Bernd
01/17/2020 (Fri) 04:05:56
No.34087
del
4)There weren't much women to be mobilized. The majority were already in war-vital work, not in the weapons factories but in the fields which were just as important. The topic of fields is interesting because Germany could free up a lot of manpower by modernizing its rural sector, but this is long-term structural change and not something that takes place in wartime. A lot could have changed if the Reich had pursued agricultural modernization in peacetime, but this topic was left to the postwar, when it could be dealt with at the same time as the settlement of conquered territory.
This line, however, is not quite wrong as after 1943 there were still manpower to take from the civilian sector and output to squeeze from it by demanding more working hours. However, exploiting it in the early war wouldn't produce late war results because of the limitation of how much there was to mobilize and said results had other sources. Further, there was probably an upper limit to how fast mobilization could happen. So in this case Hitler could have Goebbels do his Sportpalast speech in 1940 and have some extra production but not all that much.