The Second World War for Oil 1939-1945
The Second World War for oil cannot be considered as an independent event from the First World War for oil. After wining the war, the allies imposed extremely hard conditions on Germany. The German people suffered, and this led a lunatic to power, and as soon as Germany was strong enough she stroke back. According to historians, the decisive battle of WWII was the Battle of Stalingrad (blue circle). Stalingrad was later renamed to Volgograd.
As you can see on the map, if Hitler had won in Stalingrad, he would have marched to Baku, and he would have secured oil reserves for his army. Today we can easily go to a gas station and get fuels, so it is difficult to imagine that an army can actually run out of fuel. And yet it was very often the case for whole army divisions to run out of fuels in the Great Wars. And it was the allies that were controlling both the Caspian and the Middle East oil.
If Hitler had taken control of Baku, he would have oil supplies to launch a Panzer attack to the Middle East. And if he had won the English in the Middle East, the war in Europe and North Africa would be over. This is the reason that the battle of Stalingrad is considered as one of the most decisive battles of WWII.
It seems strange that Hitler turned against Stalin and the Soviet Union, his former ally in 1941, since until then it was the Communists who were supplying the Germans with the oil and minerals they badly needed. As you can read in section “Later Events and Total Trade”, of the following Wikipedia link, the Communists supplied the Nazis with 900.000 tons of oil in the period 1940-1941, that is before the Nazi attack on Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Credit_Agreement_(1939)
At the end of the first paragraph of the same Wikipedia link, you can read the following:
“The Soviets fulfilled their obligations to the letter right up until the invasion, wanting to avoid provoking Germany. All these agreements were terminated when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, in violation of the treaties between the two countries.”
However the oil that the Communists were supplying was not enough for Hitler who was fighting a global war, and he needed total control of the Baku oil. The Nazis were not crazy to terminate the Nazi-Communist alliance which would mean a giant enemy on their east. They simply needed more oil than the Communists were supplying.
In the second paragraph of the following encyclopedia.com link, you can read that according to the Nazi-Communist Economic Agreement that was signed on the 20th of August of 1939 by Karl
Schnurre and Yevgeny Babarin, the Communists would supply the Nazis with raw materials i.e. oil, wood, manganese etc, and the Nazis would supply the Communists with manufactured goods.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404101270.html
You can read about how the Communists were feeding the Nazi war machine at the Marxist site
www.marxist.org, at the following link.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/vance/1941/01/russia1.htm
In the 5th paragraph of the following article of The Guardian, you can read the following:
“The pact eventually extended to the economic sphere, with Germany providing military equipment in exchange for raw materials such as oil, grain, iron and phosphates”.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/06/devils-alliance-hitlers-pact-stalin-1938-1941-roger-
For the importance of the Nazi Communist Economic Agreement, you can also read the article of the historian Heinrich Schwendemann, “German-Soviet Economic Relations at the Time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact 1939-1941”, at the following address:
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cmr_1252-6576_1995_num_36_1_2425