Planning Aircraft Production in Germany

Abstract

There are plenty of studies of Germany’s part in the air war from 1939 to 1945. Some of them deal in general terms with the production of aircraft, and a few touch on the problems of planning, usually from the high ground of strategy. It is obviously much more important to establish whether the right decisions were made as to the scale of aircraft production, the type of aircraft to be built and the balance between different types than to pursue the question how these decisions were translated into production programmes or how the activities of all the firms involved were coordinated. How planning in this sense proceeded is also much more difficult to establish because it requires an intimate knowledge of what went on within the Air Ministry and within the firms over the six years of war and much of what one needs to know is not recorded. When one does come across a book that throws light on the subject it is apt, like Homze’s Arming the Luftwaffe,¹ to deal exclusively with pre-war arrangements or, like Overy’s PhD thesis on German aircraft production,² stops, nominally at least, half-way through the war.