The Kindly Ones

In the beginning of March, things began to speed up, but not to get any clearer. Speer, I had learned from a phone call from Thomas at the end of February, had pulled through and, even though he was still in Hohenlychen for now, was slowly resuming control of his ministry. Together, with Field Marshall Milch, he had decided to set up a Jägerstab, a special staff to coordinate the production of fighter planes; from a certain point of view, it was a great step forward toward the consolidation of the last sector of war production that still escaped his ministry; on the other hand, intrigues were proliferating, it was said that Göring had opposed the creation of the Jägerstab, that Saur, Speer’s deputy appointed to head it, was not the person he would have chosen, and other things besides. What’s more, the men in Speer’s ministry were now openly discussing a fabulous, outlandish idea: burying the entire production of planes underground to shelter it from the Anglo-American bombers. That would involve the construction of hundreds of thousands of square meters of underground workshops. Kammler, they said, passionately supported this project, and his offices had already almost completed the necessary studies: it was clear to everyone that in the present state of affairs, only the SS could carry out such a mad concept successfully. But it greatly exceeded the capacities of the labor available: new sources had to be found, and in the present situation—especially since the agreement between Speer and Minister Bichelonne forbade any more siphoning off of French labor—only Hungary was left. The resolution of the Hungarian problem, then, was taking on new urgency. Speer’s and Kammler’s engineers, gradually, were already integrating the Hungarian Jews into their calculations and plans, although no agreement with the Kállay government had been achieved yet. At the RSHA, they were studying alternative solutions now: the details I had were sketchy, but Thomas sometimes informed me of the evolution of the plans, so that I could adjust my own. Schellenberg was closely involved in these projects. In February, a shady currency traffic affair with Switzerland had led to the fall of Admiral Canaris; the entire Abwehr had then been incorporated into the RSHA, fusing with the Amt VI to form an Amt Mil under the control of Schellenberg, who now thus headed all the foreign intelligence services of the Reich. He didn’t have much time to exploit this position: the career officers of the Abwehr weren’t particularly fond of the SS, and his control over them was far from being assured. Hungary, from this perspective, would allow him to test the limits of his new tool. As for labor, a change of policy would open up considerable prospects: the optimists spoke of four hundred thousand workers available and easy to mobilize, most of whom were already skilled workers or specialists. Given our needs, that would represent a considerable contribution. But their allocation, I saw already, would be the object of fierce controversy: against Kammler and Saur, I heard a number of experts, sober, clear-headed men, tell me that the concept of underground factories, tempting as it might sound, was illusory, for they would never be ready soon enough to change the course of events; and in the meantime, it would represent an inadmissible waste of labor, workers who would be much more useful, trained in brigades, to repair the factories that had been hit, to construct housing for our workers or the homeless, or to help decentralize certain vital industries. Speer, according to these men, was also of that opinion; but I no longer had access to Speer at the time. For my own part, these arguments seemed sensible to me, yet to the tell the truth, it didn’t really concern me.