The War Illustrated, Volume 8, No. 188, Page 246, September 1, 1944.

A yearly average of 12,000,000 tons of liquid fuel has been needed by Germany to support her mechanized forces alone. The supply now is running dangerously short; for the Nazi home front, too, the fount of essential fuel is almost dry. Dr. EDGAR STERN-RUBARTH explains whence supplies have been forthcoming-and how the red light of danger now glows for the Reich.

Germany is extremely poor in natural oil. There are but a few small wells near Wictze, in Hanover, which were hardly worth exploiting before the war. Before squeezing her into his political serfdom, Hitler found Rumania willing enough to sell to him the better part, and finally all, of her production, then the largest in Europe. With the conquest of Poland, he found a second reservoir north of the Carpathians, the oilfields of Borislav, Drohobycz, Stanislovo, and Jaslo.

Technical progress accounts for the now rich yields of his own Hanoverian wells, of an originally neglected field at Zistersdorf, in Austria, and of the previously unimportant and only field in France, at Pechelbronn in Alsace. But all that together would not have given him more than half the desired quantity of the precious fuel; and that is why, on the one hand, he ordered his armies’ mad drive into the Caucasus and, on the other hand, had hastened the development of plants for the hydrogenation of coal and lignite.

There are no official figures; but a total requirement of between 13 and 15 million tons a year, between 10 and 12 of them for purely military purposes, is a guess based on sound foundations. Theoretically, Hitler was just able to get these quantities during the first three or four years of "his" war, and even to accumulate some emergency stocks by looting the huge fuel dumps of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France. But always it was a rather precarious balance, as the table of approximate production figures (tons) in this page shows.

OIL-SHALE, potato spirit and other substitutes had to make up for the missing quantities, while generator gas came to the rescue, with an ever more restricted allocation of liquid fuel for civilian transport and other requirements, up to the end of the fourth year of war. The scores of oil refineries, originally mostly in Rumania, were multiplied by new or enlarged plants all along the river Danube, in Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany; new hydrogenation plants were commissioned wherever coal and lignite deposits permitted, in the Ruhr valley, in central Germany, in Moravia, so as to make make up for the natural depletion of the Rumanian wells, hastened by war conditions and the lack of necessary machinery. And without the Allies’ systematic bombing campaign even the demands of a three front war might have been met, to some extent.

Months of Allied bombing have altered all that. Systematically, one after the other, refineries and hydrogenation plants have been flattened out all over Germany and occupied countries; the oil wells themselves, at Ploesti and near Pitesti in Rumania, became one of the foremost targets of British and American bomber fleets operating from Italy and, of late, from Russia; and, together with their huge distillation plants at Giurgiu, Constantza, Campina and elsewhere they should be pretty well devastated by now. The main plants-there are about 24 altogether- for synthetic fuel: the Leuna Werke the I.G. Farben Trust’s and probably all Europe’s biggest industrial works, between Hallae and Merseburg, the same combine’s plant at Ludwigshafen, the Scholven plant at Buer in the Ruhr valley, and many minor ones, shared that fate. Nor did the small refineries along the Danube escape; and as careful watch was kept over all repairs done by specialists running around like rats in a cage, Allied air attacks were renewed as soon as improvement seemed imminent.

The results became, eventually, disastrous for Hitler’s war machine. The total output of fuel, natural as well as synthetic, fell in June 1944 to only 30 per cent of the requirements of the German forces alone, at a time when their stocks had dwindled to a bare two months minimum quota for the army and three months for the air force. During that month of crisis, the Nazis managed to increase the output to nearly 50 per cent, only to see it affected again by new and heavier attacks, while their meagre stocks had been further depleted. First priority over all war material and ammunition was granted to machinery and repair material for oil plants of any kind; all technicians, engineers and workers who had ever held a job in an oil or hydrogenation plant were at once released from the armed forces and the most drastic orders for economizing petrol and lubricants were issued.

Thus, the German railways, already ramshackle and overburdened, were deprived of 25 per cent of their quota of lubricant oils and fats; the tank training units, and even the Luftwaffe in all its training camps, base airfields and transport wings, suffered a cut of no less than 50 per cent; the subsidiary army units such as engineers, pioneers, signallers and so on were wholly or partly deprived of their motorized transport and, like the ambulances in all towns and cities not under permanent threat of air attacks, were provided with makeshift equipment for going back to horse-drawn locomotion.

Clumsy, heavy, generator-gas driven vehicles put in an appearance, even in front of our own jeeps and motor- lorries of the latest design; and the 10 th Panzer Division in Normandy, except for its tanks, runs entirely on wood-gas. Apart from the official and decreed economies-disastrous as their consequences may be with whole units plodding along at a speed of two or three miles an hour while others move with ten times that speed-the lack of sufficient stocks everywhere, and of fuel for transport engaged in carrying petrol to forward units, has brought about local shortages which seriously endanger military operations. Hundreds of planes and thousands of vehicles, tanks, and guns had to be abandoned to the Russians simply because there was no fuel-not even enough to destroy them.

This state of affairs is bound to become still worse with the loss of the Polish oilfields (Borislav and Drohobycz fell to the Russians in August 1944). A Russian penetration into the Wallachian plains would accomplish that which our air assaults systematically prepared: Hitler’s loss of well-nigh all his supplies in natural oil. He might fight against these looming shadows of utter defeat by cutting out all motorized transport at home, and by depriving industries and craftsmen of the small ration so far left to them.

But all that will only accelerate his breakdown. For the workers, engaged in 10, 12 or 14 hrs of daily uninterrupted toil, will be unable to reach their benches; and thousands of small but useful factories all over Germany and in occupied countries will have to close down for lack of petrol or paraffin oil for driving their engines. Thus, the collapse of Hitler’s war machine within a very few months is inevitable, because he will be unable to feed its motor.