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In February 1940, Germany had nearly run out of metals to meet the Wehrmacht’s demand for munitions. From May to June 1940, specially trained “economic commando” teams followed German troops into Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France with the objective of requisitioning metal reserves, either for shipment to Germany or for use in local factories. Hermann Goering and Georg Thomas decided how to allocate this plunder. Should they take the raw metals from factories or take what they produced, or, figuratively, should they “kill or milk the cow”? This case study of the plunder of western European metal reserves shows how a policy emerged in the summer of 1940 that did both.