Already, at the beginning of the year, Hitler had issued a Führer command demanding an increase in armaments production and giving priority to the army. Fritz Todt, the Minister for Armaments and Munitions,17 had been introducing measures to increase armaments production and make it more efficient when, on 8 February, following a visit to Führer headquarters, he was killed in a plane crash. The following day, Hitler surprisingly transferred Todt’s offices to his personal architect, the 36-year-old General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital, Albert Speer. Thus, Speer became Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions, General Inspector for the German Road Network, General Inspector for Water and Energy, General Plenipotentiary for the Regulation of the Construction Industry within the Four-Year Plan, and head of the Todt Organization, the official construction organization created by his predecessor.18
By making this appointment Hitler was, not least, hoping for psychological impact. Speer was regarded as dynamic, a good organizer, and had considerable experience with large-scale building projects, particularly in the armaments sector.19 He radiated youthful energy and optimism, and the fact that he clearly had the Fuhrer’s confidence indicated right from the start that he would have considerable clout within the regime. Speer’s appointment was designed to create a mood of optimism both within the confused and disorganized armaments sector, but also among the general public. From the very beginning, Speer’s activities were hyped in an extraordinary propaganda campaign, with which Hitler was personally involved, and which systematically constructed the legend of the ‘armaments miracle’ under Speer, the brilliant organizer.20 Reinforced by Speer’s own personal propaganda after the war and often uncritically accepted, the legend has had a lasting effect right up until the present day.21
With Speer’s appointment, Hitler was following his principle of solving problems by appointing particular individuals who possessed his confidence, and who were directly responsible to him. A few weeks later, on 21 March, he applied this principle again by creating a new office with plenary powers in the shape of the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization, to which he appointed Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia. Sauckel was assigned the task of ‘organizing the deployment of all available supplies of labour, including foreigners and POWs, in accordance with the requirements of the war economy, as well as mobilizing all labour that is still not being utilized in the Greater German Reich, including the Protectorate, as well as in the General Government and in the occupied territories’.22
Dr Robert Ley, the head of the German Labour Front, had tried to acquire this appointment, but both Bormann and Speer had objected to such an excessive concentration of power in Ley’s hands. Sauckel, Hitler’s eventual choice, was neither professionally qualified nor temperamentally suited to the post. However, by appointing an average Gauleiter, Hitler (no doubt under the influence of Bormann) intended to continue shifting the balance of power away from the state bureaucracy towards the Party apparatus. For in order to provide Sauckel with the necessary administrative machine, with his edict of 21 March Hitler removed two departments from the Reich Labour Ministry, subordinating them to Sauckel, who then went on to appoint the Gauleiters to be his ‘authorized representatives for labour deployment’ in their areas.
The General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization was subordinated to the Four-Year Plan (above all, in order not to damage Göring’s prestige), and not, as Speer had wished, to the Armaments Ministry. Moreover, as a Gauleiter, Sauckel was directly responsible to Hitler. Thus, Hitler’s two important personnel appointments of February and March 1942 had created a new relationship calculated to produce conflict.
In his reorganization of the armaments sector Speer applied his own ideas, which, in close collaboration with Hitler and backed by his authority, he implemented during the following weeks. Like his predecessor, Todt, the new minister aimed to work in close cooperation with industry. Apart from ammunition, for which he was responsible for the whole of the Wehrmacht, to begin with his authority was limited to the equipment needs of the army. His main aims were: to secure a degree of clarity in the whole production process; to extend his authority to the whole of the Wehrmacht’s armaments production; to expand the armaments sector at the expense of the production of civilian goods and to make it more effective; and, above all, rapidly to increase armaments production, in order to achieve a decisive victory in the East, if possible before the end of the year, in other words before American resources could be mobilized.
A few days after his appointment, at an armaments conference in the Air Ministry, Speer was already making blatantly clear his claim to the central role in the whole of the armaments sector. Hitler, with whom he had discussed the path he intended to follow the previous day, strengthened Speer’s position by inviting the participants to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery, where he spoke for an hour about Speer’s appointment. Five days later, on 18 February, at a further armaments meeting, Speer got those present to provide written confirmation of their acceptance of the leadership role he was seeking. Having had the results of this meeting approved by Hitler in the course of a lengthy discussion, on 24 February he spoke to a meeting of Gauleiters in Munich, seeking their support.23
Speer took over from Todt the system of ‘Committees’, in which the firms responsible for the final stage of the production of particular armaments were brought together, and extended this system with Hitler’s express approval.24 Around these committees the ‘Rings’ were then reconstructed, bringing together the firms that provided the relevant parts for those particular armaments. In this way, under the slogan of the ‘self-responsibility’ of industry, the representatives of the various firms worked together in a complex, but unbureaucratic system made up of Main Committees, Special Committees, Main Rings, and Special Rings. These bodies were responsible, in the first instance, for the allocation of orders to the individual firms, giving preference to the most efficient ones, encouraging the exchange of best practice among the firms involved, and in general ensuring the continual optimization of production.25
Speer also created a tough disciplinary instrument through Hitler’s Decree for the Protection of the Armaments Economy of 21 February, for which he had presented Hitler with a draft on the 19 February. Under it he could order the punishment of those who intentionally gave false statements about their labour or raw materials requirements, or about the size of their labour force or stocks of raw materials and the like.26 In May Speer secured the bureaucratic apparatus he needed by using a Führer edict to remove the Armaments Office from the OKW’s Military Economic and Armaments Office and transfer it to his Ministry. This gave him control over the Armaments Inspectorates in the Reich and the occupied territories.27
By April 1942, backed by Hitler’s authority, Speer secured Göring’s agreement to the creation of a ‘Central Planning’ committee [Zentrale Planung]. This new committee, of which Speer, Göring’s state secretaries, Erhard Milch (Luftwaffe)and Paul Körner (Four-Year Plan) were the permanent members, became the central coordinating body for the allocation of raw materials. To avoid damaging Göring’s prestige, Speer, as a formality, had subordinated himself to him as ‘General Plenipotentiary for Armaments Production within the Four-Year Plan’. In effect, however, this meant that Speer was responsible for all armaments projects within the Four-Year Plan.28
In September 1942, Speer created a new intermediate authority by establishing regional armaments commissions, in which all the various agencies involved in armaments production in the various regions were represented. These regions followed the borders of the Gaus, not those of the military districts, that is, of the armaments inspectorates, and assigned a decisive role to the Gauleiters as chairmen of the commissions. This new arrangement prepared the way for a reorganization of the system of Reich Defence Commissioners. While hitherto only fifteen Gauleiters had held this office, which corresponded to the military districts, on 16 November 1942 Hitler appointed all Gauleiters Reich Defence Commissioners
. From now onwards, these power-hungry regional Party bosses had the task of coordinating and promoting the war effort within their Gaus.29
Speer now visited Hitler every two weeks, during the first months even more often, in order to discuss the armaments situation with him in detail, sometimes over a period of several days. These so-called ‘armaments meetings’, which began on 19 February 1942, contained on average several dozen agenda items. From Speer’s point of view, they served above all to secure Hitler’s agreement to his proposals and in most cases they succeeded in doing so. In June 1942, Hitler assured Speer ‘that everything that came from me would always be signed off’.30 However, the minutes show that, in a considerable number of cases, Hitler opposed Speer’s proposals or wanted changes, above all in technical matters, which in some cases even involved going into detail. Thus, the idea that, during these armaments meetings, Hitler adopted a passive stance, merely nodding his agreement with Speer’s detailed expositions, is mistaken. On the contrary, the minutes reveal a dictator who was keen to make it clear that he knew what he was talking about in armaments matters, capable of making suggestions for improvement, and was reserving for himself the role of ‘effective head of armaments production’.31
It is important to note, however, that the continuing discussions between Hitler and Speer concerning armaments involved decisions on particular issues; they did not pursue a general programme based on an overall view of the various armaments and of the most important factors involved in production – industrial capacity, labour supplies, raw materials, transport availability and so on. Significantly, during these meetings, Speer did not provide a series of statistical pictures of the armaments sector as a whole, but used individual figures, whose reliability was difficult to verify but which evidently often impressed Hitler, who was a numbers enthusiast.32
Speer’s method of always giving Hitler the opportunity of commenting on particular armaments issues and making decisions on the production of particular armaments without any reference to the overall situation corresponded exactly to the ‘Führer’s’ arbitrary armaments policy. This involved permanently overstraining the whole armaments sector with overambitious projects and abrupt changes of priorities, as well as putting pressure on those responsible by then referring to the resultant shortages and inadequacies. Had Hitler established a rationally functioning armaments operation, which matched his requests with the available resources, this would in time have created a control mechanism that might have acted as a veto over his overambitious military and strategic plans. However, Hitler had no interest in doing that, and Speer was aware of the limits of his power within Hitler’s system.
The reorganization of armaments production was already having an effect during 1942. Apart from expanding the motorized units of the army, Hitler’s basic directive of 10 January 1942 had, above all, envisaged boosting the supplies of army munitions by six times compared with the figure consumed in August 1941. This was the main challenge facing the new Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions.33 At the end of June, Hitler also told Speer what the monthly production figures for the most important types of munitions must be. As usual, his demands exceeded many times over the available productive capacity.34 To achieve this goal, the allocation of steel to the munitions industry had to be rapidly and considerably increased. However, this was impossible within the existing allocation system, which had become completely distorted because of the excessive demands being made on it. Thus, in order to reorganize the whole steel sector, on 1 June Speer created the Reich Iron Association, and Hitler ‘recommended’ as chairman Hermann Röchling, a leading figure in heavy industry whom he admired.35 To begin with, Röchling managed to sort out steel allocation on a clearer basis; but increasing steel production was much more problematic, in particular because of the need for a significant increase in coal supplies. On 11 August 1942, Hitler told a high-level meeting36 that ‘if, as a result of a shortage of coking coal, the production of steel cannot be increased as envisaged, the war will be lost’.37 In this way he forced Paul von Pleiger, the chairman of the Reich Coal Association, to pledge to deliver the required amount of coal. Sauckel agreed to provide the necessary number of workers. However, in the autumn these promises were revealed to be worthless. The impending crisis – a collapse in steel production – with catastrophic results for armaments production across the board – was in the end avoided through a 10 per cent cut in private coal consumption. Speer commented laconically that it was better ‘for people to feel a bit chillier at home than that armaments production should collapse’. As a result, and through an improvement in the allocation system, it even proved possible to increase steel production during winter 1941/42, which meant that Speer’s key goal, the increase in munitions production, could still be achieved.38
As far as the armaments actually produced during 1942 were concerned, the balance shifted as follows: the most important products were aircraft, which made up 46.1 per cent of total production at the beginning of 1942, although only 36.3 per cent by the end. While warships increased their percentage from 9.3 per cent to 10.9 per cent, the production of tanks, motor vehicles, and weapons, during what was after all the year of the decisive eastern offensive, only increased from 18.3 per cent to 19.5 per cent of the total. The highest percentage increase was achieved by munitions, namely from 26.3 per cent to 33.3 per cent.39
Meanwhile, Sauckel had been engaged in ruthlessly implementing the ‘Reich mobilization’ of foreign labour in the occupied territories. This occurred through a combination of more or less voluntary recruitment, conscription by the local administrations, and compulsory recruitment by the occupation authorities, in some cases by simply deporting people who were pressganged off the streets.40 At the end of 1942, the total of all foreign workers in the Reich had already reached over 5.6 million, among whom there were over a million Poles, over 900,000 French POWs, as well as almost 50,000 Soviet POWs, and over 1.2 million Soviet civilians.41
Conditions in the Soviet POW camps were still horrendous, so that the death rate was extremely high.42 Civilian workers from the Soviet Union, who had been promised more or less equal treatment with that of German workers, ended up in camps surrounded by barbed wire, poorly fed, badly paid, and subject to disease. Clearly marked out by the ‘eastern worker’ badge they were forced to wear, they were in general treated as ‘sub-humans’ by the German guards and foremen. The edicts issued by the RSHA, which imposed on the eastern workers a strict and repressive regime, declared them to be ‘enemies of National Socialist Germany’.43
In March, Hitler told Speer that he ‘did not approve of the poor nourishment of the Russians’ and was surprised that the civilian workers were treated the same as the POWs. Speer had to explain that this was the result of his own instructions, but the ‘Führer’ claimed not to be aware of it.44 However, even when Hitler realized that the miserable situation of the eastern workers impaired their productivity for the war economy, as with the Soviet POWs, he did not make any serious attempts to change the situation fundamentally. The categorization of the eastern workers and the members of the Red Army as second-class humans was a direct result of the aggressive racism that was fundamental to the regime’s policies. Treating the Soviet workers in the Reich humanely would have threatened the foundations of his war policy. Thus he was obliged to accept that the ‘deployment of Russians’ would not achieve the desired results.
The radicalization of the murder campaign
It is striking that the gradual overcoming of the winter crisis and the move to a military offensive in the spring and summer of 1942 is chronologically linked to the further radicalization of Jewish persecution. The mass murders that began in the summer of 1941 and, during the autumn, were extended to Poland and also Yugoslavia, were now expanded by the Nazi state into a comprehensive plan, set in motion between May and July 1942, to murder all European Jews. Thus the military plans for the eastern offensive and the preparations for the ‘Final Solution’ occurred during the sam
e period. Moreover, the planned schedule for the ‘Final Solution’ shifted: It was now no longer to be concluded after, but rather during, the war. The questions of ‘where’ and ‘how’ were also changed at the same time as the issue of ‘when’: no longer in the Soviet territories, but instead in Poland; no longer through a combination of deportation, debilitating forced labour, executions, and gas vans, but rather through stationary gas chambers in special death camps.
The concrete decision-making process and Hitler’s role within this process can only be partially reconstructed from documents. He had, however, played a central role in all the previous phases of Jewish policy. Moreover, as dictator, he alone possessed the requisite authority: (a) to coordinate the various radical plans for a ‘Final Solution’ that had been worked out during 1941/42 within the SS-police apparatus, the Party organization, the Foreign Ministry, and the other offices and administrative agencies of the Third Reich; (b) to combine them in a murder programme covering the whole of Europe; and (c) to set this in motion, ordering the participating organizations to carry out their various tasks within the extermination project.
To understand the fateful move towards the ‘Final Solution’ one should bear in mind the ‘Führer’s’ central role in determining the regime’s policies, his war aims, his out-and-out racist ideology, and his imperialist views. Governed by these various ideological perspectives, during spring and summer 1942, he developed and implemented his radical ideas for ‘solving the Jewish question’. For Hitler’s Europe, which now appeared to be taking shape, was to be reorganized along racist lines, that is to say to be dominated and exploited in order to fight a global war. He was determined that there should be no more Jews living in this empire. By breaching all the norms of civilization through its programme of murder, carried out by hundreds of thousands of perpetrators not only in Germany but within the occupied and allied states as well, this regime had burnt all its bridges.
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