Ostkrieg (82 page)

In retrospect, the most noteworthy aspect of the summer of 1944 was not the heartening (from the Allied point of view) sight of the German debacle but the fact that, despite the savage blows of Normandy, Bagration, the escalating bomber war, and the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, the regime not only survived but also somehow managed to hold
off its demise for another eight months. After all, in just June, July, and August alone, on all fronts the Wehrmacht lost a total of 750,000 men killed (590,000 on the eastern front), or roughly a third of the total number who had died from September 1939 to May 1944 (2.23 million). At the same time, the Western allies dropped ten times more tonnage of bombs on Germany in 1944 than they had in the war to date, and would top the 1944 figure by a third in just over four months in 1945, yet proved unable to break the German war economy. Amazingly, despite the battering the German armaments industry took, its output did not peak until the late summer of 1944. Bagration, as well as the other blows, certainly accelerated the German descent into the abyss, but it was not a decisive, war-winning operation.
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The key question, then, is why, despite their overwhelming advantages, the Allies proved incapable of knocking Germany from the war in the summer of 1944. Part of the answer certainly lies in the failures of Allied strategy and decisionmaking. In the east, Stalin and the Stavka shrank from a truly bold initiative that might have dealt the Ostheer a mortal blow, while, in both east and west, a preference for broad frontal advances allowed the Wehrmacht to wriggle free from its death trap. The Allied drives also slowed as a natural consequence of logistic, supply, and manpower problems as the offensives simply reached their culmination point. In addition, the German military leadership showed an uncanny ability time and again to cobble sufficient troops together for well-placed counterattacks that succeeded in knocking the enemy off stride. Finally, the dogged persistence and remarkable fighting skill of the average Landser also played a role.

Just as importantly, however, not only did the institutional pillars of the regime (the Wehrmacht, the SS, the party, and the ministries) remain intact, but the myriad catastrophes of the summer of 1944 unleashed a flurry of activity as the Nazi leadership made one last effort at implementing total war. No one in the inner circle promoted or benefited more from this than Joseph Goebbels, who, of course, had long been obsessed with the need to reorganize the German economy and German society. As early as the winter crisis of 1941–1942, he had warned about the deleterious impact of the continuation of peacetime activities and, instead, sought to harden the public for the demands ahead through a propaganda campaign of “realistic optimism.” Again in the winter crisis of the following year, supported this time by Albert Speer, he had railed against the luxuries and excesses of the elite while demanding the extensive mobilization of German society. Young men should be released by the armaments industries for service in the army, he insisted, with their
places taken by women. At the same time, production of unnecessary consumer goods should be halted and the bureaucratic ranks combed for men suitable for military service, both of which would free further manpower for the front. He also expected this “war socialism” to generate a huge wave of energy from the body of the Volksgemeinschaft that would result in a national rising against the existential threat from the east. None of this, of course, eventuated as the political infighting among top Nazis ensured that little of lasting consequence would be done.
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The summer crisis of 1944, however, presented another opportunity for action. Already on 2 July, Goebbels had published a leading article in
Das Reich
, one intended to begin the psychological mobilization of the masses, in which he answered the question posed in the title, “Are we conducting a total war?” by suggesting, “obviously not total, or at least not total enough.” He stressed again his recurrent theme that, in view of the material superiority of the enemy, Germany had to make the most rational and efficient use of its resources. A few days later, he found an ally in his initiative as Albert Speer, in conversations with Hitler between the sixth and the eighth, urged that Goebbels be placed in charge of mobilizing the home front while Himmler be given an expanded role in supervising the Wehrmacht. In a 12 July memorandum to Hitler, Speer explicitly adopted Goebbels's program, setting out a list of “revolutionary measures” for boosting armaments production—closing unnecessary businesses, drafting women into the labor force, combing administrative offices for personnel—that were virtually identical to the propaganda minister's. Speer followed this memorandum with another on the twentieth, the day of the attempted coup, in which he further bolstered his proposals with a favorite Goebbels argument. There was, complained the armaments minister, “an absolute disparity between the numbers of productive [workers] required for the defense of the homeland and those unproductive ones needed to maintain living standards and the bureaucracy.” By this time, Goebbels had joined the debate directly. In a memorandum of 18 July to the Führer urging the ruthless mobilization of the German people for total war, he stressed that Germany could still win the war simply by not losing it; that is, given the superiority of its opponents, Germany's only chance for victory lay in a rupture in the enemy coalition. That breach would surely come, Goebbels asserted, but it was questionable, without a full reorganization of the economy, whether Germany would have enough punch left to take advantage of this crisis when it happened.
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Given his steadfast loyalty and actions on 20 July, it was hardly a
surprise when Hitler named Goebbels plenipotentiary for the total war effort on 25 July, seemingly making him, as Goebbels bragged, dictator over the home front. Since in June Hitler had rejected just such a move to total war and had assured Goebbels that the crisis would be surmounted “in the usual way,” his action now amounted to an admission that his regime faced an unprecedented existential threat. As always in the Third Reich, however, this new burst of dynamism worked largely at cross-purposes. Not only did the Gauleiter continue to resist full implementation of total war measures, being particularly opposed to plant closings and limitations on consumer goods, but Goebbels and Speer, although having linked their efforts at procuring Hitler's approval for total war, also had conflicting conceptions of its goal. While Goebbels aimed at a levee en masse, an ideological activation of the Volksgemeinschaft that would throw hundreds of thousands of fanatics at the enemy, Speer envisioned the use of the newly available personnel in armaments factories. Typically, Hitler resolved the dispute by attempting to satisfy both squabbling parties. He allowed Goebbels to undertake an extreme austerity drive within Germany and Speer to make good the lost armaments workers with an increased employment of women and foreign workers.
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For both, however, the reality was that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Although Goebbels succeeded in instituting a sixty-hour workweek, pruning personnel from the cultural sphere (where theaters, orchestras, and newspapers were shut down), closing many firms producing goods unnecessary for the war effort, and weeding staff from administrative offices, the results proved disappointing. Since a large proportion of the men sifted from the economy and bureaucracies were too old for military service, Goebbels increasingly forced younger men out of exempt occupations—work thought essential for the war effort, including skilled work—and replaced them with older, less-fit, less-qualified workers, with predictable results. The net addition of women to the workforce also proved disappointing, with only about a quarter of a million added. As before, the war economy continued to depend on the widespread employment of foreign labor; by August 1944, roughly every third worker in the German economy was either a foreign worker or a prisoner of war (with a much higher percentage in agriculture and some specific armaments sectors). Despite improvements in working and living conditions, these laborers remained far less productive than their German counterparts, which proved a further hindrance to maximizing output. Although Goebbels's efforts between August and December 1944 freed around a million men to be sent to the front, most of
the replacements were either very young or overaged, poorly trained, physically or mentally unfit (hundreds of thousands were rejected by the army as unsuitable for service), and unable to stand the strains of front service. As a result, German casualties in that same period exceeded 1.2 million men.
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In yet other ways, as well, the Germans were losing the competition between production and destruction. With the intensification of the Allied bomber war over Germany, efforts were under way to speed production of aircraft and the much-trumpeted wonder weapons. Faced with the imminent extinction of the Luftwaffe in early 1944, Speer joined forces with the Reich Air Ministry to form a
Jägerstab
(fighter staff) to streamline and accelerate fighter production. Aided by the brutally efficient Karl Otto Sauer and Hans Kammler, the Jägerstab enjoyed a priority in armaments production that allowed it to achieve extraordinary gains. Between February and July, aircraft production more than doubled, from 2,015 to 4,219, an armaments “miracle” that was achieved through a combination of material rewards, a longer workweek, the production of only a few models, and the application of coercive violence and the most severe discipline, especially to foreign workers. Himmler's SS also took advantage of the demand for labor by supplying ever-larger numbers of concentration camp prisoners to the aircraft and engine factories; by August in some plants over a third of the workers had been “subcontracted” by the SS. Moreover, the need for labor resulted in the last remaining taboo being broken as Eichmann began furnishing Jewish labor from Hungary, particularly to Kammler's underground rocket factories at Mittelbau-Dora.
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Despite these efforts, however, the Jägerstab failed to narrow the gap between German and Allied production. Although Germany produced 39,807 aircraft in 1944, Allied production of 163,000 dwarfed this total, the United States alone churning out over 96,000 aircraft. Similarly, the Allies enjoyed almost a 2.5-to-1 advantage in the production of armored vehicles and artillery pieces. As Adam Tooze has stressed, despite their achievements, the Germans could not overcome the crushing logic of economics: in 1941, the combined GDP of Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union exceeded that of Germany by 4.36 to 1, a disparity the Germans could never surmount. Speer's efforts in 1943 and early 1944 to make better use of Germany's “foreign capacity,” especially in France and Belgium, certainly paid dividends, and, without its occupied territories, Germany could likely not have continued in the war beyond 1943, but, in spite of their value, they still could not offset the overwhelming material superiority of Germany's enemies. More to
the point, the loss of key raw materials and productive facilities beginning in early 1944, especially Ukrainian ore and Rumanian oil, wrote the death warrant of the German economy. This was accentuated by the disruption produced, after the elimination of the distractions of the Normandy invasion, by the unprecedented intensity of the Allied bombing campaign. From June to October, the British and Americans dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on Germany than in the entire war to that point—and over the next six months equaled that effort. This massive destruction clearly contributed to a growing dislocation of German production as factories were obliterated, machinery buried in mountains of rubble, bridges destroyed, transportation of key parts and materials cut off, synthetic fuel plants crippled, power stations closed, and (not least) the lives of workers disrupted. Although the bombing campaign could not of itself bring the war economy to a standstill, it severely hindered its ability to produce even more material and imposed a time limit on German survival.
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Nor was the crisis merely one of production as German society was also eroding. By midsummer, economic officials worried that the nation would soon face an inflation just as severe as the one that had shaken the structure of the Weimar democracy in 1923. With the value of money eroding, economic actors large and small showed increasing disinclination to comply with the regime's directives. Although black marketeering in the occupied areas—Germany's flea market, as Götz Aly put it—had been not just sanctioned but encouraged, with the contraction of the Nazi Empire it became more difficult to acquire many staple consumer items. This proved especially the case with regard to food products since the two regions most important to Germany, Ukraine and France, had been lost to its exploitation by the late summer. Nor were the retreating troops able to loot and transfer sizable quantities of grains and foodstuffs back to the Reich. Moreover, rising demands from the Wehrmacht, which until now had been fed primarily from local supplies in the occupied territories, aggravated the loss of foodstuffs from these areas. In addition, by the autumn and winter, even before the mass post-war treks, millions of Germans had been uprooted, either as evacuees or as refugees, and were largely dependent on state welfare. Now completely reliant on domestic German agricultural production to supply larger numbers of people, Nazi officials were forced in the autumn drastically to reduce rations. Stepped-up Allied bombing of the transportation network, however, meant not only that distribution became more difficult but also that some food supplies never reached their destinations. Faced with a lack of consumer goods and increasing food shortages
in stores, average Germans, as in World War I, turned increasingly to the black market—and, as in that earlier war, engaged in criminal activities in order to survive. The regime reacted with growing coercion and violence, but, sensitive as the Nazi leaders were to the example of the previous war, they remained reluctant to impose the full burdens of total war on the Volksgemeinschaft. Instead, they clung stubbornly to the promise made at the beginning of the war not to lower the living standard below a certain basic level. As compensation for scarce food items, the regime introduced ersatz products that supplied essential vitamins and protein and, as always, shifted the burden of shortages onto foreign forced laborers, who suffered the most from lower rations and the increasingly chaotic distribution system.
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