Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Wehrmacht during the first months of ‘Barbarossa’. As early as December 1941, Keitel had demanded a weeding out of superfluous personnel from the bureaucracies of government ministries, the economy, and the Wehrmacht itself.²² This had led to attempts to release personnel for the army by simplifying the extraordinarily unwieldy and cumbersome governmental administration. The proliferation of ‘special authorities’ alongside government ministries and the Party-State dualism — direct products of the Fuhrer state — alongside the new administrative tasks created by the demands of the war had led to a colossal expansion of bureaucracy, churning out hundreds of regulations, decrees, and ordinances. The amount of red tape involved was suffocating. There was huge resentment at what was dubbed a ‘paper war’.

Hitler’s tirades against government bureaucracy were well known to all those who came into contact with him. His scorn for legally minded administrators knew no bounds. He took the view that their number could be cut by two-thirds.²³ So there was no difficulty in pandering to his prejudices. It was easy to gain his support for the action to reduce bureaucracy. To implement any such measures was a different matter. Hitler’s own stance was in practice often hesitant, contradictory, and ultimately, in the main, conservative. And despite Hitler’s backing, attempts to cut the personnel of government offices rapidly ran up against powerful vested interests. The results were predictably meagre.²⁴ The manpower demands of the front inevitably, however, forced renewed efforts to squeeze out any surplus personnel back home. In the autumn of 1942, Hitler had commissioned General Walter von Unruh, who had earlier been relatively successful in freeing personnel from military and civilian bureaucracies in the eastern occupied territories, to sift through the civil administration and even the armaments economy.²⁵ But this, too, had produced little as government ministers successfully fended off the worst inroads into their personnel. And when General von Unruh attempted to claw back some of those engaged on the Fuhrer’s grandiose building projects (including sixty-eight men aged thirty-five or under employed in the planning office for the intended rebuilding of much of the centre of Munich), Hitler predictably decided that they could not be released.²⁶

Before the failure of Unruh’s efforts had become clear, Hitler had, at Christmas 1942, given the orders for more radical measures to raise manpower for the front and the armaments industries. Martin Bormann was commissioned to undertake the coordination of the efforts, in collaboration with Head of the Reich Chancellery Hans-Heinrich Lammers.²⁷ Goebbels and Sauckel were immediately informed. The aim was to close down all businesses whose trade was in ‘luxury’ items or was otherwise not necessary for the war effort, and to redeploy the personnel in the army or in arms production. Women were to be subject to conscription for work. Releasing men for front-service was impossible, it was agreed, unless women could replace them in a variety of forms of work. According to the Propaganda Ministry, the number of women working had dropped by some 147,000 since the start of the war.²⁸ And of 8.6 million women in employment at the end of 1942, only 968,000 worked in armaments.²⁹ In the spring of 1942, Hitler had rejected outright the conscription of women to work in war industries. Industrialists had been pressing for this, and Speer had taken up their demand. But Sauckel, jealously guarding his own province and claiming responsibility for labour deployment was his alone, had held Speer at bay, backed by Goring and calling upon the support of the Fuhrer. Probably, as Speer suggests, Sauckel had therefore solicited Hitler’s rejection of female conscription.³⁰ According to Sauckel’s version, Hitler’s reasons had been ideological.³¹ The birth-rate of the nation would be threatened and as a consequence Germany’s racial strength undermined. He also thought that women would be exposed to moral danger.³²

But by early 1943, the labour situation had worsened to the extent that Hitler was compelled to concede that the conscription of women could no longer be avoided. Even the forced labour of, by this time, approaching 6 million foreign workers and prisoners-of-war could not compensate for the 11 million or so men who had been called up to the Wehrmacht.³³ The most he could do to limit what he regarded as a move likely to damage morale was to raise the age of eligibility from sixteen years, as agreed by the government ministers involved, to seventeen.³⁴ In an unpublished Fuhrer Decree of 13 January 1943, women between seventeen and fifty years old were ordered to report for deployment in the war effort.³⁵ There was little enthusiasm among those affected. Women made use of the exemption criteria — including responsibility for children, and employment in agriculture or the civil service — and any personal connections to avoid duty where they could. Where that was impossible, they headed in the main for light desk jobs, leaving the armaments industries still short of women employees.³⁶

Even before Hitler signed the decree, the wrangling over spheres of competence had begun in earnest. In order to retain a firm grip on the ‘total war’ measures and prevent the dissipation of centralized control, Lammers, backed by the leading civil servants in the Reich Chancellery, Leo Killy and Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, suggested to Hitler that all measures should be taken ‘under the authority of the Fuhrer’, and that a special body be set up to handle them. The idea was to create a type of small ‘war cabinet’; the ‘Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich’, as we noted in an earlier chapter, had potentially constituted such, but had never functioned as one in practice, and had long fallen into desuetude. Lammers thought the most appropriate arrangement would be for the heads of the three main executive arms of the Fuhrer’s authority — the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the Reich Chancellery, and the Party Chancellery — to act in close collaboration, meeting frequently, keeping regular contact with Hitler himself, and standing above the particularist interests of individual ministries. Hitler agreed. He evidently saw no possible threat to his position from such an arrangement. On the contrary: the three persons involved — Keitel, Lammers, and Bormann — could be guaranteed to uphold his own interests at the expense of any possible over-mighty subjects. An indication that this was, indeed, Hitler’s thinking was the exclusion of Goring, Goebbels, and Speer from the coordinating body — soon known as the ‘Committee of Three’ (Dreierausschu?).³⁷ This was to last until the autumn before withering away — a further casualty of Hitler’s refusal to concede any actual power that might conflict with his authority as Fuhrer, and of his unsystematic, dilettante style of rule.

From the very outset, the Committee was only empowered to issue enabling ordinances in accordance with the general guidelines he had laid down. It was given no autonomy.³⁸ Hitler reserved, as always, the final decision on anything of significance to himself. It was an exaggeration when Speer later claimed that it had been the intention of the three members of the Committee to control Hitler’s power.³⁹ The loyalty of all three, and their subservience to Hitler’s will, was beyond question. They did nothing in practice which might have conflicted with Hitler’s wishes. And, though Speer emphasized Bormann’s plans to use the Committee to further his own power-ambitions, the head of the Party Chancellery seems to have been largely content in practice to leave the bulk of the routine business to Lammers — hardly a man aiming to take over the Reich.⁴⁰

The ‘Committee of Three’ had, in all, eleven formal meetings between January and August 1943. The heads of government departments were invited, but the meetings did not amount, as Speer later claimed, to a revival of the cabinet.⁴¹ The Committee, for all its potential for aggrandizement of power as a body operating in close proximity to the Fuhrer, rapidly ran up against deeply ingrained vested interests both in government ministries and in Party regional offices concerned to hold on to their personnel and to their spheres of competence which might have been threatened in any move to centralize and simplify the regime’s tangled lines of administration.⁴² It had little chance of breaking down the fiefdoms on which Nazi rule rested, and soon revealed that any hopes of bringing any order to the Third Reich’s endemic administrative chaos were utterly illusory.

Nevertheless, Hitler’s mightiest subjects were determined to do everything they could to sabotage a development which they saw as inimical to their own power-positions — and from which they had been excluded. The first notions of a challenge to the role of the ‘Committee of Three’ were intimated during the reception in Goebbels’s residence following his ‘total war’ speech on 18 February. Nine days later, Funk, Ley, and Speer met again over cognac and tea in Goebbels’s stately apartments — gloomy now that the light-bulbs had been removed to comply with the new ‘total war’ demands — to see what could be done.⁴³ Soon afterwards, at the beginning of March, Goebbels travelled from Berlin down to Berchtesgaden to plot with Goring a way of sidelining the Committee. Speer had already sounded him out.⁴⁴ In talks lasting five hours at Goring’s palatial villa on the Obersalzberg, partly with Speer present, the Reich Marshal, dressed in ‘somewhat baroque clothes’,⁴⁵ was quickly won over.

The ‘Committee of Three’, which he scornfully labelled ‘the three kings’,⁴⁶ was a worry to him too. He detested Lammers as a ‘super bureaucrat’ who wanted to put the Reich leadership back in the hands of the government officials. Hitler, thought Goring, had not seen through Lammers. It was necessary to open the Fuhrer’s eyes. Bormann was, of course, following his own ambitious ends. Keitel was a complete nonentity.⁴⁷