The key question, then, is why, despite their overwhelming advantages, the Allies proved incapable of knocking Germany from the war in the summer of 1944. Part of the answer certainly lies in the failures of Allied strategy and decisionmaking. In the east, Stalin and the Stavka shrank from a truly bold initiative that might have dealt the Ostheer a mortal blow, while, in both east and west, a preference for broad frontal advances allowed the Wehrmacht to wriggle free from its death trap. The Allied drives also slowed as a natural consequence of logistic, supply, and manpower problems as the offensives simply reached their culmination point. In addition, the German military leadership showed an uncanny ability time and again to cobble sufficient troops together for well-placed counterattacks that succeeded in knocking the enemy off stride. Finally, the dogged persistence and remarkable fighting skill of the average Landser also played a role.
Just as importantly, however, not only did the institutional pillars of the regime (the Wehrmacht, the SS, the party, and the ministries) remain intact, but the myriad catastrophes of the summer of 1944 unleashed a flurry of activity as the Nazi leadership made one last effort at implementing total war. No one in the inner circle promoted or benefited more from this than Joseph Goebbels, who, of course, had long been obsessed with the need to reorganize the German economy and German society. As early as the winter crisis of 1941–1942, he had warned about the deleterious impact of the continuation of peacetime activities and, instead, sought to harden the public for the demands ahead through a propaganda campaign of “realistic optimism.” Again in the winter crisis of the following year, supported this time by Albert Speer, he had railed against the luxuries and excesses of the elite while demanding the extensive mobilization of German society. Young men should be released by the armaments industries for service in the army, he insisted, with their places taken by women. At the same time, production of unnecessary consumer goods should be halted and the bureaucratic ranks combed for men suitable for military service, both of which would free further manpower for the front. He also expected this “war socialism” to generate a huge wave of energy from the body of the Volksgemeinschaft that would result in a national rising against the existential threat from the east. None of this, of course, eventuated as the political infighting among top Nazis ensured that little of lasting consequence would be done.30
The summer crisis of 1944, however, presented another opportunity for action. Already on 2 July, Goebbels had published a leading article in Das Reich, one intended to begin the psychological mobilization of the masses, in which he answered the question posed in the title, “Are we conducting a total war?” by suggesting, “obviously not total, or at least not total enough.” He stressed again his recurrent theme that, in view of the material superiority of the enemy, Germany had to make the most rational and efficient use of its resources. A few days later, he found an ally in his initiative as Albert Speer, in conversations with Hitler between the sixth and the eighth, urged that Goebbels be placed in charge of mobilizing the home front while Himmler be given an expanded role in supervising the Wehrmacht. In a 12 July memorandum to Hitler, Speer explicitly adopted Goebbels’s program, setting out a list of “revolutionary measures” for boosting armaments production—closing unnecessary businesses, drafting women into the labor force, combing administrative offices for personnel—that were virtually identical to the propaganda minister’s. Speer followed this memorandum with another on the twentieth, the day of the attempted coup, in which he further bolstered his proposals with a favorite Goebbels argument. There was, complained the armaments minister, “an absolute disparity between the numbers of productive [workers] required for the defense of the homeland and those unproductive ones needed to maintain living standards and the bureaucracy.” By this time, Goebbels had joined the debate directly. In a memorandum of 18 July to the Führer urging the ruthless mobilization of the German people for total war, he stressed that Germany could still win the war simply by not losing it; that is, given the superiority of its opponents, Germany’s only chance for victory lay in a rupture in the enemy coalition. That breach would surely come, Goebbels asserted, but it was questionable, without a full reorganization of the economy, whether Germany would have enough punch left to take advantage of this crisis when it happened.31
Given his steadfast loyalty and actions on 20 July, it was hardly a surprise when Hitler named Goebbels plenipotentiary for the total war effort on 25 July, seemingly making him, as Goebbels bragged, dictator over the home front. Since in June Hitler had rejected just such a move to total war and had assured Goebbels that the crisis would be surmounted “in the usual way,” his action now amounted to an admission that his regime faced an unprecedented existential threat. As always in the Third Reich, however, this new burst of dynamism worked largely at cross-purposes. Not only did the Gauleiter continue to resist full implementation of total war measures, being particularly opposed to plant closings and limitations on consumer goods, but Goebbels and Speer, although having linked their efforts at procuring Hitler’s approval for total war, also had conflicting conceptions of its goal. While Goebbels aimed at a levee en masse, an ideological activation of the Volksgemeinschaft that would throw hundreds of thousands of fanatics at the enemy, Speer envisioned the use of the newly available personnel in armaments factories. Typically, Hitler resolved the dispute by attempting to satisfy both squabbling parties. He allowed Goebbels to undertake an extreme austerity drive within Germany and Speer to make good the lost armaments workers with an increased employment of women and foreign workers.32
For both, however, the reality was that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Although Goebbels succeeded in instituting a sixty-hour workweek, pruning personnel from the cultural sphere (where theaters, orchestras, and newspapers were shut down), closing many firms producing goods unnecessary for the war effort, and weeding staff from administrative offices, the results proved disappointing. Since a large proportion of the men sifted from the economy and bureaucracies were too old for military service, Goebbels increasingly forced younger men out of exempt occupations—work thought essential for the war effort, including skilled work—and replaced them with older, less-fit, less-qualified workers, with predictable results. The net addition of women to the workforce also proved disappointing, with only about a quarter of a million added. As before, the war economy continued to depend on the widespread employment of foreign labor; by August 1944, roughly every third worker in the German economy was either a foreign worker or a prisoner of war (with a much higher percentage in agriculture and some specific armaments sectors). Despite improvements in working and living conditions, these laborers remained far less productive than their German counterparts, which proved a further hindrance to maximizing output. Although Goebbels’s efforts between August and December 1944 freed around a million men to be sent to the front, most of the replacements were either very young or overaged, poorly trained, physically or mentally unfit (hundreds of thousands were rejected by the army as unsuitable for service), and unable to stand the strains of front service. As a result, German casualties in that same period exceeded 1.2 million men.33
In yet other ways, as well, the Germans were losing the competition between production and destruction. With the intensification of the Allied bomber war over Germany, efforts were under way to speed production of aircraft and the much-trumpeted wonder weapons. Faced with the imminent extinction of the Luftwaffe in early 1944, Speer joined forces with the Reich Air Ministry to form a Jägerstab (fighter staff) to streamline and accelerate fighter production. Aided by the brutally efficient Karl Otto Sauer and Hans Kammler, the Jägerstab enjoyed a priority in armaments production that allowed it to achieve extraordinary gains. Between February and July, aircraft production more than doubled, from 2,015 to 4,219, an armaments “miracle” that was achieved through a combination of material rewards, a longer workweek, the production of only a few models, and the application of coercive violence and the most severe discipline, especially to foreign workers. Himmler’s SS also took advantage of the demand for labor by supplying ever-larger numbers of concentration camp prisoners to the aircraft and engine factories; by August in some plants over a third of the workers had been “subcontracted” by the SS. Moreover, the need for labor resulted in the last remaining taboo being broken as Eichmann began furnishing Jewish labor from Hungary, particularly to Kammler’s underground rocket factories at Mittelbau-Dora.34