ON 30 JANUARY 1942, Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and the man in charge of the Reich’s defence construction, was travelling east in a Heinkel 111 of the Führer’s personal Staffel, which had been converted to carry passengers. Another of the passengers was Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, commander of the Waffen-SS Panzerdivision Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, which was currently being hard-pressed by the Russians near Rostov in southern Ukraine. They were flying to Dnepropetrovsk, Dietrich to rejoin his division and Speer to see his staff, who were hurriedly trying to repair damaged railway lines there.
As they huddled in this flying tin can, Speer gazed out of the window at the relentless landscape. Occasionally he saw burned-out farmsteads, but almost no roads. They were following a railway line, but there were no trains either. Speer was alarmed by the emptiness of this vast snowscape; it brought home to him just how cut off the armies at the front were from their supplies.
Within a few days of their arrival at Dnepropetrovsk, Speer was rather regretting venturing out into this desolation. The snow continued to fall and, more worryingly, the Russians were getting nearer. This was part of a major counter-attack by the Red Army around Kharkov, in which the Soviets had managed to punch a 50-mile hole between two German armies along the River Donets. Speer and his staff held frantic conferences over what they should do – the only weapons they had were a few rifles and an abandoned field gun with no ammunition. Inexplicably, however, having got to within 12 miles, the Russians appeared to circle around then call off a further assault.
After trying unsuccessfully to get away by train – the line was blocked by drifts – Speer eventually managed to leave on Saturday, 7 February in the same Heinkel that had brought him, by which time a short, sharp counter-attack by German forces out of Dnepropetrovsk had ended the crisis there for the time being. Speer’s plane was not headed to Berlin, however, but to Rastenburg. Speer didn’t mind – it was in the right direction and, in any case, there was a chance he might get to talk to the Führer, whom he had not seen since early December.
Hitler did not attend dinner, however, although the Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, did. Speer and he got on well enough; in fact, increasingly well in recent times. Speer valued him as a prudent, more experienced colleague and respected his judgement. After supper, Todt was called away to speak with Hitler and did not reappear until much later, when Speer thought he looked tired and strained; the conversation with the Führer had obviously been difficult. They shared a drink together, but Todt said little, his mind clearly somewhat preoccupied, until he mentioned that the following morning he was due to fly back to Berlin and offered Speer a seat, which he gratefully accepted.
Soon after, Speer himself was summoned to see Hitler. The Führer looked every bit as strained as Todt had done. It was now after one in the morning, and Speer was shocked by the frugality of the Führer’s study – there was not even a single upholstered chair. Hitler did, however, brighten a little once they began talking about their planned building projects for Berlin and Nuremberg – the capital was to be renamed ‘Germania’ and would include new avenues and even a vast domed hall that could seat more than 150,000.
After later giving Hitler a brief account of his impressions of the front, it was not until three in the morning that Speer finally retired. Todt had wanted to leave early and Speer, now exhausted, sent word that he would forgo the flight and instead get some rest.
Some hours later, the telephone in his small room rang, waking him from his deep sleep. It was 8 a.m. Dr Brandt, Hitler’s physician, was on the line. ‘Dr. Todt’s plane has just crashed,’ he told him, ‘and he has been killed.’1
The man in charge of Germany’s all-important armaments industry, and who had been telling Hitler for months that the war could not be won, was dead. Speer was both stunned and saddened, but was soon to be shocked again. At around 1 p.m., Sunday, 8 February, he was summoned to see Hitler once more – and as the Führer’s first caller of the day. Hitler was standing, formally, when Speer entered and, after hearing condolences about Todt, said brusquely, ‘Herr Speer, I appoint you the successor to Minister Todt in all his capacities.’2
Speer was dumbstruck and assumed Hitler meant he would take over all construction duties only. ‘No, in all his capacities, including that of Minister of Armaments,’ Hitler told him.
‘But I don’t know anything about—’ said Speer, before Hitler cut him off.
‘I have confidence in you. I know you will manage it. Besides, I have no one else. Get in touch with the Minister at once and take over!’
Speer insisted Hitler put that in writing, which reluctantly he did, then turned to other business. The close confidence of the previous night had gone; he had been dismissed. Just as he was leaving, however, Hitler’s adjutant announced the Reichsmarschall, who had just arrived and was demanding to see the Führer, even though he had no appointment.
‘Send him in,’ replied Hitler sulkily, then, turning to Speer, added, ‘Stay here a moment longer.’
Göring hurried in, having rushed the 60 miles from his own hunting lodge in Rominten, and immediately told Hitler it was best he took over from Todt within the framework of the Four-Year Plan, the armaments programme of which he was head. ‘This,’ Göring told him, ‘would avoid the frictions and difficulties we had in the past as a result of overlapping responsibilities.’ Göring’s point was a fair one, but that was not how Hitler liked to run things.
So Hitler brushed the Reichsmarschall’s suggestion aside. ‘I have already appointed Todt’s successor,’ he told him. ‘Speer here has assumed all of Dr Todt’s offices as of this moment.’
Rumours and inconsistencies have surrounded Todt’s death ever since. He and Hitler had argued over the continuation of the war the night before, yet it seems unlikely the Führer would have wanted him dead. Then there was Speer himself: conveniently there, and at the last minute deciding against taking Todt’s flight. But again, it seems unlikely that Speer would have murdered a man he liked and admired, especially since he was, in every regard, so unready to take on the mantle. Most likely it was pilot error: flying in the snow and wind, in the aircraft of the day, carried risk.
Speer himself insisted he was incredulous and thought his appointment reckless. ‘Never in my life,’ he noted, ‘had I had anything to do with military weapons.’3 Fortunately for Speer, Todt had had a number of very able men working for him and they remained in the Ministry. Furthermore, it has often been assumed that, from his accession, Speer became the armaments supremo in Nazi Germany. This was not quite the case. Rather, Speer inherited precisely the same brief as Todt: that is, his authority extended purely to the equipment needs of the Army and to those of ammunition – which amounted to around 45 per cent of the Reich’s armament effort. The Kriegsmarine still retained its own procurement office, as did the Luftwaffe, which accounted for between 35 and 40 per cent of the armament effort. And since Udet’s suicide, this had been in the hands of Feldmarschall Erhard Milch.
What did change in the weeks following Speer’s appointment was the establishment of the Zentrale Planung, which was, as its name suggested, a central planning committee for all armaments production, and which was presided over jointly by Speer, Milch and Paul Körner, Göring’s secretary, but with Speer in the chair. Of the three, Speer also had the greatest access to Hitler, but really, from the formation of the committee, German armaments production was not dominated by Speer, but Speer and Milch; Göring had not gained from Todt’s death but had not lost ground either. And Milch was not only Göring’s deputy and head of procurement, but his authority in the Zentrale Planung was unquestioned – and this was an overarching body that also regularly included Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, the head of manpower; Herbert Backe, the new Minister of Food; and others like Paul Pleiger, the head of the coal industry. Conspicuous by their absence were Wehrmacht men from the General Staff, such as General Georg Thomas. In fact, it was the Military Economics Office at the OKW that really lost influence following the bitter winter of 1941–2, but this was as much to do with the emergence of the Zentrale Planung as it was with the rise of Speer.
The partnership of Speer and Milch, especially, and the very concept of the Zentrale Planung, was a major leap forward for German armaments production, which had for so long been riven by rivalries, a lack of co-operation, disparate committees and organizations, and inflated bodies and offices, all of which had led to both waste and inefficiency.
If this new and overarching body could, at long last, not only dominate the armaments industry, but also get some real grip on the situation, cut out much of the chaff and increase efficiency in the toxic and corrupt world of Nazi business, then the production of war materiel might yet improve.
And it had to, or else Armageddon would fall on Germany. Already, the violence and terrible treatment they had meted out to prisoners and civilians alike in the East ensured that, should the Soviet Union start pushing German forces back, terrible vengeance would follow, along with the dark cloak of Bolshevism. Nazi Germany could expect no mercy for what it had already unleashed in this war.
The solution was clear: in the summer, when the campaigning season resumed, they had to win the war in the East. Although General Warlimont and the Operations Staff at the OKW had been asked to prepare an appreciation, Hitler, it seemed, had swiftly drawn up his own vision for future strategy, one that he had put to the Japanese Ambassador back on 3 January. The oilfields of the Caucasus were to be the main focus of a resumed attack the moment the weather improved. ‘This is the most important direction for an offensive,’ Hitler said.4 ‘We must reach the oilfields there and also in Iran and Iraq.’ Once there, they could help the Arab ‘freedom movement’. In North Africa and the Middle East, Axis forces would also mount what would be a giant pincer attack – the drive through the Caucasus in the north and another through to the Middle East in the south. It would be Kesselschlacht on a giant scale. At the same time, his armies would attempt to obliterate Leningrad and Moscow too. ‘England remains our main enemy,’ he assured the Japanese Ambassador.5 ‘We shall certainly not go under in face of the Russians.’
In Hitler’s mind, it followed that with the oilfields captured and the huge agricultural expanses of the Ukraine secured, these assets would be denied to the Red Army and would be of vital benefit to Germany. With the British beaten in the Middle East, the Soviet Union would inevitably collapse and then the Germans could turn back to Britain and the United States. Practicalities such as how they were actually going to transport oil from the Caucasus – or the Middle East, for that matter – had not really been thought through, but it would, at least, be denied to the Russians, and, as the Germans were only too well aware, without oil it was impossible to keep fighting a war.
This was, frankly, a pretty fantastical appreciation, but certainly everything now depended on ending the war in the East in 1942. That meant making sure the Army and Luftwaffe were equipped to do the job – and that, in turn, meant ensuring there was enough ammunition and shells, enough tanks, trucks, aircraft, artillery pieces, small arms, and that the equipment they did have was more than equal to the challenges demanded. Since their starting point for this was so far behind those of the Allies, it was an enormous challenge, to say the very least.
The biggest headache facing the Zentrale Planung, and the focus of many of their meetings, was steel – and how to get more of it. So far in the war, it was ammunition production that had dominated the allocation of this precious resource; whenever Hitler had ordered a drive to produce more shells, production of tanks and other war materiel suffered. Now, however, there needed to be an increase in ammunition and other weapons. It could no longer be a case of one or the other. Production needed to increase in both at the same time.
It was in the area of improving efficiency that the Zentrale Planung looked to make their first move, challenging a committee of steel magnates with the task of overhauling steel allocation. On 15 May, they presented their proposals. Any backlogs of steel orders – and there were many – were to be cancelled. In future, allocations of steel would be assigned to only 90 per cent of steel production and a reserve of 10 per cent would be kept for the highest-priority orders. Steel mills were not to take on more orders than they could reasonably expect to fulfil.
Later, the overall quantity of steel rations was to be cut to keep it in line with actual production. The axe would fall heaviest on exports, which was poor news for Italy, for example, but that was too bad. Military allocation was only cut by 7 per cent, but of the three services it was the Kriegsmarine, that most junior of German armed services, that took the biggest hit. The steel ration to the Army, on the other hand, increased. These measures were all quite sensible and did improve matters significantly, although the Zentrale Planung had no answer yet, in the spring of 1942, as to how best to improve steel output.
They needed to find solutions soon, however. The clock was ticking inexorably; time for the Germans was fast running out. The Soviet Union was still not beaten and all the while the Russians were building more tanks and guns, and pushing more divisions into the battle. At the same time, Britain was producing more bombers, more tanks, more of everything – and British output was now being outdone by what was starting to emerge from US factories.
This meant that even if Germany did beat the Soviet Union in the summer, it was likely that Britain and the United States would outproduce the Reich to a point where defeating them would become well nigh impossible. Germany had gambled on a swift victory against Russia in 1941 and it had failed. Now they were faced with trying to fight a war on multiple fronts when they barely had the resources to fight on one.
New equipment was on its way, however, including a new tank to combat the Russian T34. Both Daimler-Benz and MAN had been asked to produce designs for a 30–35-ton panzer with increased armour and a high-velocity 75mm gun, and in May 1942 Hitler chose the MAN design. It would become the Panzer Mk V, better known as the ‘Panther’, and, although it was a much bigger tank than the current stock, ease of build and comparative cheapness were expected to be key attributes.
Speer, who understood a thing or two about propaganda and who, from his position within the Führer’s inner circle, knew Goebbels well, ensured that much was made of increased tank and weapons production. ‘The best weapons bring victory’, was the slogan, and one of those was the new multipurpose machine gun, the MG42, which, it was boasted, could fire 3,000 rounds per minute. This was nonsense, but it could fire 1,400, which made it comfortably the fastest-firing machine gun in the world, and it took only 75 man-hours to make rather than the MG34’s 150. This was still more than the British Bren, for example, but there was not much aesthetic about it, so, to a certain extent, the designer at Mauser, Werner Gruner, had listened to General Thomas.
However, devastating though such a high rate of fire undoubtedly was, the MG42 had just the same practical issues as its predecessor, only more so. As it was also air-rather than gas-cooled, it overheated even more quickly, used even more ammunition, gave off a huge amount of smoke, and still needed its users to carry around a whole stack of spare barrels, all of which ate into that precious steel allocation. Bren-gun teams carried one spare barrel, whereas those on MG42s would need at least six.
The dilemmas facing Germany’s war leadership were, however, now multiplying as they began their desperate effort to regain the initiative in the war. Suddenly they were faced not only with having to crank up rearmament with a shortage of supplies and cash, but also with a labour force that was overstretched. In addition, they had to find ever-more troops when the cream of German youth had already been exhausted. Finally, and perhaps most pressing of all, they needed to find more food, of which they were also already desperately short. These were all seemingly insurmountable problems. The fact they had captured gargantuan numbers of Russian prisoners, or could sink 400,000 tons of Allied shipping a month, or gain 2 miles of desert, or pound Malta into dust, did not really solve any of their difficulties. If anything, it made their situation worse.
The current predicament stemmed from the fact that they had never been as big and powerful as they had made out publicly before the war. They had invaded Poland with most Germans and certainly much of the rest of the world believing they were highly technological and mechanized, when in fact quite the opposite was true. One of the biggest conundrums was the paradox that their victories depended on lightning strikes, but for the most part they lacked the transportation to achieve it.
Going on the defensive over the winter had not done much to improve General Adolf von Schell’s life, for example. Such had been the attrition on the Wehrmacht’s motor vehicles, von Schell now had to keep back 40 per cent of the operating weight just for spare parts. By April, troops at the front had received around 210,000 new vehicles of all kinds and the repairs had risen to some 30,000 per week. These, however, made up only around 20 per cent of the required strength, while most already at the front were in need of replacement. A further complication was the North African front, as well as the demands from their allies, Finns, Romanians and Italians.
Von Schell had tried to streamline the number of different types of vehicle but had been only partially successful. By around this time, some 1,300 different models of vehicle were used by the Germans, a huge number and clearly massively inefficient despite his best efforts, but because the Wehrmacht was still dependent on requisitioned and captured vehicles, this was unavoidable. So too were the huge distances of the Soviet Union and the almost total lack of metalled roads or infrastructure. Even if he had had enough vehicles and spares, getting them to the front and then sustaining them, especially the further east they went, was an incredibly difficult challenge.
As it was, they did not have enough, and yet everyone in the German armed forces wanted vehicles and everyone wanted more spares. At the same time, Oberst Hermann Balck, still working as General of Mobile Forces at the OKH, was expected to be stockpiling vehicles for the summer offensive. There were, however, only so many vehicles that could be built, repaired and saved with the raw materials and labour that had been allocated. A more Machiavellian, unscrupulous and better-connected man than von Schell might have been able to worm his way into Hitler’s inner circle and lobby the Führer direct, but there were always others whose demands went above those of the Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicles. And still towering over almost all, despite his recent humiliation, was Göring, controlling much of German industry and the raw-material allocations, and regarding the requirements of lowly Adolf von Schell as quite far down the pecking order.
Just to make his life a little harder, in the spring of 1942 Hitler hired Jakob Werlin, a member of the board of Daimler-Benz AG and a good party man, as Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicle Matters. It was yet another classic piece of Hitlerian divide and rule that only made von Schell’s life even more difficult and served to undermine still further his considerable efforts in the face of never-ending obstacles.
Meanwhile, there was the mounting food crisis. The harvest of 1941 had been poor – Britain had done well only because of the massive increase in productivity, but that had not occurred elsewhere in Europe – and the Germans had not captured the large amounts of grain and other foodstuffs they had expected from the Ukraine and other occupied territories. In March, Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia in eastern Germany, to the new position of Plenipotentiary General of Labour Mobilization. An acute political operator, Sauckel was deeply anti-Semitic and an ardent Nazi, and had made himself rich by ensuring he had holdings in key armaments industries within Thuringia, including Wilhelm-Gustloff-Stiftung, one of the Reich’s leading manufacturers of small arms. He also made sure that the largest of the second wave of concentration camps was built on his home turf at Buchenwald. Ruthless, greedy and cunning, he was also a superb administrator and quickly set in motion a mammoth programme of bringing in forced labour, through a combination of prisoners of war and ‘civilian’ workers from the occupied territories. In fact, by the end of March, the numbers arriving in the Reich reached around 34,000 per week.
This helped solve the manpower shortage, but it had other detrimental knock-on effects. None of these men – and women – was capable of feeding themselves. The ever-larger armies also needed feeding, as did German civilians, who were already suffering from stringent rationing. As it was, Herbert Backe, who had been promoted to Minister for Food in April 1942 when Walther Darré was forcibly retired by Hitler, was wondering how he was ever going to feed the Soviet prisoners now being brought to Germany as slave labour. Göring had half-joked that he should give them cats and horsemeat. Backe had replied with no trace of irony that there were not enough cats and that horsemeat was already supplementing German rations.
To make matters worse, the winter had been bitterly cold throughout Europe, not just on the Eastern Front. On his estate in Prussia, landowner Hans Schlange-Schöningen felt he had never suffered such a terrible winter, which had made the food situation even worse. ‘We have had no chance of sending potatoes into the town to feed the people,’ he wrote.6 ‘And the worst is the widespread destruction of our winter grain – the grain we need for bread.’ In April there was a further ration cut – for both the fighting troops and the population back in Germany. It was a disaster for the Nazi regime, who were paranoid that this, above all things, had the potential to cause revolution at home. It certainly was not received well, and in addition to the hunger there was now bomb damage; shops had fewer goods than ever before; more Sicherheitsdienst (SD – security services) men roamed the streets. Furthermore, troops back from the front looked emaciated and exhausted, and in the security of their homes they talked. Else Wendel was a young divorced mother of two living and working in Berlin. When her younger brother, Rudolf, returned on leave, he told her terrible tales of atrocities at the front. ‘We behaved like devils out of hell,’ he told her.7 ‘We have left those villagers to starve to death behind us, thousands and thousands of them.’ He also told her prisoners were shot on the slightest excuse. ‘Just stick them up against a wall and shoot the lot,’ he said. ‘We order the whole village out to look while we do it.’ She was horrified.
The combination of cold, hunger, shortages of everything, physical signs of the war and despair from the front was, the Nazi leadership was well aware, a potentially explosive combination. The biggest priority, however, was to stop Germans going hungry, whilst at the same time feeding enough foreign workers. If that could be solved, and if they started winning again, then the crisis would pass.
In the end the solution was a simple one, which combined the cold-hearted logic of the Wehrmacht-endorsed Hunger Plan, which had originally been devised to strip Ukraine and feed Germans at the expense of millions of Soviets, with the illogicality of Nazi racial ideology. Architect of the solution was Herbert Backe, who immediately set about a complete overhaul of the current food-distribution system and the introduction of a number of new measures readily endorsed by Göring and Hitler. From May onwards, all food deliveries from the Reich to the troops at the front were to cease. The Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS units were, from now on, to feed themselves from the territories they occupied – and with a ruthless disregard for the needs of the local population. At the same time, Ukraine and France would be expected to send a far greater proportion of the 1942 harvest straight back to Germany. While local populations were still expected to be left with some food on which to survive, the real benefit of Backe’s new plan was the exclusion of some groups from getting any food at all.
In this way, Backe had found a means to kill two birds with one stone. Poland’s Jews were to be completely eliminated from the food chain. That was 3.5 million people Germany was no longer responsible for feeding in any way whatsoever. They would, of course, starve, as would many other millions of people, but it was better, Backe believed, to starve Jews and the conquered Slavs of the East – and even Frenchmen, for that matter – than to allow Germans to die of hunger. Germany’s need for food was starting to affect everyone in the occupied territories. For many, it would mean starvation and death. For others, such as those in the West who were not part of Germany’s racial plans but who were still subordinate in the pecking order, it meant life was about to become noticeably harder. That, however, was the way it had to be as far as Backe was concerned. The interests of pure-blood Germans took precedence over everyone else.
Far away in the United States, there was also a new armaments supremo. Don Nelson, the head of the recently formed War Production Board, was an outwardly mild-mannered, pipe-smoking, balding and bespectacled 53-year-old with no industrial or manufacturing experience whatsoever – apart from, that is, what he had learned from Bill Knudsen during their time together on the NDAC and OPM, the War Production Board’s precursors.
Nelson, however, had proved himself as a supremely successful businessman with that most famous of American retailers, Sears & Roebuck, the mail-order giants. From Missouri, and with a degree in chemical engineering under his belt and the intention of saving a few dollars so he could study for a doctorate at Harvard, he had joined Sears & Roebuck back in 1912. Somehow, he never quite left and after thirty years had steadily worked his way up the ladder until he was president of the whole caboodle. What his long career had taught him was how to make manufacturers give him the best prices and how to get a flow of materials from multiple sources out to the customer, and on time. Since joining NDAC back in 1940 as one of the ‘dollar-a-year’ men, or leading capitalists, he had impressed everyone with his cool, calm efficiency and good sense. Tall, rotund and bookish, people warmed to Nelson: he looked like a gentle giant, was affable and easy-going and very hard not to like. There was no barking and snarling, nor fist-thumping of tables; rather, he relied on charm, patience, imperturbability, razor-sharp analytical powers, gentle coercion and a voracious appetite for work. So far in his life, it had proved a disarming but highly successful combination.
When first offered the job of the new head of the WPB, Nelson had pointed out to Roosevelt that earlier boards had struggled because they had lacked any clearly defined authority. Accepting this, the President asked him to write out his own brief, which he promised he would sign. Nelson did as he was bidden and presented a draft that gave him the authority to exercise power in such a manner as he felt fit. The key line was, ‘His decisions shall be final.’8
This was what Knudsen had always lacked. From now on, manufacturers could be forced to accept contracts, private property could be forcibly requisitioned, and Nelson could also halt the production of civilian goods if he felt it necessary. He was the new war production tsar. ‘As I understood my job,’ he wrote, ‘it wasn’t up to me to tell industry how to do its job; it was our function to show industry what had to be done and then to do everything in our power to enable industry to do it.’9
That meant harnessing big business even more than Knudsen had been able to. It also meant doing away with normal peacetime business practices. Competitive bids, for example, were scrapped, even though fair competition practices – or antitrust, as it was known – had been at the heart of US business since 1890. Rather, Nelson convinced Roosevelt that the rules now had to be bent. Instead, a contract was negotiated on the basis of what the Government was willing to pay upfront, and while this was certainly open to corruption, Nelson saw it as a question of priorities: what was more important, mass-producing vast numbers of armaments, or clogging the production chain with lengthy bidding processes? Time and a profound sense of urgency dictated everything: every day lost to unnecessary legislation and red tape, or to maintaining ethical business policies, could mean the loss of more American lives.
No one had ever doubted the United States’ potential to mass-produce armaments, but whether that potential would ever be effectively realized had been very much up for debate. Knudsen’s vision of harnessing big business whilst maintaining civilian production, and stressing speed of process at every turn, had set the country on the right path: in the eighteen months since the formation of the NDAC, it had been Knudsen, above all, who had laid the foundations for America’s war production. Now it was up to Nelson to try to deliver the increasingly high expectations not only of the President and America’s war leaders, but also those of Britain and the Soviet Union.
The challenge of converting the US economy to an all-out wartime footing was a gargantuan one. Priorities were horribly tangled and urgently needed rationalizing. The conversion from civilian to military production now had to be sped up, although just how fast and to what extent was still being argued over both within industry and in the corridors of Washington. A mass of bottlenecks and some worrying raw-material shortages were also emerging, not least in steel, copper and magnesium, all essential if they were to get even close to the kind of production figures that were being talked about.
Highly capable though he was, whether Don Nelson could pull it off was another matter altogether.