WI: No Nazi slave labour

[NORGCO]

What if Germany in WWII had calculated that maximum possible production of appropriate quality weapons meant avoiding slave labour?

From the statistics I have seen and one or two people I have known who had family working as slaves in those factories the slaves did as little as possible, as badly as possible and sabotaged everything possible. I have seen calculations that given all that and the number of guards it would actually have made better economic sense to send the slaves home and have the guards do the work instead. Other countries of course brought a far bigger percentage of women into the workplace to keep up production, but AS I UNDERSTAND IT the Nazi's kept this to a minimum and used slaves instead.

So, would it work? Was it possible to mobilise enough German women into the factories to do the work? Would having the workers want to produce more and better instead of less and worse change anything meaningful - reliable King Tiger tanks? - or would the difference be marginal?

 

[LeX]

There were plenty of things the Germans could have done to make their war effort more efficient. But the issue here is that we are dealing with the goddamn Nazis. Their ideology means that they are going to make stupid assumptions like "women shouldn't work" or "we need to waste valuable infrastructure on wiping out the 'untermenschen'". Without Nazis you can still have militaristic Germany that goes on the warpath in the 30s or 40s but then you would be talking about a different scenario.

 

[NORGCO]

There were plenty of things the Germans could have done to make their war effort more efficient. But the issue here is that we are dealing with the goddamn Nazis. Their ideology means that they are going to make stupid assumptions like "women shouldn't work" or "we need to waste valuable infrastructure on wiping out the 'untermenschen'". Without Nazis you can still have militaristic Germany that goes on the warpath in the 30s or 40s but then you would be talking about a different scenario.

A totally different timeline, not just a variation on OTL then?

 

[LeX]

A totally different timeline, not just a variation on OTL then?

Well, it'll be similar because the divergence is only about a decade before WW2 as it happened IOTL, but the war and situation will be different and only bear cosmetic resemblances.

Now that's assuming you have some dictator other than Hitler come to power as the divergence. What you could also do is change something in the way Hitler thinks, say in his childhood, in his wartime experience, practically anything leading up to his seizure of power. That way, since the change only affects Hitler, you can still have him get into power and be a Nazi, but his personality and speciffic views, habit, etc., are different from the OTL Hitler.

 

[altamiro]

One could probably do it the Rommel way - conscripted labour which is still paid, so that people may not get a choice over their conscription, but get paid better if they work better. Rommel insisted on this procedure being used in construction of the Atlantic Wall - however this were French civilians, not what Nazis considered "subhumans" from the East.
This would work if the bottleneck would be labour shortage, not a lack of strategic materials and of funds as it was OTL.

 

[Shaby]

IIRC the real bottleneck was the food. The Germans were simply unable to feed all their workers and pretty soon devolved into 'paying' the most efficient slave workers in food bonuses. This in turn meant that less efficient workers became progressively less and less efficient and eventually starved.

Also, without the slave labor Germany wouldn't be able to mobilize as many troops as they did. And as altamiro says, whatever they do, they'd still lack raw materials to employ their industry to the maximum of its potential.

 

[Max Sinister]

I once read that in 1944 one fourth of German arms were made by slave labor.