1941: Escalating the Exploitation of Foreign Territories

Historians have traditionally maintained that a significant amount of the resources that supported the German war economy in World War II came from outside the national territories. While this still holds true, at least two crucial issues have become a point of controversy in the last decades: the role played by foreign resources in the German war effort as a whole and the significance of this finding for an overall reassessment of the military strategy of the Third Reich.

Alan Milward's well-known thesis of a planned economic short-war strategy (wirtschaftliche Blitzkriegstrategie) assumed that from the very beginning the Reich had envisaged the exploitation of foreign countries in order to fill the gaps in the undermobilized German economy. Rolf-Dieter Müller criticized Milward's theories by pointing out that the undermobilization of the German war economy was not part of a strategy, since Hitler had always striven for a total war, but was simply due to the administrative chaos that marked the power structure of the Third Reich. This view has also been rejected by recent analyses that shed new light on the shortcomings of the statistical evidence used so far for evaluating Germany's war production. A recent analysis based on alternative and more accurate statistical sources called into question the very idea that has dominated the historiography since its very beginning, namely, that the German economy was undermobilized.