On 28 July 1944, transmitting Hitler’s decree of the previous day for the construction of fortifications in the east, Guderian, the newly appointed Chief of the Army General Staff, declared that ‘the whole of eastern Germany must immediately become a single deep-echeloned fortress’. The State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, amplified the order, laying out details for implementation of the construction work to the eastern Gauleiter and Hans Frank, boss of the General Government. The fortification workers would need spades, pickaxes, blankets, eating utensils and marching rations. Their overseers were to have pistols and other weapons—a hint of the possible need for harsh action to stamp their authority on a recalcitrant workforce. The Reich Transport Ministry and railway authorities would organize transport. Building materials and equipment would come from OT offices. Horses and carts were to be used as far as possible for carrying the building materials. Rations would be allocated through provincial food offices or, in the case of the General Government, through deep inroads into the provisions of the region.28
At the beginning of September, Hitler made it clear that command over the fortification work was exclusively in the hands of the Party, to be deployed by the RKVs under Bormann’s direction.29 In reality, the Gauleiter, as RKVs, had a good deal of independence in the way they ran affairs in their provinces. Erich Koch, the brutal Gauleiter of East Prussia, one of Hitler’s favourite provincial chieftains, led the way in dragooning the population of his province into compulsory labour service. Already on 13 July he had decreed that the entire male population of specified districts between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five were to be conscripted with immediate effect for fortification work. Anyone defying the order would be subject to punishment by military court. Shops and businesses not absolutely necessary for the war effort were closed and their owners and workers sent to dig. Trains leaving the East Prussian border were controlled, and men taken off them and brought back for construction work.30 Koch’s example was followed by the other eastern Gauleiter. A report from Königsberg in East Prussia, noted by British intelligence authorities, indicates the effect of the conscription on daily life in the province.
Great simplifications have been introduced in the everyday life of the population. In restaurants guests must go to the kitchen with their plate, so that all waiters and male kitchen staff can dig. The newspapers no longer publish regional editions but only one standard edition. Thus editors, compositors and printers are released for digging. Every business which is not of importance to the war has been closed. Every East Prussian fit for military service has been called up. The large gates of Königsberg University have been closed. The students and all men employed at the University are digging.
Even harvest workers were taken away at the most crucial point of the agricultural year to dig, though in separate waves so that the garnering of the harvest was not impaired.31
Anxiety probably underpinned an early readiness to help in the digging operations, notably in East Prussia, closest to the front line. Certainly, there was a positive initial response to appeals to take part as the local population, most readily members of the Hitler Youth, rallied round in an emergency, though propaganda about the enthusiasm of the diggers should be taken with a sizeable pinch of salt.32 The Party itself, though claiming there was a good deal of understanding for the necessity of the digging action, was aware of the extensive criticism of its poor organization of the entrenchment work and lack of conviction that the fortifications had any military value.33 Practical difficulties—poor accommodation and food, transport difficulties, even a shortage of spades—and the very nature of such cripplingly hard toil, digging the baked ground hour on hour in the heat of summer, soon withered whatever good spirits had prevailed at the outset. Women in Pomerania wrote to Goebbels complaining that they had received no medical inspection before deployment, that they had to sleep on straw mats in primitive communal quarters, and that food and sanitary arrangements were lamentable. For foreign workers and prisoners of war, needless to say, the conditions were far worse.34
The behaviour of Party officials and overseers often did not help. There were reports of Party officials drinking, skiving, siphoning off food and drink meant for diggers, of their high-handed behaviour and dereliction of duty setting the worst example to the conscript workers. Driving up to the columns of diggers in a car, inspecting the ranks without picking up a shovel, and bawling at elderly men and women actually doing the work was not guaranteed to encourage enthusiastic commitment to the task or endear the Party to the conscripts. Unsurprisingly, there were attempts to evade the work. Even veterans of the First World War, it was reported in East Prussia, had absconded, less than enamoured by the work they were being compelled to carry out, and worried that the front was so close. They had to be hauled back by the police.35
The weeks of grinding toil by hundreds of thousands of men and women were militarily as good as worthless. Even Goebbels saw that the East Prussian fortifications erected by Koch were pointless unless troops and weaponry were poured in to hold them.36 On paper, the achievements looked considerable: 400 kilometres of defences erected in Pomerania, for instance, and a 120-kilometre ring to hold five armed divisions around the newly designated fortress of Breslau.37 Much was made by propaganda once the Russians had been forced back about the value of the entrenchments, eulogizing about the usefulness of all the hard work that had gone into them. But in reality, the kilometres of earthworks, entrenchments and hastily constructed, inadequately manned, fortifications were never going to stop, or even hold up, the Red Army for long. Their worth had been severely limited. And of the designated ‘fortresses’, Königsberg, it is true, only fell in April 1945, and Breslau held out until 6 May. All this meant was that the futile loss of life of civilians, let alone of front soldiers, was magnified.
If the digging marathon in the east served any purpose, it was in large part as a propaganda exercise, demonstrating the continued will to hold out. How effective the propaganda function was is difficult to assess. It has been claimed that the endeavour shown in the fortification work bolstered the patriotism of the east German population and their resolve to defend the homeland; that the communal work served as an inspiration elsewhere in Germany, underpinned faith in the Party, and boosted military morale through showing the troops that, in contrast to 1918, they had the undiluted backing of the ‘home front’. Such claims are impossible to test accurately, but almost certainly greatly exaggerated.38
It would be a mistake to presume that the brash propaganda trumpeting of the fortification effort had no effect at all. Conceivably, it did help to solidify patriotic feeling in eastern Germany. And it conveyed a sense that the actions of ordinary Germans mattered in the fight to hold off the Red Army. But at most it boosted a readiness—from fear, if nothing else—to defend the homeland that was already present. Outside the eastern regions, and perhaps within them, too, people were as likely to see the frenetic entrenchments less as a heroic achievement than as a panic move, a sign that the situation was indeed extremely grave.39 As for faith in the Party, this was so sharply on the wane in the summer and autumn of 1944—whatever the lingering reserves of hope in Hitler himself—that it was as good as impossible for the fortifications programme to alter the trend, apart, perhaps, from impressing a few gullible waverers in the eastern regions by the energetic actions of Koch and other Gauleiter. Finally, while soldiers were doubtless gratified to hear of solidarity at home, it is questionable whether their fighting morale drew much inspiration from news of a huge digging programme carried out by the young, the old, and female labour on fortifications about whose defensive qualities against the might of the Red Army a level of scepticism was only too understandable.