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The secret of the factory codes.

Zeppelin5000

Zeppelin5000

Senior Member
During the war, did the allies ever figure out which code corresponded to each factory? Or was this information brought to light post-war from factory documentation? I could have sworn I read somewhere these codes were made known after the war.

Of course factories were still being bombed, but I wonder if the allies actually had a general idea on production numbers.
 
Something I’ve always wondered too, be curious if anyone knows the answer!


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Zeppelin5000 said:
During the war, did the allies ever figure out which code corresponded to each factory? Or was this information brought to light post-war from factory documentation? I could have sworn I read somewhere these codes were made known after the war.

Of course factories were still being bombed, but I wonder if the allies actually had a general idea on production numbers.
Click to expand...

The idea of them being secret codes is bit goofy, especially when some of the things have both the code and the name of the maker on them. This is especially true with electronic devices.

The allies had very good estimates on German war production. This was especially true with your higher value items, like planes and tanks. It even lead to a theory:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

The one thing that the allies did mess up on calculating was the number of production machines like lathes and mills. The big mistake was based on an assumption that the Germans would rationally run their war economy.

Let’s say one machine can make 100 parts in a 24 hour day. If you find 500 objects made in one day, you know that five machine worked to generate those parts. Get enough data points and you can figure out a nation’s industrial capacity.

HOWEVER: the Germans were only doing 10-12 hour days because of the unions and other labor issues. The rest of the time the machines were sitting dormant, doing nothing; not making war supplies. Allied nations were doing 24 runs and just assumed that the Germans would do the same thing. When allied teams went to Germany postwar they were blown away, as early all machine numbers had to be doubled. They couldn’t believe what they found. Just astonishing.
 
nirvana said:
The idea of them being secret codes is bit goofy, especially when some of the things have both the code and the name of the maker on them. This is especially true with electronic devices.

The allies had very good estimates on German war production. This was especially true with your higher value items, like planes and tanks. It even lead to a theory:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

The one thing that the allies did mess up on calculating was the number of production machines like lathes and mills. The big mistake was based on an assumption that the Germans would rationally run their war economy.

Let’s say one machine can make 100 parts in a 24 hour day. If you find 500 objects made in one day, you know that five machine worked to generate those parts. Get enough data points and you can figure out a nation’s industrial capacity.

HOWEVER: the Germans were only doing 10-12 hour days because of the unions and other labor issues. The rest of the time the machines were sitting dormant, doing nothing; not making war supplies. Allied nations were doing 24 runs and just assumed that the Germans would do the same thing. When allied teams went to Germany postwar they were blown away, as early all machine numbers had to be doubled. They couldn’t believe what they found. Just astonishing.
Click to expand...

Unions were banned in Nazi Germany. Many factories used slave labor. There were no limitations on hours of work!
 
The Germans may have “banned” unions, but there is no doubt they existed and that they continued to operate. The Soviets banned religion and we see how well that worker. The existence of slave labor has no relevance on that.

One of the more interesting issues the union men created was that of limiting the ability of a person to use a machine. Union rules required that you work so many years as a journeyman or whatever before you could have total control over a machine. The consequence of this was that you had a lot of people that were denied the ability to run tools. I believe the four years was dropped to three years as the war went on.
 
Prior to the ascension of Albert Speer, the German armaments program under Fritz Todt was a disaster. Speer had real difficulty getting the industrial potential on a wartime footing, and in fact until the very end there was chronic underutilization of manufacturing potential, mass wastage of raw materials and misuse of available manpower.

Constant specification changes, and modification to equipment under construction, meant maintainability headaches in the field as replacement parts were often not interchangeable between older and newer vehicles and weapons systems.

The Germans never put true mass production methods, practiced by the Allies and Russians, into a rational procurement program, no matter how much Speer threatened or cajoled them.

Take the M1 rifle in consideration. Disassemble 100 , dump the parts in a mass on the floor, randomly reassemble them and 100 serviceable rifles will appear. Try the same with any German weapons system and see what happens.
 
DaveDavis said:
Take the M1 rifle in consideration. Disassemble 100 , dump the parts in a mass on the floor, randomly reassemble them and 100 serviceable rifles will appear. Try the same with any German weapons system and see what happens.
Click to expand...

You get 100 Russian capture Mausers!
 
DaveDavis said:
Prior to the ascension of Albert Speer, the German armaments program under Fritz Todt was a disaster. Speer had real difficulty getting the industrial potential on a wartime footing, and in fact until the very end there was chronic underutilization of manufacturing potential, mass wastage of raw materials and misuse of available manpower.

Constant specification changes, and modification to equipment under construction, meant maintainability headaches in the field as replacement parts were often not interchangeable between older and newer vehicles and weapons systems.

The Germans never put true mass production methods, practiced by the Allies and Russians, into a rational procurement program, no matter how much Speer threatened or cajoled them.

Take the M1 rifle in consideration. Disassemble 100 , dump the parts in a mass on the floor, randomly reassemble them and 100 serviceable rifles will appear. Try the same with any German weapons system and see what happens.
Click to expand...

All of this, exactly. The Nazis may have run a totalitarian state that put its enemies into camps or mass graves, but that doesn’t mean that they knew how to run a war economy. While Germans have this stereotype of being organized Teutonic overlords, and they were to a degree, the truth is that they fumbled a lot of things. Whether it was focusing on designs that were too new, or too old, or permitting competitive bidding between companies that created a jumble of vehicles that had no spare parts commonality... it was a mess. The US govt had unskilled women riveting planes together with less than a month of training. The Soviets had children running machines at all hours of day or night, all while the Germans prevented a man with “only” two years worth of training from running a lathe. Then they filled in the gaps with untrained and spiteful slave laborers who loved to see things leave the factory with defects. It’s absurd, and it was their own doing.
 
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