Joseph Goebbels (Reich Minister of Propaganda, and head of the Party’s propaganda organization), and Albert Speer (Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production) had utilized the needs of the war to emphasize their own indispensability to Hitler. Losses at the front had left troop numbers severely depleted.10 Destruction of equipment urgently required a concentrated armaments drive. Labour had to be combed from all possible sources for Wehrmacht recruitment as well as for armaments work. Not least, new efforts in propaganda were vital to mobilize the population, compelling them to recognize the need for utmost self-sacrifice in the interests of the war. Yet here the frustrations with Hitler’s leadership, within a framework of unquestioned loyalty, were evident. They centred on Hitler’s unwillingness to move to the requirements of all-out ‘total war’, meaning much more drastic measures to maximize recruitment to the Wehrmacht and war production.
Goebbels—a diminutive figure in his late forties with a pronounced limp in his right foot (a deformity of which he was very self-conscious), one of the most intelligent Nazi leaders, possessed of a cruel wit, ruthless and dynamic, organizationally able, a fervent Hitler acolyte who in his mastery of propaganda managed to combine utter cynicism with extreme, brutal ideological fanaticism—had been pressing for a move to ‘total war’ (to maximize every conceivable resource of hitherto unused manpower and drastically curtail any activity not essential to the war economy) since February 1943, in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad. Speer had joined him at that time in urging a reorganization and revitalization of the war effort at home. Goebbels most of all aspired to take over the running of the home front, leaving Hitler to concentrate on military matters. But Hitler had commissioned little beyond token steps and total war had remained largely a propaganda slogan. In a long private meeting with Hitler on 21 June 1944, just before the Soviet breakthrough on the eastern front, but with the successful Allied landings in northern France plainly constituting a major threat, Goebbels once more vehemently pressed the case for total war and a drastic overhaul of the political and military command structure. Again Hitler demurred. He wanted, he said, to proceed for the time being ‘along the evolutionary, not revolutionary, way’.11
The depletion of labour resources as a consequence of the enemy inroads from the west and the east had prompted Albert Speer temporarily to join forces with Goebbels in July in the attempt to persuade Hitler to adopt total-war measures aimed at dredging out remaining reserves of manpower. Speer, only thirty-nine years of age, good-looking, cultured and highly intelligent, a superb manager and organizer, and from the outset intensely ambitious, had rapidly established himself in the 1930s as a ‘court favourite’ by exploiting Hitler’s passion for grandiose building projects. Before he was thirty he gained Hitler’s commission to design the Reich Party Rally stadium at Nuremberg. In 1937 he was given responsibility for turning Berlin into a capital befitting a master-race. In the last year of peace he delivered, on time and at breakneck speed, Hitler’s imposing new Reich Chancellery. Hitler saw in Speer the architect of genius he himself had wanted to become. Speer for his part revered Hitler; and he was intoxicated by the power that the favour of the Dictator brought.
When Fritz Todt, in charge of weapon and munitions production, mysteriously died in an air crash in February 1942, Hitler, somewhat surprisingly, appointed Speer to be his new Armaments Minister, endowed with extensive powers. Since then, Speer had masterminded an astonishing rise in armaments production. But he knew the limits had been reached. He could not compete with Allied superiority.12 In a memorandum written to Hitler on 12 July, Speer purported to accept the Dictator’s claim that the current crisis could be overcome within some four months through new weapons, notably the A4 rocket (soon to be renamed the V2). And he agreed that, despite all difficulties, new recruits were potentially available from different sectors of the economy, including armaments, to replenish the Wehrmacht. At the same time, Speer argued, everything had to be done to strengthen the workforce in the armaments industry, and not simply through more foreign workers conscripted from across the Nazi empire. It was essential to make total-war demands on the population. People were ready to make the necessary sacrifices to their daily lives, he stated—a point that internal SD opinion reports seemed to back up.13 He suggested that women could be freed up for work in great numbers and that organizational improvements could produce new labour supplies. He recommended tough measures to ‘revolutionize’ living conditions. A proclamation on the mobilizing of last reserves would produce enthusiasm of a kind not experienced since the Wars of Liberation from Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, he thought.14
Hitler finally gave an indication that he accepted the need for action. The somewhat colourless head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, gave notice on 17 July that Hitler wanted a meeting of ministerial representatives most directly concerned about ‘a further strengthened deployment of men and women for defence of the Reich’ to take place four days later.15
Leaving no stone unturned in the pressure for total-war measures, Goebbels took up the charge on 18 July, following Speer’s lead, in a manoeuvre plainly coordinated with the Armaments Minister, and pushing in the same direction.16 In his memorandum to Hitler, Goebbels urged wide-ranging powers to be invested in one man (meaning himself, of course), who would work through the Gauleiter at regional level to galvanize action. He claimed that through the rigorous measures he had in mind he could produce fifty new divisions for the Wehrmacht in under four months.17
Speer then added his own second memorandum just over a week after the first, providing figures on current manpower in armaments, administration and business, pointing out the organizational mistakes that had allowed large-scale unproductive hoarding of labour, and indicating potential sources of recruitment to strengthen the Wehrmacht. He estimated (though the figures were hotly contested by those who would have to yield manpower) that as many as 4.3 million extra men could be found for the Wehrmacht through an efficiency drive. Though there was a need to protect the skilled workforce in armaments—a self-interested plea—he was adamant that the manpower problem for the needs of the front could be solved, but only if responsibility were given to a ‘personality’, endowed with plenipotentiary powers, and prepared to work with energy and dynamism to overcome vested interests and coordinate the necessary organizational changes in the Wehrmacht and Reich bureaucracy to allow for a rigorous exploitation of available human resources.18
Speer was making a scarcely veiled request to be handed control over the coordination of armaments and personnel within all sections of the Wehrmacht to add to his existing powers over the production of arms. Had this ambition been fulfilled, Speer would, through his armaments empire, have become the supremo of the total-war drive.19 What impact this memorandum might have had on Hitler, and on the meeting planned for 21 July to discuss total war, at precisely this juncture cannot be known. For there was no time to present this second memorandum to Hitler before events on the very day it had been composed, 20 July 1944, concentrated the Dictator’s mind.20
II
What hopes Germans still harboured as they reeled from the events on the western then the eastern front in summer 1944 crystallized in what had emerged as the last remaining war aim: defence of the Reich. The grand, utopian ideas of German rule stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals had long since been forgotten, except by lingering fantasists. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, and almost surreptitiously, the once heady vistas of a glorious ‘final victory’, however inchoate they had been, had yielded to bitter reality and to a limited and defensive objective: keeping the enemy from German soil. The time of the devastating blitzkrieg offensives, when the Wehrmacht would cut through weaker enemies like a knife through butter, was long past. In a war that had become a protracted rearguard against powerful enemies with immense resources, Hitler’s limitations as a warlord became ever clearer. At the same time, what he saw as the aim of the war, or how it might end, had become utterly opaque.