Why Didn't Germany Win World War II?
And what lessons can the United States apply to today's defense industrial contests?
Arthur Herman is the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II. His newest book, Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump, will be released by Hachette/Center Street on April 21. Find him on X at @ArthurLHerman
It’s a question historians have often asked themselves. It’s one Nazis caught in the Führerbunker, and later on trial at Nurenberg, must have pondered, as well.
What went wrong, they wonder, when Nazi Germany had so many trump cards in its hand?
A world-class industrial economy.
A first-rate military. (“The most professionally skillful army of modern times,” according to Martin van Creveld, one that, according to Colonel Trevor Dupuy’s analysis, was able to inflict 50 percent more casualties on its British and American opponents under all conditions than its opponents were able to inflict on it).1
An exquisite community of brilliantly trained scientists and engineers.
Above all, a fistful of advanced—even futuristic—military technologies. These included the first jet fighters and aircraft, the first killer drones and ballistic missiles, the first precision-guided munitions (the Fritz-X radio-guided bomb), the world’s most advanced submarine design, and an atomic bomb program underway by 1939.
Imagine what might have happened if Germany had managed to deploy its jet aircraft during the Battle of Britain. Imagine if the V-2 rockets had been improved to reach Moscow and even New York City. Imagine Germany using the first atomic bomb to stop the D-Day invasion, as many in the Manhattan Project had feared.
Yet the truth is, Germany lacked what the United States had and was able to bring to the other Allies: an industrial base large and flexible enough to scale production of the military technologies that did give the Allies their decisive edge: tanks, trucks, conventional fighters and bombers, artillery pieces and machine guns, submarines and destroyers and aircraft carriers—by 1944 eight a month—as well as the freighters needed to carry all this material to battlefields across two oceans.2
The rest—including the atomic bomb—was largely icing on a massively conventional cake.
That’s not to say innovation didn’t play its part in victory. The weapons the Allies started the war with—with the exception of the Supermarine Spitfire fighter—were markedly inferior to those used by the Axis. By the last year of the war, however, America and its allies outclassed the Axis in every area that counted, from tanks to fighters to bombers to artillery fuses.
That truth reveals a larger point: innovative military technologies don’t change the larger strategic balance. They express the larger strategic balance. In that sense, Germany was beaten two years before the war actually ended. By the summer of 1943 the Allies had taken Sicily and the Soviets had crushed the Wehrmacht’s last offensive in the East at Kursk—while U-boat losses forced the German navy to halt its campaign to control the Atlantic at the end of May.
People began avoiding giving the Nazi salute whenever they could. The German security service reported that no senior industry leaders still believed the war was winnable.3
Yet the war itself dragged on until May 1945. What followed was simply a regime struggling to escape its inevitable fate: downfall and defeat.
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So went wrong for Nazi Germany?
Let’s start with its industrial base, the third largest in the world in 1939. (Tied for second with the Soviet Union if Austria and Czechoslovakia are included).
Further: with the fall of France and occupation of Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway, Nazi Germany had captured the industrial heart of Europe. Hitler controlled an economic bloc equal to the GDP of the United States, when you include allies like fascist Italy—even excluding Germany’s potential ally and biggest trading partner in 1940-1, the Soviet Union. Germany’s sphere of influence at its zenith covered one-fifth of the world’s population: or roughly that of the entire British Empire.4
Yet even with this formidable base, the German war machine lacked two essential ingredients. The first was energy, specifically oil, while the United States was able to supply its allies and meet its own needs and more throughout the war. 5 Access to sufficient oil to keep its armies, navy, and air force running was Germany’s Achilles heel, right from the start.
The other was workforce. Here Germany’s first-rate military demanded more men than the nation’s demographics could support, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Incredibly, by the fall of 1941 virtually every German male in his twenties had already been called up.6 Every demand for more men afterward to fight a three-front war (Western Europe, Russia, and North Africa/Italy) increasingly drained manpower from factories and shipyards; the only alternative for keeping the industrial base going was slave labor. By 1944 more than one-third of workers in the German war industries were unwilling foreigners, including Jews destined for the gas chamber. Even in 1943, 80 percent of the workforce making Stuka bombers were Russians.7
Foreign workers, of course, were not as efficient as German counterparts. Then, even when a superhuman effort was able to surge the production of fighters in the desperate months of 1944, still there was no fuel for flying them.
What about the much-vaunted secret weapons?
We can start with jet propulsion. Heinkel first tested a jet-powered prototype in August 1939, a month before war broke out. Both Heinkel and Messerschmidt immediately plunged into developing jet aircraft. So swift was their progress that some worried the entire prop-driven aircraft development program might be in jeopardy.8 Hitler gave his enthusiastic backing to Messerschmidt’s first designs in the summer of 1942. By the end of May 1943, the Air Ministry was pushing Messerschmidt to start mass production.
If Messerschmidt had somehow succeeded, the entire U.S. daylight bombing campaign that fall might have been swept from the skies by squadrons of Me 262’s. But Messerschmidt couldn’t do it. Going from prototype to production models takes thousands of hours of testing and evaluation, then months of experimental series production. Messerschmidt had no AI or computers or other information technology to accelerate the process; even the Junkers-Jumo jet engine the fighter required wasn’t ready for limited series production until the summer of 1944, when the Allied bombing campaign was approaching its peak.
Instead, it was a prop-driven fighter plane, the P-51 Mustang, which had shifted the balance in the air war over Germany and Europe, escorting thousands of prop-driven bombers to their targets. The Eighth Air Force’s fighter strength quadrupled in just eight months in 1944, while German air losses that summer amounted to half its aircraft and one-quarter of its pilots every month.9
When the 262 finally did take to the air in September, it was still largely in a trial and development unit. Its top pilots died all the time from accidents, while its slow landing speed made it an easy target for P-51’s roaming the skies at will.
Despite claims by German air ace Adolf Galland and others that it was Hitler’s obsession with using the 262 as a fighter-bomber instead of an interceptor that kept it from being a decisive weapon, what actually kept the German jet program from tipping the balance in the air war “was not incompetence or conservatism but the debilitating material limitations of the German war economy”—limitations that did not constrain America’s industrial base.10
Something similar happened with Germany’s rocket program. Here again the Germans were off to a flying start, as it were, going back to 1923 when a German scientist published The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. The German army set up its first top-secret rocket laboratory in 1932, just as Hitler was becoming chancellor. Its first employee was a 20-year-old student, Wernher von Braun.11
The funding for testing and development in 1935 was generous enough to enable von Braun and colleagues to set up a launch pad and supporting lab and production facilities at Peenemünde in northern Germany. Still, it took six years of relentless testing and serial failures before the team had a rocket prototype with which to approach Adolf Hitler in August 1941.
The Führer became rocketry’s enthusiastic champion and hailed the new missile as a military revolution. But it would be another year before the rocket had its first successful operational flight in October 1942, just before American and British troops landed in North Africa in Operation Torch. Nonetheless, Hitler dubbed the rocket “the decisive weapon of the war,” and ordered five thousand for immediate production.
That was a fantasy number. In fact, technical difficulties held up production repeatedly. Then, when the Luftwaffe offered its own “flying bomb,” the so-called V-1, resources were diverted to bring it into production first. It wasn’t until July 1943 that it seemed von Braun finally had the missile he and Hitler wanted: but an RAF air raid the next month virtually destroyed the Peenemünde site, setting production back months.
Now the SS stepped in, taking over production of the V-2 (as it was now designated) in a brand-new site deep underground in the Harz mountains, using slave labor to build the site and then construct the rockets. By January 1944, production finally got underway with an initial contract for 12,000. That month SS managers produced exactly three V-2s, all of which had serious production defects.12 It took another eight months before the first V-2 was fired at its principal target, London. Others were launched almost daily at Antwerp, where the Allies were building up for their final offensive into Germany.
In the end, six thousand V-2’s were built—half the promised contract—and 1,403 were launched, with just 517 landing on or near their target. Unlike the V-1, the supersonic V-2 arrived virtually without warning, with a huge field of destruction.
Together with the V-1—of which some 2,420 landed on target out of a total production of 30,000—the V-2 earned its reputation as Hitler’s “terror weapon.” Together they killed some 9,000 British civilians.
Still, it’s instructive to realize that the 2,500 tons of explosives both weapons delivered over a nine-month campaign equaled less than a quarter percent of the tonnage the Americans and RAF unloaded on Germany during the same period. 13 That destructive power depended not on advanced space-age technologies, or even innovative scientific breakthroughs, but a grim dedication to putting massive amounts of steel on target, while Allied air forces decimated the Luftwaffe and Allied armies swept back the Wehrmacht month after month.
Whether that Allied bombing campaign had a strategic impact on the war worthy of the cost in materiel and lives has been debated almost from the moment the war ended. What we can say is that the Germans themselves knew that while the bombing did not and could not halt their wartime production, it could severely curtail its potential. When German industrial leaders met in January 1945, they discovered that in 1944 they had produced 35 precent fewer tanks, 31 percent fewer planes, and 42 percent fewer military trucks than planned—almost entirely due to Allied bombing.14
By contrast, during that same year America’s factories and shipyards were producing a warplane every five minutes, eight aircraft carriers a month, fifty merchant ships a day, and 150 tons of steel every minute—whereas Germany was lucky to get a third of America’s industrial output that same year. 15
Sclerotic production also doomed Germany’s efforts to build its advanced submarine, the Type XXI, of which 118 were commissioned but only one actually carried out a combat patrol before the war ended.16
Likewise, Germany’s radio-guided munition, the so-called Fritz X, did severe damage to the handful of ships it struck in the Mediterranean when it was deployed in 1943 (including, ironically, an Italian battleship), but then faded from use when the Allies learned how easy it was to disrupt its radio guidance using an early version of electronic warfare.17
Which brings us to the ultimate weapon: the atomic bomb.
One disadvantage of the German nuclear program was Hitler’s lack of interest. For Hitler and other Nazis, atomic physics was still “Jewish science,” even after most of those Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein had left Germany. Hitler never attempted to stop the program, but he never gave it the funding or passionate attention of other secret weapons.
One big advantage was that many of the leading scientists who had created nuclear physics were still working for the Reich, and most were involved in the atomic bomb project from its start in 1939. That year, chemist Otto Hahn published the first paper demonstrating that uranium was capable of nuclear fission; German physicists soon realized a fission reaction would produce an explosion of almost unimaginable power. Another chemist and member of the Nazi Party, Paul Harteck, alerted the Wehrmacht of this potential, and by September—even as German tanks were rolling into Poland—the army had set up its first research team and lab. In December, Germany’s star nuclear physicist, Werner Heisenberg, explained in detail how such a weapon could be created.
Unfortunately for the Nazis, and very fortunately for the Allies, the German scientists chose the most complicated and circuitous path imaginable to create the U-235 needed for fission. They decided using plutonium as a cheaper substitute was impractical (plutonium would be the basis for the bomb the Americans would drop on Nagasaki) and opted for using intermediate materials to slow the nuclear fission reaction of U-235 down to controllable levels. One of those materials was graphite, but the German aircraft industry needed all the graphite it could get, so that wasn’t an option. Instead, the German program had to rely on deuterium or “heavy water,” which had only one source: a hydroelectric plant in far-off Norway.
Once the Allies caught on to what the Germans were doing—even as their own joint U.S.-British-Canadian atomic bomb project was surging ahead—they sent commando teams to disrupt the production and outflow of the heavy water from Vemork in Norway.18 In the end, the Germans never produced more than half the heavy water the program needed; a disappointed Wehrmacht passed the program over to the Education Ministry in 1942, a sure sign no one took the building of an atomic bomb very seriously. When Allied investigators examined the remains of the program in 1945, they found Germany were still years away from building anything like the weapons which America had used to end the war in Japan.
The Germans had also seriously underestimated the amount of U-235 needed to create a nuclear reaction leading to an explosion, thanks to Heisenberg’s miscalculations (whether he did so accidentally or deliberately, in order to undermine the Nazi effort, is still not clear). The larger point is that the German program was entirely dominated by scientists rather than engineers: scientists who were more interested in proving theory than devising workable solutions. When they ran into technical difficulties, as they often did, the program stalled and hesitated.
By contrast, the Allied bomb project found all the engineers it needed through the private companies who were intimately involved in every stage of the program, like DuPont, Union Carbide, Monsanto, Chrysler, Stone & Webster, and many others. America and Britain never hesitated to commit its best minds but also its best companies to the project, knowing they would find the solutions to whatever obstacles the program faced.19 And when the British realized it was a project beyond their industrial resources, they quickly handed it over to the Americans and American industry.
No such hand-off was possible with the German program. Instead, years were wasted in large part because the resources were never there, material or intellectual, to achieve a final result. Even the greatest industrial power in the world, devoting 150,000 personnel and $2 billion to the Manhattan Project ($50 billion in today’s dollars), could not manage to create a workable bomb until after Germany had been defeated.
With the atomic bomb, like so many other secret weapons programs, the Germans were in a race to nowhere. The simple fact is that the United States and the allies had the resources to devote to victory. Germany did not.
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What are the lessons for today?
The first is worth repeating: new defense technologies, no matter how advanced, don’t change the strategic balance. They express the strategic balance, reflecting the material resources in men, machines, and production that created that balance in the first place. Even the atomic bomb was used when the war was already won in Europe and effectively won in the Pacific. By the time Germany’s jet fighters and V-2 rockets became operational, Germany was all but defeated. It was Allied armies and industries, not secret weapons, that determined the tide of war.
The second lesson resonates with today’s defense industrial contest with China and Russia, and even with the current war against Iran.
It’s often said that war is a contest of wills, and the object of victory is to destroy the opponent’s will to fight. That applies to cold wars as much as hot, kinetic ones.
It’s important to acknowledge that China has been on an industrial production “war footing” resembling the United States in World War Two for several years now, while the United States itself has more closely resembled Nazi Germany in its obsession with exquisite and expensive weapons systems like the F-35 and Gerald Ford-class carriers, and an equally exquisite industrial base focused on quality at the expense of quantity.20
Still, if dire warnings about China’s proficiency in technology and defense production serve to discourage and dismay Americans instead of encouraging us to urgent action, then the fault lies not with Beijing but closer to home. The American industrial base that produced victory in World War II no longer exists, but a new industrial landscape is developing before our eyes.21 With it produce a host of new defense companies that can compete with the fabled Big Six--,Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and BAE Systems Inc.--ones that bring those new technologies like AI and autonomy directly in line with productive resources and capabilities.22
And that’s the key point. In the end, what defeated Germany weren’t better weapons or even more industrial output, but the ability to bring the two together in an ever-ascending spiral of innovation and production. No other country, not even China, is able to match the promise the United States has of doing it again.
The crucial question now is, are we poised to end up like Germany during World War II, stuck with lots of great innovative weapons but no means of scaling them into action? Or will we end up like our parents and grandparents in the United States, welding innovation and productivity together into an invincible combination?
The answer will determine the future of the 21st century.
Quoted in Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (New York, 1984), 220, 184.
Summarized in A. Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York, 2012).
A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, 603.
A Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York, 2006), 383-5.
A. Herman, From Fueling Victory to Running on Empty: Lessons from American Energy Policy in War and Peace (Hudson Institute, 2023).
Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, 513.
Tooze, 517-18.
Tooze. 620-1.
R. Overy, Why The Allies Won (New York, 1995),124.
Tooze, 620.
Overy, 238.
Tooze, 623.
Overy, 270.
Overy, 131.
Herman, Freedom’s Forge, 283.
David Mason, U-Boat: The Secret Menace, )New York), 1968.
R. Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-4 (New York, 2007), 217-9.
A. Herman, The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World (New York, 2021), 386-93.
Tooze, 510.
Seth G. Jones, The American Edge: The Military Tech Nexus and the Sources of Great Power Dominance, Oxford, 2025.
A. Herman, “The Start-Up Paradox: The Coming Red Shift in Innovation,” Civitas Outlook, Feb. 26, 2026 https://www.civitasoutlook.com/research/the-start-up-paradox-the-coming-red-shift-in-innovation-2c4540fa-5173-4aa3-8c5a-8145c51cb642 (
Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart, Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III (New York, 2026).