Inside The German Military Factories Of Hitler's War Machine | War Factories: Germany | Timeline

my name's dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video deuce more is always going to triumph over the other side hitler knows he needs industry if he wants to build a war machine this is a war between the factory the real story of how the second world war was fought and won the united states is about to launch the single greatest program of armament production in human history they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production the secret war of the factories that would decide the fate of the whole world gotta get back to work [Music] [Music] world war ii would be a new kind of war nazi technology would lead the way their aviation engineers would design planes which are bolder more futuristic to be used in ways never seen before but for germany this new war of the skies would be a disaster having seduced german voters with a promise to drag their country out of recession and make germany great again adolf hitler plans to create the most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen and at its heart a vast new air force of 21 000 planes but who will build them [Music] at the end of world war one the germans have a very large very modern aircraft industry companies like junckers are producing all-metal monoplanes these are some of the most advanced aircraft in the world they also have brilliant german science many ways german science was the greatest in the world in the early 20th century things like physics chemistry metallurgy which is incredibly important in the design of aircraft they're highly skilled craftsmen doing excellent intricate work but after defeat in the first world war germany is forced to accept the treaty of versailles which forbids them from building a military air force however all of the main companies in germany dealing in civil aviation are filled with former german imperial air service officers and these people will work very closely together secretly with the military in the 1920s and early 30s german aviation engineers are designing new military aircraft under the guise of producing civilian aircraft civil aviation in germany are actually building prototype bombers and prototype aircraft as a postal aircraft or as transport aircraft the heinkel he-51 developed supposedly as a training aircraft is actually a fighter plane the he-70 is officially a male plane but will soon be used as a light bomber the juncker's ju-52 supposedly a civilian airliner will soon be a troop transporter and bomber and to further conceal the true purpose of these planes they are tested in soviet russia the secret part is that germany will provide uh technology and knowledge to the russians and the russians will allow the germans to create military bases deep into russia where they can practice with aircraft germany will train a new generation of fighter pilots and air force officers with the latest aircraft [Music] by the time the nazis come to power germany has already spent years laying the groundwork for rearmament all hitler has to do is approve the spending and all of these ex-officers who were very involved in civil aviation put on a uniform and go and do what they've been doing as a secret shadow luftwaffe hitler appoints his second in command former world war one flying ace hermann goering as minister in charge of the new government air ministry the rice luftwaffe ministerium hermann goring who's a pilot is not terribly well versed in the construction of aircraft and all the intricacies of it within the nazi leadership you don't have a lot of scientific expertise when girling's air ministry moves to take more direct control of production not all of germany's airplane makers are happy hugo junckers refuses to comply in true nazi fashion when junkers tells the nazis no they can't have his company he mysteriously dies and the government takes his company so it's not really any doubt in anyone's mind that the air ministry and goring are calling the shots other aircraft designers like willie messerschmitt and anne's heinkel are ready to cooperate with the nazis after all their dream designs are about to be made real because hitler is about to throw gigantic amounts of public money at them it's not money raised from taxation it's borrowed money created money construction of aircraft for germany is between 40 to 50 of overall munitions production when you take into account the arming of the aircraft it is usually over 50 by 1936 the output of germany's aviation war factories far outstrips that of britain and america combined the nazis build new aircraft factories with war in mind blast walls protect workers and machinery [Music] buildings are dispersed so that a single bombing raid cannot destroy a whole factory men like messerschmitt and heinkel can hardly believe their luck but they are not just industrialists they are passionate aircraft designers they love technology they love aviation now it's nice to make money and to create a business but for them it's creating these wonderful airplanes and they're quite obsessed with that as their factories expand they attract some of the most skilled aviation engineers in the world there's so much money coming into the likes of heinkel and mitchell schmidt that they're not only building housing for their workers but they're building mess halls sports centres health facilities they've got organic farms as well and they're even using the sheep to keep the grass short on the airfields workers were treated very much as the aristocracy of the german workforce it was considered far better to have a motivated workforce and a workforce that was under your control so someone like heinkel will not just build a factory a factory is simply a place of production they will build an infrastructure to provide for the worker but also make the worker reliant on them but the workers themselves don't care about that they're being looked after for the first time in years and so they look at the national socialist regime as something that's looking out for them [Music] in the coming years the workforce in the aviation industry will rise to 3 million ever more wonderful models make it from the design board to the factory floor [Music] the he-111 medium bomber the ju-88 light bomber the ju-87 stuka and the me-109 one of the greatest fighters of the second world war these aircraft are as good or better than any other aircraft in the world by 1939 after the nazis have spent vast sums the luftwaffe has become the largest best-equipped air force in the world with 4 000 of the most advanced warplanes and they are about to be unleashed to devastating effect [Music] september 1st 1939 the nightmare screams of the stuka dive bombers strike terror into the people of poland [Music] the outdated polish air force is outnumbered five to one by the luftwaffe many polish planes are destroyed even before they can take to the air the way this overwhelming air power is used to support the army heralds a new kind of warfare poland surrenders in a matter of weeks [Music] britain and france two of the most powerful countries in the world declare war on germany so gerving turns his mighty look further westward to demolish the french air force and britain's raf the allies are stunned at the speed of the german attack hitler's fearsome luftwaffe seems unstoppable it appears that the allies are being overwhelmed by german numbers but that's not the case the germans used their numbers very effectively the german fighter planes and stukas will fly four to six sorties every day the french fighter force will fly one sortie a day on average but allied fighters do expose a weakness in the luftwaffe squadron the stukas which have been so devastating in that attack on poland are suddenly found to be extremely vulnerable to fighter attack [Music] what's more allied warplane production is rapidly catching up in 1936 the british are seriously alarmed by this huge increase in german aircraft production so what they do is set in place a scheme to use the substantial car industry with its experience of mass production to start to build aircraft by the time you get to the battle of britain crucially the most important thing which is making sure that you have enough aeroplanes and ammunition and equipment to fight it has actually been going on for about four years already in 1939 britain is catching up producing 7940 warplanes to germany's 8295 [Music] by 1940 britain has taken the lead while german factories produced 10 000 planes british production soars to over 15 000. [Music] between may and december 1940 the luftwaffe lose nearly 4 000 aircraft a 71 loss of their strength the british and americans have not only figured out better ways to mass produce their aircraft they have also invested in logistics to provide parts for rapid maintenance and repair close to the front line wherever that was the germans have not throughout the war grounded german aircraft that are missing a few parts that have very limited damage they're almost flyable aircraft but they're grounded because they don't have a forward repair system anything beyond minimal level of damage the luftwaffe put the aircraft on a train and they send it back to germany to be rebuilt at leisure in the factory where it was made the nazi high command knows it must dramatically increase warplane production but to succeed they must abandon the traditional methods of production that the national socialists hold dear the nazis have a curious and ambivalent relationship towards modern mass production modern technical industry on the one hand they like it and they're actually quite big fans of high tech but at the same time there's an aspect of nazi ideology which idealizes handicraft production small scale production it's the curious and ultimately incoherent attempt to combine modern economy and modern high technology with a highly romanticized backward looking vision of the past and so the idea is to somehow have your cake and eat it to have both a modern economy and at the same time not take on board what that modern economy requires the nazis backward-looking reverence of handicrafts meant that their aircraft were well made but their output was slow the aviation industry in the 1930s was the cottage industry you had very skilled technicians sheet metal workers primarily working at a static station it wasn't a production line as we would understand things now some of the very high level sheet metal work guys would have taken three four perhaps even five years to train to get to that particular level if a contract was given where you had to suddenly leap into mass production you had a shortfall of very skilled labour available they shoot themselves in the foot because unlike the allies they are determined only to use highly skilled workers which means that you you don't have enough of them and they can only run one shift a day german aeronautical engineers come up with wonderful designs highly skilled craftsmen lovingly build beautiful planes but it's all hopelessly inefficient costing far too much and taking far too long there is a cultural aspect to the german failure they just didn't want to adopt american management theory and then of course you've got this other problem that's cronyism because in the nazi regime it's not about what you know but who you know under nazi's state control corruption and cronyism goes right to the top the man hermann goering appoints in 1936 to oversee the creation of what is supposed to be the greatest air force the world has ever seen is his old friend the flying ace ernst udet ernst is one of the most remarkable characters of early 20th century and nazi germany he is a first world war playboy ernst udette with 68 victories is germany's top surviving ace from the war he's a hero he's a brilliant stunt pilot he enjoys nights out he enjoys uh women he enjoys very much the perks of his celebrity lifestyle he's also an alcoholic in many ways you could not imagine a more unsuitable character to handle the nuts and bolts of putting together a modern air force at a time when german industry is desperately short of raw materials and resources huge contracts are dished out by udet without the normal competitive tenders it's an exceptionally inefficient way to do things the more capitalist approach of the americans and the british in simply insisting that companies produce at reasonable cost in mass production with reasonable quality now that worked a lot better than germany's approach which is this bad mix of private industry and state control and direction as the crisis of german war production deepens hitler gets more involved which only makes matters worse hitler will be having these staff meetings and he will be changing the production priorities every six weeks you know if you're trying to produce 200 aircraft a month and somebody's saying oh can you just change this or can you just do that you could be down to 100 a month you could lose 50 of your production for no good reason how do you plan and run a war economy when the fuhrer who is the source of all the power is changing the production priorities and issuing orders off the top of his head and this is this is gets more extreme as the war goes on now this is taken to a whole new level by udet he wants pretty much every plane to have dive bombing capabilities in the initial plans to build up the luftwaffe dive bombers had a role hitting precision targets dive bombers would take out bridges and keep places in support of the army and ground troops and so you get for instance with the ju-88 it's a mid-range bomber it's great it's ready to go into mass production and then along comes udet and decides no actually i'd rather it was a dive bomber so he pauses production and the whole lot has to go back to the beginning again you're adding a lot of complexity you're rebuilding redesigning aircraft you're adding a lot of weight and you're making the production process much more difficult to put that into a production factory environment is a nightmare so by the time it actually does come off the production line it's already lost that competitive edge [Music] german aviation production is plagued by design flops and the failure to produce enough planes but it doesn't matter to the aircraft designers in charge of the war factories state funding just keeps coming allowing them to indulge their passion for new aircraft design the thing about government contracts is they are a cash cow and if you're a company owner with your own ambitions and your own projects in mind and things you want to achieve then inevitably you're just going to milk it as much as you possibly can each new design is dangled in front of the nazi high command as a solution to their problems the superiority of german engineering will secure an aryan victory [Music] got designers and scientists able to test and develop really advanced theories and technology and of course you've got these ambitious company owners who are really keen to establish a commercial lead on the opposition and they make a really compelling case for government funding the problem is when you're constantly coming up with new research ideas and new technology in terms of production it required a whole new level of intricate planning about how to produce these things and they were losing ground all the time the combined problem of self-indulgent engineering design and bureaucratic state interference reaches a new level with the development of the he-177 they pour more resources into the building of the heinkel 177 than they put into any other aircraft it dwarfs the construction of any other aircraft because it is going to be the german heavy bomber it's going to be the german lancaster it's going to be the german liberator the problem is they make a fundamental design decision early in the process rather than actually put four engines on it they actually got four engines and made two engines the two power plants on a 177 are two standard engines bolted on a common crankshaft and that might sound good you might think that actually will improve aerodynamic quality i mean the engineering in that must have been enormous with this huge great prop shaft coming out the front rather than just simply put four engines on the thing i mean you would wonder why otherwise that aircraft could have been over here bombing england very successfully actually what it did is it created too much heat and led to explosions so the heinkel 7177 was a death trap it killed many of the pilots who tried to fly it hitler called the plain garbage he 177 is a testament to udet and his meddling because he suddenly decided at the end presumably he walked onto the factory floor and said guys do you know what would really make this awesome is if we made it a dive bomber they just actually get it to the point where it flies pretty well and then they pull the plug on the program [Music] the middle of the war the commitments of the luftwaffe have grown dramatically the nazis are fighting on the eastern front north africa [Music] and defending against the threat of allied invasion from the west [Music] cadets production plans are a disaster [Music] almost all flying units are operating far below authorized strength [Music] that is overwhelmed he starts suffering from depression he starts gorging on food and alcohol ignoring his work udette does become a bit of a scapegoat for goring but goering apparently has been keeping him under control using drugs that he gives him at hunting parties november the 17th 1941 whilst he's on the phone to his girlfriend he shoots himself in the head [Music] to make matters much worse for the nazis the americans have now formally joined the war the luftwaffe has been whittled down to only 468 operational bombers but the americans are producing bombers and fighters at a rate of thousands every month to avoid defeat the nazis must perform a war production miracle the man given the task is field marshal erhard milch milch was actually jewish but he had been a nazi party member since 1929 and he had been an integral part of the air ministry since it had been born so he's going to go on to become one of the most influential figures in the german war machine general erhard milch understands bureaucracy far more than udet and understands production far more than you did and he's desperate to ramp up production in a coherent way he sees the american design process of mass production he wants to transfer it to germany american newsreels report that ford have built the biggest aircraft factory in the world at willow run the world's mightiest bomber plant is rolling the schedule one bomber every hour they're the ones with the experience with the big factories the big floor space and the large assembly lines [Music] mils decides that the german state must build a factory twice the size of willow run codenamed ultra but the giant factory will never open its doors the nazis failed to master the american production systems german war production continues to depend on skilled craftsmen performing complex tasks by hand [Music] losses are mounting in the war on the eastern front the germans are now punished for their reliance on skilled labor with soldiers dying at a rate of around 60 000 a month ever more men are called to fight by 1943 you've got german young men who might have been working in factories who are all of a sudden being shipped to the front and you've got a serious labor shortage there is a potential solution now that's not one that a more ethically minded society is gonna deem thinkable that of course is slave labor [Music] all over nazi occupied europe ss run concentration camps are bulging with prisoners they have a basically racist view of the world so they have them to grunt horrible work which leads to many of them dying however as the war gets more intense and it looks like germany's going to lose it they lose some of their scruples when they start saying okay we need to get slave labor to build things [Music] but as firms like heinkel discover it is not that simple so thanks to udet and the the general cock-up that was the he-177 bomber um heinkel is basically on the verge of financial collapse they bring in 400 soviet prisoners of war with the intention of having them produce aircraft but unfortunately they've treated them so badly that they're too weak to even hold a wrench up and after the first day they send them all away again overworked half-starved slave laborers don't do a very efficient job at producing aircraft the germans looked at these workers and treated them as humans they starved them they didn't care for them and then you'd often have disease take over these camps so many of these workers die heinkel persists and uses as many as 8 000 slave laborers and the company establishes about two or three shifts every day making better use of their expensive premises and all their machinery nazi war factories are now full of workers who are unskilled starving and hateful there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that these planes are sabotaged so if you use slave labor to build something all they need to do is damage a few small pieces of internal mechanism and that's going to explode natsville strutoff camp in france housed 52 000 forced laborers from across foreign [Music] the germans introduced a number of measures to try and control this sort of sabotage for example putting germans on the shop floor with the slave laborers to measure rates of production as slave laborers tended to try and work very very slowly deported [Music] is over the course of the war the nazis will abduct around 12 million people across europe many of them will die on top of the shortage of skilled labor german war factories are now also desperately short of raw materials although they have access to the resources in the territories they occupy widespread looting and nazi economic mismanagement means that output plummets in key sectors like mining they start running out of coal they start running out of fuel and the whole war effort starts to grind slowly and surely to a halt to build aircraft you need aluminium and in 1940 germany is the world's leading aluminium producer two years later the allies are producing twice as much aluminium z-axis powers america's plants multiply their output to meet the demands of the rapidly expanding aircraft industry german industry is now so short of aluminium that they start resorting to salvaging it from crashed american bombers german aircraft companies even try and revive skills they had abandoned 20 years earlier making planes from wood [Music] this isn't as crazy as it sounds in britain furniture makers helped build a wooden bodied the de havilland mosquito [Music] dubbed the wooden wonder the mosquito is one of the fastest planes of world war two and eight thousand of them are built nazi high command order a copy the fokkerwolf ta154 but the designs are disastrous and after a year the project is cancelled they found it extremely difficult they hadn't got that skill set left since those air very early aircraft of the late 20s early 30s had been stopped in favor of metal aircraft whereas de havillands over here had traditionally made that type of performance all wooden aeroplane with great success culminating of course in the mosquito allied war factories are out producing the nazis [Music] and they are fast reducing germany to rubble the depleted luftwaffe can only try to defend against the onslaught [Music] on a bright cold sunday morning in february 1944 over 1 000 allied bombers form up over the coast of england for the start of operation argument for six days they will pulverize what's left of germany's aviation factories in a desperate attempt to protect them every available german fighter is scrambled [Music] but this is part of the allied plan [Music] flying with the bombers is a vast fighter escort as the bombers decimate the war factories the fighters deliver a mortal blow to the luftwaffe operation argument becomes one of the defining engagements of the second world war so much so that um it's referred to as big week i can only imagine what was going on in the administrative circles when the nazis realised that they'd lost one in three of their remaining fighters and one in five of their aircrew in the battle of the war factories the nazis refuse to admit defeat they establish repair teams are sent out to damage factories to salvage whatever they can now this is remarkably successful partly thanks the construction of the new factories with their blast walls placed around all the key pieces of machinery the nazis have a two-pronged reaction to operation argument and that is to firstly not have all of their factories so close together and to disperse them as widely as possible to make it difficult for them to be destroyed but also to put all of their focus into producing fighter aircraft to combat allied bombers but even in these desperate times the nazis managed to waste vast resources in march 1944 hitler orders that to protect it from bombing war production should be moved underground at massive expense a giant network of caverns and tunnels can be built to house subterranean factories a huge amount of the german economy goes to the production of concrete because they're building these facilities to withstand bombing [Music] even today the brooding remains of this herculean undertaking haunts the forests of germany and eastern europe and for those manufacturers forced to move to mines and caves there are a whole host of other problems to contend with in dime le benzis factory in a former gypsum mine near heidelberg 195 people are killed in accidents caused by tunnel collapse conditions are so bad in an underground junkers factory producing fuselages for bombers that forty percent of its output is unusable eighty percent of the flight instruments produced in a factory and assault mine are destroyed by dust in the air to be able to keep materials stable in those conditions must have been an absolute nightmare i don't know how they managed to do it but there is one war factory innovation which actually seems to work it's cheap easy to build and the allies didn't even know about it until after the war forest factories all you do is you find a remote part of a railway line and you plonk a load of makeshift huts next to it and you move your machinery and then you start to produce the logical thing for the nazis to do would have been to just do the forest factories but instead being lunatics they decide to embark on this massive construction of underground bunkers and tunnel factories [Music] as the forest factories remain undiscovered by allied bombers nazi plane production rockets to its highest ever levels the germans are building almost 30 000 fighters by 1944 a truly massive number [Music] they never ran out of airplanes they had lots of airplanes all over the place they ran out of pilots so many of these fighters were never used [Music] although 1944 sees record german aircraft production allied war factories easily out-produced them building a staggering 160 thousand warplanes [Music] and while you've got the loofah for struggling with this massive shortfall of pilots high commander fixated on trying to mass produce an aircraft that's at the very cutting edge of technology the messerschmitt 262 jet fighter on paper the plane looks like a great fighter but in practice as ever its development is hampered by military and bureaucratic interference and its production thwarted by a lack of crucial raw materials the nazis have got approximately 1.3 million people employed on producing the me 262. if that's true then the nazis had more people employed on producing one type of aircraft in 1944 than the america had employed in the whole aviation industry which is just ludicrous [Music] it's also very unreliable so putting a jet engine into the air for the germans in 1944 1945 is a terrible gamble and one that doesn't pay off by the end of 1944 allied bombers have destroyed much of germany's rail infrastructure severing the links between the ever more dispersed factories cutting supply lines they were so short of raw materials because obviously everything was closing in on them the allied bomber offensive was so powerful that it unleashed this this destructive chain reaction whereby for example the destruction of transportation meant that coal could not move if coal couldn't move factories couldn't operate if factories couldn't operate you couldn't make aviation fuel if you couldn't make aviation fuel airplanes couldn't go up into the into the air so the german economy collapses from from within the nazi high command know how their crimes appear to the rest of the world they expect no mercy so they fight on sending more men pointlessly to their death the luftwaffe now resorts to suicide missions they prep these young pilots for this mission um it's always the kids that get it when you're on your way out because that's all you've got left so they take these really young pilots and they strip all of the armor plating off of their planes they reduce them to one machine gun to fight with and just give them like a pathetic 60 rounds which will last what half a second they were going to take these barely trained pilots 30 40 50 hours and they were going to crash into uh allied bombers uh they were supposed to bail out essentially for for one of a decent plan they're going to use the aeroplane as a weapon the original plan envisaged a force of 1500 aircraft but orders from above scale it down to just 120 and on april 7th 1945 these young pilots take off very few of these germans got through the american fighter screen it's only later that they realized that no this was they were actually trying to ram them it's a desperately futile attempt to curb the bombing because just 13 american bombers are destroyed by ramming attacks out of a total force of 1 311 53 germans are shot down and only 27 of them make it back to their unit [Music] germany's warplane factories were lavishly funded they were led by aviation pioneers operated by skilled workers and were producing war planes long before the allies were forced to do the same [Music] german war factories produce 120 000 planes allied war factories produce 600 000 we'd love to look at the war as battles bright battles take something like the battle of curse biggest tank battle of the war tanks have been sent forward a hundred at a time often talk about a crippling blow to germany germans were wiped out in tens of thousands tanks in hundreds tank losses are 0.2 of one percent of german military output these battles don't actually destroy a lot you lose far more of your production in this air war then you will lose an everton land battle look at as an economic technological competition for control of the air and you'll have a very different view of what the war is but you'll have a better idea of why germany actually loses [Music] the war that the nazis started would not be won by aryan bravery or by the military skill of german generals or the poisonous propaganda of nazi leaders this mechanized war was to be a war of the factories a war the national socialists were always going to lose [Music] the untold story of war production all wars are about competition and production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph over the other side hitler knows he needs industry if he wants to build a war machine this is a war between the factories the real story of how the second world war was fought and won the united states is about to launch the single greatest program of armament production in human history they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production the secret war of the factories that would decide the fate of the whole world gotta get back to work [Music] essen the great industrial city of the roar here is germany's coal and so here is the home of industrial giants like tissencorp it was from industrial centers like essen that the nazis fought and lost the war of the factories germany 1926. when it surrendered at the end of the great war germany was forced to agree not to rebuild its war machine so instead of building tanks in the massive crook factory engineers are working on the design of a giant tractor at least that's the official line in fact this is a forerunner for a new kind of tank which will spread terror and destruction across europe they will become known as panzers [Music] defeat in war has not dented the ambitions of germany's powerful military bureaucratic elite certain elements of the german hierarchy don't appear to have learned anything from world war one and they want a british empire but they're fixated on the part where you go out and conquer and not on the part that comes afterwards which is essentially his trade almost as soon as the great war is over despite all the chaos despite all the hyperinflation the german ruling class is firing up its war factories again now most ordinary germans don't want war but germany's militaristic elite think of little else firms like crook work to find ways around the ban on german arms manufacturing in 1921 crook buys the swedish arms manufacturer bofors as a front company the following year they established the darius aeg in the netherlands as a front company to build warships and submarines to keep its engineers skills up to scratch crook hires them out to numerous eastern european war factories including those of the soviet union the germans need to test their new weapons well away from the prying eyes of allied inspectors preferably outside germany one country in particular has vast unpopulated areas perfect for the job russia and the russians will allow the germans to create military bases deep into russia where they can test tanks where they can practice with aircraft they will set up a tank school practicing with real tanks and they're working together with the russians on tank maneuvers for once uh we have something that's not solely the nazi's fault um when they came to power in 1933 they they ramped up rearmament but it was already there it had already been happening for 10 years the national socialists disapprove of capitalism which they see as jewish and american but to win an empire they need its help even though the nazis of course despised jewish capitalism as they call it hitler knows he needs industry if he wants to build a war machine the nazi view of american business which they saw was a jewish product really was that it promoted the wrong kind of social values and that it also promoted cheap tact mass production they did not like the whole process of modernization at all the idea was far better for people to remain as peasants where they could not only produce organic food but also produce lots of children who would go on to be big burly soldiers and fight efficiently in the army then move to towns and cities where they would become as they saw it consumption obsessed producers hitler demands enormous numbers of war machines germany's war factories deliver these numbers and more he calls for 21 000 military planes to be built in the end his war factories will produce almost 140 000 hitler says he wants 4 000 tanks but his war factories will eventually produce almost 50 000 and to fight war at sea german shipyards will build over one thousand one hundred u-boats much of germany's heavy industry was based here in the rua valley here were among the largest coal fields in the world and big factories sought to be close to their main source of energy under the nazis the rose factories shift their focus from trains and tracks to tanks and guns and they will be rewarded with vast amounts of taxpayers cash of which large amounts go back to the nazis in bribes [Music] all the big industrialists of germany contribute lots of money uh in the expectation the hitler will work for them they ended up working for hitler of course hitler was actually in some ways a rather pragmatic politician and he very rapidly made a series of deals with large german firms companies such as bmw krupp it's a cozy relationship between the two sides between large firms on the one side and the central state on the other in the six years after the nazis come to power the major industrial companies involved in rearmament will see their incomes rise by 50 percent if you own a company like crop and you make armaments you you just want to cuddle hitler because he's going to give you endless amounts of money he's going to make you very rich and you're going to want to be his best friend and in krupp's case his son joins the ss you make him your best mate and you're set for life so croup in particular embraces the nazis and hitler calls croup the fury of industry by 1934 croup's giant works at essen are openly producing panzer tanks and at krupska manievert in kiev construction of u-boats begins [Applause] [Music] german rearmament plans are breathtaking in their ambition and german war factories gear up production many years before the allies are alive to the threat german war factories appear to have a number of other advantages over the allies and the first is the quality of their engineers germany had industrialized in the second half of the 19th century and had drawn on the engineering skills of the british but germany had a much bigger population than britain and was rich in coal and by the end of the century firms like crook siemens and aeg had turned germany into europe's industrial giant german engineering was now focused on perfecting hitler's war machines well this is a panzer mark iii one of a family of german tanks and of course they change the nature of warfare the gun is good the protection levels are excellent the running gear it was always seen as an extremely well designed tank it's a good looking tank and it did take the world by storm german engineering is revered the world over and german engineers have served long apprenticeships they're highly skilled highly trained in their craft compared to factories in america german war factories are organized along more traditional lines placing greater value on craft skills to qualify as master engineers workers have to serve long apprenticeships this is further encouraged by the nazis who revive the old german craft guilds in footage of german tank factories the tanks are seen not on a production line but static in different stations surrounded by engineers for people today who are interested in tank design it's of course those german tanks that are the most fascinating there are so many types of german tank and each model's got so many variations and so many clever little things about them all those little engineering flourishes that makes them unique there is another key difference between german and american war production the nazis have a different attitude towards free market competition instead they grant monopoly privileges to favored war manufacturers by 1937 70 percent of production in germany is carried out by state-sanctioned monopolies if you're a certain type of politician there are obviously going to be advantages in a totalitarian system now if the state has got total power and you want something done you don't have to ask someone or persuade someone or even compromise you just get on and do it and overseeing these state-funded monopolies is germany's famously efficient civil service which the nazis greatly expand between 1935 and 1939 the number of government officials grows by two million under the nazis civil servants see their budgets rise tenfold 20-fold even 30-fold germans love bureaucracy and under the nazis it gets a completely new lease of life so before the first world war i think prussian civil service was the biggest employer in the world and now with with all of the rearmament that the nazis are doing they they're employing legions of them to fix prices take quotes uh set contracts all kinds of things so yeah any anyone who with a poncho for signing things and uh trying to look smart while doing it is well employed in nazi germany government spending rockets under the nazis and it's going mainly on arms in the five years leading to the war america is spending 300 million dollars on munitions britain which is gearing up for war is spending 500 million this is dwarfed by the soviet union which is spending more than one and a half billion but far in the lead is nazi germany spending almost two and a half billion a year on munitions alone and hitler is not finished in the following year german expenditure on munitions will be more than double the total for the previous four years [Music] [Music] in the late 1930s the german economy is to all intents and purposes on a war footing the workforce in groups factories and shipyards has tripled from 35 000 to 112 000 this is the german baltic coast it is where you'll find tusson croup marine systems which can trace its lineage back over 200 years even today they still manufacture cutting-edge ships and submarines in 1939 alone at croup's shipyard in keel and 15 others along the german coast 60 new u-boats are launched with many more under construction and on the order books [Music] by now the nazis have at their disposal no fewer than 3 000 panzer tanks 4 000 warplanes and a giant stockpile of armaments what's more is that these war machines have been beautifully crafted by german engineers according to the very latest designs so the oldest tank in the german inventory is just seven years old and the u-boats are brand new but if you look at the royal navy some of britain's submarines date back to the first world war they're a lot older german war factories have equipped the nazis with the most formidable armed force the world has ever known just in terms of production german factories had done something incredibly impressive and at the same time utterly terrifying [Music] the cost of building this war machine is vast now somehow they have to make this monster war machine pay for itself hitler thinks that winning an empire will cover the cost so that's what he sets out to do on the 1st of september 1939 the german army invades poland when hitler enters poland it actually looks really easy because he unleashes this huge newly constructed army and air force and of course the world is left absolutely stunned two days later you've got britain and france declaring war when germany turns west and invades france victory is no less decisive and swift now he sends out his u-boat wolf packs to devastate allied shipping lanes in the atlantic in the newsreels and from the point of view of the allies poland and france look like relatively easy victories but the polish and french armies are huge and though the wehrmacht have won it's come at a cost many tanks many planes many lives hitler is delighted but the wehrmacht know they've been in a fight in the first four weeks of the war um they they've marched into poland and it's a seemingly a walk over they've conquered poland um but they've lost 25 of their tanks already and it's taken them six years to build up that tank force and they've lost a quarter of it in four weeks with the greatest respect to poland against an adversary that is nowhere near the toughest that they're gonna face hitler orders his war factories to go into overdrive when he'd invaded poland he hadn't expected the british and french to declare war now he has a much bigger fight on his hands and hitler knows it will get even bigger when he invades russia but the nazi state controls all economic life so it's able to put all the country's resources at the service of war production the german people will be taxed to the limit and must do without the ordinary comforts of life output from german war factories begins to rise [Music] as germany has gained more territory so more factories and resources have come under its control already german expansion into austria and czechoslovakia has won the nazis coal mines and steel mills as well as the highly prized skoda works a rival to croup in terms of size and output just one of skoda's factory complexes employs more than 35 000 when hitler invades russia in the summer of 1941 he is able to send in the largest invasion force ever assembled in human history three and a half thousand tanks backed up with seven thousand armored vehicles and more than 2 700 warplanes the speed with which the nazis move into russia is absolutely breathtaking and stalin can only do one thing he's got to relocate his factories to the east to stop them being captured it seems that hitler and the nazis are riding high but the reality is somewhat different in fact as early as 1941 it is becoming apparent to some in germany that the nazis cannot win [Music] the battle of britain was hitler's first setback between may and december 1940 the luftwaffe had lost nearly 4 000 aircraft a 71 loss of their strength and soon losses quickly start to mount on the eastern front the nazi invasion force that is unleashed on soviet russia is monstrous in size but um nobody had read a history book and learnt anything from napoleon and it losses were correspondingly enormous by the end of 1941 hitler has lost almost 3 000 tanks the mighty fourth panzer division is reduced to just 38 vehicles what's more the communists have access to a seemingly endless supply of manpower and resources by the end of 1941 its tank factories are out producing germany's by two to one a figure that will increase to five to one by the following year to make matters worse from a slow start british and american war factories are gaining momentum allied wall factories are now overtaking those of germany in 1941 between them allied war factories produced 15 000 tanks in the same year nazi war factories produced just two thousand four hundred fewer than they're losing in battle so many of what the nazis had imagined to be the advantages of german war production were turning out to be the very opposite the use of skilled craftsmen has become a terrible hindrance the logic of american mass production was to divide up the complex tasks of skilled workers into many simpler tasks which can be carried out much more quickly and repetitively by lesser skilled workers or machines skilled craftsmen take longer they have to spend time changing tools wandering around the factory floor looking for parts and switching mentally and physically from one task to another apprenticeships meant that it took several years to train more craftsmen and just at a time when german factories needed more skilled labor existing skilled workers were being called up to fight in the army the interference of the military meanwhile was causing huge delays to production vermont generals were constantly interrupting production demanding changes to the designs of tanks and other equipment in america a firm like general motors concentrates on tanks like the sherman that have been specifically designed with mass production in mind and then they're able to produce them in these really big numbers but the germans have got the opposite problem they've got these far more technically complex tanks which are just impossible to mass produce well the tiger one has is built around a superb gun the 88 millimeter gun it has excellent armor good protection levels but it is over engineered the tiger was simply too complex too heavy and too expensive they were produced at a time when germany was short of fuel and these were very very thirsty tanks and so as often or not they ran out of fuel as broke down compared to the tiger one the sherman could not be more different this was virtually hand produced like a bentley this was mass produced like a ford and it has straight welding cast turrets it was the ultimate mass-produced tank of world war ii [Music] as the second world war intensifies so does the battle between the factories in america firms are forced to become more efficient because they must compete with each other for war contracts in germany the state has awarded monopolies to favored companies what's more these companies are heavily regulated working under the supervision of large numbers of civil servants in germany quite unlike the united states and britain the economy is entirely controlled so you've got these legions of government officials and bureaucrats controlling every aspect of production every transaction from hiring workers sourcing parts machine tools and raw materials they all have to have official state approval so if a tank or an airplane factory needs copper or steel or drills or lathes they need to apply for a permit this of course doesn't encourage efficiency at all what it does it hampers it in fact this huge bureaucracy actually causes chaos and there's something else crippling production in germany's war factories one of the biggest problems nazi germany faced once it started the war was getting raw materials huge huge problem and it was one of hitler's biggest worries and headaches this was a problem entirely of the nazi's own making to the national socialists global free trade was jewish and capitalistic they yearn for national economic self-sufficiency and they will require raw materials from abroad not through jewish trade but by germanic conquest there's a quite deliberate policy to reorient german trade away from global trade networks the idea they have is that being dependent upon foreign trade makes you vulnerable the problem they faced was that a lot of the raw materials they needed things like nickel for example could not be found except in either the soviet union or the british empire so if you aren't going to connect with the rest of the world by trade the only way you can get those vital raw materials is by conquering the territory or having them controlled by puppet states but as hitler discovers although the territory he conquers is rich in resources and industrial prowess conquered peoples prove remarkably uncooperative and unproductive by contrast allied war factories are simply buying what they need quickly and easily from the world market the british economy of the interwar years was the largest importing economy in the world by far it imported some very very important raw materials even if hitler had now suddenly embraced global free trade the construction of his vast war machine has crippled much of the rest of the economy germany has little other than guns and tanks to sell so even the nazis were prepared to pay for supplies from abroad which they really weren't the devotion to war production means they have barely any other goods to trade by autumn 1942 the inadequacy of german war factories is beyond doubt and contributes to a major defeat for hitler in north africa montgomery's eighth army attacks rommel with 1 000 tanks at least half of them american of comparable panzer tanks rommel is defending with just 123 but german war factories now face a new problem even resources like coal of which germany has huge reserves appear to be running short the problem is transport germany was an early pioneer of the railways not only does it have a rail network that many countries can only dream of german companies manufacture locomotives rolling stock and track used on railways around the world but in their eagerness to build tanks and planes the nazis have starved the railways of money with catastrophic knock-on effects for german industry at any given time about a third of any rail freight is coal but the german railway network is in such poor condition but it's actually become an international joke and there are these constant major bottlenecks trapping thousands of freight cars and as a result coal is starting to stockpile up at the mines and they in turn have to cut production just at the moment when demand for coals increasing goebbels describes this as the problem of the german war economy by 1940 the coal shortage is starting to bite no coal means no steel at a time when croup and other german factories desperately need more steel to build tanks guns and ammunition just to keep up with the losses let alone catch up with allied production steel production is less than half what it was at the start of the war german war factories are short of coal steel and every other raw material but the military setbacks in russia and in africa present them with another problem in north africa the nazis lost 75 000 troops in russia 60 000 german soldiers are dying every month to replace them the nazis are taking skilled workers out of the war factories you have the armed forces and industry often competing for the same personnel who are moving around as germany has different military advances or reverses you have personnel being taken into the armed forces then being reclaimed by industry in order to keep things going hitler is pillaging occupied europe he has commandeered factories he has confiscated raw materials now he will abduct humans to replace workers in their war factories the nazis resort to using slaves very few of the 42 000 incarceration sites established by the nazis throughout europe still remain but those that do serve as a chilling reminder of just how far the nazi regime was prepared to go to keep their factories running places like this natsville strutof camp in france became an integral part of the nazi war effort yes [Music] slave laborers were put to work in every factory and every type of production from lufthansa to hugo boss they worked in creation of armaments of all types u-boats airplanes guns tanks everything everything you can think of so important was slave labor to german production the camps are built near factories and some factories were built near camps it is estimated that group factories alone exploited the labor of 100 000 slaves but as a study at crooks factory in essen reveals unwilling starving slave laborers are far less productive than the workers they replace overworked a half starved slave laborers don't do a very efficient job german war factories have now descended into barbarism inefficient immoral and unproductive in an effort to transform them hitler will turn to one of his closest friends albert speer as early as spring 1940 hitler is growing dismayed at the poor performance of nazi war factories germany actually had a great head start against the allies the nazis continued to divert a far greater proportion of their national income to armament spending but the allied war factories are starting to out-produce germany by a huge margin an army and a war economy do not just need tanks and guns and planes they need thousands of other goods to function and high on the list are trucks [Music] today modern germany is renowned for its state-of-the-art automotive industry their cars are amongst the most popular in the world and produced in vast numbers but under the nazis the production of trucks and jeeps like so much else was dwarfed by vehicle production in america and britain true to form hitler of course doesn't blame himself or even this bureaucratic and parasitic system of nazism uh actually in early 1940 he decides to put the blame on the head of army procurement that's a man called general carl becker now he's the senior nazi who oversees germany's war factories on the 8th of april 1940 allegedly in the presence of the gestapo general becker commits suicide he is replaced by fritz todd the construction engineer behind hitler's autobahns when the nazis come to invade russia it's tote who's put in charge of rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed by the retreating russians now tote of course understands industry his father owned a factory and he himself is a qualified construction engineer so he's the man for the job todd can see what the german war factories are doing but he also understands the allies production methods he can do the maths germany is going to lose the mistake he makes is to tell hitler at hitler's wharf lair bunker which todd himself had built he tells hitler that germany's war factories are too feeble to supply the eastern army with everything it needs and that the war in the east should be called off hitler is claimed to have been furious germany is the master race the best soldiers in the world the best engineers in the world by extension they must have the best war factories in the world the next day tote actually meets with what is seen as a rather convenient accident when the plane he's flying on back to berlin mysteriously crashes who steps into his role that's hitler's close friend albert spare and what do you know he was actually supposed to be on the same plane and he had rung that morning to say that he had been delayed or missed the flight and shortly afterwards of course he then becomes a head of war production now some people see this as a kind of conspiracy i don't necessarily think that's true but this is going to have a big impact on the way that the german war machine is going to go into production [Music] speer is an ambitious architect who had joined the nazi party in 1931 and was rewarded with the task of designing hitler's gigantic state buildings whilst he is complicit in many things including the exploitation of slave labor he does not share the nazis disdain for american capitalism although hitler of course has a very low opinion of what he calls jewish capitalist america spare can see the united states and the american system of mass production is vastly out producing germany so spear sets about copying america he attempts to strip back state control he reintroduces competition between firms he stops nazi officials from confiscating the profits of companies in short he embraces the very capitalism the national socialists despise and to a degree it works between may 1940 and june 1941 german tank strength doubles but this temporary increase in tank production comes at a cost in order to increase the production of tanks spear has to divert huge amounts of steel from the production of all sorts of other things the temporary increase sphere achieves in tank production is hard to replicate elsewhere u-boat production has reached crisis levels in 1939 hitler ordered the construction of 658 new u-boats by the end of 1942 but by june 1940 crooks and germany's other shipyards had built just 20. by contrast british shipyards were producing a million tons of shipping a year [Applause] by the summer of 1940 only 25 u-boats were operating in the atlantic speer decides to apply american mass production methods to u-boat production and to that end appoints the vehicle maker otto merker otto merka has no experience of building ships now he comes from an automotive background and he's come to the attention of hitler because of his exemplary work building fire engines murk has splits production of u-boats into stages just as the americans do with their mass-produced liberty ships the hull is divided into eight sections parts to be built by multiple suppliers with these american style techniques merka promises to bring production time of each boat down to 175 days a single mark 21 u-boat the first mass-produced u-boat is unveiled in danzig to great fanfare on hitler's birthday this weapon would win the war it is hailed as an armaments miracle by spear himself but behind the scenes the attempted mass production of u-boats is a disaster so the prefabrication of a ship potentially if you've got everybody cooperating if you've got uniformity of aim and uniformity about the specifications and the design particularly for a relatively crude and inverted comma ship like a merchant ship potentially quite a good result the more exacting the requirements of the ship as you move up through higher quality warships larger and more complicated warships it becomes more difficult to apply that model certainly in this era and once you're applying it to effectively the most complicated environment of all the submarine environment that's when you're really really pushing the envelope in terms of challenge [Music] american industry has mastered the art of bringing high precision engineering to the production line german war factories however simply aren't used to the demands of mass production when it comes to the assembly of u-boats the different sections are out of alignment by as much as three centimeters even a relatively minor manufacturing floor operating floor in a submarine can lead to total loss of the vessel so you've got these u-boats now they take 175 days to build but it's taking almost that length again to repair them before they even leave the boat yards the boat unveiled on hitler's birthday it turns out is a roughly assembled mock-up which leaks so badly it is taken immediately back into dry dock by the end of 1944 of the 80 type 22 u-boats produced by the nazis only four are fit for action only two launched and neither manages to sink a single allied ship in march 1943 of the 17 major convoys crossing the atlantic u-boats are able to intercept just three by may 1943 the germans are losing u-boats at a rate of one a day spares attempt to introduce this american style mass production into u-boat shipyards is a monumental failure speer can find no solution to the problem of german war production he cannot solve the shortage of labor in the first half of 1942 alone the vermont calls up 200 000 men from their armaments factories germany's skilled craftsmen are being put into uniform and slaughtered in the east replacing them are slave laborers among them girls as young as 12. by late 1944 more than a third of war factory workers are foreign forced laborers even german workers are now going hungry the slaves are dropping with starvation nor can spear despite his power liberate industry from the dead hand of the nazi civil service spares attempts to reign in nazi state bureaucracy are doomed to fail because even under him there are well over 200 committees and subcommittees overseeing german war production and spear can do nothing to overcome nazi germany's alienation and isolation from the rest of the world the nazis spurned the global market and now they are paying the price as their war factories run out of supplies of all the raw materials in short supply the most critical is fuel fuel has been running short since early in the war you only have to look at what happens in november 1941 because then you've got germany's largest truck factory that's the opel factory brandenburg which is actually forced to shut down why because it doesn't even have enough fuel to check the fuel pumps of all the vehicles being produced it's hopeless by autumn of 1941 lack of fuel means the german navy can't even leave port food in france confiscated and earmarked for consumption in germany is rotting where it sits because there is too little fuel and too few trucks to transport it to germany by 1943 american and british war production is going through the roof germany's is falling through the floor in the first quarter of 1943 german steel production falls by 200 000 tons but if the nazis think this is bad it's about to get a whole lot worse in march 1943 the battle of the roar begins britain's raf drops 34 000 tons of bombs crippling germany's steel production dams are destroyed cutting the water supply to steel plants and factories smaller factories too are destroyed factories that supply all kinds of parts and machine tools to the bigger wall factories this is the beginning of the end for german war production [Music] by now allied bombers have better fighter cover better bomb sites better electronic guidance systems but more than anything allied war factories have produced many more bombers and many more bombs it unleashed this this destructive chain reaction whereby the german economy collapses from within the allies target anything that could possibly be utilized by the germans to aid their war production and that's not just by bombing a factory that's taking out the water supply the coal supply is taking out in particular railway lines that would move stuff around after it's been produced over the course of the war the allies will drop one and a half million tons of bombs on the crook factory in essen which is more than the total weight of steel produced by the factory the raids of german cities are also rendering factory workers homeless further disrupting what little production is taking place the hamburg firestorm destroys 250 000 homes rendering almost a million people homeless the castle raid displaces 62 of the population setting back the production of tiger tanks and 88 millimeter gun production by months and things only get worse in what would become known as big week for six consecutive days in february 1944 american bombers attack every major factory in germany in that one month alone the luftwaffe lose one third of their remaining fighter planes [Music] so with no power no components or no means to get goods from the factories to the battlefront wartime production effectively ceases to exist it grinds to a halt the end of the war when it finally comes leaves germany little more than a smoldering heap of rubble national socialism had picked a fight with industrial capitalism in this war of the factories the outcome from the very beginning was inevitable ultimately all wars in the second world war is the greatest example of this are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to ultimately triumph over the other side even if the other side has better soldiers braver soldiers more skillful soldiers despite the incredible sums spent by the nazis despite germany's inherited industrial might german war factories were comprehensively out produced by the allies after the war ludwig erhard takes charge of the west german economy a sworn opponent of the nazis and everything they stood for he scraps government regulations reintroduces competition and free markets and slashes taxes the period of astonishing growth that follows becomes known as the german economic miracle untold story of war production all wars are about competition and production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph this is a war between the factories the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories [Music] they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world volkswagen fiat mitsubishi they're all household names now but they made those names as war factories gotta get back to work [Music] the volkswagen beetle the world's most successful car everyone loves a beetle it's got that lovely iconic curved shape there's never really been anything like it before or certainly since i defy anyone to say they don't like the volkswagen beetle they're awesome they're cute how can you not look at it and smile it's so silly looking it doesn't just look good but it's also really affordable it's recognized all over the world it's what the term cheap and cheerful was made for but there's a darker side to this car the bonnet of the vehicle had to be capable of supporting a machine gun what does that tell us about what's really going on because the people's car and its slogan strength through joy were created by the nazis and like everything touched by them it was designed for war [Music] 1933 adolf hitler becomes chancellor of germany and soon after sees his total power when adolf hitler came to power he had to face a very very significant obstacle in that the country was broken and he had to deal with a broken and fractured economy the fallout of the wall street crash the depression it unleashed in europe this was one crisis too far millions millions of ordinary germans suddenly found themselves unemployed their savings destroyed to counter this hitler has a plan hitler's intention was to modernize the reich economy and he was going to do that with autobahns and cars the car was the future hitler frankly was a bit of a petrol head uh he absolutely loved cars now he never learned how to drive but that didn't stop him from from loving them i think hitler's attraction for cars really came out of that adoration of speed of efficiency of getting somewhere fast in fact the new york times once estimated that hitler did more mileage in his cars than any other world leader and he's driven around at one point in this huge armor-plated five-ton mercedes it was an absolute beer moth it's one of the heaviest cars i think ever produced now if hitler had known the origins of the brand mercedes he may not have been quite so fond of being driven around in them because the mercedes was named after the daughter of the man who had commissioned the firm's first car an entrepreneur called emil jelenek and emil jelinek was a jew the idea of hitler being driven everywhere in a big muscle car would play perfectly into his ego the idea that it makes you look like the daddy so yeah i can totally see why cars appeal to hitler cars were the perfect vehicle to help solve some of the economic challenges faced by nazi germany the nazis come to power after the great depression and what hitler knows he must do is put germany to work he creates the autobahn network motorways germany is building the most modern automobile highways in the world as part of the new motorization program 5 000 miles of new roads are being built simultaneously in all parts of the country the autobahns fulfilled a number of purposes one of the key elements of course was showing how hitler's germany was well ahead of the rest of the world and it was this has uh two benefits to it first of all if you're getting people working again you you're providing employment but secondly the autobahn network is going to be another really vital tool in reinvigorating the german economy not just for getting people around but for getting goods around germany and not just goods like everything to do with nazi germany the autobahn network has a sinister ulterior motive but actually autobahns don't just move goods and people around they can also move tanks and that's going to prove very useful to hitler in the years to come autobahns uh obviously serve a very evident military purpose they'll get um hitler's armies from a to b very quickly and because he is the most humble individual in history uh he originally wants to call them adolf hitler strasses so hitler streets but actually even hitler decides that maybe just a step too far even for him these modern roads would transport you to a brave new world founded on very traditional values we may think of fascism as being a backward political concept it's something that kind of plays in to the mythology of nazism uh you know the the old germanic way of doing things but actually what hitler wants to do is imbue it with modernity there was a long tradition amongst academics of dismissing the idea that there was anything modern about nazi germany but the third reich was itself using technology and the imagination to create new mental spaces and new possibilities to reshape the future this is this is radical the motorway it's almost a kind of space age thing at the time but to be of use to anyone other than the army the autobahns needed cars and hardly anyone in pre-world war ii germany owned one rich people and doctors had cars to go places and everybody else either rode on public transportation or they got there on horseback or on a bicycle or using a horse-drawn cart hitler realizes if the car's going to be successful it's going to have to stop being a luxury item and for that to happen it's going to be affordable you could democratize the way that people move around the country and it will provide a reliable means of transportation for every german family but hitler only wanted to give people cars and freedom on the nazis terms the nazis were proud of abolishing individualism and individual freedom because they saw it as essentially anarchic free time was never free it's really regimented and almost bolshevik in in that you can have this freedom and you can have this vehicle that will take you anywhere you want to go but really what it's supposed to do is take you from home to work and then back home again while you're doing everything that the state tells you to do so having one type of car that everyone would drive is very much part of that nazi philosophy but at the time there weren't many factories producing affordable cars during those really bad depression years in the 1930s you've got several car manufacturers just going to the wall and one of them actually realized that the only way it could survive was to team up with three other companies and then call themselves a auto union this big joint venture what's fascinating the outer union a a combination of four rather struggling marks which together um came up with two proposals for hitler for a racing team uh which would became hugely successful in the 1930s but you've got a problem if you're going to survive in the long term you can't just produce top spec fast cars as well as the eye catching sports car auto union needs a cheap runabout for the mass market the other idea is something called the people's car volkswagen and that's going to be made affordable to the masses by constructing it with a massive state subsidy now hitler loves both these ideas but he gives them to somebody else a man called ferdinand porsche porsche is part of the team that pitches the whole volkswagen idea to hitler he's someone who knows hitler who hitler gets on very well with but he's not only talented he's very politically skilled too so when hitler asked him to design the car himself porsche has got absolutely no compunction about going alone by 1936 porsche has three design prototypes ready for the people's car and he needs a factory to build them in it turns out that hitler is already one step ahead what he had in mind was it was going to be built in a special factory city known as the city of strength through joy and this was going to be this really model nazi workers paradise if you like it was to be a great great metropolis in a way it was to be a motor city much as detroit had become in the states and it was going to have all the latest production methods learned from henry ford whom hitler was frankly a really big fan of ford's popularization of the the assembly line approach to car manufacturing is just the sort of the more modern technological advance producing a classless car that hitler massively admired the new car was going to be called the kdf wagon the strength through joy car snappy title but when the car is finally unveiled to the waiting world some felt they'd already seen it this is a model of the volkswagen it's got a very distinctive shape curved at the front and it's very unusual for its time it's actually got a rear mounted engine which is air cooled however there was already something very much like it here it is this is a later model of the tatra if you look at it you'll realize it's got very much the same features same rear engine same rear events the same curving shape and in fact they were so incensed by what porsche had done they threatened to take him to court to sue him for infringement of copyrights porsche went to hitler and said what should i do hitler replied do nothing 15 months later nazi tanks rolled into czechoslovakia and they stopped making the tetra but they continued to make the volkswagen the kdf finally hits the autobahn in 1938 when it was shown off by the nazis at the berlin motor show at the time it was a game changer the kdf market was robust it was reliable didn't await it's a modern equivalent to ford's old model t what it could do was to seat your model nazi family it's going to have a cruising speed of about 100 kilometers an hour it's pretty quick in those days the kdf falcon was also most importantly um attractively priced at 990 rocky marks that all sounds great that all sounds brilliant and then you've got to realize a small problem the average weekly wage of a german worker was around 32 rights marks that's just under a tenner so what you're looking at there is to afford a car is 30 weeks of your salary so to make the car affordable the nazis came up with a payment plan what was a very modern concept was selling the ktf [ __ ] through up sort of a public high purchase scheme where you put a little aside basically you paid the government in installments and eventually there'd be enough in the government bank to be able to afford your car according to official figures loyal nazi followers donated around 280 million marks to the scheme hardly any of them got their car frankly the scheme is an utter failure and many of those who put you know money dutifully into their little savings books they never saw their money again because only 630 kdf bargains were ever produced and where did they go have a guess the ones that were produced were basically being driven around by sort of mid-level hitler flunkies in the nazi party so the volk people never got to see their wagon in hitler's lifetime at least but maybe the people's car wasn't intended for the people in the first place yes it was the people's car but it was also imagined as being a part of the mobility of the german military one of the technical requirements of the volkswagen was the idea that the the the bonnet of the vehicle had to be capable of supporting a machine gun why on earth are you mounting a machine gun on a people's car you know what does that tell us about what's really going on you don't design cars today strong enough to mount machine guns unless you think you're going to go and have a lot of fighting that was a military vehicle that gives a very different meaning to the whole idea of strength through joy because this car is more about strength and not about joy so actually rather than producing cars for everybody to drive what you're actually producing is a fleet of war machines for the nazis and those war machines were all part of adolf hitler's plan to avenge the humiliation of world war one [Music] by 1936 when the kdf bargain was on the drawing board hitler's factories had already started rearming germany the treaty of versailles had severely limited the size of germany's army after world war one by this treaty the germans agreed to disband the general staff to limit their army to a hundred thousand men to hand over their fleet to demilitarize the rhineland and coastal fortifications under the terms of the treaty of ssi germany is not allowed to be building new weapons um and so you've got many uh machines being designed with the dual purpose they may look like they've got a civilian application but actually they're for military usage germany would do this with with multiple other things they would have um private airliners that could be equipped with bomb racks should that ever be needed and then you had these great roads that allowed people to drive across the country but then could allow you to move tanks from place to place should you need that as well and so a lot of agricultural machinery was actually designed with future tanks and and armored vehicles in mind and the kdf was no exception the type 82 koobel bargain was a utilitarian off-road vehicle based on the kdf bargains chassis the kubelwagen was germany's jeep it was a vehicle that could be mass produced that provided transportation not just for vip in command leadership and it could also function as a fighting vehicle after they tested in poland in 39 the german army went back to porsche and said there's something we want you to change about this car and one of the specifications that came from the german military about that vehicle was that it had to be able to move at the speed that german soldiers marched which is basically two and a half miles per hour porsche the man who designs you know racing cars the fastest cars in the world and yeah here he is being asked to design basically the slowest car in the world but he's a truly versatile engineer so building a military version of the kdf should be a walk in the park porsche gives it larger wheels revising its suspension and installing a gear reduction system this is a car is meant to be capable of 100 kilometers an hour um and so he's then going to come up with a whole new sort of kind of gearbox uh with a sort of reduction facility in it and of course actually ironically this gives rise uh to the mechanism that's going to enable four by fours in years to come so something does come out of it but production of the kubelwagen was slow by the end of the war the kdf's war factory had only managed to produce 50 000 vehicles the adaptation of the kdf far into the the kubelvarg and the the military vehicle it wasn't an analog success it was prone to break down it was thin skinned high velocity bullets could pass straight through it so it wasn't the um the great success that the willis jeep had been for the allies if you just compare that to the production line for the american jeep which doesn't even go into full production until the end of 41 that is coming out at a rate of 660 000 vehicles in just four years so you know when you look at 50 000 compare it to the jeep you realize it's a pitifully small number so the relatively limited amount of kubernetes never enjoyed the success that the porsche and the german army had hoped for in fact most of the nazis motorized transport was actually produced by american-owned factories commandeered by the nazis during the war [Music] it was interesting that that by far the vast majority 70 percent of the trucks produced for the german army were made by american-owned plants basically you're on american wheels going into poland at the end of the war the u.s car giants ford and gm made representations to the american government for the amount of money these factories had lost during the war [Music] ford in fact secured uh immense damages from the american government after the war even though their cologne factory was relatively unscathed but what ford didn't realize is that they had just scored a massive own goal [Music] sometime after the war the us car giant's claims for war damages incurred by the factories which the nazis had commandeered to make trucks came back to haunt them the compensation that ford and gm demand for damage their factories was actually used in a series of class actions against those car companies by slave laborers who worked at those plants now they had a lawyer you know who turned around and said well listen if ford is so eager to demand compensation for losses due to bomb damage frankly it should also be responsible for any benefits derived from any forced labor in those plants however in 1999 the judge ruled that the issues concerned involved foreign policy and were not in the jurisdiction of the courts and the case was dismissed while american industrial know-how churned out vast numbers of vehicles during the war the production of the nazi's own people's car wasn't going so well and the same could be said for the german war effort by 1945 the same german army that had introduced the world to the concept of blitzkrieg was now a shadow of itself by the end of the war there are shortages of everything there are shortages of manpower there are shortages of raw materials people aren't being paid and things just aren't being made the kdf war factory suffered along with the rest of germany's heavy industry from the relentless pounding of allied bombing [Music] at the end of the war in may 1945 the kdf factory was a complete ruin um workers were rioting um no one had been paid for weeks it was a complete shambles but all that was about to change thanks to the tireless work of one british engineer in the bombed-out war factory of strength through joy the slave laborers left behind by the retreating nazis went on an orgy of destruction it's on the 10th of april 1945 when the strength through joy factory the factory that was meant to be churning out hundreds of thousands of these people's cars is eventually abandoned by its ss guards it was in an appalling condition it had been hugely bombed and laborers who work there go about trying to destroy as much of what remains of this factory as they can you know they're ripping telephones out of walls they're sledge hammering walls down you know they are going to destroy this place because it's been their prison for four years in the summer of 1945 the british eventually took over the ruins of strength through joyville and inherited a total mess at the end of the war you know there was some discussion amongst the allies of what was going to happen to it i mean the russians just wanted to dismantle it uh you know just just obliterate it really the americans wanted to ship some of the parts back home even the australians wanted to take bits of the kdf factory back to australia so everyone was looking to to grab a bit of the cake um and so it looked like that was the end of that project engineers from the british army are dispatched to put the war factory of joy out of its misery so ultimately it falls to two men uh who are put in charge of dismantling the kdf factory and they're both british and they're both officers in what's called remy the royal electrical and mechanical engineers so you've got a man called colonel charles radcliffe and you've got his assistant a man called major ivan hurst major hurst arrives at the vw factory and and takes a look what he finds is an unexploded bomb as an ordinance officer he has to dispose of that but then he takes a close look at what there is it's not as bad as it first looks what he realizes is actually a lot of the machinery it's actually not that badly damaged it's all pretty superficial although the buildings of the kdf factory were largely smashed to bits hurst as an engineer could see that it was still relatively workable so he thinks you know hang on a bit with a little bit of work i can get this factory you know back online and i can start building these cars again he frankly thinks it's a great idea why wouldn't he because you've got this local area there wolfsburg and you've got about 17 000 unemployed people and they're desperate desperate for work um and also postwar germany you know what does it need to get back on its feet it needs some cheap transport people in order to rebuild germany and to rebuild their lives they're going to need to move around they're going to need to to help build the country back up again so what better way to do it than to give people jobs and instigate a process by which you can actually provide people with the transport that they need to rebuild the economy for that you need a car so the story goes that hurst is sifting through all this rubble when he stumbles across this almost completely intact prototype of the kdf bargain in this little workshop kind of tucked out the way um and he realizes what he's got here um and what he does is he gets his workforce to cobble together two pre-production models based on this very prototype but no one else seemed to share hearst and radcliffe's vision so hers tries to give it to a british manufacturer who just says if you think you're going to build cars in this place and you're a bloody fool so he tries to give it to ford and he's not interested either and you've even got this figure in the form of ford's right-hand man coming to look at the plant and he reports back what we're being offered here mr ford ain't worth a damn so hurst has got this brilliant idea and this nifty little prototype and nobody wants to know it's one of those classic stories isn't it a bit like the beatles not being picked up what happened to one of the most successful cars ever in the history of motoring in its early years when you you name the car manufacturer everyone turned the model down it looked like nothing was gonna happen with this car with its awful nazi tainted past so hearst tried another attack first realizes that the british army needs reliable transport and suggests that these former kdf falcons be adapted for british military use to make this happen he comes up with a clever wheeze hers is very canny he takes a couple of cars paints them in british khaki and he sends it round to the british army and says listen you're going to need a cheap run around for soldiers and officers to to get around germany this thing is brilliant it's cheap to make it's cheap to run it goes pretty fast what do you think and the british army look at it and they go yeah all right we'll have 20 000. this was the huge plant erected at hitler's order for the construction of the german people's car now they're being turned out by the factory at the rate of 600 a month and turned over to the british military government and that is the spark that that lights that the revival of of the the old kdf fargo at hq british military government in germany there are large numbers of the people's car in service with the master race as taxi drivers volkswagen was now in business but production was slow initially after the war when they started to produce a few volkswagens um they couldn't get a piece of steel big enough for the roof so if you look at some of the early models of the beetle you'll see that it's actually two bits of steel welded together and that just tells you you know exactly what hurst was up against by 1946 the cars were rolling off the production line to great fanfare but no amount of celebration could hide the fact that it was behind schedule things got so bad that hurst was reduced to bartering for parts to keep the factory running so what he starts to do is to pay for things he needs to make the cars with cars that are already finished and he actually gets into trouble for it because he gets uh the british army are effectively accused of running a black market instantly a rumor starts that um hersta's using the the restarted assembly line to trade vw's for for favors for goods every car exchanged had serial numbers paperwork for every barter deal he was able to show the investigators look look it's all above board it's all been recorded there's no element of black marketeering whatsoever the incident brought home to hearst and radcliffe the precarious nature of their operation hurston radcliffe realized that you know they can't sustain this kind of industry you know what what they need to do is to go on to a kind of proper commercial footing aimed ultimately at a domestic market germany is only going to survive and not fall victim to communism if people can have a livelihood again they felt let them produce things export them and the income they make they can use to feed themselves and this enterprise really has to be germanized if you like given back to german people the german car workers and for that they're going to need a german manager hurston radcliffe spent months searching for a german manager to take over the plant but finding someone with the right level of experience and credentials was a tall order it's pretty hard finding a manager um at that stage because anybody with any uh experience and administrative know-how had obviously had already been employed during the nazi period and in order to be employed at those sort of levels during the nazi period you were almost certainly had to be a member of the nazi party but there's a flip side how to find a german who would work for the allies to agree to to take over a factory under british control could still be seen as as a sort of betrayal of germany and a surrender to the british allies and since most industrialists in germany were pro-nazi extremely nationalistic then that that could that could be one factor in the end they found just the man heinz nordhoff was a senior uh motoring executive who'd worked for opel um general motors own april who developed the the cadeta another people's car that in fact had been replicated by the russians after the war um he was the ideal man to take on another similar project by 1942 he was working in brandenburg helping to churn out military vehicles as the russians arrive he ran away was arrested by the americans and since then he had absolutely failed to get any kind of decent job in post-war car industry and he was running a garage near hamburg and that's where hearst found him nordhoff was just the kind of manager hearst was looking for he was smart he had hands-on experience and it even shepherded a small family car into production there were only two minor stumbling blocks nordhoff doesn't like the vw he once says the car has more faults than a dog has fleas and the other problem well the americans saw him as a nazi but he had never joined the nazi party he actually wasn't a member which meant that hers could use that to try and push him through the door into volkswagen which he did that and the fact that his uh papers were lost in the russian zone as well meant that compared to a lot of people they might have had to consider he could hers could present nordhoff as having pretty much a blank history compared to a lot of other people he might have to look at who were qualified to do the job you know what nordoff may not have liked the volkswagen but actually he had a fantastic personal opportunity to wipe his own slate clean with this brilliant new job in this new post-war car industry [Music] nordhoff officially joins vw in 1947 and volkswagen was growing from strength to strength the people who had turned up their noses when it was looking for support earlier were fighting each other off for a slice of the action much to nordhoff's concern one of those prowlers was the russians obviously north office is extremely wired one his livelihood at stake but so is his life if he falls into the hands of the russians again remember they have the records of his past uh all his achievements over the last few years to rehabilitate himself will just evaporate [Music] 1948 heinz nordhoff is happily running his office as managing director of the burgeoning volkswagen factory but he's not sure he will be there for long things were coming to a head in the standoff between the soviet union and the west that would become known as the cold war so what's going on is is this iron curtain churchill's famous phrase is being slammed down at the end of world war ii with the defeat of nazi germany uh four powers occupied germany and berlin france great britain the us and the soviet union the town where the volkswagen plant was wolfsburg was in the british occupation zone so you've got the soviet zones you're stopping five miles east of wolfsburg but you know the russians desperately won that factory it feels so close for them and the allies are going to be absolutely damned if they're going to give away anything to stalin and his red menace that's not going to happen vw is staying very much in western hands now that the vw had proved its worth the americans plan to use it as an economic weapon of the cold war if you're going to face the might of the soviet union and all its satellite states you've got to have strong countries and and what needs to be strongest of all is this new country called west germany so the us decided um with secretary of state george marshall uh to launch the marshall plan in 1947 a program of us aid to 16 countries to help them recover from world war ii it's absolutely vital that west germany is a prosperous uh strong state backed up uh by a lot of american uh know-how and frankly american cash in dealing with a broken and prostrate germany the post-war policy of the united states seeks neither vengeance nor enrichment but to rebuild an economic entity on which the peace and prosperity of europe in great measure depends hence volkswagen and other plants who were operating in this environment where suddenly there was more money there were opportunities to invest there was more food around people started to be able to get jobs they could employ people we talked today very much about the german economic miracle of the 1950s and 60s well the first harbinger of that economic miracle really was the the huge success of the volkswagen beetle it becomes an emblem of western germany the rebuilding of the volkswagen works and the and the creation of the volkswagen stripped of its nazi connotations and given new connotations of post-war german recovery personal mobility the embrace of individualism of freedom of travel was symbolic of this process of the rapid recovery of a new german national consciousness and actually is now going to do everything that hitler kind of promised it was going to do you know it was under you know capitalism really going to become the people's car it was incredibly successful it was it was cheerful you know by the end of the 1950s one in three cars on the road in west germany was a beetle and now it had proven to be worth more than a dam even the american car companies wanted to get in on the act the ford motor company had initially of course rejected the volkswagen factory um now not only is the volkswagen a success um ford look at it and think this could be our rival to to their that the big american competitor general motors whose opal cadet is is proving a huge success in the west too they want a small compact car of the sort that they really don't have in america nordoff sees a potential takeover by ford as a way into the american market but the deal is a non-starter the approach by ford is very heavy-handed it's it's total control there will be no autonomy um for the german management and particularly for north and north is not someone who likes taking orders that the deal collapses it's a no-go this is now the second time that ford have not uh got their hands on on the vw beetle and they're never going to get a third opportunity meanwhile the vw beetle is selling like hotcakes actually it was the germans who came up with the name beetle not the word beetle but actually the german for beetle is kefir but it's not until 67 68 that um a us shot is produced where they refer to it as the volkswagen beetle and then we have a film which comes out called the love bug which features a 1963 beetle in it which is affectionately called herbie but it's the word bug in the title that really sticks in the american market and not the word beetle so that's why you've got bug in north america and you've got beetle just about everywhere else you know when hollywood turns you into a movie star that you've arrived and that was the beginning of everybody's love affair with the volkswagen beetle when the millionth beetle rolls off the production line it's a big celebration [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] with the celebration of the millionth vw in 1955 you got the midwife for the original concept major ivanhurst brought back from britain so you've got a british military officer there um at the celebration of one of uh west germany's great economic miracles it's a celebration that hitler would have hated because what they did is that they made the car lurid and gold and rhinestones and they had african dancers and brazilian dancers and drums people from around the world came to sort of kind of celebrate this people's car this global people's car [Music] the model that everyone had written off in 1945 was now very much the car of the moment at a time when other motor manufacturers were really living off past glories the beetle turns into an icon of 50s and swinging 60s design it's ubiquitous on both sides of the atlantic and truly becomes the people's car nordoff has a really simple design philosophy it's not to go out and uh you know constantly make lots of different versions of the same car it's not even to go out and make lots of different cars it's just to make this same car over and over again but keep refining it and making it better heinz naughtov was fascinating in that he he tended to mimic in his design philosophy the man who he came to eclipse by 1972 henry ford in that he puts all his his eggs in one basket the one model there's a few more more modern sophisticated elements put in but it's still ultimately in 1972 the same basic vehicle that it had been in 1945 this in a way i think is the secret of its success it's also very easy to make assembly lines were established all the way around the world [Music] on the 17th of february 1972 you've got a big day because it's the 15 million 7 000 and 34th beatle rolling off the assembly line at wolfsburg this now is the best selling car in the world now that's now overtaken the record held by model t which the model t ford had held for four decades but it's now been beaten by this stubby little bug which ford had once written off as not worth a dam well you know what it was worth more than his own model t and so it was that a small car designed by the nazis as part of a sinister plot to take over the world achieved its original destiny in a way that would make hitler turn in his grave the volkswagen stories is a it's a wonderful parable in a way it's about um the renewal of hope a brand that was toxic that was looked like it was down and out is not only revamped rethought re-launched but becomes very much an icon of the age and a symbol of a whole nation a symbol of renewal people didn't look at a beetle and think of it as a nazi vehicle they thought of it as a as a german car but this german was no longer a nazi aryan german it was a post-war economic miracle german it could be painted it could go hippie it could go popular it could have all sorts of things added to it to make it more functional in for holidays etc now this is an incredible turnaround germany was the enemy now everyone is embracing this fun little car that's sort of the symbol of a modern germany a democratic germany a friendly germany you've got this car designed by hitler to do something that it singularly fails to do under nazism which is to create a proper people's car and yet it takes british military bloody mindedness and proper capitalist thinking to actually make this come into life and it makes it into a concept which is all about you know freedom and liberalism and and the good side of capitalism so i kind of like the beetle as a kind of symbol of subverting the nazi nightmare and turning it into a dream it wasn't actually a success until the nazis were already history so i like that irony [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, germany ww2, nazi germany, nazi war machine, blitzkrieg, arms race, war of production, war factories, kursk, volkswagen, volkswagen beetle, second world war, timeline, timeline world history, timeline channel, timeline world history documentaries

Id: iOuw0UJjd8k

Length: 130min 4sec (7804 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022