern Front and remedied the "logistical snafu" that happened.   He corrected it, came home and they had another and that was the beginning of The End for the 3rd Reich.   

[iTunes]

Very Interesting reading guys, quick question, how did the Allies manage to come up with Axis production nunbers and do you think there was a team of Production experts sitting in an office in the UK working out how much damage was being done to Axis production by each bomb dropped?

[dtango]

...quick question, how did the Allies manage to come up with Axis production nunbers and do you think there was a team of Production experts sitting in an office in the UK working out how much damage was being done to Axis production by each bomb dropped?

Quick answer: yes, more or less.  The USAAF Committee of Operations Analysis (COA),  OSS Economic Objective Unit (EOU), and the British Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) all employed economists who studied various parts of the German war economy.  They were the ones who came up with the target lists.

ULTRA, other signal intelligence, and human intelligence provided info regarding damage assessments.  The backbone of assessments however came from photo interpretation which was conducted through the Allied Central Interpretation Unit (ACIU) in the UK.  Usually 3 levels of photo intelligence was conducted with the 3rd level focusing on the strategic and economic impacts.  It was all educated guesses requiring not only lots of data collected prior to the war but estimates throughout.  Damage to the German aircraft industry was over optimistic while the it was spot on regarding damage to the oil industry.

Tango, XO
412th FS Braunco Mustangs

[Scherf]

Not sure if this will work - taken from a site which presents text, tables and exhibits from the USSBS Aircraft Division report:

Table V-7
Comparison of Allied Intelligence Estimates of German Aircraft Production with Actual Production
(Average monthly figures for six month intervals)
        Single-Engine Fighters      Total Aircraft Production
       Allied Intelligence              Allied Intelligence
               Estimate   Actual       Estimates        Actual
1st half 1941   325    244         1575                880
2nd half 1941   360    232         1725                870
1st half 1942   410    323         1820              1115
2nd half 1942   435    434         1880              1341
1st half 1943   595    753         2030              1985
2nd half 1943   645    851         2115              2172
1st half 1944   655   1581         1870              2811




http://www.ordersofbattle.darkscape.net/site/sturmvogel/airrep.html

[Rich46yo]

So after, "they had another" ,was he sacked? Your answer doesn't "answer" anything.

Gladly, Milch flew out to the Eastern Front and remedied the "logistical snafu" that happened.   He corrected it, came home and they had another and that was the beginning of The End for the 3rd Reich.   

[Masherbrum]

So after, "they had another" ,was he sacked? Your answer doesn't "answer" anything.

Read Milch's book, if you had, then you would know the answer.   Why would he "have been sacked"?   He wasn't.   

[dtango]

As we’ve seen an increase in labor and labor productivity played a factor in the rebound of German fighter production in 1944.  Labor would be a crucial constraint for the Third Reich throughout the war.



The table above is a summary of German labor and armed forces mobilization from the USSBS.  The total civilian labor force was 39 million in 1939, with German males making up 62% of the civilian labor force at 24.4 million.  As the war intensified the Wehrmact continued to mobilize men for the armed forces.  The drain on labor for the war economy was dramatic.  By Sep 1944 German males had dropped to 13.5 million making up only 37% of the total civilian labor for force.

The German war economy was already highly mobilized by 1939.  From the early 1936 onward Germany dramatically ramped up for war.   The Reich’s effort to rearm had stretched the labor pool thin.  By 1938 the Labor Ministry reported an incredible unemployment rate of barely more than 1% of the total workforce.  Of the 292,327 reported only 28,000 were deemed fully fit to work. 

As the armed forces continued to mobilize men for war additional labor was needed to replace the outflow of men from the economy.  Germany had already mobilized women for the workforce.  In 1939 women made up 37% of the workforce.  Comparatively Britain which was known to effectively mobilize women into the labor market during the same time period, women made up 25% of the total British labor pool.  The total amount of women mobilized in the German economy was stable throughout the war. 

Foreign Laborers in the Reich
To make up the increasing deficit of men in the labor force the Reich used foreign workers.  Foreign laborers rose from 301,000 in 1939 to 7.5 million in 1944.  Foreign laborers increased from <1% of the total German labor force to over 20% in just 4 years.  Who were these foreign laborers?  They consisted of voluntary and forced civilian workers from countries under the Reich’s occupation, prisoners of war and concentration camp laborers.  Civilian labor exported from territories under German occupation was supplied by one of the largest coercive labor programs in history under Fritz Saukel and the GBA.  Himmler and the SS provided laborers from concentration camps.

The numbers in USSBS table above for foreign laborers only represents the stock of laborers recorded available.  It is only an accounting of inventory at a point in time.  They don’t give an indication of the total number of foreign laborers mobilized and supplied to the German war economy.  Recent studies shed light on this.  The numbers mobilized are staggering.
   



The total foreign-labor force mobilized over 4 years is estimated to be 13.5 million made up of civilian laborers, POWs and concentration camp inmates.  Of that total the German war economy consumed the lives of 2.5 million people, many of these literally worked to death producing aircraft and armaments for the Reich.  Concentration camp laborers suffered the highest attrition of all foreign laborers with a survival rate of only 31%.  The numbers are brutal but they also ignore a gap in the statistics for those unaccounted for between people exported from Eastern territories and those registered for work in Germany with rough estimates in the hundreds of thousands not accounted for.

[dtango]

Aircraft Industry Use of Foreign Labor
According to the Wagenfuehr index, the aircraft industry made up the largest proportion of armaments production throughout the war averaging 42% of total armaments output.  It is no surprise therefore that a study of the German aircraft industry reflects this increased reliance on foreign laborers to produce aircraft.

A glance at the USSBS statistics shows that in Oct 1944 foreign laborers, POW’s and concentration camp inmates made up on average 48% of the total manpower for aircraft factories.  The following table below highlights an example of the rate and run-up of all categories of foreign laborers at the Heinkel-Oranienburg facility which illustrates the increasing demand in the aircraft industry for foreign laborers.


 

“In the plants of the Reichswerke Hermann Goering and the Luftwaffe, the foreign share routinely exceeded 40 per cent.  On individual production lines the percentage could be even higher.  As State Secretary Milch boasted in June 1943, the Stuka Ju 87 was being ’80 per cent manufactured by Russians’.” (Tooze).  A large portion of those laborers were also concentration camp inmates.  Himmler opened up the camps to contract with businesses in 1942 in response to the growing manpower shortage.  The Hienkel Oranienburg factory was one of the first to tap this labor pool followed by others in the aircraft industry.   “Up to the end of 1943, the aircraft industry was certainly the chief industrial employer of inmate labour, with Heinkel, Messerschmitt, and BWM leading the way.” (Tooze)   In 1943 the RLM obtained 317,000 foreign civilian laborers from Saukel for the aircraft industry.  In addition to that the RLM claimed 100,000 concentration camp inmates supplied by the SS in 1943 and 1944.  As we’ve seen earlier, the increase of labor manpower was one of the factors for the dramatic jump in single fighter production in 1944.  At this point there should be no doubt where the increase of laborers came from.

[dtango]

Plight of the Foreign Laborers: Civilian Laborers
The sheer numbers alone are amazing but they only begin to hint at some of the brutality and horror faced by these foreign laborers.  The survival rates start to give us some indication.  The civilian labor survival rate estimated at 94% masks some of the horror experienced.  Most of these laborers came from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Poland.  The civilian Ostarbeiter suffered mass attrition before it stabilized later in the war.  The influx of millions of civilian laborers overwhelmed the system.  Thousands of them were arriving daily in major industrial centers and it was impossible to organize adequate housing and rations for them.  Conditions were terrible in the Ostarbeiter camps. 

Food was already in short supply in the Reich and it only got increasingly worse as the war intensified.  Performance rationing of food was instituted which Speer eventually adopted as a best practice.  The Ostarbeiter were grouped into three categories: 1) those achieving average performance would receive the ‘normal’ food ration, 2) those underperforming would receive less, 3) those achieving above average performance would get the deductions from those under performing plus their allowance.  This resulted in a death spiral for those underperforming.  Rations for foreign laborers were cut as food became more scarce.  The Ostarbeiter were being slowly starved while they sat fenced behind barbed wire.  As a result tens of thousands of half-fed Ostarbeiter had to be shipped back under horrific conditions.  One account describes the conditions during transport: “There were dead passengers on the returning train.  Women on the train gave birth to children that were tossed from the open window during the journey, while people sick with tuberculosis and venereal disease rode in the same coach.  The dying lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was…thrown onto the embankment”. 

It was under these conditions that nearly half a million civilian laborers died.  Only the expanded employment of the Hunger Plan brought stability to the situation.  Of course this was at the expense of literally starving to death millions of Jews and other peoples in the eastern occupied territories as the food supply was drastically altered and millions were cut off from food allocation now redirected into Germany.  Even at its best after the expansion of the Hunger Plan the mortality rate of the Ostarbeiter was still twice as high as normal Germans and a third higher than their counterparts in occupied territories.

The Suffering of POWs and Concentration Camp Inmates
The civilian laborers’ suffering pales in comparison with the suffering of the prisoners of war and concentration camp laborers.  2 million prisoners of war and concentration camp laborers died while building aircraft and armaments for the Reich.  30% of the prisoners of war employed died while a staggering 69% of concentration camp laborers perished working for the German war economy.  The attrition of POW’s resulted mainly from the starvation and brutal treatment of prisoners from conquered territories in the East.

The concentration camp attrition resulted from the fusion of the Nazi ideology and twisted pragmatism.  By 1942 the destruction of the Jews was violently underway.  The SS was not blind to economic potentials as they exterminated the Jewish population.  The practice of ‘Selektion’ which proceeded the massacres separated those deemed able to work from those unable meaning that the first to be killed were women, children, and old people.  From there onward the Jewish population would continue to be progressively reduced to an ‘indispensable core’.  Because of the shortage of laborers the minority of Jews and other unfortunates in concentration camps who survived ‘Selektion’, instead of being gassed they would be simply worked to death in the practice of ‘destruction through labor’ (Vernichtung durch Arbeit).  Following this prescription “In all concentration camps, productive labour was coupled with a regime of ill-treatment, overwork, and starvation that resulted in mass death (Tooze).”

[dtango]

Human Tragedy Beyond the Numbers
A few examples specific to the aircraft industry will bring some meaning to these numbers and methods. 

Germany became ever more desperate to produce key arms as the war progressed.  The Speer’s V2 rocket program and the Milch’s Me-262 jet fighter program needed to be brought into mass production.  In the aftermath of the Peenemuende raid in August 1943 Speer asked the V2 program be moved underground. Mass production of the Me-262 was being prepared at the same time and both the V2 and Me-262 production lines were brought into the infamous underground Mittelbau facility under the savage direction of General Hans Kammler.  The Buchenwald and the spin-off Dora concentration camps supplied the labor for Kammler’s tunnels.  Quoting Adam Tooze:

In a construction effort that combined ruthless brutality and speed, Hans Kammler got the Mittelbau tunnel complex into production by the end of the year [1943].  To honour this remarkable feat, Speer and his staff visited the site on 10 December.  What they saw left a deep impression.  In the dock at Nuremberg, Speer denied ever having seen the true conditions in a concentration camp.  But in his memoirs he no longer hid the horror that he witnessed at the Mittelbau.  To meet the timetable set by Speer’s Armaments Ministry, Kammler had sacrificed the lives of his inmate workforce.  No time had been wasted building housing.  The labourers slept on site, inside the tunnels, seeing daylight at most once a week, deprived access to clean water and sanitation.  They died in their thousands.  To encourage those still alive, Kammler strung recalcitrants from the rafters.  Speer and his staff saw a factory littered with corpses…it did not dent Speer’s commitment to his alliance with Himmler and his admiration for the slave-driver in chief.  A week after his inspection of Dora, Speer wrote to Kammler congratulating him effusively on his remarkable feat, ‘in transforming the underground installation on Niedersachsenwerfen (Mittelbau) from it’s raw condition two months ago into a factory, which has no equal in Europe and which is unsurpassed even when measured against American Standards.’

Not only did the Me-262 come into mass production at the expense of slave laborers, but the Fw-190’s and Bf-109’s jump in production in 1944 was a result of this malevolent system at work.  Tens of thousands of concentration camp laborers were worked to death building Bf-109’s for the Messerschmitt Regensburg factory supplied by Flossenbuerg and Mauthausen concentration camps.  As mentioned previously the Jagerstab was formed in early 1944 to further increase fighter production.  In response Himmler quickly informed Milch that he planned to increase the Luftwaffe’s employment of concentration camp laborers from 36,000 to 90,000.  Germany militarily occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944 and thus the Hungarian Jewish populous was sucked into the maelstrom of massacre to supply fighter production.  Hungarians Jews were supplied at a rate of 12,000 – 14,000 a day in mid-May.  Two-thirds would be immediately murdered under the process of ‘Selektion’ leaving a third to be fed to the aircraft industry.  At the start of the deportation the Arms Ministry minutes notes their consternation with the first deliveries of Hungarian Jews.  They had been only been offered ‘children, women, and old men with whom very little can be done’.  The able-bodied had been kept by the Werhmacht in Hungary to initially to dig tank-traps against the Russians.  At this stage no one should have any doubt what happened to these Jews in the first deliveries.  A month later the deliveries improved.  Of the estimated 509,000 Hungarian Jews deported only 120,000 survived the war. 


Summary
In summary the “miracle” in single fighter production in 1944 was a combination of factors:

• Rationalization of the aircraft industry and pre-planning for increased production by Milch and the RLM
• Dispersion of manufacturing plants to reduce destruction from Allied bombing
• Re-allocation of raw materials and labor to focus on the aircraft industry
• Increase in productivity and labor for the aircraft industry

It is in this last category of labor manpower that we come face to face with the horrors behind the “miracle” in German fighter production.  We marvel at the technical achievements in aircraft such as the Me-262’s delivered in mid 1944 or the Fw 190D-9’s and Bf 109K-4’s delivered in the Fall of 1944.  Let us be sobered by the fact that hundreds of thousands were worked to death producing them and countless millions died in the deadly tempest that surrounded Germany’s foreign labor mobilization.

Tango, XO
412th FS Braunco Mustangs

[iTunes]

Have to say Tango, that was very Interesting and also very sobering too.
Great posts and very very Infornative. I just wonder why the Aircrat Industry got all the support? Wonder why the Tank or Submarine Industries never got priority?

[MiloMorai]

Not sure how accurate but tank production certainly increased.
http://www.battle-fleet.com/pw/his/Tank_Production_Germany_ww2.htm

[Angus]

The Atlantic wall was also mostly built with slave labour.
This was all the nazi way to counter damege from the field and from the bombings. After all, they had subjects that counted hundreds of millions (occupied nations etc),so....The Nazi way. Prolonging the fact that they had lost.