> Lutz Budrass has offered an important overarching corrective to Overy’s narrative of disorganization in 1940-1941. According to Budrass, the best explanation for the hiatus in Luftwaffe production around the battle of Britain, is not organizational inefficiency as implied by Richard Overy and Rolf Dieter Mueller’s interpretation of the German war effort, but technological uncertainty.
> The focus of the Ministry and the lead developers into 1941 was therefore on R&D and capacity expansion, rather than increasing immediate output. Meanwhile the enormous hinterland of sub-contractors, who serviced the key final assembly plants, had every incentive to diversify their product ranges, so as to hedge their risks in case of abrupt changes to the production programme. It was not until 1942 that the Air Ministry focussed deliberately on mass production.
From the book's conclusion:
> The idea that armaments production in Germany lagged in 1940-41 and that there was a dramatic collapse in productivity is in large part a statistical illusion.