The Paradox of Germany’s WW2 COAL Problem
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- čas přidán 23. 05. 2021
- Despite the fact that Germany had an abundance of coal, they suffered shortages of coal in 1939 and 1941. How? What caused this shortage? Was it the coal thief - the Kohlenklau? Well, this video will explain what happened, and also look into other resources like iron, steel, copper, wood, and entities like the Reichsbahn.
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ABOUT TIK 📝
History isn’t as boring as some people think, and my goal is to get people talking about it. I also want to dispel the myths and distortions that ruin our perception of the past by asking a simple question - “But is this really the case?”. I have a 2:1 Degree in History and a passion for early 20th Century conflicts (mainly WW2). I’m therefore approaching this like I would an academic essay. Lots of sources, quotes, references and so on. Only the truth will do.
This video is discussing events or concepts that are academic, educational and historical in nature. This video is for informational purposes and was created so we may better understand the past and learn from the mistakes others have made.
TLDR: the Kohlenklau was running around stealing all the coal and turning it into butter
Able to find pic of romanian generals and found all regimental commanders for 76,94,295 and 389 ID.
docs.google.com/document/d/1Q89EcL_11z4KxMdWaaj-5ugRnJ9QstMOIXxlg30e4m8/edit
"You have not enough Coal."
"You must construct additional Coal Carts."
"Additional Coal Mines required."
"Spawn more Coal Miners."
And can you make out the economy of the USSR during the war years from the same side, why the Soviet industry was able to withstand the war years, although, unlike the German war, it was on the Soviet territory with the loss of factories / coal deposits / with logistical problems?
@UCbyXuXoXxfIdUT0Ojndntyg basically yhe same story as IGIL
@@kagtavieponi9722 they shot most of railway managers until only competent ones left
Spaniard here. My Mother who had lived through the Civil War and postwar periods and had had her fair share of ersatz products, always went mad at the sight of margarine. She would say: that rubbish is made from coal!......I always wondered where that idea came from........now I see she was right. No Wonder. She always was :)
Margarine was also made from fish oil. Doesn't really make it any better.
David Garcia Garrido . That is a Great memory to have from your Mother ! Ha ha She was on to Something .
Ah yes Marge'. The french came up with that disgusting muck; which in some US states legally has to be other colours than yellow, such as red.
(to make it clear that it isn't nor is pretending to be Butter)
@@jimtaylor294 Isn’t it butter for people too scared to eat animal products?
@@Predator20357 Not really, it often has dairy added to it so that it has some semblence of flavour.
"Mom, there is butter in my coal!" - German children, probably
He got coal in my butter!
czcams.com/video/O7oD_oX-Gio/video.html
Mmmm, not bad!
Soviet troops would eat soap if they found it. They knew the value of food.
coal = butter and gasoline. we could make butter using gasoline??? i guess if you keep "adding" chemicals anything can be anything ???
@@tijotypo5252 true. Explains why most food is more chemicals than food these days.
@@theeternalsuperstar3773 Food is already composed of chemicals. So, I fail to see your point.
Sooo... they needed more wagons, but more wagons congested the traffic therefore they should have doubled or tripled the railways. But railways need steel so they should first allocate everything for steel. In order to make steel you need coal and without wagons there's no coal and no steel...
the irony is that had Hitler and co prioritised the railways more for efficiency, they'd have completed a lot more of their production goals in general, which would have a knock on effect on the armaments industry
To make machinparts factory you need machineparts
I have no machineparts
@@BoredLoserAlpha You have hands and a brain, I presume.
More, they needed to raise rates/pricing for customers, which would lower their usage of the trains and increase income for the railways and that'd also free up space for the coal.
Ah, therein lies the paradox!!!!
Who would’ve ever thought that someone (TIK) could make the coal shortage issue in Germany during World War II - a fascinating topic? Well you did! Thank you!👍👍👍
Energy wins wars and is a precursor for human happiness.
The Axis powers really were hurt when American fuel wasn't available
Great job! Thanks :D
There is joke in Poland: When You implement socialism in a desert, soon there will be shortage of sand.
They've lived it.
It It is from Churchill
There are only a few things that comunism had a positive efect on in Poland. The nationalisation of forests (all belong to the state, National Parks most of all) means that everyone can go into the forest and pick wild berries and mushrooms (as long as you don't make out of there with a truck load/ a few buckets of mushrooms are fine for drying and preserves). Meat products like ham, smoked and or dryed sausages etc. Development of personal ingenuity (figure it out so it works somehow) due to shortages and idiot comunists higher ups.
@@cx24venezuela Friedman.
It was in the GDR also used.
It also has to be said that the german coal wasn't the highest quality coal.
Also a reason why in WW1 the german ships rarely reached their trial speed since the best coal got used for the trials but not during deployment.
lignite, the lowest grade, below Bituminous, which in turn is below anthracite. Hitler told Manstein that he must defend the Donets basin for coal. later Manstein found out that German locomotive could not burn the anthracite from Ukrainian sources.
which no doubt you learned by watching Dracs videos :D
This was the norm for all Navies.
@@bikes02 yup^^
@@novat9731 nope the british had welsh coal which was / is one of the best coals you can have leading their ships to be pretty close if not better than their trial speeds
Fascists: At least we made the trains run on time.
Traveller: This train is not on time, it is 24 hours late.
@Wulf Mussolini only made one train run on time - the one that took him to ... um,... Milan? Or was it from Milan to Rome?
@Wulf Italian trains keeping to schedule started during the first world war due to the demands of total war, not during Mussolini's rule afterwards. Check it out.
thats a good one, lol . it was on time but not on date..... just canceled today's train so you'll be in advance on the tomorrows one... ;)
@@KarakNornClansman El Duce's claim to fame was simply relaxing the railroad schedules. He actually went the other-way than the Nazis. This made sense as the Italian economy simply didn't need the frantic tempo of WWI, a time when most travel was by box-car. Even the Italians used a variation on the 8 & 40 car.
Who care about date? Time is important! So, just in time! Even if it is two days later. :) :) :)
TIK you might have been describing the New Zealand Railways. In the late 70’s the government imposed a price freeze on freight charges. After three years the system was choked with loaded wagons. Operating costs were skyrocketing and deferred maintenance and loss of customer confidence led to a situation from which the railway has never recovered. I’m a retired railwayman. Thank you for your amazing work.🇳🇿👍
How did the railway privatisation work in Britain? Capitalism fails.
I have been listening to Silent Hill music for a while other stream & nothing seems incongruent reading comments
Hey TIK, just wanted so say this to you:
Seriously appreciate the HIGH QUALITY Content from the endless of hours spending to read those books, edit those videos and constant citation of the sources.
Yes, the average CZcams consumer is not eager to consume a 28 minute long video, but hey, just amazing that you constantly keep uploading these interesting videos
Greetings from 🇩🇪
That was a half hour long video? Seemed shorter
Considering who that is from, and his historical significance to the timeline and video, this is probably the best comment Tik has ever received...
Crap. A half hour? To me, always way tooooo short.
I like these short ones too.
occasionally breaking up the longer lectures.
Totally agree, love these videos.
Glad to see Mierzejewski getting some recognition. Years ago I attended his classes ranging from the war economy and logistics, to the postwar Erhard era economy. His office was adjacent to the often cited Citino.
I didn't realize they knew each other! Both good historians, although Mierzejewski hasn't got as many books on the market I don't think, which may explain the issue
Ya, hopefully as appreciation grows for the less-sexy topics like infrastructure and logistics there will be more books like this one! Citino's classes are also proportionally larger, because everyone wants to hear about BEWEGUNGSKRIEG! *gestures excitedly like Citino* instead of the logistics necessary to do it, haha.
@@stug41 it is logistics and infrastructure that is key.
I even pointed this out to HM government in a report on yet another fuel tax.
I postulated that the Saudis wouldn't like it, and was proved right as the economy started to grind to a halt.
OPEC opened the taps..
I sometimes wonder if politicians actually know anything about history.
or economics..
Every German Landser (Soldier) had a "spreads" container to put on their bread ration The "spreads" consisted of ersatz (replacement) Butter was replaced by a margarine - troops complained of a heavy petroleum taste An artificial "honey" , a glucose syrup made from wood pulp was also issued
That fake honey was still probably healthier than margarine
I live in a small German town at the gates of Munich. There is a "Spezialbrennstoff Raffinerie" around which was responsible to convert coal into pretty much ANYTHING. Petrol, Lubricants, Fertiliser, you name it.
The strangest thing was "Petrol-Schnapps". In 1946 there were two waggons of highly pure petroleum
left from the war, which was made from coal. Using it for fuel was considered a waste of this expensive liquid. So a food chemist sat down and made a pretty good Schnapps out of it. For Christmas 1946 every household in our town got one bottle of "Petroleum Schnapps". The food chemist later became pretty successful and famous by also inventing "Fanta" and then changing the formula for Cola (either Coca or Pepsi Cola, can't remember) and later creating a German branded Cola for like 20% of the price which is still produced today.
My Grandpa worked there when they produced the Petroleum Schnapps. The factory back then was just being handed over from the US military to Texaco. It was hilarious how much security they had around that rather small refinery: Inside the compound worked German civilian workers under the supervision of an US officer. Then they had a big fence which was patrolled by US soldiers. Then came another big fence which was patrolled by German security and that is where my Grandpa worked.
He still laughed his ass off when they got a new US officer and the officer demanded to remove the pictures of women from the outside of the lockers. He said they can put them inside but not outside the lockers. My Grandpa and his buddies did as told and under every picture there was an swastika ironed into the wood of the locker. The officer quickly gave permission to put the pictures back on the lockers. When they finally removed all the lockers my grandpa got one for our sheet. It still has the same picture of a woman from some 1946 magazine over the swastika.
Holy hell Mars mass . . the crooked cross synchrotron
Thanks for sharing that story
Göring used up all of it to power his miniature train collection.
That is very german
"We have no butter…but I ask you-would you rather have butter or guns?…preparedness makes us powerful. Butter merely makes us fat." -- Herman Goering (1936)
"I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!"
... cuz its not butter.
You’ve heard of chunky peanut butter? How about chinky butter butter?
100% less cholesterol, 100% more black lung.
Old man in a can probable was old man in a can soylent green ww2 Germany
They had the best drugs though . . from A to Z
7:00
The bottom line is: The German tradition of killing grand-scale projects by perfectionism and bureaucracy (BER... *coughcough* Stuttgart 21... *coughcough* Elbphilharmonie) goes back to the mid-20th century.
It's EXTREMELY good that you cite your references, that's professionalism in the handling of information. Thank you for your great productions!
Great content Lewis! No suggestions here, keep doing what you’re doing. We all love it
Thank you, glad to hear you're enjoying the videos!
@@TheImperatorKnight Most of us here aren't looking for some sorry excuse to fly at your throat and possibly eat the consequences later. Thanks for uploading, bye for now.
**Peter Grifin voice** *hey lois*
@@TheImperatorKnight that's why we subscribe, old bean.
@@TheImperatorKnight would be higher quality if you focused less on monologues and showing ya face talking and focused way more on the vid part of your vids i.e. more on presenting material, stills, vids, graphs, data, literally anything as you're narrating
The principle reason for the shortage of coal within German was AH's implementation of his version of Großraum. Once France, Belgium and the Netherlands were occupied and were meant to now supply Germany with goods, they had to be supplied with raw materials. Half of France's coal came from the UK and nearly all of Belgium and the Netherlands did, which was now cut-off. Much of the increase in German coal production was exported to those three countries. Add in the increase in coal use for synthetic fuel and Germany very quickly had a coal shortage problem. Read Karl Haushofer to understand Großraum.
And there wasnt really an alternative. He picked the best play at the time, which was still not an optimal solution. The only real avoidance of this, or any other economic reality for the Germans, was to not start the war in the first place. Tik's pointed out before that the shrinking markets idea is a fallacy, it wasnt going to happen. Once the war is started to avoid this problem that wasnt going to happen, it placed them in a spot where even the best decisions they could have made, still were bad decisions that led to shortages on top of shortages caused by their situation of being cut off from global trade.
Its a compounding problem with no way out.
I think its easy to say "This is ____'s fault!", but much more accurate to realize they put themselves in this situation and were being pragmatic to the best of their ability. There wasnt a better, more optimal strategy once they were in the war. It becomes necessity rather than ideological. There are mistakes made, but its not like "Welp, if only AH did ____ instead, this wouldnt have happened". They're pretty much doomed the moment they cross the Polish border.
This is a pretty good example here, because, what other solution is there? Dont ship coal to these places, then put another million men on police duty as they turn to rioting and looting? You started a war without enough industrial production to win it. If you dont get MS and Dewotine and Renault up and running, you've already lost as well.
More coal for Germans doesnt equate to more Panzer IIIs, but more coal to France means more D-520s and S-35s, which you desperately need against the guy who has 11,000 planes in his airforce and about as many tanks to your east, that you're inevitably going to go to war with one way or the other.
Then you have the fact that many people in occupied countries sandbagged, or just straight quit their jobs in transpo and logistics, or were killed, or fled, or were replaced with sycophants, plus the reality of air raids, which of course had people fleeing on rail networks and recovery operations required railing of tons of food and construction equipment, partisan attacks...shit could just blow up at any time....you had to figure out where all of some French companies trains even were, what their logistics network was before you invaded...its a nightmare.
no mention of France's locomotives and wagons....
Your explanation makes far more sense than . This all had to do with Hitler had too BIG an ambition and didn't have the infrastructure to support his ambition. Therefore, this pushed German infrastructure to the limit, and something had to give. In this case, that "something" was the transportation system. I don't think a "free market" would be able to help him.
@@tomogburn2462 Not starting the war also wasn't an option (for the Nazis and Hitler). Germany was bankrupt and the only other alternative was to explain to the Germans that they're bankrupt and to resign.
@@robertboemke8705 Yup. Whole thing was doomed from the start. You had a bunch of guys with almost no practical experience, but a whole host of thoughts and prayers. Theres tons of examples of the older Prussian elite in the military, pointing out how the Nazis are doomed, so lets hang out with these dudes as a way to get back into power.
Im sure it makes for awesome clickbait to cast these events as somehow dramatically outside of what is reasonable or pragmatic to any of these groups or governments or movements, but the reality is, theres almost always a pragmatic reason for why they did what they did. They werent nuts. They were just wrong.
That said, had they resigned and let MEFO go to pot, they'd probably have been fine. American business was right there, waiting to break into that market. They'd have gotten all the social welfare and industrial reforms, without all the bloodshed *shrug* but clearly that was never going to happen.
Now that you have more and more of these informational videos out, I am developing a much clearer picture of what was really going on in the war, and popping a few of those German stereotypes. I now find discussing the war with my Dad more and more frustrating, as he idolises German engineering and efficiency, and perpetuates myths about the Soviet hordes. He would prefer it if I were to "stick to tanks" too.
Yeah a lot of people get hung up on the toys. I heard a quote somewhere saying that highly professional armies of the world are first concerned with logistics and others are concerned with tactics. I tend to agree with this and find it more relevant the older I get. If you cannot get the supplies you need from point A to point B then who cares how good your tanks are.
Concerning the shortages of raw materials and more specifically wood. There is not only the problem of building new infrastructure, but this is aggravated by the need to replace existing infrastructure like rail lines, buildings, bridges destroyed by bombing.
I appreciate the amount of effort you put into your videos
In WW2 my grandfather hid escaped Russian PoW's from the Germans on his farm in Limburg, Belgium. They escaped from the coalmines where they were forced to work , I guess the not so great distance to the Ruhr made our coal very wanted by "de Pruus"...
@typo pit give me a moment, trying to re-arrange your letters to form coherent sentences... ah, yes the Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, go cry me a f***in river, the Germans occupied, murdered and pillaged Belgium for 4 years, quickly signed an armistice and peace to keep the victors of WW1 from their own territory (scared that other people would behave like they did) and agreed to pay repair bills... When Germany failed to keep up their part of the deal the occupation took place and they, the Germans, decided to just stop delving up coal, strike and just print more money... resulting in inflation. Which they concluded was of course, again, not their own fault, heavens no. So, to keep it short, the actual reason of Hitler's rise and his murder spree in WW2: The german attack on Belgium in 1914 to ambush France. Try and blame us, yeah, you must be fun at Neo-nazi parties. Also that Nigel Farage guy and his rant? The dude is a certified liar and mentor of people who can't even try to think for themselves. Who cares what he says, only rightwing idiots. Van Rompuy did act as someone with dignity should act, ignore the bugger. Did we care? No. Will we care? No. It's like the loudest kid in kindergarten, shouting in a corner against the wall.
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/seb-dance/nigel-farage-seb-dance_b_14591852.html
Wow. So it seems like Germany invested into the military, diverting funds from infrastructure. Which in turn, the infrastructure couldn't support the expanded military because the infrastructure itself hadn't kept up with its own expansion because of lack of funds, leading to the downfall of the military (though sped up by other poor decisions compiling the problem further).
It wouldn't have happened with a free market. Prices would have forced a better allocation of resources
@@juliantheapostate8295 truth.
Rail funding was deliberately diverted to autobahn construction in the early 1930s by the Nazis. This policy was strongly opposed by the Reichsbahn at the time. It was a deliberate policy to change the emphasis in investment in transport infrastructure with the aim of improving efficiency and flexibility. Unless you have private companies building toll roads it's difficult to see how a a pricing mechanism could realistically achieve these kinds of strategic infrastructure reforms. It's not the way it's usually done.
Good thing America isn't doing this. /s
NO IT'S ALL LEFTISTS FAULT. FREE MARKET FIXES EVERYTHING ALWAYS WTF IS THIS HERESY?!?!
The whole coal nicking thing reminded me of a documentary of the black market in France 44-45 where almost 2 divisions worth of AWOL GI's where stealing and even raiding supplies. You may find that one interesting to look into;)
I love how the worst and best books on the German railway have been written by Poles
A bit like how some of the best (for the money) and very worst (period) scale model kits on the market are sold by polish company Mistercraft.
Yes, such diversity. It is simply the market at work.
@typo pit What.
@typo pit An artificial state? Pick up a history book before talking. Poland's existence dates back to 1025 AD....
So the Germans got there first with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter?
I was 11min to slow. XD
@@juanduenas1943 Cheers
Margarine was invented by the French. Somehow the Germans figured out how to hydrogenated coal tar🤷♀️
@@IvorMektin1701 The French probably knew how to make coal butter too, but only Germans could stomach it.....
@@Raskolnikov70
Lol
I was aware of massive "shortages" during WWII but coal in Germany ???? ! Very interesting video as usual !
Wow, these guys made oil, butter, soap out of coal. I wouldn’t be surprised if I hear about a coal sauerkraut at this point
You won't because it's not a fat and the other three are
There was a song about this: Fuel if you think it's over, it's just begun.
Well played good sir!
There were many songs - "Fuel on the Hill", "These Fuel-ish Things", ...
Have you ever seen the movie _The Train?_ Nothing to do with coal, but a great WW2 movie with Burt Lancaster about the end days of Germany in Paris.
Watch it every couple of months. Great movie. Take care
My late father, a POW, worked in a Polish coal mine. Closed before the was as it was no longer economically violable as the large deposits had high quality coal had been exhausted. With the free unpaid labor, the infrastructure still in place and German desperation for coal it could be reopened. The mine was not far from a synthetic oil plant.
So, steampunk Germany could have won WWII?
Yes steampunk hahahaha.
Some officer "Sir if we do steampunk we win!"
Furor: "Well alright then! Dieselpunk it is!"
*Sad Barbarossa noises*
The irony is that the 1914 German economy was probably better positioned to fight ww2 than the 1939 economy.
@@AliasAlias-nm9df
Honestly I've heard quite a few good arguments in favor of Kaiser Wilhelm 2 continuing the war. He didn't have much chance of winning... but he may have been able to get some better terms of surrender had he not launched that last offensive and attempted to continue the stagnation on the western from (which wasn't nearly as stagnant as people believe).
@@spiffygonzales5160 The problem is that the German public was starving. The numbers i have seen were between 500,000 and 800,000 by the end of 1918. Internal strikes and revolution coincided with millitary disaster in the field. Germany was not going to make it to 1919. Furthermore the Entente didn't need to negotiate because they knew that with American forces landing in Europe total victory was immenent. Frankly Germany should have negotiated after the russian revolution when it looked like they may win.
Overall situation in Germany sounds as if you were reading about Soviet problems. Interesting coincidence?
Different flavors of the same failed economic system.
it is not a coincidence it is the same problen.
The difference is, that the Russians got over it by now.
@@tatin82 Is an economic system that wins a world war with half of its industrial base under occupation, competing with the United States in industrial production and RGO output, really a failure tho?
Gonna have to explain that one to me.
@@tomogburn2462 Still failed.
I just randomly stumbled on this video and the whole channel is absolute GOLD!, love the content, instant sub
TIK - This is some seriously good scholarship. Well done! I read about the rolling stock issue in Adam Tooze's book The Wages of Destruction, but you put the last piece together for me with the four year plan and central planning with the lowering of prices for transport leading to increased wear and tear on the Reichsbahn rolling stock. Well done sir! Keep up the great work!
Comment 2: nationalization alone is not allways the problem. Example from my own Sweden and our railways/roads: the maintenance was mainly nationalized right thru the end of the 80's. It worked. Kind of. There were problems, such as lack of cost controll. So in the 90's, the whole thing went private. And it is an ongoing joke. The railways are ridicously worn out. The traffic has gone up, but none to little efforts have been done to accomodate that. And maintenance are made after the principle "whoever offers to do it to the lowest price get the job - who cares about quality?" The roads are no better: in 2008, it was stated that it would not matter how much mkney was thrown on the roads, they were in such a state that it could not be fixed anytime soon - there were simply not enough skilled labour and machines in the country for that.
My point: whatever a country does - the main thing is to take care and put the effort in to do it well. Because both nationalization and privatization can go horribly wrong.
Japan is a case in point of how nationalization (JNR) didn't work; but privatization (JR) did and does.
Agree though on how well privatization is done being key.
The be honest, the privatization of the Swedish Railways seems to be an awful mess. The state apparently still owns the railway lines which alone explains why the privatization of their maintenance led to a worsening of the situation (the state is incentivized to go for the cheapest options or the ones that grease their leg, which happens a lot in France as well whenever the state get private enterprises to do stuff for them, they just get swindled). State institutions are absolute crap when it comes to contracting private enterprises.
Not only that but there seem to be also lots of publicly owned regional and national trains.
From what I can see, the issue with the privatization of their railway system is simply that it's not complete, you guys seem to be only halfway there and thus ended up with the worst of both worlds.
@@Knoloaify yupp. Hence my point that whatever a country does on a grand scale, it needs to be well thought out and followed thru.
@@Knoloaify Aye. It was the seemingly promising early days of said efforts in Sweden which got the EEC/EU "encouraging" everyone else in the bloc to do the same; John Major's government in the UK at the time was the first to respond (by psuedo-privatizing BR in the early '90's), which has had basically the same Worst of Both result.
And to think he's mostly only remembered here for calling his own MP's "bastards" for objecting to the Maastrict treaty XD.
Generally, a private monopoly is worse than a state monopoly and various types of infrastructure are natural monopolies (it doesn't make sense to build a parallel highway, rail line, or train station, it would not eliminate the risk of oligopoly either). A hybrid system makes sense: private and municipal carriers utilizing state tracks, stations, and arbitrage. Another aspect is related to social network effects - this is one area where the market often fails: at times (since companies pay intention to their direct profit, not holistic balance) it is reasonable to subsidize loss-making infrastructure, so bigger savings can be achieved elsewhere: for instance when costs of subsidies to maintain rail links is lower than the cost of extra wear and tear on roads/environment - the free market would not work, for a rail company does not care about roads since it doesn't own them.
So epic, I live in Duisburg and as you put old maps of Duisburg as your background, I even saw my house.
Apparently I mispronounced Duisburg though, so sorry about that!
Ich habe mich auch ganz kurz ganz groß gefühlt. TIK sagt Duisburg ❤️
@@TheImperatorKnight that's fine
Bro actually, that's awesome!
WOW!!! Amazing episode. Thank you so much. I’d venture to say that it was even the best I’ve see so far. I’ll make sure to get my paws on that book you recommend
Awesome work and quality production and great citing of sources- thanks!
[Desire to eat coal intensifies]
good comment, good cat, 11/10
cool cat, man
Well it beats eating turnips.
Hello. I just wanted to mention that in addition to your exelent imformation and argument your video quality is also constantly and considerably improving, great work on that. Thank you very much!
Interesting comment about the paper shortage. I've read of Germany encountering the same problem in the first world war, with generals and their staff having to scribble in the margins of orders
As a Pole 1st thought Ober Schlesien = Górny Śląsk region = lots of mines, population with strong miners' tradition and tons of coal. I remember as a kid in 1970 ties and 80 ties in whole Poland even at the shore we prepared in classes black miners' hats (from carton painted by us) for the 4th December "Barbórka" Saint Barbara (Patronne of miner's) Fête
You can pretty much pinpoint where the coal mines are by looking at the regions industrialising early. First in England, in the midlands, then southern Belgium and northern France and in Germany Ruhr and, as you said, Oberschesien. (You see the same pattern in USA too, by the way.) The heavy industry almost always located near the coal mines, or possibly to where coal could be easily shipped (by boat as others means of transport would be too expensive). Iron ore was easier/less expensive to transport than coal.
One thing to note: the German coal was low grade. In the book about the cruiser SMS Emden, the author, actually the ship's second in command, mentions the crew taking all the coal (fine Welsh coal) from conquered enemy ships before sinking them rather than using the Schlesian coal loaded on Emden's supply ship. He explicitly claims the reason to be the difference in quality, though the book was published in 1915 and clearly was a part of the war propaganda.
one of the things you have to realize is that the German coal was of extremely low quality even the hard coal had a much lower quality compared to the high quality coal found in South Wales or Pittsburgh when it comes to use in Steam turbines like those used for generating electricity, this had a major impact in both wars in WW1 this can be shown as once the High Seas Fleet ran out of the high quality coal they imported from the UK prior to the war none of their vessels were able to get to their design speed usually being 2-3 knots slower and having to spend much more time in maintenance due to the damage the poor quality coal had on the machinery. While in WW2 this had a major impact in the amount of electricity produced by their power-stations.
Ummm...
Germany had majority of lignite so the 65 to 70 and Anthracite the 86 to 92 which is high grade...
The UK majority is Bituminous at 76 to 86...
To give you an understanding Germany still has more Anthracite then the UK has total coal.... In ww2 Germany mined more coal of both types then the UK total...
So your statement is not 100% correct, as for Pittsburgh it is a massive amount mined, but for south Wales over all the Germany had better quality coal then the UK in ww2.
@@brianlong2334Not only are you failing to see the differences between the coal from the Welsh coal fields compared to the rest of the UK as the Welsh coal from the mines in the Rhonda Valley had the highest quality coal in the world at the time followed closely by certain coal mines in the Pittsburg area. It's not just the carbon content it is the other chemicals in the coal that caused issues, but it is well known from WW1 that the German First Scouting group were incapable of sailing at anything above 24 knots well below the their design speed once they ran out of Welsh coal as before 1914 they had been major purchasers of the Coal from those mines. The South Welsh is of much higher quality than the rest of the UK due to the unique local geological features (the UK is actually made of of joining of several different land masses from vastly different geographical locations that drifted together over hundreds of millions of years becoming one this can be seen in the vast differences in the rock formation in different areas i.e why parts of England were originally attached to what is now sub-Saharan Africa while parts of Wales and Scotland were once in the Caledonian Orogeny that included many parts of what is now North America as well as modern Scandenavia this and the dissipation of what was once the lapeteous Ocean roughly 450-500 million years ago created a series of local geographical features that had massive effects on the geology of the region). My comment is 100% correct your just misreading what I said and jumping to stupid conclusions and are obviously not a geologist. And probably just read a few things on Wiki without actually understanding the underlying events.
@@jonsouth1545 I was just pointing out your argument clear problem with reality mate...
I never said the Germany didn't use welsh coal in ww1.... lol
I don't think you understand what you are trying to say is more then misleading however I'm talking about coal types, that you claim the UK had better yet the reality isn't that, it mite have had a few small amounts of the best quality but like 96% of British coal now and then is the bituminous not Anthracite which is superior....
You seam to be stuck on ww1 anyway something I'm not talking about, maybe they did but I don't think the UK product of coal sold to Germany was enough to keep the German fleet going however I'm sure some ships did but you can't use the minority as the common accurance...
I think you have little understanding of how coal is mined and used mate but OK.
@@brianlong2334 I'm using WW1 as an example as it's easier to understand as their is a lot more surviving documentation and the issues propped up again and again it is also a great teaching aid, as as it shows the effects of substandard coal on what were arguably the most advanced and well maintained coal powered steam plants ever built as the Germans in WW1 did not use oil firing ships and had to rely solely on high pressure coal powerplants and thus the problems they had with the Battle Cruiser fleet are much easier to extrapolate into the coal power plants of WW2 due to the similarity in the power-plant design themselves, as if the High Seas Fleet had a massive increase in the amount of time they needed to be offline and in maintenance due to coal quality issues which they did, you can bet your bottom dollar the power plants who had a significantly lower maintenance budget would have had even more issues when using. It also shows how economically incompetent the Nazi's were as even with this prior knowledge about the importance of high quality coal and the problems in supplying it they still messed it up royally. Before both wars the Germans did import millions of tons of Welsh coal, before WW1 the Germans bought so much Welsh coal that the Battle cruiser squadron (1st Scouting group) ran exclusively on it until mid 1915 after which they started to ration their supplies and as the rations got tighter you saw more and more issues. This in turn had major effects on the capabilities of the German Battle cruiser force. Maybe read something other than Wiki! Up until the 1950s the Welsh mines in the Rhonda Valley were Europe's biggest supplier of high grade coal accounting for over 70% of the premium coal market. As for your assertion about the amount of coal Germany imported you should read "Coal Exports and British Shipping" by C Knick Harley. On a different note it is one of Histories great ironies that the largest supplier of Coal powered steam Turbines for the Germans before both WW1 and WW2 for both industrial and military use were Parsons of Newcastle (well actually Wallsend but Wallsend is only 5km/3miles from Newcastle and nobody outside the region would know where it is, so its so much easier to just say Newcastle) and thus the UK arguably knew more about their steam turbines than they did having either built or supplied licenses like they did to AG. Vulcan for most of them.
@@jonsouth1545 Moronic argument your argument is ww1 yet we talking ww2...
Again I'm not arguing about ww1, I don't think the UK traded that much coal with Germany and even if it did I don't think you understand how much of that high quality there was it wasn't that abundant....
I wish people like you would at least research your information in depth before taking nonsense...
Some of your information is right yes but then the rest is completely misleading, sorry that's what I've pointed out, if you have a probably with that you shouldn't be online mate your point I'm talking about is easily proved wrong...
I don't think the welsh mines produced enough high quality coal in ww1 but I could be wrong however I'm not arguing that...
I don't really think it has much to do with it but you clearly do, you keep talking about it because it's your reference, your hole belief is based on a ww1 fact 25 years before the problem I am point out...
I mean I get it if you don't have much information or credibility go after the person and/or focus on something you can turn to suit your agenda....
I'm sorry it's OK to be proven wrong, and it's OK to have an argument or a discussion...
You said in your comments the UK had better coal no it didn't!
Let me explain as you seam to not understand we say OK 96% of UK coal was better then 70% of Germany coal and 4% of British coal was better then Germany best 30%, OK cool but the British don't have enough coal to compete you do see that yes?
The Germans produced more of one type of coal the the hole UK production in ww2 not ww1....
If you make a mistake just take it like a man it's not that big of a deal....
Great video as always Tik, thanks for all of the effort you put into these.
My dad was from coal country in West Virginia. Germany may have had lots of coal, but moving it to where it is needed takes resources, especially railroad power and rolling stock. I heard Germany's railroads never got a large enough share of funding and equipment for the very very heavy demands made on them. Keeping the trains running and well supported was expensive and not sexy compared to building aircraft or a great big army. Yet everything relied on the railroads. Germany did not have the roads and very heavy trucks required to move coal by road. The railroads were taking a beating from excess demand, even before they were taking damage from bombing. Coal like manure is great stuff, if you can get it to where it is needed. My father was a farmer around WW2 as was my mother. Dairy farms on both sides. My grandfathers home was heated with coal originally. My mother's farm may have been heated with wood. Either way that is lots of heavy work. Germany also did not have the resources to tap alternate fuel sources like wood, in massive amounts. Once your boiler or furnace is built for a certain type of coal, you may have trouble changing it. My dad had a small coal stove from his home in soft coal country. In the Boston area only hard coal was around, That stove just would not work with hard coal, after my dad bought 500 lbs of it. .
The Nazis did not understand anything but running costs. Nor did they really understand those costs very well. Things might have worked if funds were allowed for equipment replacement and the need to increase equipment to match the increasing demand A command economy cannot stop stuff from breaking, or command one rail car carry twice as much. Workers paid for political reasons focus on their politics, not on producing more work. As the old Soviet saying went, " They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. " Just keeping your head down becomes more important than actually doing anything. Tanks are sexy heavy industry. New trains to haul those tanks is not sexy, just necessary. Germany thought willpower could replace horsepower and material resources. As the Star kissed Tuna ads said, "Sorry Charlie" hat just did not work. And it failed badly from the start. Germany was also drawing down its internal resources before the war because of the bans on international trade. The smart play would be to use external resources, in peacetime, saving internal stocks for wartime. Hitler isolated Germany ahead of the war.
Love that you include precise sources. Hope this begins a trend. Great work.
my favorite video game quote is "It takes a strong man to deny what's in front of him. And if the truth is undeniable, you create your own." it is from the game "Spec Ops: The Line"
This is probably your most technically proficient and well presented video yet. Really excellent work.
Love the video - I love all your videos, you have a fantastic oratory style and know an incredible amount; thanks for sharing :)
Excellent content. Very glad I can support you through patreon, the quality of your videos is superb.
The real teachable lesson isn't so much an argument of state v private rail ownership, but that such a vital infrastructure requires significant investment in servicing facilities, maintenance, personnel and even with artificial manipulating of demand has no appreciable impact on the capacity for trains to run.
That's one of the big problems with socialist economies, they are terrible at allocating the needed investment. They either pour ludicrous amounts into ideologically motivated projects and so most of it is wasted, or they neglect and starve vital areas. Money and the market are what is needed to allow investment to go where it will be productive. That's not to say the private sector will always do the right thing, in the pursuit of short-term profit it is forever falling into disastrous bubbles or tragedy of the commons. As far as I can tell neither system is terribly efficient, but overall socialism seems worse, while capitalism actually needs quite a lot of regulation and oversight to keep it from going off the rails too much.
@@gamebook727 We're actually seeing the perils of such an unregulated private rail economy in the UK right now. Given that a government whose campaign included frequent attacks on their main opponent's desire to renationalise the railways, has had to renationalise the railways as a result of the current private rail system being unable to sustain the economic shock of COVID and lower ridership on certain services, meaning that they risked cutting off entire communities.
I would imagine the future solution would be a blend of private concession-based contract services for commercially viable lines and state administered lines that maintain a level of basic service to prevent communities being cut off. Not that I trust any particular party to oversee such a thing with any particular competency or impartiality, mind you.
@@saltmerchant749 "economic shock of COVID" I wonder how much of that is government-induced.
@@saltmerchant749 "We're actually seeing the perils of such an unregulated private rail economy in the UK right now."
The only entity in the UK that's legally allowed to build railways lines and stations is Network Rail. Network Fail is the government (state) run corporation that's directly funded by the government/central bank. It has failed to do its job for decades. Private operators are struggling with overcrowding as a result. Virgin Rail closed down because of all the regulations (wage and price controls, but also the State told them to increase their pensions so they threw in the towel). So no, we do not have an "unregulated private rail economy in the UK right now" in any way shape or form. You have been tricked into believing that we do though.
@@TheImperatorKnight By and large we had an "unenforced regulated private rail concession operator economy" to be specific.
Virgin Trains is a curious example here when their concessions were the among the most commercially viable lines. The circumstances around Virgin ceasing their concession were actually as a result of the disqualification by DfT of Stagecoach, not Virgin, from bidding over concerns they were unable to meet their pension liability, which left Virgin without a operating partner and subsequently ended their interest in renewing. Stagecoach, naturally, challenged this in the high court in 2020 and lost. Given that a company might not be able to meet its pension obligations thus creating a greater financial burden on the state to provide, you can see the logic for disqualifying that party from bidding.
This case is something of a rare example for regulations actually being enforced, something successive governments have been reticent to do.
I make no excuses for the train wreck that is Network Rail and their prominent role in decay and delay of rail in the UK. But many operators would disavow themselves of their own role in the collapse of their service by hiding behind network rail.
As someone who's been timed via stopwatch by management both overtly and (attempted covertly), it's an idiotic process for the most part. Management typically doesn't understand that slowdowns that are unavoidable can happen and they're most certainly not interested in knowing why.
I'm for the German worker having protested that practice.
I agree that management doesn't understand or care about slowdowns. And it does suck for the working man. But that is what is needed. A constant emphasis on timeliness. If the boss doesn't hold the worker accountable, most workers will not hold themselves accountable. Or at least, as accountable as they could. Yeah it sucks to be hassled by the Man, but that's what the money is for.
@@shorewall If they had any interest in increasing efficiency, they sure would have an interest into what's slowing down their process. I've worked at more companies than most people have owned underwear, and I can tell you that the companies that go under, are the ones who crackdown on the lowest workers first and examining their own leadership errors last; that is a company whose days are numbered. There's a big difference between having a general idea of how long a particular process may take, and using it as a negative motivator as many companies do. It destroys any potential cohesion between the workers and the leadership of that company there could have been; and to want that positive relationship avoided, is to have a fundamental mistrust and disdain of your own workers, believing they're lazy and need negative motivation to work: a bad company attracts bad workers, and more commonly creates bad workers.
@@KI.765 the company i work for is a company getting manpower for other companies and thus i was outsourced to this other company, now yesterday, i was told not to come in today because some other workers couldn't make what they had to make and me being at the tail end of the production line was thus not needed for at least a week while they fix the kinks. Honestly what this means to me is that i should not have been that particular about quality control. I was in charge of the final quality control of the products and they were NOT up to scratch. I could've just let them past to inflate the numbers making sure i was still needed like they were "on the right track" but instead i made sure only the highest quality products got out because that's what they asked me to since its a prototype product. Now i of course know better and to let things that are of low but still usable quality through too, its not worth my job for them to perfect this product and earn more money if i stand to loose money from it. Learned by experience... Next time i go back i will be more lenient with the product quality so they can feel hope for the direction they take, its no skin of my back if they fail completely, as long as i can keep my job until the end of the contract i'm happy, the contract is just until the end of the summer anyways and chances are, no customer complaints will likely come back in time because i doubt we will start large scale production before august anyways.
Where I served my apprenticeship I worked with a person who at the time the war broke out was employed in a railway engineering works. Thinking he would get conscripted he decided to signed up. He was at Dunkirk and was captured and spent the war in a German POW camp working in the coal mines. The irony was he would never of been conscripted as he would of been on the reserve occupation list.
I bought both Volume I & II ... and I too am blown away by both the research and presentation!
"I can't believe it's not butter." To the 100th level!
Another very informative video, this is why I watch. In the book the German War, A Nation Under Arms 1939-45 by Nicholas Stargardt, it talks about all the shortages that the citizens endured, mostly coal for heat, food and even clothing. This book also contains some information on the black markets that sprang up to sell these items and the rampant theft of the coal by the party officials. It only talked a little bit about the transportation issue, but this video made the 'why' so much clearer. Thank you.
My father showed me a coal mine in Wyoming that had been fire for forty years. The water which was needed to extinguish the coal fire was more valuable than the coal. We drove by in 1999, and fire was out.
You make history clear and enjoyable. 👍🏻
1:00 - 1:05 lol! The POL situation was so desperate especially near the end where "holzvergaser" (wood gasifiers) were used to power vehicles and tanks! There are pictures of these gasifier even on tanks (Panzerwrecks 2 pp.44-45) such as Pz. II and apparently 2-2.5kg of wood equated to ~ 1L of petrol.
czcams.com/video/3apnzNVHtLg/video.html
A definite sign that you're doing a great job, is how your videos about logistics, national socialism, and now about coal, come together into a one clear picture.
There's a strategy game I've played from the 90's called "Imperialism" where (among other things) you're put in charge of industrializing your nation. You need to recruit workers, assign them to different sectors, and then allocate the production from each sector to produce other things.
The catch is that all the raw materials have to be transported! So even as you build new lumber mills, or expand mines, or import cotton, you have to construct additional Traincars, Railroads, and Merchant ships to transport it all. But these cost resources and can't be sold for profit or used in war! So it's easy to deprioritize them when you could sell clothing instead of making sailcloth, and build cannons instead of trains.
Most strategy games involve Central Planning, because it's an interesting challenge for the player. But they're all easy-mode because you somehow actually know the true quantities and capacities of everything in your nation. Imagine if you had to play a game like that where you could only get information from delayed, incomplete, and deceptive reports that you had to PAY to produce in the first place?
It would be utter madness!
Good ssi Classic Game. Try workers and Ressources. Sim City communist basically. Hard AS hell. And this is a Game on a Computer. Imagine calculating this stuff IRL Like Germany and russia did. Of course they failed Without Computers.
I had the privilege of studying under Dr. Mierzejewski at UNT back in the early 2000's. Nice to see his work here.
Hmmmm yummy coal 😋
Fantastic to learn about the much neglected economic history of the war and to see that Hitler's socialism is not just an internet meme but was a real thing that had very serious real world consequences.
I cant love your videos enough. Mondays afternoons are such a treat!
Thank you! I recently finished Shirer’s book Berlin Diaries describing these winter coal shortages and I was puzzled thinking, wait I thought coal was the one thing they had a surplus of?
Exellent work as ever tik.
I've found coal quality to be a factor in all this mess too, as you quotes tropani where heads it took 5 times more brown coal that hard coal to produce gasoline it also damaged the boilers and furnaces that used it (needing more steel and iron to repair them). Its often a massive complaint found in German naval documents too as it ruined ship boilers.
If you need 5 times more coal you need 5 times more rolling stock to move it. Although that's just one type of freight in and amongst the whole lot
if state planning is so bad, explain the centuries of success of the British navy.
"Rum, Sodomy & The Lash."
How do you quantify success? They had their hands full with pirates.
I agree with you Bruce. You can't have a for profit economy in times of war, and the US didn't either, nationalizing control of the rail as well. Even in a pure capitalist system the government can always pay more for resources because it can print money so it controls things anyway. And if you have a system where the government can't do that, then the companies will just do what is more profitable, like making cars over tanks and setting high transportation costs. Efficiency in terms of profit doesn't equal maximizing war effort.
Germany simply didn't have enough stuff to wage the kind of war it wanted and no economic system of any kind can change that. Even if German could produce and transport and process an ideal amount of coal, they couldn't compete with nations getting oil out of the ground or getting rubber from South America.
I have always held the theory that if my real ale has a faint taste of coal then it is really good stuff. (Maybe as a child, in the age of King Coal, I was always playing in the coal bunker at home.
Hi TIK, your comment on the shortage of wood affecting the ability to construct railways due to wood being used to make the railway ties (or sleepers as they're known in the UK) is interesting as Concrete sleepers were developed during WW2 by France and the UK precisely because of a shortages in wood. Unsure about what Germany did and I have no sources, I just know a lot about railways :)
Central state planing and intensive focusing on the army, what did you expect. They simply didn't spend enough of their infrastructure. And they spent too much on their armed forces.
Their own economic man told them to not to go to war and they ignored him.
@@JK-gu3tl Well technically, they couldn't win war at a later time.
Sounds VERY familiar
TIK, you sure are stressing that poor bookshelf.
I love these videos. I find it harder and harder to argue against you. Fantastic presentation 😄
Not just rail ties, but at that time nearly all freight cars and most types of passenger cars were made of wood (steel used to make frames aside, the car bodies themselves were generally wood), So if there is a lumber shortage, not only are you having problems fixing rail ties and wood-type bridges, you also are hard pressed to maintain many of the largely wooden facilities, and you certainly are going to have problems not just repairing but building out and expanding your freight and passenger car fleet.
A triple whammy of inability to do proper maintenance, inability to acquire new equipment and expand facilities, and massive increase in traffic is a death spiral on the best of days. Aggravated even more when the railroads have no control over their ability to price their services accordingly. This very same problem brought the US rail network to it's knees in the late 1970's when the oil crisis brought an insane amount of traffic back to the rail system that was still trying to get back on feet from the war years and the two decades of shrinking traffic due to trucks and buses. Staggers Act relieved them of that burden, but not before we lost the Rock Island, the Milwaukee Road, and several smaller railroads.
#ILoveEatingCoal
I know that Germany was a swimming pool of coal,becouse I live in Silesia.
Dear TIK. I have watched through your entire video. And all I have to say is this. Amazing, get wrecked, well done. The evidence of everything you've said, shown and quoted in your video. Is out there and referenced in all of your videos. Even Wiki was made to agree with you, that most holy of sanctions of trustable information.
And I didn't know you could make butter from coal. Looking forward to more of your videos. The get wrecked part, was for your so called critics.
Just wokest screeching and screaming and attacking your character because they have no argument.
Wow thank you for your comment Calum! I was a little worried about this video because it was done a bit hastily, and it mentions the big bad 'S' word, which normally gets people fired up... So it's great to hear that you (and others) think it's good!
And yes, I'm sick of people screeching and screaming. Someone's just done it now in reply to another comment of mine. Even though I didn't say anything to trigger them, they got triggered anyway! It's getting ridiculous. So now I'm pointing out the facts and not holding back. I've tried being reasonable but it hasn't worked. The gloves are coming off!
You will notice that TIK carefully cut out the section of the sentence he quoted from Tooze which stated that the Reichsbahn were operating their dwindling number of trains efficiently. The evidence is out there... on page 343.
@@agentorange6085 "They were efficiently utilizing the few trains that hadn't broken down from neglect." Yeah, what a great way to sell central planning.
@@SepticFuddy The neglect was the result of a deliberate government policy to move funding away from railways and into autobahns. This was criticized by the railway operators at the time (obviously), and Tooze clearly says the trains were being operated efficiently, which TIK carefully edited out...
@@agentorange6085 You're missing the point. The deliberate government policy to shift funding was a deliberate government policy to meet another need. They were being bombarded by exaggerated need requests from literally every industry in the economy. The entire point is that central planners cannot possibly collate the information necessary to make such decisions appropriately and adapt them on a running basis. Every bit of effort put into trying is effort that would have been put to productive use in a free market. Free market pricing allows everybody to see plain as day where and how limited resources are best distributed to meet the optimum needs of the economy in a way that central planners can only have wet dreams about. The calculations do not need to be done by giant, clueless bureaucratic offices, but instead are distributed to all participants in the economy by weighing costs and benefits for themselves based on their own objectives.
Stick to tanks? Yes, I have requested the form for an information request pertaining to the delivery and production schedules of said tanks.
A very interesting presentation again TIK keep up the good work!
While I love your work and I do not agree with the "Stick to the tanks"-brigade, I do feel like the quality of your economic videos is somewhat lower than that of the other videos, especially the Battlefront series which I await the next part of every few weeks. Instead of the usual verbal aggression I endeavored to summarize some of the things I find problematic and perhaps start a conversation on them.
My first complaint would be about your selection of your sources- more accurately, the ones about the theory of economics. While the sources on the historic issues seem to be great, when it comes to general economic theories you seem to prefer citing economists of the Austrian School. While the importance of those economists is beyond question, the Austrian School as a whole is heavily criticized and mostly rejected by mainstream economists. Without going into too much detail, their assumption that almost all economic planning and state interference is bad regardless of context seems unsupported by empirical evidence. Citing them (and only them) on centrally planned economics or economic planning without mentioning this background info is bound to result in presenting a onesided narrative. In the Battlefront series you usually cite several sources, often ones that you disagree with or those that disagree with each other, and compare them while addressing potential misgivings about both and providing background info on the works and the authors. I find that doing the same when addressing these topics would be fantastic, and while I realize that is a lot of work, a short explanation of why you prefer one source over another would be nice.
My second point would be that I feel like that unlike in the Battlefront series, where you are very cautious around drawing conclusions (which I feel is a rare and commendable trait in both the general public and researchers), you seem to be far more willing to draw sweeping conclusions without investigating alternative, plausible explanations for the same observed phenomenon in your economic videos. In this particular video, you assert that it was basically the central planning of the Reich’s economy that led to all of its material shortages. In other videos, you equate central planning and any economy that is not fully based on a free market with rapid and automatic economic ruin. The problem is that fully “free” economies do not exist- literally every country on Earth used and uses a mix of state and private ownership, and by the definitions you use (and a bit of a stretch) almost every economy could be described as “socialist”. That is especially true for war economies: literally every major power (and at least several minors too) used some level and form of centralized planning. The economy of a total war is a very special economic situation: total war does not make sense economically, military products have a single user (directly the army, indirectly the state) and have no value to consumers (and thus cannot be priced according to demand, since there is no private demand), they have to conform to norms and requirements that would be counterproductive in peacetime, certain resources, which are a non-issue in peacetime become rare, trade becomes difficult or impossible. Yet the nation has to maximize its production of those goods that enable it to fight and win the war. Any of the rare resources like oil or rubber or others that are consumed by the civilians outside of the essential level of consumption is lost to the war effort. The decision of IG Farben to not invest into synthetic oil production illustrates this point: while the investment would have been positive for the war effort, it would have been inefficient from a fully free-market standpoint, and state intervention became necessary. Even in the US, price controls were introduced and the usage of certain rare resources was drastically restricted, including that of oil. The strongest economy in the war felt the need to heavily restrict the resource usage of civilians. The form it takes can be debated, but I do not see an alternative to state intervention in the case of a war economy. Thus I find your argument that state control caused the oil shortage unfounded.
I absolutely do not intend to defend the catastrophic decisions made during Soviet and especially German economic planning, but I would prefer to see a detailed analysis of the real problems instead of you simply concluding they were doomed to fail this hard without sufficiently backing up these assertions. Neither do I deny the existence of the problem of misallocation, but I find that the alternative you seem to suggest- to allow everybody to consume whatever they wanted- would be even less efficient in winning a war.
I do not want to be a gatekeeper in this subject or to discourage your research into these very interesting topics (as a student of economics, I always want to read and see more on it), but I do feel like your argumentation here is sometimes not up to your usual high standards. Instead of the usual complaints looking to dismiss your ideas and opinions, I only hope to start a discussion. Your response would be highly appreciated. Sorry for the gargantuan comment!
EDIT: I might not have made it clear enough, but I do assume you are acting in good faith. This is the reason I bothered to write this comment- I do believe a rational debate can happen here.
Economics is not Tiks area of expertise. The arguments are in fact far more nuanced than his sweeping assertions would indicate, :)
@@gmdyt1 Perhaps, but then it isn't mine or most likely yours either. That in itself should not preclude a debate, and I definitely do not want to act as a gatekeeper here.
Agreed on every point.
Brilliant series of information History video thank you. Answers many valuable questions which actually far more important than battles. Wars are clearly won on Logistics and supply
Impressive. This is truly cutting edge history. Beautifully done.
Thanks so much for the great reference book references! Ordered two of the (trains vol2 and vampire economy) - fascinating presentation-,thanks again 😊!!
I wait for each Monday Evening for TIK's vids... the only good thing about Mondays xDDD
Great work! I had no idea, and I thank you for informing me!
Frozen railwayswitches are still a running gag in germany. The Bahn has only four problems: winter, spring, summer and autumn.
I would love TIK to maybe take a look at the shortages and bottlenecks in the modern economy, like the chip shortage or the inflationary rise of commodities over the last few months. It seems very similar to the "What causes Depressions or Recessions" video he did about monetary policy and the capital goods industries.
I strongly second this.
The fed low interest rate and crypto curency bubble
The chip shortage is because it takes 3 years and £60-80 billion to build a chip factory with no guarantee of success or longevity. Returns on that sum from other investments are greater and risks less. The economy is distorted by asset bubbles and corporate welfare.
Very interesting video, Thanks TIK! Harris himself states in his book (Bomber offensive) that bombing only started to have a real effect in the spring of 1943, when Bomber Command began the Battle of the Ruhr. Any problem of distributing resources before this time must be considered to be self-inflicted. Hope this helps
covered so much on this one. great work TIK.
Wow, now the loose ends are connected! All of this makes sense now!
Ya, well done. Makes sense about the breakdown of their infrastructure and why the regime would blame the "coal thief" as a way of deflecting blame for the break down. Also explains the extreme reliance on horses as a mode of transportation which in itself creates it's own logistical challenges. And remind everyone that the US created over 800k 2.5 ton trucks(the famous deuce and a half's) for the war effort.
The US also built an autobahn that if laid out straight, would be over 50,000 miles long, using the same general system that Germany used to build its own modernized highway network.
And for what its worth, GM and Opel had the exact same management strategy, just as many competent administrators (and were the same administrators until 1939, as Opel was still managed by Buick) and operated functionally identical for all intents and purposes from 1939 until 1944.
One big difference between the two, is that GM, and Buick as a subsidiary, could use Opel being "lost" to them for a few years, as a huge tax write off. That plus the subsidies and payments from the Federal Government, set up GM and Buick specifically, for their post war surge.
Opel just got bombed.
lol
So yeah, Opel made quite a few less trucks than their parent company GM. And I mean technically speaking...all the Opel Blitzs were GM trucks too. So thats more like 1.35 million trucks.
And in Opel's defense...I dont know if you've seen under a hood of a vehicle before...theres a lot of rubber tubes.
Pretty hard to churn out trucks with no fuckin fuel lines, brake lines, belts, tires, or electrical insulation and heat sinking.
Germany ran out of rubber in like, mid 1940. The synthetic rubber went to the production of tank engines, airplane engines, and industrial equipment. Namely right back into the expansion of more synthetic plants and chemical engineering.
@Blesava Konjina And you cant just fart out more rail lines. This isnt a Paradox game lol.
Only so many trains can operate on a line in given direction, and every line isnt a double track. If you need more than the throughput of a railhead, welp, you have shortages. I dont care what economic system you have, or how well or terribly organized your logistics network is.
You're going to have shortages.
Resources have to go one way, troops another, wounded back, equipment forward, finished goods all over the place.
And from 1943 on, you had to contend with your tracks, bridges and trains being bombed and strafed.
Its amazing they did as well as they did.
Incredible actually.
I dont know how socialism and Mises factors into railhead throughput not being adequate for a total war and tripling the population demand and RGO demand of Nazi Germany in two years, but ok Tik. Its prices. Definitely prices.
Not, you know...fucking trains.
@@tomogburn2462 Not to mention the fact that fighting an offensive war deep into enemy territory extends those supply lines with each victory. Neither Marx nor Mises can explain situations like these because they happen under less-than ideal conditions. The Confederacy lost the Civil War mainly because of a poor logistical situation in the South.
@@dejjal8683 Yup, and thats stretching your trains pathing and taking it away from things it used to do. Its not like your enemy is just GIVING you trains either. You might have captured some from Poland, definitely some from France, but those had to keep doing what they were designed to do in their own countries. Capturing trains from the Soviets was pointless because the rail gauge was different and their trains literally dont fit on your tracks.
As your rearming, and adding millions of people, who eat millions of lbs of food, and shoot millions of pounds of ammo just in training and for parades, some train that used to move coal from the Ruhr to Dresden, well, now thats moving from Dresden to Potsdam to keep the 180,000 men and their horses fed.
This started cropping up as early as 1936.
By 1942 it was a goddamn catastrophe. I think we should kind of step back and appreciate what the Germans pulled off. No one is defending them here or speaking kindly of their ideology, but given their situation and resources, their logistical network for their industries was a hell of a feat even for as badly as it seems to have occurred.
Tik is really prone to give credit to "private enterprise" as if the human being motivated by a paycheck to not fuck up a railyard logbook, is somehow going to be better at his job than a guy motivated to not let his family's power go out, or their brother at the front to not get his new boots. People, or more specifically, skilled labor, is not the bottleneck. Fucking trains are. Logistical bandwidth. Tracks. Warehouses. Railyards.
The system of economics has very little to do with it, outside the number of trains you have.
Germany lost 1,400 trains and built 1,600 trains.
By comparison, the MONSTROUS industry of the US, in the same timespan, built 2,100 trains. A solid chunk going to the Soviet Union, who was also having its trains blasted from the air.
I mean ffs, Germany did alright. Lets just play What-If (which is ridiculous, but ok) and say with some sort of private measure Germany could pump out 1,800 trains instead of the apparently paltry 1,600 they built.
Wow. You're still about 1,000 trains and 100,000 miles of track short of filling your demand. Congrats. Socialism bad mkay.
Im not arguing for the merits of any economic system here, im just saying, this is a ridiculous line of thought.
There wasnt any room for them to have done any better than they did, and what they did, wasnt too shabby all things considered. Rapidly expanding past your ability to support the expansion, will lead to shortages. Who knew.
@@tomogburn2462 And as he pointed out, this all happened BEFORE the war started idiot
I thought you were referring to IG Farbin's disastrous synthetic oil production program from glancing at the title but wow. This is interesting...
How was it disastrous? Synthetic oil made up 50% of their oil by the end of the war, and the coal hydrogenation plants were almost the sole source of high octane aviation fuel.
And thanks for all the great book recommendations!
Really a great program thank you very much. Well done well done
TIK, you may have forgotten one minute point about the rail situation. The use of the system for the consolidation, resettlement and "Concentration" which took up a lot of log, i.e., maintenance of locos, cars, rails, switching etc. Imagine if this was eliminated, would there have been some relief to the system overall without this?
Actually it was the deliberate emphasis on constructing autobahns which was the missing element in TIK's video.
1:55 twenty-two tons of brown coal or 4.5 tons of hard coal to produce one ton of gasoline. But it takes under two tons of coal to make one ton of methyl alcohol, or methanol. Methanol is what the Germans should have been using in place of gasoline as their standard vehicle fuel (and di methyl ether derived from methanol in place of diesel). Yes, methanol has only about half the range of gasoline but that's largely compensated for by being able to make much more than twice as much methanol as you can of gasoline. Methanol is also much higher octane (thus also solving the German problem of low-quality low-octane gasoline which especially hurt them in aerial combat). THIS is the key step the Germans missed that could well have transformed everything. Along with using Romanian natural gas (which was just being flared off unused) to make methanol even more cheaply and easily.
OK, so maybe you couldn't run the Condors doing patrols over the Atlantic on methanol, nor the U-boats on long range patrol on di-mehyl ether. But by having the vast majority of other vehicles (the ones doing short-range and medium-range trips) running on methanol and DME, you then free up what little gasoline and diesel you have for the vehicles that absolutely HAD to have that ultra long range capability.
Same story with 'GreenFuel' today! The Germans being blinded by Gasoline made from green sources or even co2 captured from the atmosphere.
p.s. Smaller engines for metanol. Then the consumpton, liter for liter, evens out.
Unlike the US, which had it's national parks created just to preserve nature. The UK's national parks were created to give us a strategic wood reserve. This after wars causing major deforestation for the third time in several hundreds of years.
I am not sure it was a very serious problem because I have not seen it mentioned a great deal but the problem went something like this.... the UK needed increased coal production because coal was used to power our warships. It was also used to create the steel to make the warships, and to power the trains which took munitions to the front. So with coal in short supply, people took to heating their homes and cooking over wood. But in order to increase coal production, they needed wood for the props in the mine shafts, and to increase railways, you need wood for railway ties. Also, because so much metal was going into the war effort, things that would now usually be made of iron or steel, would now have to be made of wood. In fact, even bricks needed to be baked in kilns which require coal.
And then there is the fact that wood isn't just wood. You can't pick up twigs and make an airplane. And you can't just chop down a tree and make rifle stocks. Some wood needs to be seasoned, which can either be done by putting it in storage for years, or baking it.... using coal.
Thankfully, the US and Canada were able to help out. But the point stands, with coal and metal in short supply, the demand for wood sky rockets. A greater supply of wood may have alleviated some of the problem.
Germany was the one place where kids would ask Santa for coal.
From what my parents told me: It was not only the move to a non-price controlled economy it was also the firing of those who were not a Nazi. That way lots of stupid and lazy people came to power.
Same again in east-Germany after the war. Then only communists were left in command. Starting again today. Strong preference of women and "diverse" for job openings.
Same happened in Venezuela
Funny thing is they now provide therapy to some women for 'imposter syndrome' when they know they are promoted beyond their capabilities.
@@fenderOCG That's not at all what imposter syndrome is. It is when a person is skilled or is excellent in their field but irrationally perceive themselves as a fraud, beating themselves up, underestimating their own value to the point of harm. Think a sprinter who can run sub 10 seconds, win the race but don't feel like they earned it seeing themselves a fraud despite clearly knowing they ran that time, done countless hours of training and ran clean. If anything they need to get promoted as they are working below their potential.
It has nothing to do with huhhuhu WOmEn or dIVErSity.
A person can be promoted beyond their capabilities not because of lack of merit but because the promotion came with responsibilities not compatible with their previous skill set. Example Stillwell who made for an excellent logistic officer but was an absolutely dire general who couldn't read the room driving off allies, a dysfunctional command, no head for strategy resulting in losing Burma. He was promoted for his merit but was the wrong guy for the job.
@@oohhboy-funhouse simping for the USA!
@@oohhboy-funhouse Same thing with Michael Flynn who by all accounts was excellent in Iraq and Afghanistan but when promoted to lead DIA was clearly in over his head, leading to his failing there, being forced into retirement, becoming alienated and vulnerable to being turned.