‘The size of the internal American market and its wealth of buying power and also raw materials . . . guarantee the American automobile industry internal sales figures that alone permit production methods that would simply be impossible in Europe. The result of that is the enormous export capacity of the American automobile industry.”
So wrote a young Adolf Hitler in the unpublished “Second Book” of Mein Kampf. And he was right. Which raises the question of why he would declare war on such an awesomely productive power on December 8, 1941, when his alliance with imperial Japan (whose leaders hadn’t even bothered to give the Führer advance notice of Pearl Harbor) required no such thing. For it was the greatest exports of the American automobile industry — the nearly 300,000 aircraft, 90,000 tanks, and 400 million tons of bombs it retooled itself to produce during the war — that would prove to be the doom of the Third Reich.
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