Preparing for the Next Blockade: Non-ferrous Metals and the Strategic Economic Policy of the Third Reich

Abstract

This article refutes a fundamental assumption behind the Western powers’ ‘long-war strategy’ in 1939, and casts doubt on the conventional wisdom regarding the alleged unpreparedness of Nazi Germany for a longer war. It does so by re-examining Germany’s war-preparedness through the lens of those raw materials that were of vital importance for the production of all armaments: non-ferrous metals. Contemporaries believed that these metals were the Achilles heel of the Nazi war economy because Germany had to cover its consumption predominantly with imports from overseas, which meant that it was extremely vulnerable to a sea blockade. But this article challenges these assumptions and shows that the Nazi war-planners were prepared for a longer war because of the lessons learned from the Great War, which they had carefully and covertly studied. The statistics compiled in this article demonstrate that it was the preparations based on these lessons rather than contingencies and non-predictable events, such as the access to occupied Europe due to unexpected victories, that were primarily responsible for the fact that Germany did not run out of metals during the Second World War. Germany lost the war not because of a lack of economic preparation, at least not in the field of metals, but because of the strategic decision to start a war which was bound to draw in an ever more superior coalition of enemies the longer it lasted.