Well first we need to question if it was a truly blanket thing, or if simply one of the first rate industrialized nations of the time had by luck of the draw and structural support, some areas they were ahead in, and others they simply paced their peers.

Certainly in some areas they did very well, such as rocketry. But others such as radar, particularly as a means of fire control, or naval architecture they lagged or were at best no better than the UK, US, or USSR.

Each nation made use of and supported developments by national scientists and labs, but that is not a uniform process, and not some comparable race across nations.

It also ignores organizational choices that can double down. The USN for instance before the war recognized the conditions it would fight in, and practiced often with underway refueling, meaning the fleet could take the whole show on the road and operate from much less developed areas without ever coming into ports. But the same level of technology was essentially present in all the great fleets, they just had the ability to rely on large ports at a closer range.

It was in fact very patchy. Hitler had a very mixed record of funding super weapons, most of which did not offer much strategic advantage. Moreover, the oversight for management and logistics was quite poor - even after Speer was appointed - with Ministries competing for resources, and frequently reliant on whoever was most in favour with Hitler at the time. So, if you were a German scientist interested these areas that Hitler was interested in (and a member of the Nazi party), lucky you. German industry as a whole benefitted mostly from the drive to innovate prior to WW2, which resulted from the fact that Germany did not have significant access to a number of scarce materials, one example being helium (think airships). This is particularly true in the areas of chemical engineering, where the German's were considered to be very advanced, especially after WW1- see the history of the Haber process. Another area they were advanced in was optical technologies - as many an allied tank crew could attest to. In other areas the Germans were quite far behind - one amusing anecdote was made by an observer at one aviation engine test, where he noted that the German technicians were all huddled around the instrumentation, trying to take hand written notes of the readings, rather than there being any system to automatically record the data.

I would actually dispute that Germany had any comprehensive technological advantage at all. What they did have was a series of flashy prestige projects that got pushed into accelerated development schedules and then production before their designs were refined. When everything worked perfectly these were potent weapons of war. But, because it’s war, things rarely worked perfectly, and many of the so-called German super weapons were plagued by persistent flaws that rendered them radically less effective than they appeared on paper. In many cases the Allied powers possessed similar technology, but they didn’t have the impetus to gamble on anything risky because they were already winning with tried and tested designs. The Germans, on the other hand, were increasingly desperate for a game changer of any kind, and so they were willing to take shortcuts which the Allies would have found unconscionable. This could of course give the impression of tremendous technological prowess, but a closer examination shows that few of the technical advantages which the Germans are presumed to have enjoyed were advantages at all.

What seems to be missing in a lot of the discussions that tout German technology is that designing and building a weapon is not an abstract exercise. It’s too easy to get lost in rivet counting -- comparing technical specifications like nominal horsepower and armor or penetration values -- to the detriment of understanding what the purpose of a weapon was, how it was used, and whether it was capable of accomplishing the tasks set before it. What’s more, even if it is possible to build a wonderful weapon of unmatched strength and reliability, if that single item is so expensive and time consuming to manufacture that it overshadows other projects, then it is a failure as well. Of course there is room for theorizing and innovation, but the ultimate goal of any design process must be to create something which not only works as intended, but can also be fielded in numbers large enough to be consequential. This is especially true as relates to war, where function is a matter of life and death.

And, while the counterpoint might be made that there were situational factors like resource shortages and the Allied bombing campaign which impeded German production, that doesn’t wholly excuse German design failures. Rather, it is something of an indictment of German design processes. It is a technological failure to design something which depends upon materials that are not available and manufacturing tolerances which are not achievable. The more impressive feat would be to take such deficiencies into consideration and create something which still works pretty well. This is not a task that wartime German design bureaus and industry conglomerates were able to reliably accomplish, and that they could not undercuts any claim of technological superiority.

The fact is that the actual mechanics of winning a war like the Second World War are rather boring. Though battles may be won against all odds with elan and daring tactics, no single battle is likely to turn the course of an operation let alone an entire war. What will matter is getting the correct number of men with all the requisite material into the correct place at the correct time. The bravery of any individual soldier notwithstanding, armies can only fight so far as the enormous logistical effort which is supplying them can support. While it pales in comparison to the flash of enormous cannons and the thunder of jets soaring past, the most consequential technological advantage of the war was the industrial and logistical capacity of the Allied powers. When it came to building the weapons of war and supplying them to the front lines, the Allied powers leveraged technology in order to make the best possible use of their resources. Advanced manufacturing techniques, processes, and organization allowed the Allies to capitalize on the consistent pressure generated by their industrial and human advantages.

It must be emphasized that this difference was not merely due to geography. While the Allied powers no doubt had greater access to more abundant resources than Nazi Germany and her Axis partners, they also made better use of what they had. It’s not dramatic, but one of the most consequential super weapons of the war was located just outside of Detroit, Michigan. The United States had largely neglected its armed forces after the First World War, but German belligerence in Europe shook their complacency, and in 1940 the government partnered with Chrysler to revive an arms industry which had produced only thirty-five tanks between 1920 and 1935. With the input of the famed industrial architect Albert Kahn, construction of the Detroit Arsenal was begun in September 1940, and production work was underway by January of 1941, with the first deliveries of finished tanks being made by July of that year.

When the plans for the Detroit Arsenal were laid out, it was to be the largest tank manufacturer in the world. It spanned 1.1 million square feet, and was intended to sustain an average production run of 14 units per day. By the end of the war, it would surpass all expectations. At peak production, the workers at the plant delivered about 896 M4 Sherman tanks in a single month, and would average more than 30 per day for the entire war. All told, the Detroit Arsenal alone accounted for about a quarter of the United State’s total tank production. The workers there single handedly out produced the entire production runs of Germany’s Pz. IV, Panther and Tiger tanks. And, while it’s true that a single factory cannot win a war all of its own, the Detroit Arsenal is significant because of the way in which it represents the totality of Allied industrial effort.

One aspect is the sheer amount of capital that the United States was able to bring to bear upon any project. The Detroit Arsenal was big, it was well organized, there was room to expand and make revisions, and it had five parallel assembly lines run along railroad tracks, each capable of accommodating 100 tanks at a time. The tools themselves were world class, and this one factory alone was fitted out with over 8,500 specialized jigs and dies, and over 1,000 machine tools, all laid out in exacting order by Chrysler engineers in order to streamline the production process. In 1942, a visiting Soviet engineer remarked that while the M4 Sherman was less than stellar compared to domestic Soviet tanks, the factory itself was a “first-class tank building giant.” The Detroit Arsenal was a technological marvel unmatched by anything in any Axis country.

To understand why requires some comparison. When trying to estimate the Arsenal’s potential production capacity, the visiting Soviet engineer made note of the “12 carousel machines [which] are used for cutting down the bottom of the turret.” This was a very time consuming task, as each machine took “7 hours to process one turret base,” and it therefore represented a bottleneck in the production process. However, it was noted in the report that the bottleneck would seen be alleviated by the installation of more capacity. The carousel machines are therefore significant for the way in which they illustrate the underlying technological advantage embodied by the Detroit Arsenal. It was fitted with specialized machine tools to accomplish any sort of task that might be necessary. The time that was invested in thinking about the production process ahead of time and then designing custom tools to accommodate it correlated to a direct time savings once production was actually begun. Bottlenecks that sprung up could be overcome simply by adding more tools. On the other hand, the German arms industry was very reliant on skilled and semi-skilled labor. Where Chrysler had almost wholly standardized their production, fitting together German designs required time-consuming and expensive hand work.

The benefit was that in nominal conditions hand work might produce a more finely crafted product. In reality, the lack of standardization and specialized tooling was purely a drag upon German production. At the Henschel facility in Germany where they were building Tiger tanks, the factory’s nominal production should have been upwards of 200 tanks a month, but at their most productive they only managed 104. What went wrong is that the design of the Tiger tank was never rationalized to fit the needs of mass production. Dr. Robert Citino counts more than 250 design modifications over two years for a production run of only 1,347 units. The many tiny alterations meant that on average, a finished tank rolling out of the factory doors would be different than the tank only six units behind it. Once they made it out to the field, keeping all the variations in order and supplying them with the correct spare parts was a logistical nightmare. Because Germany did not sufficiently develop the technology necessary to mate a design on paper to the realities of their manufacturing process, they were not able to build very many tanks, nor were they able to build tanks that could be reliably used or supplied in the field.