How could Germany afford waging WWII?
score:3
Accepted answer
GDP is a per annum figure. You are conflating wealth and income, and ignoring that Germany was a wealthy country in both resources (although not in all war-critical resources such as oil and iron) and human capital.
Additionally, Germany was able to extort vast quantities of both material and labour from its conquered territories until late in 1944. Recall that most of the concentration camps were slave-labour camps, designed to work inmates to death in support of the war effort, and not the abhorrent death camps designed for wholesale killing. However, even some of the latter (eg Auschwitz-Birkenau) extracted slave labour from able-bodied inmates before slaughtering them.
Ironically, one of the ways in which Germany minimized cost was it's minimal use of motorized and mechanized troops. Through the entire war most units relied exclusively on horse-drawn transport, with only the Panzer divisions and a roughly equal number of Panzer Grenadier divisions, being excepted.
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