I recognize that German tanks were expensive and included too many features to be reliable; but this can’t be the only reason.
I recognize that German tanks were expensive and included too many features to be reliable; but this can’t be the only reason.
To expand of the logistics a bit: German arms and other equipment was produced by multiple private companies, thus their was no overall standardization. In addition they also used a lot of captured equipment (Austrian, Czeckslovakian etc.) and made use of captured industries. This resulted in german logistics having to deal with multiple different infantry small arms calibres, heavy arms calibres, vehicles replacement parts of multiple producers that were not interexchangeable ontop of long supply lines, not having remotely enough vehicles for said supply lines and not enough fuel for either the number of vehicles needed or the ones they actually had.
It was a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
That, plus German companies kept designing new vehicles, so vehicle production was always slow and constantly wasted resources on retooling. whereas the Soviets, for the most part, just refit designs that worked to do a different job. Which had a minimal impact on their production efficiency, and required less retooling.
War material produced in occupied territories was also often tampered with; I’m not sure of the specifics but I know the resistance would try to send faulty material out of the factory. Apparently you could get ammunition that would explode in your face if you were in the Wehrmacht.