Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

The army leaders were not acting in response to pressure from Hitler. They had their own agenda. They were at the same time ‘working towards the Führer’, consciously or unconsciously acting ‘along his lines and towards his aim’ (in phrases tellingly used by one Nazi official in a speech two years earlier, hinting at how the dynamic of Nazi rule operated)³⁰ in the full knowledge that their rearmament ambitions wholly coincided with Hitler’s political aims, and that they could depend upon his backing against attempts to throttle back on armament expenditure. Reich War Minister Werner von Blomberg, Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and his Chief of Staff, Beck, were thereby paving the way, in providing the necessary armed might, for the later expansionism which would leave them all trailing in Hitler’s wake.³¹

Even so, the economic impasse seemed complete. Huge increases in allocation of scarce foreign currency were demanded by both the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Armaments.³² The position could not be sustained. Fundamental economic priorities had to be established as a matter of urgency. Autarky and export lobbies could not both be satisfied. Hitler remained for months inactive. He had no patent solution to the problem. The key figure at this point was Göring.

Several factors contributed to Göring’s arrival centre-stage in the arena of economic policy: his own insatiable drive to aggrandizement of power; his involvement the previous autumn when acting as Hitler’s troubleshooter in a dispute between Schacht and Richard Walther Darre, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture, over the allocation of scarce foreign currency to import food products in short supply instead of for raw materials needed by the expanding armaments industries; Schacht’s attempt to use him as a barrier against Party intrusions into the economic sphere; the increasing desperation of Blomberg about the raw-materials crisis in armaments production which eventually forced him to back the power pretensions of the Luftwaffe chief; and not least Hitler’s patent reluctance to become involved, especially if it meant taking decisions in opposition to Party demands.³³

Blomberg had been pressing for months for a ‘Fuel Commissar’. Schacht’s repeated rejection of the proposition, realizing the threat to his own sphere of competence, opened the door for Göring, as Air Minister and head of the Luftwaffe, to demand that the Fuel Commissar be answerable to him. Then in March 1936, as the fuel shortage reached crisis-point, Göring decided to put himself forward as ‘Fuel Dictator’.³⁴ Keen for different reasons to block Göring’s ambitions, Schacht and Blomberg tried to tie him down within the framework of a four-man commission involving the three of them and Reich Minister Hanns Kerrl (a close ally of Göring to whom Hitler had assigned a role in economic affairs in spring 1936) to tackle the foreign-exchange crisis.³⁵

Hoping to keep the party off his back, Schacht helped persuade Hitler to install Göring at the beginning of April as Plenipotentiary for the Securing of the Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange Demands of the Reich. Göring’s brief was to overcome the crisis, get rearmament moving again, and force through a policy of autarky in fuel production.³⁶ But by now Göring was in the driving-seat. Schacht was rapidly becoming yesterday’s man. In May, shocked at the new power-base that his own Machiavellian manoeuvrings had unwittingly helped to create for Göring, the Economics Minister protested to Hitler. Hitler waved him away. He did not want anything more to do with the matter, he was reported as telling Schacht, and the Economics Minister was advised to take it up with Göring himself.³⁷

‘It won’t go well with Schacht for much longer,’ commented Goebbels. ‘He doesn’t belong in his heart to us.’ But Göring, too, he thought would have difficulties with the foreign-exchange and raw-materials issue, pointing out: ‘He doesn’t understand too much about it.’³⁸

It was not necessary that he did. His role was to throw around his considerable weight, force the pace, bring a sense of urgency into play, make things happen. ‘He brings the energy. Whether he has the economic know-how and experience as well? Who knows? Anyway, he’ll do plenty of bragging,’ was Goebbels’s assessment.³⁹