The most common response to the increased bombing was some form of dispersal. For several years production had been dispersed to different units in order to expand capacity. From the summer of 1943 dispersal policy was designed to provide substitute sites rather than extra ones. On 28 June 1943 Hitler issued a decree for securing factory space and accommodation for workers in those areas where production was to be dispersed.198 Two weeks later Speer’s ministry sent orders implementing the decree, which included a prohibition on any ‘wild dispersal’ undertaken without approval and an injunction not to move everything to the eastern regions just because they were still beyond range of regular air attacks. Instead firms were encouraged to disperse into local rural areas, which would allow them to keep their workforce intact and maintain links with local service and component contractors.199 The Air Ministry had already begun a programme of dispersal in October 1942, when orders were issued to move all production out of the most endangered areas and to ensure that each product was manufactured in at last two or three different places. Sometimes by chance the same component was bombed simultaneously in two separate places – a Ju87 component, for example, in two raids on Bremen and Osnabrück in 1942 – but in general multiple production gave an added cushion of flexibility. By November 1942 most of the 290 businesses producing 100 per cent for the air force west of the line Stettin-Berlin-Munich had dispersal plans prepared.200 Over the following months much aircraft production was moved to the Protectorate, Slovakia, Poland, Silesia and Saxony, but there still remained much to be done by the time Hitler published his decree in June 1943. The next month, Göring as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, ordered complete ‘evacuation of war-essential industry from the core of major cities’.201
The success of the dispersal policy, which allowed German production to expand significantly despite the escalating bombardment, can best be illustrated by looking at the two industries chosen by the US Eighth Air Force as potential bottlenecks: ball-bearings and aircraft assembly. Both cases demonstrate the substantial cushion available in a heavily industrialized state when manufacture needed to be decentralized. The potentially disruptive effects of this process were mitigated by the simultaneous insistence, laid down in regular orders from Hitler himself, on simplifying and standardizing production and design, concentrating on a narrow range of model types, searching for substitute materials or parts for those in short supply, and eliminating any production, whether civilian or military, that was classified as less essential. Bombing forced the German productive system to become more flexible and improvisatory in ways that the Allied air forces had not anticipated. The attack on the production of ball-bearings at Schweinfurt failed in its purpose for just this reason. Four days after the attack Speer flew to Nuremberg on Hitler’s orders to inspect the damage; the following day, 19 October 1943, Philipp Kessler, a member of Speer’s Armaments Advisory Council, was appointed General Commissar for Restarting Ball-Bearing Production. Disliking the rather ponderous title, he established a ‘Ball-Bearing Rapid Action’ (Kugellager-Schnellaktion) organization under his direction. Schweinfurt represented only 45 per cent of available ball-bearing production; stocks were immediately taken over from the other producers and from contractors who held substantial reserves, a total equivalent to two months’ production. The careful husbanding of stocks meant that by January 1944 reserves of ball-bearings were three times greater than in January 1943. Machine tools for production at Schweinfurt were by January 1944 back to 94 per cent of requirements. Production was decentralized so that under half was left in Schweinfurt itself, the rest spread out among 20 other producers. The whole ball-bearing industry in Germany was served in the end by 49 dispersal plants; only 20 per cent of national production remained in Schweinfurt a year after the main attack. The output of aircraft and tanks, which relied extensively on ball-bearings, was affected hardly at all thanks to design changes. By the time ball-bearing supply was back to its pre-raid level, aircraft production was 58 per cent greater, tank production 54 per cent.202
The dispersal of the aircraft industry indicated another cushion of productive capacity, even if in some cases in 1944 assembly or repair had to be improvised in farm barns, wooded shelters or road tunnels. The second wave of dispersal following the planned decentralization in 1942–3 came following the Allied air attacks in ‘Big Week’ in February 1944. Although the production loss was small and soon made good, the decision was taken by the German Fighter Staff to decentralize all aircraft and aero-engine production even further in case the campaign intensified. The 27 main assembly plants were divided out among 729 smaller units, though in the end only around 300 were used; aero-engine output was divided from 51 plants (in many cases already dispersed once) to 249 new sites. Up to the end of 1943 some 3.3 million square metres had been made available as dispersed capacity, but the new programmes involved a further 2.4 million.203 The result was a complex mosaic of productive sites for each of the main producers. The Erla Works in Leipzig, producing one-third of Me109 production, was split up among 18 dispersal plants, 13 component plants and 5 main assembly points, and although output was temporarily safeguarded, the six-month transfer of production lines cost 2,800 lost aircraft. The Me109 production at Wiener-Neustadt also had to be decentralized in spring 1944, and was also achieved with mixed success because sites were chosen where too much new installation and reconstruction was needed. Efficiency was hit by the requirement to have no unit capable of producing more than 150 aircraft a month. Nevertheless the company managed to build 50 per cent more fighter aircraft in 1944 than in 1943. By contrast, Me110 production at the Gothaer Waggonfabrik in Gotha was more successfully dispersed after the raids in February, so that full production was restored after only a few weeks.204 The whole dispersal policy ensured that aircraft output would reach a peak of almost 40,000 aircraft in a year when 1 million tons of bombs were dropped on German and German-occupied targets. Bombing might have prevented higher output, but the aircraft industry would anyway have faced limitations from raw material and labour supplies in trying to produce more, with or without bombing.
The decentralization of production did come at a cost, and no doubt overall output would have been higher in 1943 and 1944 without it. The success of the transfer to above-ground sites ensured that overall output could continue its upward trajectory. For those who had to undertake the reorganization, or for the workers forced to transfer to different sites, almost 850,000 by late 1944, the social and psychological costs were considerable. For one thing managerial and technical personnel had to be divided out among a larger number of small plants, increasing individual responsibility and diluting a firm’s leadership corps; more workers were engaged indirectly on military orders for which they had not been trained, or other workers (usually foreign or camp labourers) had to be transferred from one camp barrack to another; shorter production runs undermined the time and cost savings of large-scale assembly; tools and jigs had to be supplied in multiples, though in this case the large number of general-purpose machine tools available in Germany made the transfer to fragmented production easier to carry out. Above all, dispersal placed strains on the communication system and in particular the carefully controlled distribution of equipment and parts run by the Armaments Ministry, designed to ensure that components and tools only arrived at the time and in the quantities needed. With an exceptional amount of organizational and labouring effort, German industry succeeded in maximizing production despite the obstacles presented by dispersal. The object, as one manager put it, was for ‘the impossible to be made possible’.205
Doing the impossible might well have described the coincidence of peak bombing and peak production. The factors that kept war production expanding during 1942 and 1943 played a critical part in sustaining the expansion of output during 1944. The concentration of production on the most essential equipment reached its high point in the spring of 1944 as older models of weapons and equipment were eliminated and standard models introduced. Types of lig
ht-infantry weapons were to be reduced from 14 to 5, anti-tank weapons from 12 to just 1, anti-aircraft guns from 10 to 2; the number of vehicle models was reduced from 55 to 14; and so on.206 All inessential or non-military manufacture was combed through one more time to weed out unneeded production: the 117 firms still making carpets were reduced to 5; the 23 firms making 300 types of prismatic glass were reduced to 7, making just 14 types; the 900 machine-tool firms were reduced to 369. Where possible, the floorspace and labour were allocated to direct military output. In the machinery industry 415,700 workers were freed by early 1944 to work directly on war material.207 Rationalization, defined by the regime as extracting as much military equipment as possible from existing machinery, materials and labour, was pushed to its limits during 1944. The major constraint on the German war effort, labour supply, was ameliorated by drawing in resources from occupied Europe, exploiting camp labour more extensively, and finding ways to get women with children to undertake part-time work or work at home. To cope with the large-scale movement of the population as a result of bombing, the Plenipotentiary for Labour, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, issued an order on 17 January 1944 obliging those who had been evacuated and were not yet working to report to local labour offices for work. The first order produced only 65,000 volunteers, but as the number of evacuees increased, the second and third ‘Report Orders’, which applied to women with children under seven and women aged 45–50, reaped a larger harvest. By October 1944, 1.6 million had registered, out of whom 303,000 were given work, three-quarters of them half-day shifts in dispersed factories. Almost all of these were women, joining the 3.5 million female workers already on half-shifts. Women constituted more than 50 per cent of the total German workforce by the end of the war.208
The changing composition of the industrial workforce brought advantages and disadvantages for German war production. The foreign workforce made up 1.6 million (15 per cent) of industrial labour in July 1942, 2.7 million (22 per cent) in July 1943, and by summer 1944, 3.2 million (29 per cent). Their presence could present problems of language, discipline and training, and there was anxiety that they would not cope as well as German workers under the pressure of bombing. At Daimler-Benz, 31 different nationalities were recorded in the workforce, including one lone Afghan and one Peruvian.209 Women came to make up a growing proportion of the labour force, many of them forced labourers from the east. Female employment raised problems about family care, physical exhaustion and the struggle to secure rationed goods, but the economy would not have functioned without them. Efforts were made to sustain their productivity too with bonuses or extra rations and appropriate training. Of the total of 6.2 million employed in the arms industry, more than half of all industrial employment by October 1944, 35 per cent were women, 37 per cent foreign workers or prisoners of war.210 This heterogeneous labour force was subject to persistent and heavy bombing throughout 1944 and the first months of 1945.
The assumption for Allied planners was that urban destruction would create a growing problem of absenteeism, which would contribute to undermining armaments production. Yet the statistics show that bombing contributed only a small proportion of lost hours in 1944. According to records compiled by the Economics Ministry, in October 1944 only 2.5 per cent of hours lost nationally was attributed to air raids. Absenteeism was a result of illness, leave, truancy or workplace policy – a total of 16 per cent lost work hours – but was not directly caused by bomb attack.211 The aggregate figure nevertheless disguised wide variations from one branch of industry to another, and between different areas of the Reich. The absenteeism rates for the main industrial groups between March and October 1944 are set out in Table 7.2: Absenteeism rates were higher in the western areas of Germany, in Hamburg and in Munich. Yet over the course of 1944, despite the losses, the total number of hours worked in the 12,000 war production firms surveyed by the Ministry actually increased from 976 million in March to 1,063 million in October.212 One explanation is that the large proportion of foreign, prisoner of war and concentration camp workers made it possible to use coercion to keep them working. At the Ford Works in Cologne, absenteeism was a problem only among German workers. In 1944 it was estimated that 25 per cent of the German workforce was absent on average over the year, whereas the figure for the Eastern workers (Russians, Poles, Ukrainians) was only 3 per cent. German workers either absented themselves permanently – a total of 1,000 at Ford in 1944, two-thirds of them women – or returned slowly after a raid, one-tenth after one to two days, two-thirds after two weeks.213 For the German war economy one of the major advantages of exploiting captive labour on a large scale in 1944 and 1945 was the possibility of controlling their work effort even in the adverse conditions imposed by heavy bombing.
Table 7.2: Hours Worked and Hours Lost in German Industry, March–October 1944 (%)
Industrial Branch Hours Worked Hours Lost Air Raids Illness/Leave
Iron and Steel 84.7 15.3 5.1 10.2
Machinery 83.3 16.7 6.2 10.5
Vehicles 77.0 23.0 10.6 12.4
Aircraft industry 85.6 14.4 4.6 9.8
Shipbuilding 82.2 17.8 7.9 9.9
Source: BA-B, R3102/10031, Statistical Office, ‘Vermerk über die Auswirkung der Feindlichen Luftangriffe auf die Arbeiterstundenleistung der Industrie’, 27 Jan 1945.
The large captive workforce also made it possible to contemplate from summer 1943 onwards a more radical solution to the policy of dispersal by placing the most important war production under the ground, either in converted mines, caves and tunnels, or in new purpose- built underground facilities, covered with up to seven metres of concrete. Interest in the programme was generated from a number of quarters. In July 1943 Hitler asked that production of the new A4 rocket (the later V2) should be made as safe as possible from bombing, preferably underground; Himmler undertook to carry it out because he had access to a rapidly expanding concentration camp population for the supply of labour. The Air Ministry had already asked the mining section of the Economics Ministry to compile a list of all potential sites in Germany and the nearest occupied territories with underground floorspace for the aeronautical industry to escape the raids.214 The list of possible sites ran to 22 pages, 15 with German locations, 7 more for those identified in Hungary, Slovakia, Bohemia/Moravia and Poland. Limited progress was made in 1943, but in the spring of 1944, with the onset of more targeted bombing of key industries, comprehensive plans were drawn up for a colossal construction programme to embrace eventually 93 million square metres of underground room, to include separate programmes for oil and SS projects, among them the A4 rocket. The distribution of underground plant, planned, completed and in hand, is set out in Table 7.3.
Table 7.3: Programmes of Underground Construction, November 1944 (sq m)
Industry Planned Abandoned Under Construction Completed
Airframes 20,766,800 645,000 16,570,400 3,550,800
Air Components 6,391,400 – 5,347,700 1,043,720
Aero-engines 20,992,700 1,345,000 15,871,000 3,776,800
Tanks 2,109,000 – 1,818,400 290,500
Motor Vehicles 2,808,360 – 2,711,500 96,800
V-Weapons 1,538,700 – 387,400 1,151,300
Shipbuilding 1,775,400 – 1,248,200 527,200
Weapons 2,173,500 – 2,119,720 53,800
Machine Tools 7,101,600 – 6,079,400 1,022,200
Total 65,657,460 1,990,000 52,153,720 11,513,120
Source: TNA, AIR 10/3873, BBSU, ‘German Experience in the Underground Transfer of War Industries’, 12.
The plans were by 1944 difficult to implement, though the SS control of slave labour in the camps provided a ready-made supply of workers for the rocket programme, set up in the notorious Mittelbau-Dora works at Nordhausen. Only 17 per cent of the programme was completed by the end of 1944, and not all of that was occupied or functioning by the end of the war. The initial programme was designed to get aircraft production into shelters so that increased output of planes could be used to turn back the bomber
s and perhaps render the rest of the programme redundant. By May 1944 some 10 per cent of aircraft construction was underground, more by the end of the year. Saur developed a plan to create large underground sites in Hungary, first for fighter aircraft, then one for fuel oil, finally an integrated plant for weapons, munitions and vehicles, even though the Red Army was now within striking distance. The underground programme has always been viewed as a waste of resources: ‘burrowing away from reality’, was the judgement of the British Bombing Survey Unit.215 It is true that most of the dispersal underground was wasted effort. The transfer of BMW aero-engine output into salt mines began in May 1944, was scheduled for occupation by December, but was not in the end utilized. The access shafts were narrow, the subterranean corridors only 10–30 metres wide, the salt a threat to the workforce and the machinery. Many of the underground installations suffered from poor ventilation, condensation, and the danger of rockfalls; conditions for workers were so poor that preference was given to using the captive workforce, which in the case of BMW made up 13,000 out of 17,000 at the main plant. By the time the vast Volkswagen works at Wolfsburg was ordered to disperse underground in August 1944, only 15 per cent of its 17,000 workers were German.216 It is nonetheless difficult to see what other long-term solution remained to a regime that refused to surrender and over-optimistically assessed the prospects of survival into 1945 and 1946. When Allied bombing was finally directed at oil production in May 1944, the threat to the vulnerable capital-intensive sectors of German industry could only be solved by finding effective ways of sheltering it from the bombs, or giving up the conflict.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 63