Oil and Iron. Romania and Sweden from the Perspective of the Great Powers during the Second World War

Oil and iron are two natural resources with an inestimable strategic value in the context of wartime economies. The Great Powers perceived oil and iron as essential raw materials in sustaining attritional warfare, while Romania and Sweden leveraged them as currencies in exchange for preserving their sovereignty and territorial integrity. Prior the outbreak of the Second World War, Germany and Great Britain launched their competition to monopolize the oil market in Romania and the iron market in Sweden. As a result, we can identify numerous similarities and differences in the strategies employed by these powers to secure control over the natural resources found in Romania and Sweden. Germany eventually won the battle of resources for a short period. Berlin persuaded Romania to join the Axis, which meant an almost unilateral oil export to the Reich, and convinced the Swedish authorities to approve the shipment of iron ore to Nazi-controlled territories. In 1944, the Allied forces targeted and destroyed Romanian oil refineries and significantly reduced Swedish iron ore exports to German harbors