The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945

by Richard Overy

  Since the regime was exaggeratedly anxious about the state of public opinion, the duplication of effort by the air force, local authorities, the Party and the police meant that whatever jurisdictional friction might be generated, problems were identified and tackled. The plethora of mobile emergency columns, bringing food or medical care or construction teams, meant that none of the afflicted cities was likely to be short of some form of effective assistance. The range of civil defence activities was extensive and the mobilization of more women and young people in 1943 spread the mantle of responsibility over a large fraction of the urban population. The combination of state, party and community initiatives helped German society to cope with the rigours of a long-term bombing campaign and dampened any prospect of social disquiet. ‘Everything went on very quietly,’ wrote Nossack, reflecting on the absence of latent rebellion, ‘and with a definite concern for order, and the State took its bearings from this order.’173 Only in 1944–5, when bombing overwhelmed German society, was the search for order challenged.

  ECONOMIC MIRACLES

  It has become fashionable in recent accounts of the German economy during the Second World War to dismiss the idea that there was anything very miraculous about its ability to expand war production continuously between 1939 and 1944.174 All war economies did this, the German more slowly at first than the others, then more rapidly towards the end of the war. The difference is that German industrial cities were subjected to heavy bomb attack from at least the spring of 1943 onwards, and in 1944 to a weight of bombs many times greater than the Blitz on Britain. In September 1944 Hitler addressed the leaders of German war production on what had been achieved ‘despite the growing damage from air attacks’. The new peak in war production achieved in August, he continued, showed that German industry could be trusted, even in the shrunken and battered area still remaining to Germany, to concentrate everything on war production ‘in order to be able to increase yet further the output of the most important weapons and equipment’.175

  If the ‘miracle’ of expanded German production has very material explanations in the effective exploitation of both capital and labour, and efforts to rationalize the distribution of resources, the ability to sustain exceptional levels of war production in the face of the bombing offensive cannot be taken for granted. If bombing eventually placed a ceiling on what could be produced, the performance of the key sectors of German industry over the last two years of war did have something of an ‘economic miracle’ about it. Above all it was the exact reverse of what the Allies thought would be possible once the offensive got going, as the statistics in Table 7.1 make evident. Whatever the other resource and organizational issues confronting the German war economy, which is not the subject here, the extent to which German war-economic potential could be safeguarded against the impact of bombing became a central concern of the German war machine and allowed the German armed forces to continue fighting forlorn campaigns well into 1945.

  The geography of German industry at the outbreak of war had something in common with the British pattern. Older industrial sectors – coal, steel, machinery – were concentrated in the Ruhr-Rhineland and Saar basins, but had been supplemented in the 1930s by expanding domestic production in new greenfield sites, particularly on the Salzgitter orefield in Brunswick, and the seizure of additional iron-ore, steel, coal and machinery production in Austria, the Sudetenland and Bohemia/Moravia. Modern industrial sectors, however, including chemicals, electronics, radio, the aeronautical industry and motor vehicles, were sited away from the old industrial regions, in Bavaria, Württemberg, Berlin, Saxony, and a fringe of smaller industrial cities. After 1933, with the new regime’s emphasis on military and economic rearmament, conscious efforts were made to disperse industry away from the more exposed industrial regions behind the western frontier and to place it in relatively bomb-safe areas in central, southern and eastern Germany, a process known as Verballung, literally, breaking up the industrial ‘ball’. German territorial expansion in 1938–40 ensured that the balance of industrial output in the enlarged ‘Greater Germany’ tilted further east, creating a cushion to absorb any potential damage done to the Ruhr-Rhineland. The Ruhr supplied three-quarters of German iron and steel output in 1939 but less than two-thirds by 1943.176 The vast Reichswerke ‘Hermann Göring’, a state holding company for iron, steel, coal and armaments set up in 1937, controlled 71 firms in Germany but 241 in occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Until 1944 a proportion of German war production was protected by its geographical dispersal and the long aerial ranges needed to reach it.

  Table 7.1: Selected Statistics on German Military Production, 1940–44

  Source: IWM, S363, Saur papers, ‘Auszug aus dem Leistungsbericht von Minister Speer, 27.1.1945’.

  The vulnerability of German industrial and service sectors to bombing was well understood and ‘Work Self-Protection’ (Werkluftschutz) featured in the 1937 ‘Self-Protection’ law. But like air-raid protection in general, the factory system was introduced piecemeal; those plants furthest from the bombing threat were less inclined to introduce rigorous air-protection procedures for their workforce, provide them with effective shelters or install blast protection for machinery and equipment. When the Heinkel aircraft plant in Rostock suffered damage in the raids in 1942, it was found that the firm had not followed the Air Ministry’s advice in building protective bomb walls.177 In the cities in Zone I effective work protection was mandatory. From 1939 onwards vulnerable firms were asked to transfer some of their production to less endangered areas, and an effort was made, as in Britain, to ensure that vital components or even whole products (aircraft, aero-engines, tanks, etc.) were produced in at least three geographically distinct sites. Some of this early dispersal was effective – the Weser aircraft works at Bremen moved one-third of its production of the Ju87 ‘Stuka’ to Berlin; the Focke-Wulf plant, also in Bremen, was decentralized to three separate sites further east in 1940 and 1941; the Blohm & Voss flying-boat production was transferred from Hamburg to Bodensee, in south Germany – while new capacity was built in areas far removed from the current bombing threat. In 1938–9 Messerschmitt Me109 production was set up at Wiener Neustadt outside Vienna (five other assembly plants in Austria and Bohemia were added later); another production centre was established at the Erla works in Leipzig. None could easily be bombed until 1944.178

  As in Britain, a programme of camouflage and decoy sites was set up to confuse bombers trying to identify industrial targets in difficult night-time conditions. The largest and most effective site was at Essen, where the vast Krupp works was reproduced in effigy in the countryside outside the city and sustained, according to German Air Force estimates, around three-quarters of the bombing attacks aimed at the real plant. Decoy sites outside Stuttgart and Karlsruhe attracted well over half of all bombs in 1941.179 In Berlin elaborate efforts were made to disguise the government quarter to avoid the danger of bombing. The Brandenburg Gate was reconstructed along with mock ministries further from the centre while prominent landmarks were concealed. The east-west axis road in the centre of Berlin was covered with a canopy of wire netting and green gauze, while lamp posts were covered with green material to look like trees. A lake in west Berlin was covered with green netting with a length of grey material laid across it to resemble a road.180 Outside the city 16 major dummy industrial sites were set up, which attracted British bombs throughout the war. When firebombing became the principal RAF method, the German Air Force set up fire sites in small walled enclosures to mimic the appearance of blazing buildings. These, too, proved highly effective for much of the war. To accentuate the disruptive effect of industrially generated smog, the air force also introduced artificial smoke to screen vulnerable targets. Once daylight raids began in earnest in 1943, the programme was expanded so that by the end of the war there were 100 smoke companies composed of 50,000 men and women.181

  Of the many problems faced by the German economy between 1940 and 1942, bombing was not one o
f them. Small-scale, incidental damage could be compensated while dispersal and decoys reduced what limited prospect there was of accurate raiding against economic targets. The German economy from 1939 onwards experienced a rapid and extensive transfer to war production priorities, cutting private consumer spending by one-quarter by 1942 (against a 14 per cent reduction in Britain) and increasing the percentage of workers in manufacturing who produced goods for the armed forces, from 28 per cent in May 1939 to 70 per cent in May 1942.182 Arms production expanded steadily in the first years of war, though not without considerable difficulties. These were not caused, as has often been argued, by an unwillingness on the part of the regime to commit to large-scale economic mobilization for war – indeed it is possible to describe as early as 1941 a problem of over-mobilization – but by poor facilities for national planning of resource use, competition between the three services, and a fraught relationship between the military and industry; the one was concerned with rapid innovation and constant tactical alterations in design, the other with finding profitable ways to convert the large resources of allocated manpower and machinery to efficient and uninterrupted flow production. Productive performance was held back as much by poor planning as it was by potential resource bottlenecks, which only really inhibited war production in Germany at the end of 1944 when bombing, the collapse of the economic New Order, and the disruption of trade finally reduced German access to key materials. The effect of production politics in the first years of war was to hold back the full rationalization of war production. The gradual introduction of a system of production rings and committees in 1941–2 to oversee each branch of production, together with the establishment in March 1942 of an organization for coordinated resource allocation known as Central Planning, saw the creation of a framework within which the substantial earlier investment in war output capacity could be used to expand the supply of armaments exponentially over the last three years of war.183

  Bombing only became one of the factors that German industry had to take more fully into account during 1943 and early 1944, as a result of the RAF campaigns against the Ruhr, Hamburg and Berlin, and the American attacks on aircraft production and ball-bearing factories. Although the Ruhr campaign led to a temporary reduction in iron and steel supply, it failed to halt the upward direction of German war production, which reached new peaks during 1943. The main Krupp works in Essen lost only 7.6 per cent of its planned output in 1943; the giant August-Thyssen concern produced more iron in 1943 than in either of the previous two years.184 At the same time sales of iron and steel from the new plants in central Germany and occupied eastern Europe controlled by the Reichswerke ‘Hermann Göring’ expanded by 87 per cent between 1941 and 1943 to compensate for declining Ruhr production. The Reichswerke supplied one-fifth of all iron and steel, one-quarter of German coal.185 Bombing, as already noted in Chapter 6, only reduced potential German industrial output by around 9 per cent in 1943. That loss has to be set against a threefold expansion of war production between 1941 and 1944 evident for all major classes of weapons. Total munitions output for large-calibre artillery was 100 per cent greater in 1943 than 1942, production of tank guns 60 per cent higher, aircraft output up by 61 per cent; in 1944 these statistics were once again exceeded by a wide margin. Bombing caused local and temporary dislocation, but could not prevent German industry from adapting to the pressures and expanding output.186 The central problem facing the German war economy in the last years of war was not the bombing but the escalating loss rates at the fighting front. In the first years of the war, losses both of manpower and equipment had been relatively low; from the Stalingrad battles on the Eastern Front to the collapse of Axis forces in North Africa and the rising attrition in the Battle of the Atlantic, the toll on Germany’s armed forces escalated sharply. The demand for higher production reflected higher losses and the subsequent demands from the armed forces for more rapid and extensive replacement of stocks. Army stocks of tanks and self-propelled guns on hand were by 1944 almost four times greater than in 1941; stocks of anti-tank guns five times greater than in 1942; supply of aircraft, both new and repaired, expanded from a monthly average of 1,381 in 1940 to an average of 3,609 in 1944.187 The continuous campaigning in 1943 and 1944 for greater rationalization and concentration of production was driven by the military necessity of supplying the fighting fronts, including the anti-aircraft defences, with larger quantities of weapons in a context of high wastage. Hitler’s response to losses was always to call on the industrial economy to produce more; the priority for German industrialists and planners was to meet those demands, irrespective of the impact of the bombs.

  Clearly production would have been easier to organize and have imposed a lesser toll on managers and workers alike in an entirely bomb-free environment. Bombing inhibited the wartime development of new technologies, though it did not prevent it. Indeed in some well-known cases – the Heinkel He177 heavy bomber, for example – the problems were self-inflicted. Improvisation proved successful, but it also came at a cost in organizational effort and problem-solving that did not affect managers in the United States or the far Soviet Union. As the bombing grew heavier in 1943 and 1944, the initial attempts to offer protection or immunity to German industry were extended and consolidated. The first possibility was to provide better protection on site. Anti-aircraft guns were concentrated in special defensive zones around the most threatened areas of war production. Special ‘action units’ were established for industry which, like their urban counterparts, were sent to bombed industrial sites to try to restart production as rapidly as possible. In August 1943, following the Hamburg raids, Speer was authorized to declare emergency ‘Damage Regions’ (Schadensbereiche), which would receive priority in the restoration of productive activity.188 Individual plants were encouraged to develop comprehensive protective installations for their machinery and to increase the level of training for their workforces in simple air-raid protection procedures. Factories that had been bombed but were still able to function were told not to put on a new roof but to construct a black cover below roof level to simulate an empty building; fire-damaged external walls were kept in place to make it look as though the plant had been abandoned. Other undamaged buildings had camouflage damage painted on the sides.189 All combustible stores of materials had to be moved to safer storage sites, and by autumn 1943 the Economics Ministry was able to report that the policy was working well. Stocks were moved to the edge of the endangered cities and stored by small firms more remote from the threat of attack.190 The result was that even in cities badly hit, it was still possible to maintain a large proportion of pre-raid production. In Augsburg, for example, where industry was among the most heavily damaged, the average value of monthly production was 964,000 RM in the last five months of 1943; in the five months of heavy raiding in 1944 the average was 814,000 RM. In Hagen, hit by four heavy attacks in 1943, the pre-raid average value was 5.2 million RM, the post-raid value 5.17 million. Much of any loss was absorbed by cutting consumer production and concentrating on war-essential products.191

  The second necessity was to ensure that the working population in the bombed cities could be assisted enough to ensure that labour productivity was maintained and absenteeism kept to a minimum. This was a more complex problem by 1943 because of the introduction of an increasing number of foreign compulsory workers and the rising proportion of women in the workforce, though in both cases work discipline could be imposed more ruthlessly by male German supervisors. Foreign workers were treated as effective captives; they had restricted access to air-raid shelters or had to make do with slit trenches, so as to emphasize the difference in status between them and skilled German workers. In a controlled economy, with no right to strike and heavy penalties for dissent, worker unrest could still be displayed through slow working or sabotage. It remained in the interest of employers and the state to ensure that the German labour force was given both stick and carrot to keep it productive. Priority was given to repairing workers’ housin
g or replacing it with temporary barracks. Workers engaged in repair work following a raid were given a bonus of between 52 and 65 per cent an hour depending on their particular skills.192 Workers who were rendered homeless had to report to their employer within two days to qualify for compensation and to be allowed a brief period of compassionate leave.193

  Other rewards or bonuses were introduced to sustain worker loyalty despite the long hours and greater danger. Hourly wage rates for all German workers were increased to 25 per cent extra for overtime, 50 per cent extra for Sunday work and 100 per cent extra on holidays. Firms were encouraged to set up nurseries for working women, hostels for workers and midday hot meals. The Daimler-Benz company increased its ‘social spending’ on workforce facilities and bonuses from 1.6 million RM in 1939 to 2.1 million in 1944; in the last year of war, 4.6 million RM were spent on air-raid protection.194 In October 1942 arrangements were made to provide additional food rations for the population in raided cities, predominantly in the western industrial areas: 50 grammes of extra meat a week for a minimum of four weeks, and extra fats and bread at the discretion of the local Reich Defence Commissar. Later in the war, when overtime incentives were declining, special ‘Speer recognition’ awards were made for exceptional efforts, usually paid in kind – alcohol and tobacco for men, health tonics, tinned vegetables and condensed milk for women and youths. But at the same time German workers were subject to closer discipline. In the Ruhr cities ‘labour control’ units were organized by the German Labour Front, checking on attendance and hours worked, granting leave to bombed-out workers, and searching out workers absent without leave to return them to work. Thought was given to militarizing the labour force as ‘soldiers on the home front’, but although the term was regularly used in propaganda, it was not carried through from fear that it would make labour less rather than more efficient.195 In summer 1944 instructions were given to compel workers aged over 18 to serve 10 times a month (eight for women) in the works’ ‘self-protection’ squads to make sure there were enough people to fight the fires, though for much of the war the factory was almost certainly a safer place to be than at home.196 Yet in the end the greatest incentive for workers to remain at work was the need for regular wages to support them and their families, and the fear that defeat would usher in a return to the Depression days of high unemployment and short-time working and the possible dismemberment of Germany. Bombing gave them no incentive to give up.197