Second half:
Radicalization was the regime’s response to its cornered position in the last three years of the war: Speer extended his reach over the Ministry of Economic Affairs (RWM) and allied with Himmler and Goebells while increasing repression controlled withering civilian morale and took over the remaining civilian economy. Consumer goods providers which previously got by with bribery faced “hell hounds” from the armaments sector.
That a shift to total war took place in 1943 and arms output achieved its final burst and peak in 1944 is considered evidence that prior to it too much of the civilian sector was left unmobilized, due to political concerns or excessive mercy, and that this mobilization is responsible for the output of 1944. This in turn leads to speculation that this extra output could have been unlocked already in the early years of the war. Judging this requires knowing how much was mobilized in the early years, how much was really there to mobilize and what other sources of output expansion existed in the final years.
Taxes were already high in 1939 and de facto rose once the war began through “silent financing”: consumer goods rationing pushed private income into savings banks which financed the war effort. Tax income was raised through one-off prepayments in 1942. Taxation was a necessity to compensate booming war spending from creating inflation. If political concerns overrode that concern, it was in the final years of the war, when unchecked inflation ate away at the economy from within and was one factor in its collapse in late 1944. Hitler agreed to a tax increase in February 1945 on the hilarious condition that it’d take place after the war. This reluctance did not in practice mean civilians were spared, as inflation hit their purchasing power hard.
A lot of civilian production was not consumer goods for Germans but exports. It wasn’t wasted: since the Great Depression Germany could affort few imports and had to pay them with its exports. In wartime a system of unpaid debt allowed a trade deficit to be run with France and the Benelux but the logic did not go away. Exports were also necessary to prop up smaller states and obtain their favor.
There wasn’t too much leeway to expand the workforce by employing women. In 1939 German women already had a high rate of employment, higher even than in Britain and America at the end of the war. This was particularly the case in agriculture -just as central as industry- but major centers such as Berlin and Hamburg had a large proportion of women at work.