Hitler accepted Speer’s recommendations at their meeting at the end of November. He agreed, for example, that the Reich should provide a labour force of between 100,000 and 150,000 to assist the Ruhr, and that all workers from the area conscripted for digging elsewhere should be returned. He also ordered an improvement in shoe provision for the Ruhr.36
In the build-up to the Ardennes offensive, Speer paid another, shorter, visit to the western front between 7 and 10 December, visiting mainly units of Army Groups B and G to hear their experiences and suggestions on the armaments situation. Major improvements were no longer possible. The armaments industry was by now scraping the barrel. (This had not prevented Speer, however, just before leaving for the western front, impressing a selected audience with an array of improved weapons in preparation.37) He was reduced to recommending incentives—additional army stores goods or leave—for troop units with especially low losses of weaponry. He also encouraged intensified propaganda efforts by the NSFOs to explain how well the armaments industry was performing despite all difficulties, and to combat rumours on shortages of tanks and fuel that were damaging troop morale. He pointed out to Hitler that Saar coal and gas were keeping the whole of south-west German industry going. The severe consequences if the Saar fell to the enemy were obvious.38
Speer’s third trip to the western front took place in the second half of December, during the Ardennes offensive, when he took soundings from a number of units of Army Group B. There was little concrete return from his visit. The most significant part of the report emphasized again the crisis on the railways. The Reichsbahn network in the region had, he reported, been ‘almost completely smashed’ beyond repair. (Sepp Dietrich complained that his troops were getting no munitions because the communications routes had been destroyed by air raids.)39 Other methods had to be deployed to ensure that materials were delivered and that inefficiencies, such as leaving loaded wagons at the mercy of air attacks, were reduced. Speer recommended the deployment of Party Local Leaders who, together with stationmasters, could organize alternative transport, get railway wagons unloaded and convey important communications by car or motorbike to the army commanders. However, minor improvisations to try to keep things moving could not gloss over, even for Hitler, the fact that the end was approaching.40
With the end of the war and the onset of a post-Hitler era plainly in view, Speer’s considerable energies were not least directed, in collaboration with industrial leaders and the army, at preserving what could be saved of German industry.41 Industrialists were under no illusions about the outcome of the war. Their main concern was avoiding the total destruction of their industries in a futile struggle so that they could be swiftly restored and continue in operation when Hitler was gone. Albert Vögler, head of the Federated Steelworks and among the Ruhr’s foremost industrial magnates, a long-standing Hitler supporter, asked the Minister directly, in full recognition of the desolate state of the economy, when Hitler would end the conflict. ‘We’re losing too much substance,’ he said. ‘How shall we be able to reconstruct if the destruction of industry goes on like this only a few months longer?’42
Neither Speer’s later actions to fend off Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ order, nor that order itself, came out of thin air. Under the ever more obvious fiction that immobilizing rather than totally destroying German industrial installations would enable them to be restored to working conditions as soon as the areas lost to military action were retaken, Speer had been issuing corresponding directives both on the eastern and western fronts since July.43 In early December he had to contend with instructions from Keitel, indicating Hitler’s wish that, where industrial installations could be quickly reconstructed to serve the enemy, they should be completely destroyed, not just paralysed. Keitel emphasized in particular that the Saar coal mines should on no account be allowed to fall undestroyed into enemy hands.44 Speer evidently intervened directly with Hitler to have the order amended. The same day he wired Saarbrücken: ‘all directives stating that coal mines are not to be crippled but destroyed are invalid. The Führer has again stipulated today that he only wants the coal mines to be crippled in the way we have established.’ Four days later Keitel transmitted Hitler’s decision that industrial installations endangered by the enemy in the area of Army Group G were merely to be crippled, not destroyed, and that all contrary orders were cancelled.45 Speer’s exertions to head off the destruction of Germany’s industry were not, however, over yet. The big conflict with Hitler on this front still awaited him.
Speer was clear-sighted enough to see the scale of the mounting disaster. But his strenuous efforts to keep the collapsing war economy functioning never wavered. Whatever motives he had, his efforts helped to maintain his position of power and influence at a time when they were under threat.46 To one so power-conscious, this mattered. Of course, Speer and his able subordinates in the Armaments Ministry, realists as most of them were (apart, perhaps, from the incorrigible super-optimist Saur), knew full well that they could not prevent the inexorable disintegration of the war economy. Without their extraordinary endeavours and capacity for improvisation, however, it is difficult to see how the German war effort could have staggered on until May 1945.
III
The other members of the power quadrumvirate—Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann—also strived to the utmost during the fraught autumn weeks to ensure there was no slackening of the war effort. They gave no hint whatsoever that the war was unwinnable, maintaining a complete grip on the population through propaganda, organization and unrelenting coercion.
One task was to provide the Gauleiter, crucial figures in the power apparatus in the regions, with the backing they felt they needed. Towards the end of October, Bormann had passed on to Himmler a copy of a communication from Gauleiter Friedrich Karl Florian, the provincial boss of the Düsseldorf area and spokesman of the western Gauleiter, about the ‘extremely serious and difficult situation’ caused by air raids on cities and the transport network. Florian stated that this could not be mastered, and could become threatening, unless accelerated aid from the Reich were forthcoming. Meetings with individual ministers or their officials had so far been without powers of decision. The western Gauleiter now sought ‘new ways’ to persuade Hitler to order a meeting of ministers, to be chaired by Bormann, to coordinate measures on food, transport, armaments, labour and other urgent issues without delay. Bormann agreed to the meeting but at Hitler’s request handed responsibility for it to Himmler.47