The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

Moreover, once the total-war push was under way, Speer quickly found himself up against his former ally Goebbels and the new alliance that the Propaganda Minister had forged with Bormann, who could usually engineer Hitler’s backing. The obvious question of demands on the scarce manpower located by the various ‘rationalization’ measures, whether this should be allocated to the Wehrmacht or to armaments production, had been characteristically avoided during the time of the short-lived Goebbels–Speer axis. As soon as the issue of power over the total-war effort had been resolved and the question of labour allocation became acute, Speer found himself on the defensive.⁸⁵ He had made powerful enemies in fighting for his own domain. Goebbels’ laconic comment on the Armaments Minister immediately after winning the battle was: ‘I think we have let this young man become somewhat too big.’⁸⁶

Speer’s standing with Hitler had also weakened. Not only was he no longer so obviously Hitler’s favourite; he had to struggle against the increased influence of his own ambitious subordinate, Karl Otto Saur, head of the technical office in Speer’s ministry who earlier in the year had been placed by Hitler in charge of air defence. It would be as well, nevertheless, not to interpret Speer’s relative loss of power in the top echelons of the regime—which the former Armaments Minister was keen to emphasize for posterity—as meaning that he had been ousted from all significant spheres of influence. He continued, in fact, to occupy a decisive position at the intersection between the military and industry. The military needed the weaponry he made available. Industry needed his driving force to produce the weapons, in the face of severe and mounting difficulties. No amount of propaganda or repression by the Party’s populists and enforcers could supply the army with weapons.

On 1 August Speer was, moreover, able to extend his already sprawling empire when Göring was compelled to hand over to him control of the Luftwaffe’s armaments production.⁸⁷

Whatever the internal struggles he had to undertake in the power jungle of the Third Reich during the phase of its inexorable decline, Speer remained indispensable to Hitler and the regime. Writing to Hitler near the end of the war, he claimed: ‘Without my work the war would perhaps have been lost in 1942–3.’⁸⁸ He was surely right. His achievements constitute an important element in the answer to the question of how Germany held out so long.⁸⁹

To this extent, Speer, notwithstanding a weakening of his internal position, was a crucial—possibly even the most important—member of the quadrumvirate that directed Germany’s path into the abyss in the Third Reich’s last months.

V

The combined efforts of the quadrumvirate would have served little purpose had the armed forces shown signs of disaffection and wavered in their backing for the regime. We already saw, however, that, amid the shocked response at Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, military leaders were keener than ever to demonstrate their loyalty to Hitler and dissociate themselves from the uprising against the regime. The arch-loyalist Jodl, his head bandaged after being slightly wounded in the bomb blast and in deep shock at what had happened, set the tone. He told Goebbels that the loyal generals who worked closely with Hitler would help him ‘ruthlessly hunt down the defeatists, putschists and assassination instigators’.⁹⁰

So outraged was he at the ‘treachery’ from within that he favoured disbanding the General Staff altogether.⁹¹ ‘The 20th of July’, he told officers of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, was the ‘blackest day in German history’, worse even than 9 November 1918, ‘unique in its monstrosity’. Now there would be pitiless reprisals against those reponsible. When ‘everything rotten has been weeded out’, there would be a new unity. ‘Even if luck should be against us, we must be determined to gather round the Führer at the last, so that we may be justified before posterity.’⁹² Jodl sought a personal show of loyalty from the officers present who were to seal their commitment to sharing their destiny with the Führer by a handshake.⁹³