Goebbels had thrown himself with his customary enormous energy into his new role as Plenipotentiary for Total War. The planning committee he established, headed by Werner Naumann, his State Secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, had swiftly prepared a raft of measures aimed at manpower savings to provide soldiers for the Wehrmacht. Speed of action and an image of dynamism were objectives in themselves for Goebbels, and the haste and improvisation frequently created rather than solved difficulties. But whatever the doubts about the effectiveness of the measures introduced, they made deep incisions into public life. Postal services were cut back, theatres closed, the number of orchestras reduced, film production pared down, university study for all but a few working in disciplines essential to the war or incapable of war service halted,58 publishing houses shut down, newspapers limited to a few pages only or discontinued. The age for labour conscription for women was extended from forty-five to fifty. By late August, men were required to work sixty and women forty-eight hours per week.59
Goebbels was careful to keep Hitler abreast of the measures he introduced, and cleverly played to the Dictator’s mood.60 But he did not always have his own way. He eventually succeeded in overcoming Hitler’s initial resistance to increasing further the age for women’s labour duty to fifty-five,61 and particularly to the closure of theatres and variety shows, as well as the abolition of some magazines that he liked. Hitler drew the line, however, at Goebbels’ plans to stop the production of beer and sweets. Even the Bolsheviks had never halted sweet production, Hitler stated, and thought they were necessary not only for citizens at home, but also for soldiers at the front. And, as regards beer, he feared above all ‘severe psychological repercussions in Bavaria’, and thought the move could provoke popular resentment.62 Hitler’s instinct, much more pronounced than that of Goebbels, for avoiding popular discontent remained undiminished, and was again demonstrated in mid-August in the directive he gave to finance the provision of 190,000 bottles of egg-flip to be handed by the NSV to those in the west suffering from bomb-damage (though why anyone bombed out of house and home would have welcomed the repulsive liqueur is another question).63
Cuts in administration in government offices also proved less easy to implement than Goebbels had imagined. The Reich Defence Commissars were instructed, for instance, in early September, with recourse to Hitler’s instructions, that they should desist from commandeering personnel in ministerial offices or the administrative departments in the Länder for service in the newly established divisions of the Wehrmacht.64 And while the Prussian Finance Ministry was finally abolished—a move of little significance, first mooted the previous year—the equally redundant bureau of the Prussian Minister President (one of Göring’s panoply of offices) was retained.65 The ‘combing-out’ process did produce substantial gains in some areas. More than 250,000 men were let go by the Post Office and more than 50,000 from the railways, among other significant reductions. But overall, the reductions in staff fell short of expectations.66 And those released were, predictably, often too old or too unfit for active military service. In fact, able-bodied men were to be found in large numbers only in exempted occupations in the armaments industry, an area in which it made scant sense to lose skilled and experienced workers to have them replaced by less well-trained men.67 The obvious tension between providing men for the Wehrmacht and retaining them for armaments production was bound to lead to conflict between the erstwhile allies, Goebbels and Speer. As the need mounted for men to compensate for the losses on the western front, and at the same time the pressures on Speer grew to provide the munitions and weaponry to address the deficiencies created by abandoned matériel, the conflict was not long in coming.
Until the collapse in the west, Speer had publicly at least professed optimism.68 He was, in fact, still telling Goebbels in early September that the armaments industry would be adequately provisioned until the beginning of 1946, even if all the occupied territories were lost.69 And he had initially been accommodating towards Goebbels’ requests for manpower. At the beginning of August he had offered 50,000 men from armaments production for the total-war effort.70 On the evening of 9 August, he had quickly reached agreement with Goebbels, and indicated his readiness to make 47,000 hitherto exempted employees in the less critical sectors of the armaments and related industries available, with the assurance that replacements would be found.71 At this point he was still optimistic of obtaining the necessary labour for his own domain from the total-war effort. But the harmony was soon to end. Control over the entire war economy was at stake.72 By the beginning of September, Goebbels had come to count himself among Speer’s most bitter opponents.73
Goebbels did not mind whose toes he trod on to reach by one means or another the extravagant savings in manpower he had promised Hitler. And the Gauleiter predictably competed with each other to make the highest savings. Speer found himself on the receiving end of high-handed actions which he saw as extremely damaging to armaments production.74 At the beginning of September, Goebbels was still expecting Speer to find the promised 50,000 men that month. But the tug of war between the two of them had started, and the conflict deepened as the month progressed.75 Without a base of support within the Party, and seen as unreasonably insistent on protecting his own domain from the sacrifices other areas had been forced to make, Speer faced a losing battle. He had to contend with powerful enemies. Not just Goebbels and Bormann, but also Himmler and Robert Ley, were among his critics. Attacks by the Party, and interference at the regional level by the Gauleiter, grew.76 He did his own cause little good when he admitted to Goebbels at the beginning of September that production was holding up well despite the loss of men in exempted positions that he had been compelled to provide for the Wehrmacht.77
Speer felt his only recourse was to appeal directly to Hitler. He did so in a lengthy memorandum on 20 September defending himself against strong allegations from Goebbels and Bormann that his ministry was a ‘collection of reactionary economic leaders’ and ‘hostile to the Party’. Claiming that his task was ‘non-political’, he objected to the Party’s intervention in his sphere of responsibility and wanted the Gauleiter made responsible to him, not Bormann, in armaments matters.78 But Hitler was never going to transfer any control over the Gauleiter from the Party to Speer’s hands. Bormann told the Armaments Minister in no uncertain terms that, as regards the total-war effort, he was subordinate to Goebbels.79 In any case, Speer no longer had the influence with the Dictator that he had enjoyed in earlier years. His repeated argument that this war was a technical one, and that more and better weaponry would decide it,80 rather than simply supplying more men to the Wehrmacht, fell on deaf ears, when Hitler and Goebbels both insisted on the obvious counter-argument that increased supplies of both men and weapons were a necessity. Goebbels, constantly supplying Hitler with progress reports on the success of his total-war effort, seemed bound to end up the winner in the conflict.
Speer again addressed Hitler directly in rejecting Goebbels’ demands for 100,000 armaments workers to be recruited for the September quota of total-war recruits (beyond the 200,000 he had provided since 25 July). These could not be delivered, he claimed, without impairing armaments production. He needed time to prepare for the large inroads into his workforce, and with difficulty could only manage to offer 60,000 from 25 October, then the remaining 40,000 by 15 November. To his frustration, he then found, on returning from a visit to the western front at the end of September, that Hitler had decided that most of the 60,000 were to be sent to the army earlier than he had stipulated, something he described as ‘an extraordinarily serious and drastic measure’.81