As the army was being defeated and giving up ground in the initial assault, a gigantic operation was staged to move economic capacity from the Western areas that were about to be overrun, to Eastern regions in the Urals and central Asia that were out of reach of the Germans. Entire factories, including their labour force, were simply moved, and what couldn't be taken was destroyed ("scorched earth"). As a result, even though huge territories were captured by the Germans, the production potential of the Soviet economy was not correspondingly harmed, and the factories shifted to mass production of military equipment quickly. Even before the war, Soviet industrialization had brought Soviet GDP to a level roughly equivalent to Germany. Although a significant part of the urban population had been captured by Germany in the 1941 campaign, the Soviet economy immediately went to a total war footing and was soon outproducing the German economy in war materiel.