The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

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