by Ian Kershaw
Such restrictions on his powers left Goebbels’s enthusiasm for his new task undimmed. In a radio address on 26 July, the day after his appointment, the Propaganda Minister conveyed the impression that, far from having its manpower reserves exhausted by five years of war, total mobilization was just beginning and would ‘set free, all over the country, so many hands for both the front and the munition factories that it will not be too hard for us to master in sovereign fashion the difficulties that are bound to arise in the war from time to time’.119 The belief that ‘will’ would overcome all problems was immediately put into action as Goebbels, with his usual forceful energy, unleashed a veritable frenzy of activity in his new role. The staff of fifty that he rapidly assembled from a number of ministries, most prominently from his own Propaganda Ministry, prided themselves on their unbureaucratic methods, swift decision-making, and improvisation. As his main agents in ensuring that directives were implemented in the regions, leaving no stone unturned in the quest to comb out all reserves of untapped labour, Goebbels looked to the Party’s Gauleiter, bolstering their already extensive powers as Reich Defence Commissars. They could be relied upon, in his view, to reinvoke the spirit of the ‘time of struggle’, to ensure that bureaucracy did not get in the way of action. (In practice, the cooperation of the Gauleiter was assured as long as no inroads were made into the personnel of their own Party offices. Bormann ensured that they were well protected.)120
Behind the actionism of the Party, Goebbels also needed Hitler’s backing. He ensured that this was forthcoming through a constant stream of bulletins on progress (Führer-Informationen), printed out on a ‘Führer-Machine’ – a typewriter with greatly enlarged characters which Hitler’s failing eyesight could cope with121 – recording successes and couching general recommendations (such as simplifying unnecessary bureaucratic paperwork) in such a way that, given Hitler’s frame of mind, approval would be as good as automatic, thereby opening up yet further avenues for intervention.122
Nevertheless, Hitler did not give blanket approval to all measures suggested by Goebbels. He could rely upon Bormann to bring to his attention any proposals which his own still sharp antennae would tell him might have an unnecessarily harmful impact on morale, both at home and quite especially among soldiers at the front. He rejected, therefore, the Total War Plenipotentiary’s proposals to save manpower in postal services by ending delivery of small parcels and private telegrams on the grounds that such changes would, for little return, be highly unpopular among families divided in war. Similarly, he blocked suggestions of ending supplies of newspapers and periodicals to the front because soldiers looked forward so much to reading them.123
Elsewhere, Goebbels encountered successful resistance to his proposals when Lammers and Göring combined to head off the suggestion to abolish the office of Minister President of Prussia along with the Prussian Finance Ministry (which had been deflected by Lammers the previous year, but now made enticing through the involvement of the Minister, Popitz, in the conspiracy against Hitler). Measured against the bureaucratic effort to transfer the business elsewhere, even the closure of the Prussian Finance Ministry proved counter-productive as a manpower-saving exercise. The complex problems of administrative reorganization which Lammers raised were the Minister Presidency to be abolished were eventually sufficient for Hitler to decide on its retention.124
An obvious problem was how the labour savings were to be redeployed. As Armaments Minister, Speer wanted to make use of the newly available labour in the factories under his control. Goebbels, on the other hand, saw his main task in freeing up new reserves for service at the front. The short-lived alliance between the two rapidly, therefore, came to grief. Speer saw his own powers now undermined by Goebbels, and by the Gauleiter who, spurred on by the Total War Plenipotentiary and seizing the new opportunities that the revitalization of the Party provided, intervened frequently and arbitrarily in his domain of armaments production. Matters came to a head over Goebbels’s demand to conscript 100,000 men from the armaments industry. On 21 September, Speer presented Hitler with a lengthy letter setting out his demands for restriction of Party intervention in armaments questions.
Given both his personal standing with Hitler and the priority nature of his work, such a personal appeal by Speer would in the past have had a good chance of success. On this occasion, Hitler took the letter from Speer without comment, rang for his adjutant, and had it passed to Bormann who was asked, along with Goebbels who was in the Führer Headquarters at the time, for his views. It was as if, Speer wrote much later, Hitler was too weary to involve himself in such a difficult conflict.125
A few hours later, Speer was asked to Bormann’s office nearby, where he met the head of the Party Chancellery, in shirt-sleeves and braces over his large stomach, and the more formally dressed diminutive Goebbels. Speer was no match for the new alliance, resting on mutual self-interest, controlling the Party, in charge of propaganda, calling on the principles of National Socialism, appealing to the Gauleiter – and with Hitler’s ear. The discussion was heated. But Speer’s references to his ‘historic responsibility’ and threats to resign did not impress. ‘I think we have let this young man become somewhat too big,’ Goebbels coolly noted in his diary. Bormann told Speer he had to accept Goebbels’s decisions, and forbade any further recourse to Hitler. Goebbels informed Speer that he intended to make full use of the powers bestowed on him by Hitler. Discussion ended with Goebbels declaring that he would put the – wholly rhetorical – question to Hitler, as to whether he was prepared to dispense with the 100,000 men.126
Two days later, Hitler signed a proclamation by Speer to directors of armaments factories which, in the eyes of the Armaments Minister, granted most of the demands he had made in his letter. Hitler was typically appearing to grant both sides in a dispute what they wanted. But Speer recognized this was no victory over Bormann and Goebbels. Hitler was unwilling – Speer thought unable – to hold his Party leaders in check.127 At any rate, he could do nothing to bring the conflict between two of his most important ‘feudal’ – and feuding – barons to a halt. The dispute rumbled on for weeks.128 If there was no outright winner, the signs were plain enough that Speer’s once unique influence on Hitler was on the wane. With a reversion to Party activism, on the other hand, the position of Goebbels as well as that of Bormann had been strengthened. And now, as before, all positions of power in the Third Reich still hinged on Hitler’s favour.
Backed by this favour, Goebbels certainly produced a new, extreme austerity drive within Germany in the first weeks in his new office as Total War Plenipoteniary. In the cultural sphere, many theatres and art schools were closed, orchestras run down, the film industry drastically pruned of staff, three-quarters of the Reich Cultural Chamber axed. Big restrictions were imposed on printing, with many newspapers being shut down. Firms producing goods unnecessary for the war effort, such as toys or fashion items, were shut. Employment of domestic servants – most of them non-German – was tightly restricted, freeing up as many as 400,000 women for work (with an increase of registration age from forty-five to fifty-five years of age). Postal and railway services were cut back. Local government offices were forced to simplify administration and weed out their staff. From mid-August, leave was banned. Business and administration were working a minimum sixty-hour week. By October, 451,800 men had been made available for the war effort.129
The figures were deceptive. A large proportion of the men sifted out of the administration and economy were too old for military service. Goebbels was forced, therefore, to turn to fit men in reserved occupations – work thought essential for the war effort, including skilled employment in armaments factories or food production. Their replacement, where possible, by older, less fit, less experienced, less qualified workers was both administratively complicated and inefficient. The net addition of women workers numbered only little over quarter of a million. Many of the half a million mobilized overall replaced older women, or were tied to the h
ome. There were only 271,000 more women in employment in September 1944 than there had been in May 1939. And, despite the draconian measures deployed, German men employed in industry had dropped by no more than 848,500 over the same period (more than compensated, numerically, by foreign workers), while even the much-purged administrative sector had only lost 17 per cent of its employees. The German economy was, in fact, only holding together at all because of the employment of foreign conscript labour – now accounting for 20.8 per cent of the work-force (a far higher percentage in agriculture). And although, partly through Goebbels’s measures, it proved possible to send around a million men to the front between August and December 1944, German losses in the first three of those months numbered 1,189,000 dead and wounded.130 Whatever the trumpeting by Goebbels of his achievements as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort, the reality was that he was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
And among the most bizarre aspects of the ‘total war’ drive in the second half of 1944 was the fact that at precisely the time he was combing out the last reserves of manpower, Goebbels – according to film director Veit Harlan – was allowing him, at Hitler’s express command, to commandeer 187,000 soldiers, withdrawn from active service, as extras for the epic colour film of national heroism, Kolberg, depicting the defence of the small Baltic town against Napoleon as a model for the achievements of total war. According to Harlan, Hitler as well as Goebbels was ‘convinced that such a film was more useful than a military victory’.131 Even in the terminal crisis of the regime, propaganda had to come first.
The evocation of heroic defence of the fatherland by the masses against the invading Napoleonic army – the myth enunciated in Kolberg – was put to direct use in the most vivid expression of the last-ditch drive to ‘total war’: the launching by Heinrich Himmler of the Volkssturm, or people’s militia, on 18 October 1944, the 131st anniversary of the legendary defeat of Napoleon in the ‘Battle of the Peoples’ near Leipzig, when a coalition of forces under Blücher’s leadership liberated German territory from the troops of the French Emperor once and for all.132 The Volkssturm was the military embodiment of the Party’s belief in ‘triumph of the will’.133 It was the Party’s attempt to militarize the homeland, symbolizing unity through the people’s participation in national defence, overcoming the deficiencies in weapons and resources through sheer willpower.
Suggestions of creating ‘border protection’ units in the east were put forward as early as mid-July by the Propaganda Ministry following the Red Army’s advance into Lithuania.134 But in the weeks following the attempt on Hitler’s life, the initiative in this area was seized primarily by Martin Bormann. In readiness more to combat possible internal unrest than external invasion, Bormann sought in August the assistance of Himmler, as Commander of the Reserve Army, in arming Party functionaries. The Party had also taken over responsibility from the Luftwaffe for anti-aircraft and flak service. The threats from the borders produced new duties, again run by the Party, in digging fortifications, involving women as well as men in the hard manual labour.135
Though Goebbels continued to harbour the belief that he would incorporate in his ‘total war’ commission the organization of the ‘Volkswehr’ (People’s Defence), as it was initially to be called, leaving the military aspects to the SA, Bormann and Himmler had come to an agreement to divide responsibility between them. Drafts for a decree by Hitler were put forward in early September. He eventually signed the decree on 26 September, though it was dated to the previous day.136 It spoke of the ‘final aim’ of the enemy alliance as ‘the eradication of the German person (Ausrottung des deutschen Menschen)’. This enemy must now be repulsed until a peace securing Germany’s future could be guaranteed. To attain this end, Hitler’s decree went on, in typical parlance, ‘we set the total deployment of all Germans against the known total annihilatory will of our Jewish-international enemies’. In all Party Gaue, the ‘German Volkssturm’ was to be established, comprising all men capable of bearing weapons between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Training, military organization, and provision of weaponry fell to Himmler as Commander of the Reserve Army. Political and organizational matters were the province of Bormann, acting on Hitler’s behalf.137 Party functionaries were given the task of forming companies and battalions.138 A total number of 6 million Volkssturm men was envisaged.139 Each Volkssturm man had to swear an oath that he would be ‘unconditionally loyal and obedient to the Führer of the Great German Reich Adolf Hitler’, and would ‘rather die than abandon the freedom and thereby the social future of my people’.140
The men called up had to provide their own clothing, as well as eating and drinking utensils, cooking equipment, a rucksack, and blanket.141 And since munitions for the front were in short supply, the weaponry for the men of the Volkssturm was predictably miserable.142 It was little wonder that the Volkssturm was largely unpopular, and widely seen as pointless on the grounds that the war was already lost. According to one reported comment, the Volkssturm had been called up because ‘there is nothing more to oppose the assault of our enemies with than people and blood’. Another pointed out that the poster bearing the Führer’s decree setting up the Volkssturm looked like notice of an execution – and indeed did announce an execution, ‘the execution of the entire German people’.143
The fears, especially on the eastern front, were justified. Gauleiter Erich Koch reported severe losses among Volkssturm units in East Prussia already in October.144 The losses were militarily pointless. They did not hold up the Red Army’s advance by a single day. In all, approaching 175,000 citizens who were mainly too old, too young, or too weak to fight lost their lives in the Volkssturm.145 The futility of the losses was a clear sign that Germany was close to military bankruptcy.
As the autumn of 1944 headed towards what would prove the last winter of the war, the fabric of the regime was still holding together. But the indications were that the threads were visibly starting to fray. The closing of the ranks which had followed Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt had temporarily seen a revitalization of the élan of the Party. Hitler had, almost as a reflex, turned inwards to those he trusted. His distance, not just from the army leaders he detested, but also from the organs of state administration, started to extend immeasurably with his increased reliance on a diminishing number of his longstanding paladins. Bormann’s position, dependent upon the combination of his role as head of the Party organization and, especially, his proximity to Hitler as the Führer’s secretary and mouthpiece, guarding the portals and restricting access, was particularly strengthened. He was one of the winners from the changed circumstances after 20 July.146 Another was Goebbels who, like Bormann, had seized the opportunity to enhance his own position of power as the Party increased its hold over practically all walks of life within Germany. Mobilization and control had been the essence of Party activity since the beginning. Now, as the regime tottered, the Party returned to its elements.
Speer was one of the losers in the aftermath of the bomb plot. He could no longer depend upon his special favour with Hitler. Without a Party base, he began to feel the cold. So, too, as the Party reasserted itself, did Lammers, the only point of coordination between the work of the various Reich ministries and Hitler. Though his relations with Bormann had never been free of tension, they had functioned after a fashion – and had sometimes formed the basis of a pragmatic alliance against other forces in the regime.147 In autumn 1944, the balance in their positions had started to tip as Bormann’s position strengthened. Contact between the two waned. More important still: Lammers lost his access to Hitler. The chief orchestrator of government business was no longer in a position to discuss that business with the head of state. In a letter to Bormann on 1 January 1945, Lammers, pointing to the early good cooperation, lamented the fact that his last audience with Hitler had been three months earlier, that he had had to give up at the end of October his quarters close to Hitler’s field headquarters, and that Reich Ministers would inevitably have to se
ek other channels of approach to the Führer if he could not provide them. He had been, he bemoaned, often in the embarrassing situation that he had had to carry responsibility for decisions of the Führer which had simply been transmitted to him, without any possibility of his affecting them and bringing about a different outcome. His lament ended with a pathetic request to Bormann to arrange a brief audience with the Führer so that he could address the many issues which had accumulated in the meantime.148 With the end of the regime in sight, Hitler had, it seemed obvious, little time for or interest in the normal business of government. Meanwhile, the work of the major offices of state could only fragment further.
Yet another development, from a most unlikely source, provides in retrospect – at the time it was still well concealed – the clearest indication that the regime was starting to teeter. Among the biggest beneficiaries of the failed coup of 20 July 1944 had been Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.149 Hitler had given ‘loyal Heinrich’, his trusted head of the labyrinthine security organization, overall responsibility for uncovering the background to the conspiracy and for rounding up the plotters. And beyond his other extensive powers, Himmler had now also gained direct entrée into the military sphere as Commander of the Reserve Army, with a remit to undertake a full-scale reorganization. He was soon, as we have seen, also to have control over the people’s militia, the Volkssturm. Yet at this very time, Himmler, conceivably now the most powerful individual in Germany after Hitler, was playing a double game, combining every manifestation of utmost loyalty with secret overtures to the West in the forlorn hope of saving not just his skin but his position of power in the event of the British and Americans eventually seeing sense and turning, with the help of his SS, to fend off the threat of Communism. In October, Himmler used an SS intermediary to put to an Italian industrialist with good connections in England a proposal to make twenty-five German divisions in Italy available to the Allies as a defence against Communism in return for a guarantee of the preservation of the Reich’s territory and population. Both the British and the Americans rejected the overtures out of hand.150 In this scenario, Hitler would have been dispensable. But it was pure self-delusion. Himmler was too centrally implicated in the most appalling facets of the Nazi regime to be taken seriously by the Allies as a prospective leader of a post-Hitlerian Germany. For Himmler, too, there was no way out. Without Hitler’s backing, his power would vanish like a breath in the chill morning air. This was as true in late 1944 as at any other time during the Third Reich.