Miscellaneous: 1900 (Alternate) History Thread

(Translated by machine.)

Swedish iron ore industry during World War II

Swedish iron ore was an important economic and military factor in the European theater of World War II, as Sweden was the main contributor of iron ore to Nazi Germany. The source of iron ore for Nazi Germany 1933-43 gives the following average percentages when added together: Sweden 43.0 Domestic production 28.2 France 12.9. [1] Within the German Army, the Navy was most dependent on Swedish steel as an absolute necessity for the German war effort, according to its Grand Admiral. [2] It has also been argued that Swedish exports helped prolong the war. [3]

Both the Allies and the Axis were anxious to gain control of the mining district in the far north of Sweden , which surrounded the mining towns of Gällivare and Kiruna . The importance of this issue increased after the Allied naval blockade during the Battle of the Atlantic isolated other sources of iron from Germany . Both the planned Anglo-French support of Finland in the Winter War and the following German occupation of Denmark and Norway during Operation Weserübung.were largely motivated by the desire to deny their respective enemies iron critical for wartime steel production. [4]

Winston Churchill , then First Lord of the Admiralty , was particularly concerned about Swedish exports of iron ore to Germany, and pressed for military action by the British government to stop the trade. From the beginning of the war, Churchill tried to persuade his cabinet colleagues to send a British fleet to the Baltic Sea to prevent Swedish iron from reaching Germany from the two Swedish export ports, Luleå and Oxelösund . The planned raid was called Project Catherine and was planned by Fleet Admiral William Boyle . However, other events overshadowed the raid and it was cancelled. [5]Later, when the Baltic ports froze and the Germans began shipping iron ore from the Norwegian port of Narvik , Churchill pressed for the Royal Navy to mine the west coast of Norway to prevent the Germans from traveling within neutral territorial waters to escape Allied smuggling control measures.

After the outbreak of hostilities on September 3, 1939, Britain and France enacted a repeat of the German naval blockade used to great effect during the previous war . They were able to do this because they had far more powerful naval forces at their disposal than Germany, a country lacking in natural resources and heavily dependent on large-scale imports of a wide range of products. Perhaps the material Germany needed above all others was iron ore, a steady supply of which was imperative in the creation of steel to sustain its war effort and its economy in general. [ citation needed ]

In the year before the war, Germany received 22 million tons of iron ore from various sources. Although it could produce about 10 million tons of its own iron ore each year, it was of low quality and needed to be mixed with high-quality material from other countries such as Sweden, which supplied it annually with 9 million tons: 7 million from Kiruna and Gällivare in Lapland and 2 million from the central Swedish ore deposits northwest of Stockholm.

With the declaration of war and the beginning of the blockade, Germany lost many sources of these foreign supplies, and although it retained access to 3 million tons per year from neutral Norway and Luxembourg, it lost supplies from Morocco and Spain . The remaining supplies from neutral Scandinavia became crucially important. Grand Admiral Raeder, head of the German navy, declared that it would be "absolutely impossible to wage war if the navy could not secure iron ore supplies from Sweden."