The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Building naval strength was less urgent, since Hitler’s main aim in the short to medium term was the conquest of Europe, and above all Eastern Europe. But in the long term, as he had indicated in his unpublished second book, he envisaged a titanic transcontinental clash with the United States, and for this a large navy would be necessary. In the spring of 1937 he increased the number of battleships to be constructed from four to six, to be completed by 1944. In addition there were to be four pocket battleships (changed in 1939 to three battle cruisers), and the pace of construction increased sharply as the threat of war with Britain loomed ever closer. Expenditure on the navy rose from 187 million Reichsmarks in 1932 to 497 two years later, 1,161 million in 1936 and 2,390 million in 1939. In 1936 ship construction accounted for nearly half of all naval expenditure, though this had sunk to under a quarter by the eve of the war, as men were drafted in to crew the new fleet and munitions were manufactured for the new guns to fire. Even in 1938 the planned fleet was thought to require six million tonnes of fuel oil a year and two million of diesel oil, in a situation in which total German consumption of mineral oils stood at six million, of which less than half was produced at home. Plans for the expansion of the air force were even more ambitious, and came up rapidly against very similar constraints. Overriding the objections of the army and navy, which saw airplanes as little more than support forces, Hitler created a Reich Aviation Ministry on 10 May 1933 under Hermann Goring, himself a former fighter pilot. Göring, aided by his talented and energetic state secretary Erhard Milch, a former director of the Lufthansa airline, immediately adopted a plan drawn up by another Lufthansa director, Robert Knauss, that envisaged an independent air force designed to fight a two-front war against France and Poland. Long-range bombers were the key to success, argued Knauss. By 1935 aircraft production had been reorganized, with many firms making components, thus saving the time of the big manufacturers such as Junkers, Heinkel or Dornier. Defensive fighters were soon added to the Ministry’s targets. In July 1934 a long-term programme envisaged the manufacture of more than 2,000 fighters, another 2,000 bombers, 700 dive-bombers, over 1,500 reconnaisance aircraft and thousands more training aircraft by the end of March 1938. By 1937, however, iron and steel shortages were beginning to have a serious effect on these ambitious plans. Constant changes in the design of bombers slowed things down further. Aircraft production actually fell from 1937 to 1938, from around 5,600 to 5,200.101

  Meanwhile, iron ore imports increased from just over 4.5 million tonnes in 1933 to almost 21 million tonnes in 1938; the drive to rearm was negating the drive for autarky. Nevertheless, restrictions on foreign currency severely limited the extent to which shortfalls could be made good by imports. By 1939 the army was imposing what an American survey later described as ‘drastic restrictions on the use of motor vehicles in order to save rubber and fuel’. Already in 1937 it only received half the steel it wanted. Ammunition was in short supply, and too few barracks were being constructed to house the rapidly growing numbers of troops. The navy was unable to obtain the steel it needed to fulfil its shipbuilding programme.102 In 1937 the air force only received a third of the steel it required to meet its production targets. In October 1938, however, Göring announced a fivefold increase in the size of the air force to a size so enormous that it would have required the import of 85 per cent of known world production of aircraft fuel to keep it going. Nearly 20,000 front and reserve aircraft were to be ready for action at the beginning of the coming war in late 1941 or early 1942. In the event, when war actually did break out, the air force had just 4,000 aircraft ready for action. This was an impressive number, especially when compared to the situation six years before, but it was far below the target envisaged by Göring.103

  By 1939, shortages of raw materials were leading to grotesque consequences for the everyday life of ordinary Germans. From 1937 onwards, the regime began to encourage the collection of scrap metal in order to feed the insatiable demands of the iron and steel industry. It became people’s patriotic duty to surrender any old or unused metal objects to the authorities. A Reich Commissioner, Wilhelm Ziegler, was appointed to organize the collection and, increasingly, the forced requisition of scrap. In 1938 he ordered the removal of all metal garden fences throughout the Reich. Uniformed brownshirts forcibly uprooted iron railings around factories, churches, cemeteries and parks. Iron lampposts were replaced by wooden ones. Iron railings around family graves were torn down by gangs of stormtroopers, who also combed factories and workplaces for wire, tubing and other disused metal objects. Boys from the Hitler Youth searched people’s cellars and attics for discarded tin plates, disused metal radiators, old keys and the like. Everywhere, local committees were formed to organize the hunt for scrap. Metal for non-military purposes was strictly rationed, and heavy fines were meted out to building contractors who installed central heating with metal piping in their houses instead of the more old-fashioned tiled stoves. When a toilet was put into a house, its outlet pipes had to be made of clay rather than iron. Homeowners and town councils tried to replace confiscated iron lampposts and railings with wooden ones, but there was a shortage of wood as well, also leading to a shortage of paper. Building projects were instructed to cut back their use of wood by 20 per cent, while country-dwellers were told to burn peat instead of usable wood. Coal for domestic use was rationed. Official limits were placed on the use of gold by watchmakers. A black market began to grow up in metal spare parts for washing machines and other domestic appliances. There were instances of copper and other metals being stolen and sold to arms manufacturers, who were by now so desperate that they did not ask too many questions about where it all came from.104

  I V

  In addition to shortages of raw materials, the rearmament programme also created bottlenecks in the labour supply that became steadily tighter as time went on. As coal, iron and steel production, engineering, manufacturing, armaments and munitions factories sucked in all the available skilled and semi-skilled labour, the regime was forced to rethink its attitude towards women’s work. Women might not be able to work in heavy industry, but surely they would be able to take over more jobs in clerical work, and in assembly-lines in modern sectors of the economy like chemicals and electrotechnics and more generally in consumer goods production. Already in a series of decrees in 1936-7, the government withdrew the requirement that a woman receiving a marriage loan would have to give up her job and not take another one. This led to an immediate increase in the number of applications for loans, as might have been expected, and heralded a general reorientation of policy towards women’s work across the board. Only in one area, largely by chance, did restrictions become tighter: Following a conference in the Reich Justice Ministry in August 1936, at which participants raised among other things the issue of women in the judicial system, Martin Bormann asked Hitler whether women should be allowed to practise as lawyers. Hitler’s response was comprehensively negative: women, he told Bormann, could not become judges or lawyers; if they were legally qualified, then jobs should be found for them in the civil service.105 Apart from this area, however, women were returning to employment in larger numbers already. The number of women physicians increased from 2,814, or 6 per cent of the profession, in 1934, to 3,650, or 7 per cent of the profession, in early 1939, by which time 42 per cent of them were married. More significantly, women workers in industry grew in number from 1,205,000 in 1933 to 1,846,000 in 1938. The growing labour shortage in the countryside also led to an increased use of female family labour on the farms. Aware of the need to provide welfare and other kinds of support particularly for married women workers with children, the German Labour Front, the Nazi successor to the old trade unions, put increasing pressure on employers to provide day-nurseries for the young children of female workers and to regulate hours and conditions of women workers so that their health would not suffer. 106

  In February 1938 the Four-Year Plan organization announced that all women under twenty-five who wanted to work in
industry or the service sector had first to complete a year of duty on a farm (or in domestic work for married women workers). Extended ten months later, the scheme mobilized 66,400 young women by July 1938, and another 217,000 by July 1939. This was far more successful than the voluntary labour service promoted by the various Nazi women’s organizations with much the same purpose; by 1939 there were only just over 36,000 young women working, mainly on farms, as part of these programmes.107 One young woman who took part in such a scheme was the League of German Girls activist Melita Maschmann, who did her labour service in rural East Prussia. Here she encountered a degree of poverty and backwardness wholly alien to her comfortable background in the upper middle class of Berlin. Long hours of hard physical work were relieved only by short periods of sport, political instruction or singing. Nevertheless, despite all the hardships, as a committed member of the League of German Girls, she found the experience uplifting, even inspiring. She later confessed:Our camp community was a model in miniature of what I imagined the National Community to be. It was a completely successful model. Never before or since have I known such a good community, even where the composition was more homogeneous in every respect. Amongst us there were peasant girls, students, factory girls, hairdressers, schoolgirls, office workers and so on . . . The knowledge that this model of a National Community had afforded me such intense happiness gave birth to an optimism to which I clung obstinately until 1945. Upheld by this experience, I believed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the pattern of our camp would one day be magnified on an infinite scale - if not in the next then in future generations.108

  For farmers themselves, untrained city girls were often of little use, however. Moreover, in the economy as a whole, two-thirds of married women were still not registered as employed on the eve of the war in 1939. If they did work, it was often as unregistered, part-time cleaners or family assistants, above all in the countryside.109

  By contrast, more than 90 per cent of unmarried adult women had jobs in 1939. Yet the increase since 1933 in the number of female industrial workers had not kept pace with the corresponding increase in the number of male industrial workers: between 1933 and 1939 the percentage of women working in industry actually fell, from just over 29 per cent to just over 25. The Labour Front’s attempts to persuade firms to provide facilities for working mothers had largely run into the sands. The mobilization of the potential female labour force also ran up against the continuing insistence of the regime and its leaders that women’s most important role was to bear and bring up children for the Reich. Marriage loans, with their continuing bonuses for every child born, and the general recovery of male employment in the course of rearmament made it seem unnecessary for mothers to endure the hardships of factory work while bringing up a family. Towards the end of 1937, indeed, the government even attempted to make girls leaving school get training in domestic science and childcare before they entered the labour market. In reality, neither working men, nor their womenfolk, nor the regime itself really thought it appropriate for women to work in heavy industry, iron and steel or other arms-related industries in what were generally agreed to be men’s jobs. Despite pressure from the armed forces for the mobilization of what one senior labour official described in June 1939 as a huge potential labour supply of some 3.5 million women currently without paid employment, the contradiction between economic interest and ideological belief ensured that nothing was done to draft women into war production before 1939.110

  Behind the scenes, too, Hitler and the leading Nazis were concerned about another potential problem. Believing, as they did, that Germany had lost the First World War on the home front, not in the trenches, they were almost obsessively concerned to avoid what they thought of as a repetition of the poverty, privation and hardship suffered between 1914 and 1918 by the families of serving soldiers at home. Knowledge of this, they thought, had demoralized the troops and made the population in general susceptible to the blandishments of subversives and revolutionaries. The spectre of 1918 haunted all the Nazis’ preparations for war in the late 1930s. Drafting women into factory work would have given it concrete shape. With the outbreak of a new war, the men called up to fight would fight harder if they knew their wives were not having to slave long hours on assembly-lines producing munitions, but were instead being cared for, together with their children, by the Third Reich.111 All this meant that the regime had to look elsewhere for labour as rearmament began to intensify demand for particular kinds of workers from 1936 onwards. This meant above all foreign labour. Recruitment and virtually every other aspect of the control of workers from other countries had already been centralized under the Labour Ministry in 1933, building on previous laws and regulations that gave German workers priority and reduced foreign workers to the status of second-class citizens. Up to the summer of 1938 foreign workers were mostly unskilled and were recruited to alleviate the desperate shortage of labour on farms and to work on construction sites. Seasonal Polish workers, along with Italians, made up the bulk of this workforce. Between 1936/ 7 and 1938/9 the number of foreign workers increased from 274,000 to 435,000. Yet foreign workers were a drain on the economy because they sent much-needed hard currency back home. Thus their numbers had to be kept in check unless some means could be found of stopping them damaging Germany’s balance of payments. By 1938-9, a solution was beginning to appear, predicated, as so much else in the economy, on foreign conquest through war. Foreign workers would be recruited as forced labour, from prisoners of war and other groups in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia once the Germans had taken control of them. And they would be subject to a particularly harsh police regime that would ensure they would do as they were told. Regulations along these lines were already introduced in August 1938 and toughened up in June 1939. They were to reach draconian extremes during the war.112

  Meanwhile, however, all these measures did little to alleviate the immediate problems they were intended to address. The difficulties which the German economy was experiencing in 1938-9 were a testimony to the fundamental contradictions inherent in the Four-Year Plan. Its basic aim was to render Germany self-sufficient in foodstuffs and raw materials in preparation for a lengthy war along the lines of 1914-18, a precedent that was never far from the forefront of Hitler’s mind. A general European war, focused on the invasion of the East but encompassing the traditional enemy, France, and perhaps Great Britain as well, was expected to begin some time in the early 1940s. Yet by accelerating the pace of rearmament, the Plan created tensions and bottlenecks that could only be resolved by bringing the date of military action forward in order to obtain fresh supplies of raw materials and foodstuffs from conquered countries such as Austria and Czechoslovakia. This meant in turn that a general war might break out when Germany was less than fully prepared for it. The war that came would have to be swift and decisive because the economy was clearly in no shape to sustain a prolonged conflict in 1938-9.113 This solution was already becoming clear to Hitler in 1937, when, at the meeting recorded by Friedrich Hossbach, he told his military chiefs that the forthcoming ‘descent upon the Czechs’ would have to be carried out ‘with lightning speed’.114 The state of preparedness of the economy simply would not allow for a long-drawn-out conflict. The concept of the ‘lightning war’, the Blitzkrieg, was born. Yet neither economic planning, nor military technology and arms production, was doing anything to help prepare for putting it into effect.

  V

  The Four-Year Plan marked a massive escalation of state intervention in the economy. The priorities were being set by the regime, not by industry, and mechanisms were being put in place to make sure that business fulfilled them whatever the consequences to itself. The senior staff of the Plan were all hard-line National Socialists, from Göring at the top through the Regional Leaders Walter Köhler and Adolf Wagner, the ‘old fighter’ Wilhelm Keppler and others, who had largely displaced the traditionalist economic bureaucrats who had worked with Schacht. At the same time, however, given
the focus of the Plan on synthetic fuel and synthetic rubber, as well as chemical fertilizers for agriculture and synthetic fibres for clothing and uniforms, it was not surprising that senior managers of I.G. Farben, the mammoth firm that was being commissioned to manufacture these products, played a key role in the Plan’s administration. Most prominent amongst them was one of the firm’s directors, Carl Krauch, in charge of research and development under the Plan, but there were others too, notably Johannes Eckell, head of the chemical division. Clearly these men were there above all for their expertise; but they also took on these jobs not least in the interests of their own company. This has led some historians to describe the Four-Year Plan as an ‘I.G. Farben Plan’ and to ascribe a good deal of the impetus behind the armaments and autarky programmes to the profit-making greed of big business. After the war, indeed, twenty-three leading figures in the firm were put on trial at Nuremberg for conspiring to prepare and launch a war. Although they were in fact acquitted of this charge, a large literature, not all of it Marxist, ascribed to I.G. Farben in particular and German big business in general a large part of the responsibility in driving Europe and the world to war in 1933-9.115 More generally, a huge mass of Marxist and neo-Marxist writing both at the time and subsequently, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to present the economic and ultimately too the foreign and military policy of the Third Reich as driven by capitalist interests.116