Starting on February and lasting until around the middle of the year the war economy woke up from its relative slumber and soared for one last time. The most spectacular surge was in aircraft, from 1,323 units in February to 3,538 in September, most of them fighters. As the Speer Ministry had just begun to coordinate with the Luftwaffe’s bloc through Otto Saur in the newly-created Jaegerstab (and later absorbed it in August), this burst so late in the war under hostile conditions is the triumphant final chapter of the Speer myth. Speer himself was removed from day-to-day business from the first weeks of the year until early May, so Milch was effectively still in charge; the Jaegerstab mattered insofar as it made Speer’s “secret sources” available to the Luftwaffe. It is stated to have rationalized and revolutionized a previously “feather-beaded” field, a claim dismissed by a contemporary RLM study. The Luftwaffe’s producers were competent. The reason for the particularly good performance of this field is that over 1943 the RLM had expanded aeroengine production and acquired 243,000 workers on its own and received 317,000 from Sauckel and 100,000 from the concentration camps.
Within the war economy as a whole, this period reflects its adaptation to the bombing campaign aswell as the campaign itself becoming less effective. Rather than continuing to strike the Ruhr, in 1943 the Allies shifted attention to the less economically critical target of Berlin, while the Luftwaffe improved its defensive capabilities. It was also caused by payoff from the early war investment boom and harsher demands, including working hours, from the German and foreign workforces, the former compensated with rewards but the latter only with greater repression. Foreign workers were used more actively and their numbers still increased, with the notable case of Hungary’s Jews.

Over mid-late 1944 each war industry reached its peak production and then slid into oblivion until the rest of the war. Aircraft, the most complex, peaked earlier in the summer, while ammunition did so in September. This collapse was both internal from the buildup of inflation and external from a new phase of strategic bombing. In the first half of the year the RAF and USAAF had cemented their air superiority and, after focusing on the invasion of France, came down in full force against Germany. City after city was scorched with tens of thousands of casualties. But what was effective was neither the area bombing of cities nor strikes against specific plants, but the strangulation of infrastructure, particularly in the Ruhr, creating a coal famine across the entire economy.
The arms race started in the 30s had finally come to its conclusion. Even though the German war machine peaked later than its Allied counterparts it was still several times smaller in all fields. All efforts to raise production could not change the course of the arms race, not for German failure but because, as anticipated even before the war, the world coalition would in time bring its overwhelming economic superiority to bear.
This cemented the Reich’s fate and made the last moments of the war in Europe their bloodiest.