The Last Revolutionary

kampfgruppe:

View of one of the large halls of the Rheinmetall-borsig Armament factories at Duesseldorf, Germany, on August 13, 1939.

Re-armament in the 1930s saw the development of different theories of how to prepare the German economy for total war. The first amongst these was ‘defence in depth’ which was put forward by Geog Thomas. He suggested that the German economy needed to achieve Autarky (or self sufficiency) and one of the main proponents behind this was I.G Farben. Hitler never put his full support behind Autarky and aimed for the development of ‘defence in breadth’ which espoused the development of the armed forces in all areas and was not concerned with preparing the German economy for war.