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The conquest of Poland put the Third Reich's zinc supply beyond exhaustion. Little Luxembourg with an area (998 sq. mi.) smaller than metropolitan Los Angeles was a greater prize. The output of her well-knit iron & steel industry was one-seventh as great as Germany's while her share of the iron ore of Lorraine was equal to a third of Germany's annual imports. Norway yielded 1,000,000 annual pounds of molybdenum, which Germany desperately needed for fashioning high-speed steels, stocks of chrome, aluminum, copper, nickel. It also yielded Narvik, the only winter outlet for the high-grade ore of Sweden's northern iron mines. There were no metals in Denmark.
Ten miles from the German frontier, at Arnhem, is Holland's great tin smelter, fed by ore from The Netherlands Indies. There Germany to her disappointment picked up perhaps a sixth of a year's supply (2,500 tons) of tin. Anticipating such a move, Great Britain had let little tin trickle through the blockade to The Netherlands. With the capitulation of Belgium and the collapse of France, Germany's steel capacity was secured.
Occupied France contained the cream of France's industries (two-thirds as much as Germany's)—19% of the world's iron ore, 6% of its steel productive capacity. Unoccupied France was left with only the rubber industries of Clermont-Ferrand, west of Lyon, the textile factories of Lyon itself, and 19% of the world's supply of bauxite (aluminum ore). That bauxite might as well be in German hands because France has no other market for it. It assures Germany of abundant supplies of aluminum for aircraft production.
Germany thus found herself holding two-thirds of Europe's industrial crescent—just about two-thirds of the heavy industry, three-fourths of the manufacturing capacity of Europe. But Germany still lacks sufficient raw materials to feed these plants. Plentiful is her supply of iron ore, coal, bauxite, magnesite, zinc and lead, a few other metals. Stockpiles of the conquered nations supplied other critical and strategic metals, enough for a short war. Yet the British blockade still cut off the raw materials Germany needed for a long war: copper from Chile, nickel from Canada, tin and rubber from the East Indies, manganese from India, tungsten from China, industrial diamonds from South Africa, cotton from Brazil.
Conquer as she may, Germany cannot find adequate sources of these materials in Europe. Italy remains a have-not nation with no coal, a smattering of heavy industry around Milan and Turin, more mercury and bauxite than she can use, little else. Moreover, Italy competes with Germany for the small mineral output of the agricultural Balkans. Yugoslav copper, Hungarian bauxite, Greek antimony, others. Spain, flat on her back after her civil war, has a little copper, considerable iron ore (Bilbao) and mercury (Seville). Even the vast area of the Soviet Union next door to Europe cannot supply the deficiency. The very metals the Nazis wanted are also needed in Russia's scattered industrial centres: Moscow, Krivoi Rog, the great Donets Coal Basin. The only metal Russia can export in quantity is manganese.