Status Updates From The Wages of Destruction: T...

"The plan called for the German armoured columns to drive for three days and three nights without interruption. To ensure that the drivers could go without sleep, the quartermasters of the advanced units stocked up with tens of thousands of doses of Pervitin, the original formulationof the amphetamine now known as ‘speed’, but more familiar in the 1940s as ‘tank chocolate’
Panzerschokolade)."

"Far from lacking clear priorities, the German industrial war effort was dominated by only two components: aircraft and ammunition. Between them, these two items claimed more than two-thirds of the resources committed to all armaments production in the first ten months of the war"

"To keep an airfleet of 21,000 aircraft airborne, the Luftwaffe would need to start the war with stocks of at least 10.7 million cubic metres of fuel. To build this gigantic reservoir Germany would have needed to purchase fuel in the early 1940s at the rate of 3 million cubic metres per annum, twice the current level of global production."

"Another 100 million were raised by over-committing the funds of the DAF’s house bank and the DAF’s insurance society. The cars themselves were to be paid for by the so-called ‘VW saving scheme’. Rather than providing its
customers with loans to purchase their cars, the DAF conscripted the savings of future Volkswagen owners."

"Taxes on imported oil were a significant source of revenue, bringing in 421 million Reichsmarks in 1936, a third of the total customs revenue of the German state....It was the non-negotiability of fuel tax that forced the advocates of mass-motorization in Hitler’s regime to focus with even greater intensity on the cost of the car itself"

"Private producers, however, had long appreciated that the term ‘Volk’ had good marketing potential, and they, too, joined the bandwagon....In fact,
by 1933 the use of the term ‘Volk’ had become so inflationary that the newly established German advertising council was forced to ban the unlicensed use of the term."