Financial History Issue 133 (Spring 2020) | Page 32

A Nazi oil base is destroyed by a Soviet air raid during World War ll. oil as the main fuel for its navy, it had very little oil within its own boundaries, its government supported and financed an extensive program to synthesize liquid fuel from coal and its leaders coveted extensive oil fields in nearby territories. Hitler realized that building a war machine capable of making Nazi Ger- many the dominant force in Europe would require the acquisition of large and reli- able sources of oil to fuel the tanks, trucks, ships and planes of the Wehrmacht. As chancellor in 1933, he extended important financial and political support to chemical company I.G. Farben’s nascent efforts at producing synthetic oil from coal. Dur- ing the next few years, the Nazi regime acquired total control of what was becom- ing a very successful synthetic fuel indus- try. Germany secured additional supplies of oil when it annexed Austria in March 1938 and when Hitler signed the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939. When Germany initiated a new war in Europe the following month, it gained yet another source of oil—the Galician fields in southeastern Poland. During the next nine months, German forces faced little opposition as they over- ran Norway, the Low Countries and France. In advancing westward, they were able to capture the oil fields in Alsace and the stockpiles of oil that lay in France and the Netherlands. Germany secured yet another source of oil in November 1940 when the Kingdom of Romania joined the Axis and contributed the output of its Ploesti oil fields to the members of that alliance. In December, Hitler began planning to move his powerful army eastward towards the vast lebensraum (living space) he saw in the Soviet Union. Doing so seemed like a sensible idea. Several months earlier, Soviet troops had moved into sections of Roma- nia. Hitler considered them significant threats to the Ploesti oil fields. Invading the Soviet Union would not only preclude that threat, but would also gain Germany access to both the farmlands of the Ukraine and the oil fields of the Caucasus. In June 1941, German military forces began what they expected to be the 30    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Spring 2020  | www.MoAF.org blitzkrieg invasion of the Soviet Union. They won many battles, but they did not fulfill Hitler’s expectation of destroy- ing their Soviet adversaries within three weeks. By the end of October, the for- ward-most invading units were still 200 miles from Moscow and 400 miles from the oil fields of the Caucasus. With winter closing in, the fuel-starved Germans made one final push to conquer the Soviet capi- tal. A sharp counteroffensive pushed them back 150 miles before the Germans were forced to halt their offensive operations in the Soviet Union in January 1942. It did not take long for Hitler to plan another invasion into Soviet territory. In June 1942, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Blau. Its main objective was the seizure of the oil fields at Maikop, Grozny and Baku in the heart of the Caucasus. The task force headed for that territory was accompanied by a 15,000-man Tech- nical Oil Brigade, whose job would be to rehabilitate (if necessary) and operate (certainly) the captured oil fields. The army reached Maikop in early August,