A Study of the German Machine Tool Industry in the Weimar and Nazi Area

德国机床工业在第一次世界大战期间因生产武器而膨胀起来，预计战后将面临严重危机。实际上，20世纪20年代的头几年是繁荣的，但到了1924年，情况发生了根本性的变化，通货膨胀结束了，许多公司陷入了困境。通过这场全国性的“合理化运动”，金属加工行业在其中处于趋同地位，德国机床的技术水平得到了迅速提高，这使得德国机床接受了苏联、俄罗斯的大量订单，开始了5年工业化计划。20世纪20年代末，外国需求占了主导地位，而德国的需求再次陷入停滞。1929年的世界危机对德国的机床工业造成了巨大打击。1933年希特勒上台时，机床工业正处于萧条的深渊，生产能力严重过剩。与纳粹党的重整军备政策和机动化政策并行，机床生产逐年增加，1938年德国的机床库存超过了美国。可以说，这可能是希特勒决定战争的原因之一。机床制造能力的扩大，其与弹药生产的相关性以及二战期间生产计划与实践之间的差距等几个问题都没有得到回答，作为下一个研究项目。

The German machine tool industry, which swelled up in producing weapons during World War I, was expected to face serious crisis after the war. Actually however it came a boom in the first few years of the 1920s, It was 1924 that changed the situation drastically, when the inflation came to an end and many firms fell into difficulties. Only those firms which tried to lean business resources could survive, Through this nation wide "rationalization movement", in which metal-working sector stood in convergent position, technological standard of the German machine tools improved rapidly.This improvement led to accept large order of machine tools from Soviet , Russia, which started the 5 years industrialization plan. While in the late 1920s foreign demand took the lead, demand in Germany became stagnant once more. The world crisis of 1929 stroke a great blow on the machine tool industry in Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933 the machine tools industry was at the depth of the depression and had huge excess production capacity.Parallel with rearmament policy and motorization policy by the Nazi party the production of machine tools so increased year after year that German inventory of machine tools overwhelmed that of the United States in 1938. It could be said that this might be one of the reason why Hitler decided the war.Several questions such as expansion of machine tool building capacity, its correlation with munitions production and a gap between production plan and practice during WW2 were left unanswered as next research project.