posing only stark alternatives he had early in his ‘career’ declared that Germany would be victorious or it would cease to exist. The more any semblance of victory had evaporated, the more his thoughts had turned to the opposite pole: defeat would be total, the German people would have deserved to go under through proving too weak, and there was, therefore, no need to make provision for their future. Destruction wherever and whatever the cost, to bar the enemy advance and its inroads into Germany, was what he wanted. Speer had often had to struggle to water down the orders for destruction of industrial plant, which the High Command of the Wehrmacht had been ready to pass on, to turn them merely into immobilization. Usually, as we have seen in earlier chapters, he had succeeded, pandering to Hitler’s lingering hopes, in persuading the Dictator to accede to his wishes by arguing that the Reich would need the industries again when it reconquered the lost territory. It was an argument, however contrived, to which Hitler was susceptible. But with the enemy now on Reich territory and the fiction of reconquest harder to uphold, the issue of destruction or immobilization was bound to arise again—and in radical fashion.
At the beginning of March, the deliberate destruction of the transport infrastructure by the military was causing great concern to Ruhr industrialists.123 Speer, who had meanwhile secured control over transport to add to his other extensive powers,124 travelled west to reassure them that temporary paralysis, not permanent destruction, of industry and transport infrastructure remained the policy. Any opposition to the orders to this effect had to be ‘broken’. He repeated his key argument. ‘We can only continue the war if the Silesian industrial belt, for example, or also parts of the Ruhr district are again in our hands…. Either these areas are brought back… or we have definitively lost the war.’ A unified approach was essential. It was pointless to paralyse industry only to find that the military were destroying all means of transport. He would speak to the commanders-in-chief of the Army Groups and try to obtain a directive from Hitler. He went on to underline the duty to ensure the repair of water supplies and provide food for the civilian population. After food, coal was the most urgent area of production. Alongside troop transports, food supplies would have priority, even over armaments, a point he said he had cleared with Hitler. These measures were not put forward on humanitarian grounds, but to retain the ‘strength of resistance of the population’. The war, Speer’s remarks made plain, was far from over. He spoke further of concentrating steel production on munitions. And he repeated the priorities for transport which Hitler had decided—on his suggestion—for areas being evacuated: troop transports first, then foodstuffs, and finally, where possible, refugees.125
Hitler was still insisting on the evacuation of the population from the threatened western areas back into the Reich so that men capable of fighting should not be lost to the enemy. The Gauleiter of such areas knew how impracticable this demand was. Goebbels saw it as another ‘heavy loss of prestige’ for Hitler’s authority.126 Even Goebbels accepted that evacuation was not possible, influenced by a report Speer had given him in the middle of the month. Speer, he commented, had expressed irritation at the evacuation orders. He had taken the view ‘that it is not the task of our war policy to lead a people to a heroic downfall’. The Armaments Minister told Goebbels that the war was in economic terms lost. The economy could hold out for only another four weeks—implying until about mid-April—and would then gradually collapse. Speer, noted Goebbels, ‘strongly opposes the position of destroyed earth. He explains that if the artery of life through food and in the economy should be cut off to the German people, that must be the enemy’s job, not ours.’ If Berlin’s bridges and viaducts were to be detonated as planned, the Reich capital would face imminent starvation.127
A conflict was plainly brewing. Speer had learnt that Hitler intended the destruction of factories, railways, bridges, electricity and water installations rather than allow them to fall into enemy hands. He approached Guderian, seeking his help to prevent the madness of measures which would destroy the crucial economic infrastructure and ensure lasting misery and poverty for the civilian population. He and Guderian agreed that the detonation of bridges, tunnels and railway installations required special permission. A furious Hitler refused to implement the draft decree.128 On 15 March, Speer gave an unvarnished picture of realities. The collapse of the economy was no more than four to eight weeks away, after which the war could not be continued militarily. A firm order was needed to prevent the destruction of vital installations in Germany. ‘Their destruction means the elimination of every further possibility of existence for the German people.’ Speer concluded: ‘We have the duty to leave the people all possibilities that could secure them reconstruction in the more distant future.’129
Speer passed the memorandum to Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, and asked him to deliver it at a suitable moment. Below eventually did so on 18 March, though the Dictator already knew what was coming. In an attempt to lessen the anticipated hefty reaction and demonstrate his continued loyalty, Speer asked for a signed photograph of Hitler for his fortieth birthday next day.
He also gave Hitler another memorandum—one which he never mentioned after the war.130 It was a shorter document, and couched in a wholly different tone. It began by stating that, since economic collapse was unavoidable, drastic measures were needed to defend the Reich at the Oder and the Rhine. Defence beyond these borders was no longer possible. So for the coming eight weeks, it was crucial to take every ruthless measure needed to mobilize all possible resources, including the
Speer’s motive in producing this second memorandum is unclear. Possibly he hoped it would soften the blow of the first, though he never subsequently claimed this. His silence about the second memorandum is telling, since its wording ill fitted his cultivated post-war image of being the one Nazi leader to have tried to act humanely and broken with Hitler before the end. Perhaps more likely, it was written to try to head off any charges—dangerous in the climate—by Hitler or those in his entourage that he was a defeatist and practically a traitor to the cause.132 Maybe, since the ‘current front’ on the Rhine was on the verge of being lost, it was an obliquely clever way of encouraging Hitler to draw the conclusion that now was the time to end the war.133 If so, it is odd that Speer never made this point in any of his post-war statements. The final possibility is that Speer actually believed what he was saying—that a last-ditch effort could still wring some sort of deal from, presumably, the western Allies. He later sought to portray himself as one whose early recognition of Germany’s inevitable defeat made him selflessly work for the preservation of the economic basis needed for the people’s survival. But the memorandum of 18 March shows how late he was in accepting that the war was irredeemably lost.134 His efforts to restrict the destruction of the economic infrastructure and acceptance that, economically, Germany was close to the end were still compatible with an assumption that the war could not be won but was not yet totally lost. Up to this point, Speer told Hitler only a few days later, he had still believed in a good end to the war.135 It was not rhetoric. As the memorandum shows, until then Speer had remained a ‘believer’ of sorts. The continued destruction that fighting on would inevitably entail might have been reconciled by Speer with his attempts otherwise to restrict demolition of the economic infrastructure on the grounds that this was ‘collateral’ damage rather than wilful self-destruction. At the very least, with this memorandum Speer was showing Hitler that he still stood by him.136 The conflict with Hitler over destruction of the means of production was a serious one. But it did not amount to a fundamental rejection of the leader to whom he had been so closely bound for more than a decade.
Hitler wasted no time in providing his answer to Speer. Already on 18 March he overrode all objections in ordering the compulsory evacuation of the entire civilian population of threatened western areas. If transport was not available, people should leave on foot. ‘We can no longer take regard of the population,’ he commented.137 Next day came Hitler’s notorious ‘scorched earth’ decree, his ‘Nero Order’, completely upturning Speer’s recommendations to spare destruction wherever possible. ‘All military transport, communications, industrial and supplies installations as well as material assets within Reich territory, which the enemy can render usable immediately or within the foreseeable future, are to be destroyed.’ Responsibility for the implementation of the destruction was placed in the hands of the military command as regards transport and communications and the Gauleiter as Defence Commissars in the case of industry and other economic installations.138
Down to 18 March, Speer, for all his criticism of measures guaranteed to destroy any basis of post-war reconstruction, had, as his memorandum of that day shows, still believed that there was something to be gained from continuing the war. But on that day, then confirmed by the ‘scorched earth’ decree, his attitude dramatically changed. The breaking-point came when Hitler told him point-blank: ‘If the war is lost, then the people too is lost. This fate is irreversible.’ It was not necessary, therefore, to provide even for their most primitive future existence.
