America Built So Many Planes, Germany Couldn't Believe It

Hitler called America's production numbers propaganda. Then American factories built about 300,000 airplanes. In May 1945, two American investigators sat down with Hitler's armaments minister in a castle in northern Germany. They had come to ask about bombs. What he told them was about something else: how the leaders of the Reich had treated America's production figures as a bluff, and what that mistake meant. This film follows the story told in John Kenneth Galbraith's memoir, from the arrest at dawn to the notes that survived. Chapters 0:00 The arrest at dawn 1:05 Galbraith and the Bombing Survey 2:12 Flensburg, May 1945 3:21 The miracle man 3:40 Roosevelt's list and Hitler's "propaganda" 4:28 Göring: the radio and the razor blade 5:43 Life magazine and the German servants 6:52 An economy that never ran at full speed 8:25 The totals 9:00 December 11, 1941 9:48 Ashcan: the hotel in Luxembourg 12:52 Speer was not like them 13:54 Nuremberg, Spandau, 1981 14:47 Why the notes still matter 15:02 May 23: the arrest SOURCES John Kenneth Galbraith, "A Life in Our Times" (1981), excerpt "After the Air Raids," American Heritage, April/May 1981: the arrest and appointment, the Flensburg sessions, Speer's remarks on American factories and on German servants, the Ashcan scenes. Gilbert King, "The Candor and Lies of Nazi Officer Albert Speer," Smithsonian Magazine, 2013: Speer's interrogations and his later accounts. University of East Anglia archive, Speer interrogation records (Glücksburg, 17–22 May 1945): dates of the sessions. Time magazine, 1942, and The Michigan Daily, 6 December 1942: Roosevelt's production goals and Berlin's reaction; Office of War Information figures for 1942. Hermann Göring, radio address of 4 October 1942 (text via ibiblio.org and The New York Times, 5 October 1942). History.com and The History Place: the declaration of war on the United States, 11 December 1941, and the Tripartite Pact. Sources & Archives U.S. National Archives Internet Archive Wikimedia Commons Periscope Film Archival Footage Archival footage: U.S. National Archives, Prelinger Archives, Die Deutsche Wochenschau; some scenes use illustrative footage of the period not the people named. How This Episode Was Made Original research and script by World War 2 Desk. Archival film, photographs, documents and other historical material from the U.S. National Archives, Prelinger Archives and other collections are re-edited to match the narration and combined with our own maps, document reconstructions and graphics. Some scenes use illustrative footage of the period to represent locations, events, equipment and environments described in the narration and are not necessarily footage of the specific people named. Sources are listed above.