Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [202]
Elser was arrested one hundred yards from the Swiss border. In his pockets he had a postcard from the Löwenbräu, technical drawings of shells and detonators, and so on. He spent the next several years in a concentration camp, and was killed by the SS two weeks before Germany surrendered.376
If we’re going to talk about fulcrums, we need to also talk about bottlenecks. Anyone who has ever driven on a freeway knows precisely what a bottleneck is. You’re driving along fine at 69 miles per hour on a six-lane highway. You top a hill and hit your brakes because the person in front of you hit his brakes, because the person in front of him hit her brakes. Traffic slows to a crawl. People begin frantically changing lanes, trying to find one that will get them through this mess three minutes sooner. Eventually people realize they need to get into the center lane (you realize this about ten seconds after you got into the left lane, and just as three semis creep by you in the center). At long last you come across the problem: a car broken down in the left lane and a cop parked on the right. Moments later, you’re zooming again at precisely four miles over the speed limit, but for that forty-five minutes of traffic jam, you had the full bottleneck experience so beloved of motorists everywhere. Or one more example. Take a hose (or a pipeline). Kink it (or disable a pumping station). It doesn’t matter how smoothly the water (or oil) flows through the rest of the hose (or pipeline). If there is a kink (or a disabled pumping station) in even one place, the water (or oil) will not flow. Bottleneck!
Now, how does this apply on a larger scale?
Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments for the Third Reich, later commented that the Allied bombing efforts could have been more effective had they more often targeted bottlenecks. One small example of this was that when the Allies bombed tractor factories, the Germans were no longer able to manufacture engines for tanks and airplanes there until the factories had been rebuilt, but when the Allies bombed ball bearing plants, the Germans were hindered from rebuilding factories. You need ball bearings to manufacture manufacturing plants. Ball bearing plants were bottlenecks in the process.
Here’s an example of the Allies not hitting bottlenecks: the firebombing of Hamburg, which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed much of the city, cost less than two months of productivity.377 As a result of not targeting bottlenecks, Allied bombing reduced total German production by only 9 percent in 1943, and by building new factories, overworking undamaged factories, and diverting consumer production towards military ends, the Germans still met their production targets.378
But it ends up that ball bearing plants were trivial bottlenecks compared to others. Transportation networks, for example, were an even larger bottleneck. Eventually the Allies were able to destroy about two-thirds of the German rolling stock.379 A United States military analysis later determined that the difficulties this caused the Germans in moving raw materials and finished goods made the attacks on railroads “the most important single cause of Germany’s ultimate economic collapse.”380
We all know (and Hitler knew this too) that oil was another bottleneck.381 You can have the most powerful tanks in the world, and without oil they’re just big hunks of steel. Without oil you have no modern army. Heck, without oil, you have no modern civilization. Keep that in mind. Hitler’s understanding of these basic facts was one reason for his ultimately fatal choice to try to take the oil fields of the Caucasus instead of just pushing toward Stalingrad. Further, once the Allies started pounding the German synthetic oil industry—hitting the selected targets again and again and again—they were able to reduce monthly oil production from 316,000 to 17,000 tons.382 These shortages obviously crippled the German