Todt was an engineer and a committed Nazi who had come to prominence as the builder of Germany’s famous motorways in the 1930s. Hitler respected and admired him and had put him in charge not only of weapons and munitions production but also of energy and waterways and some aspect of the organization of forced labour during the war. Todt had headed the construction industry under the aegis of G̈ring’s Second Four-Year Plan administration. He had run his own outfit, the Todt Organization, building roads across all the occupied territories, continuing with the creation of the West Wall defences and constructing U-boat bases on the Atlantic coast. Within the Party, Todt was in charge of the Head Office for Technology, controlling voluntary associations of many kinds in the field. In the spring of 1940, Hitler had created a new Ministry of Armaments and appointed Todt to run it. This accumulation of offices had given Todt considerable power over the economic management of the war, though he had had to contend with a range of rivals, especially Hermann G̈ring.
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He would be a difficult man to replace.
Over breakfast at the Leader’s headquarters on 8 February 1942, the talk was all of who should be his successor. Speer realized that he would be asked to take over at least some of Todt’s functions, since as General Building Inspector for Berlin he already had some responsibilities in this area, including the repair of bomb damage and the provision of air-raid shelters. Todt had assigned him the task of improving the transport system in the Ukraine, which is indeed why he had been in Dnepropetrovsk. Hitler had told him more than once that he wanted to entrust him with some of Todt’s existing tasks. But Speer was unprepared when, as he later remembered, he was ‘summoned to Hitler as the first caller of the day at the usual late hour, around one o’clock in the afternoon’ and told that he was being appointed to succeed Todt in all his capacities, not just that of construction overlord. Although ‘thunderstruck’, Speer had the presence of mind to ask Hitler to issue a formal command, which he would be able to use to impose his authority on his new sphere of operations. There was, however, one last obstacle to overcome. Just as he was leaving, G̈ring ‘bustled in’. He had boarded his special train at his hunting lodge 60 miles away as soon as he had learned of Todt’s death. ‘Best if I take over Dr Todt’s assignments within the framework of the Four-Year Plan,’ he said. But it was too late. Hitler repeated his formal appointment of Speer to all of Todt’s jobs. And G̈ring’s authority over the economy was further downgraded when Speer persuaded Hitler to sign a decree on 21 March 1942 ordering that all other aspects of the economy had to be subordinated to arms production, run by himself.
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In his memoirs, written many years after these events, Speer, not without a dash of sincerity, professed to have been amazed by the ‘recklessness and frivolity’ of his appointment. After all, he had no military experience and no background in industry. It was, he wrote,
in keeping with Hitler’s dilettantism that he preferred to choose nonspecialists as his associates. After all, he had already appointed a wine salesman as his Foreign Minister, his party philosopher as his Minister for Eastern Affairs, and an erstwhile fighter pilot as overseer of the entire economy. Now he was picking an architect of all people to be his Minister of Armaments. Undoubtedly Hitler preferred to fill positions of leadership with laymen. All his life he respected but distrusted professionals such as, for example, Schacht.
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But the choice was not as irrational as Speer claimed later on. As an architect, he was not so much a lone artist sitting at his drawing-board making sketches of buildings, as a manager of a large and complex office engaged in major, indeed gargantuan, projects of construction and design.
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As General Building Inspector for Berlin, he was already familiar with the havoc bombing could wreak and, as the man responsible for restoring the roads and railways in the Ukraine, he knew all about the problems posed by poor communications and the need to organize an adequate supply of labour. He had worked closely with Todt in a number of areas. His duties had already acquainted him with the power-plays of men like G̈ring, and his initial reaction to his appointment showed quite clearly that he was fully able to cope with them. Above all, however, he was Hitler’s own man. He was Hitler’s personal friend, perhaps his only one. Together they continued even after his appointment to pore over models of the new Berlin, and dream of the transformation of German cities they would achieve together after the war was over. Long before his appointment, Speer had on his own admission fallen totally under his Leader’s spell. He would do unquestioningly anything he wanted.
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In contrast to Speer’s unquenchable optimism, others besides Fritz Todt had begun by this time to have serious doubts about the German capacity to continue the war to victory. A few months before his appointment, Speer had visited the General Manager of the Junkers factory at Dessau, Heinrich Koppenberg, to discuss the buildings needed to house the gigantic new aircraft factory he was planning in the east. Speer later recalled that Koppenberg had led him ‘into a locked room and showed me a graph comparing American bomber production for the next several years with ours. I asked him,’ Speer went on, ‘what our leaders had to say about these depressing figures. “That’s just it, they won’t believe it,” he said. Whereupon he broke into uncontrollable tears.’
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General Georg Thomas, chief of procurement at the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command, had become increasingly pessimistic from the summer of 1941 onwards. By January 1942 he was more worried about whom to blame for the disastrous supply situation facing the army in the east than how to rescue the situation, ‘since’, as he said, ‘some day somebody will be held responsible’.
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General Friedrich Fromm, who commanded the reserve army at home and had responsibility for the army’s armaments supplies, told Chief of the Army General Staff Franz Halder on 24 November 1941 that the arms economy was on a ‘descending curve. He thinks,’ Halder noted in his diary, ‘of the necessities of making peace!’
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Manpower reserves were being exhausted, and oil supplies were running short, and Fromm advised Hitler to send all available new troops to Army Group South, so that it could make a dash for the oilfields of the Caucasus. The despair of some ran even deeper. On 17 November 1941 the head of the procurement organization for the air force, Ernst Udet, a former flying ace, shot himself after failing repeatedly to convince Hitler and G̈ring that aircraft production in Britain and America was growing so fast that the German planes would face overwhelming, impossible odds within a few months.
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In January 1942 Walter Borbet, the head of the Bochum Association, a major arms manufacturing concern where he had pioneered new methods of production, also shot himself, convinced both that the war could not be won and that Germany’s leadership would never be persuaded to make peace.
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These men had good cause for concern. Despite all the Germans’ efforts, the British were continuing to out-produce them in tanks and other weapons. The armed forces procurement officials insisted on technological sophistication at the expense of mass production, and there was constant bickering between the army, the navy and the air force, each with its very plausible rival claims for priority in the allocation of resources. Focusing on complex weaponry brought higher profits to business than cheap mass production. All this slowed down production and reduced the quantities of armaments and equipment available to the armed forces. At the same time, Hitler continued to demand ever-greater efforts from industry as the military situation failed to deliver the anticipated breakthrough. In July 1941 he ordered the construction of a new high seas battle fleet, at the same time as a fourfold increase in the air force and the expansion of the number of motorized divisions in the army to thirty-six. He was all too aware of the rapidly increasing quantities of American arms and equipment that were managing to reach Britain. Already by the time America formally became a combatant nation, in December 1941, it was churning out quantities of armaments that Germany had so far shown no signs that it would be able to match. Army officers early in 1942 began to notice an improvement in Soviet military equipment and weaponry as well. To demand that German arms production match all this seemed completely unrealistic.
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Unlike Todt and the other economic managers who thought that the war was already lost in economic and therefore also in military terms, Speer believed, with Hitler, that it could still be won. He had a blind faith in Hitler’s powers. At every stage, Hitler’s will had triumphed over adversity, and it would do so again. Speer was not a technocrat; he was a true believer.
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Speer was not so blind, of course, that he failed to realize that this was a major reason for his appointment. Hitler, indeed, confided in him more than once that the death of Todt at a moment when Speer was visiting his headquarters was providential. As Speer wrote later,
In contrast to the troublesome Dr. Todt, Hitler must have found me a rather willing tool at first. To that extent, this shift in personnel obeyed the principle of negative selection which governed the composition of Hitler’s entourage. Since he regularly responded to opposition by choosing someone more amenable, over the years he assembled around himself a group of associates who more and more surrendered to his arguments and translated them into action more and more unscru pulously.
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This principle had already been at work in the changes Hitler had made in the senior ranks of the army after the Moscow debacle. Now it was at work in the management of the war economy too. But Speer was no amateur in one respect at least. In the following weeks, he warded off one attempt after another by G̈ring to restrict his powers. He repeatedly called on Hitler to back him and even to transfer the armaments functions of the Four-Year-Plan to the Armaments Ministry. In all this, he showed that his instinct for power was as strong as that of anyone in the Nazi hierarchy.
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II
Speer had several major advantages in his mission to galvanize German war production into greater efficiency. He had the support of Hitler, which he used whenever he ran into serious opposition, and he had good relations with key figures in the Nazi hierarchy. As General Buildings Inspector, for instance, Speer had worked closely with Himmler and the SS, and depended for his grandiose schemes on the supply of stone quarried by the inmates of the concentration camps at Flossenb̈rg and Mauthausen.
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He also had good contacts in the armaments management hierarchy (especially the State Secretary in the Air Ministry, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, nominally G̈ring’s man but in practice much more willing to work with Speer). Speer also came into office when the drive to rationalize had already begun, spurred on by Hitler’s insistent criticisms of inefficiency and facilitated by the changes in economic management inaugurated by Todt in December 1941. He worked hard to eliminate overlaps in arms production between the three armed services. He subordinated the leading industrial producers directly to himself and gave them a degree of delegated responsibility in improving their production methods. He fought against excessive bureaucracy and introduced streamlined methods of mass production. The result, he claimed later, was a significant increase in production in every area within six months. ‘Total productivity in armaments increased by 59.6 per cent . . . After two and a half years, in spite of the beginning of heavy bombing, we had raised our entire armaments production from an average index figure of 98 for the year 1941 - admittedly a low point - to a summit of 322 in July 1944.’
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In taking over the management of armaments production, Speer trumpeted the virtues of rationalization. He brought in a number of industrialists to man the new committee structure set up by Todt. A typical example of Speer’s use of industrialists to increase efficiency could be found in the production of submarines, where he appointed a car manufacturer to reorganize the assembly process in 1943. The new submarine supremo broke down the production of each vessel into eight sections, got a different firm to make each section with standard parts to a timetable co-ordinated with the others, assembled the final product at a central plant, and thereby reduced the time it took to make each U-boat from forty-two weeks to sixteen. Speer also implemented a new system of fixed-price contracts introduced by Todt in January 1941, which forced prices down and offered exemption from corporation tax for those who reduced costs and therefore prices by a significant amount. Speer demanded that companies exploit their workers more effectively, with double shifts being introduced, and tried to reduce costs by using existing plant more intensively instead of constructing new factories. No fewer than 1.8 million men were employed in setting up new plant, but much of the extra capacity could not be used because of shortages of energy and lack of machine tools; Speer terminated contracts for new industrial facilities costing 3,000 million Reichsmarks. And he introduced a drastic concentration and simplification of the production of arms and arms-related products across the economy. The number of mostly small firms engaged in producing prismatic glass for use in viewfinders, telescopes, binoculars, periscopes and the like was reduced from twenty-three to seven, and the variety of different types of glass from a staggering 300 to a mere fourteen. Speer found that no fewer than 334 factories were making firefighting equipment for the air force; by early 1944 he had reduced this to sixty-four, which was reckoned to have saved 360,000 man-hours per month. The number of companies producing machine-tools was cut from 900 in early 1942 to 369 by October the following year. Speer even extended the rationalization principle to consumer goods industries. When he found that five out of the 117 carpet manufacturers in Germany were producing 90 per cent of the carpets made, he had the other 112 closed down, and their factories and labour put to use in the war economy. In the competition for resources, the different armed forces and their associated manufacturers had exaggerated their needs, so that, for example, aircraft factories had demanded four times the amount of aluminium per aircraft than was actually needed. The metal was being stockpiled or put to non-essential uses such as making ladders or greenhouses. Speer made the companies surrender their stockpiles, and tied the allocation of raw materials to production targets.
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