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Albert Speer”and the Nazi War P h t s

E U G E N E D A V I D S O N

ONE OF THE genuinely gifted men to be- come part of the Nazi war apparatus was the architect Albert Speer. Speer became Minister of Arms and Munitions in 1942, when he was thirty-six years old, after Fritz Todt, builder of the West Wall as well as of more durable structures like the Autobahnen, had been killed in an airplane accident. But Speer was far abler than his predecessor, who was mainly an engineer, an efficient organizer of large-scale construction.’ Speer got rid, as far as he could, of the system of coer- cion; he put full responsibility for the efficiency of a plant into the hands of the local manager; he improvised, exhorted, par- celed out authority among bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, and hundreds of his deputies were “honorary co-workers,” borrowed from private industry for the duration of the war and paid only a fraction of

what they had been getting as managers or technicians. He resisted anyone when production was threatened-Himmler, Bor- mann, Goebbels, and finally Hitler himself.

+ * + +

It was owing to Speer that the b i g gest year of German manufacture of arms was 1944; only ten months before the end of the war, German production of airplanes and munitions reached an all-time high despite the thousands of bombers attack- ing German cities around the clock, the closing ring of Allied armies, and the blockade. In 1 9 4 seven times as many weapons were produced as in 1942, five and a half times the number of armored vehicles, and six times the a m o u n t of ammunition, but only 30 per cent more workers were employed.

*Albert Speer was released from the S p d m prison in October of this year.

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LICENSED TO UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Speer made few major miscalculations; he had no part in the d e c i s i o n to p u t so much material and labor in the cost- ly “v” weapons, expenditures he would have preferred to see devoted to fighter planes so bitterly needed against the Allied bombers. He opposed the diversion of so much labor to the construction of underground factories when other production was vitally needed; nor was it his beltline of factories that failed. The German tanks and planes became sporadically useless after May, 1944, because fuel was lacking following the massed Allied attacks on the synthetic gasoline plants; in these bombings, Speer declared at Nuremberg, 90 per cent of German fuel production was destroyed.

Speer’s achievement was of a divided character. He always thought of himself as an artist, and he was certainly a builder and organizer of monumental projects that were intended not only to rescue the Reich from defeat but to help create a resplendent and completely imaginary future Germany in which they would provide a scale of living never before approached in the world; and Speer the builder served with all his talents a nihilistic leader who built only in his own image and who would blow everything up when his luck ran out. In the closing months of the war, when Hit- ler was at his most deadly in dealing with doubters even when they were old Par- ty comrades-which Speer was not (he had joined the Party only in 1932)--Speer told the Fuehrer bluntly the war was lost. It was the kind of statement that cost the head of many a man who made it to the wrong person, for this was defeatism which immediately became high treason when the Gestapo and the VoZksgericht, not to men- tion the Fuehrer himself, heard of it.

Speer in addition disobeyed the direct and unconditional order of Hitler to blow up not only military strongpoints and plants

that could be useful to the Allies, but also those that were the sources of German sub- sistence then and in the future-the factories and bridges, ships, freight cars, loco- motives and railroad installations, power stations, and water supplies of the cities lying in the path of the advancing Allied armies. As one device for salvaging everything he possibly could, he quoted to Bor- mann-who wanted the German people to he forced to converge in the center of the country where they would fight to the last, leaving only scorched earth behind them- Hider’s assurances that the lost territories would soon be recaptured. Despite the Fuehrer’s explicit directives, Speer therefore ordered that factories were to be merely “paralyzed,yy not destroyed, and moreover this was to be done only at the last moment, keeping production and machinery intact as long as possible, and then with luck the Allies would take the factories over without serious damage.2

Speer salved his patriotic conscience by telling himself that i n any event the Allies would gain little or nothing by captur- the factories, since owing to the deficiencies in transport they at best could not use them for at least nine months. In this way he saved the Minette mines in France from destruction, telling Bormann and the other Party fanatics that a German counterattack would soon restore them to the Reich‘s uses. No one, he wrote to Hitler, had the right to order the destruction of the means of survival of the nation. And when he finally became convinced that Hitler was identifying with his own lost cause the fate of the people he had professed to love so deeply, Speer planned to kill him. Since everyone who visited the Fuehrer was searched after the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life, Speer wanted to put poison-gas grenades in the ventilating system of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, and he was prevented from carrying out his purpose only because the ingen-

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ious idea proved to be technically imprac- ticable. Hitler, with his primitive instinct for danger, had ordered a brick chimney four meters high to be built around the vents so they could not be tam- pered with.

But despite his furious resistance to Hit- ler’s orders for senseless destruction, Speer was one of the very last among the faithful and unfaithful to take his farewell of the Fuehrer; he flew to the Berlin bunker, which was now the center of the withering, converging Russian attack, only a few days before Hitler committed suicide. In his fashion he remained devoted to the man who had probably wished him as well as Hitler could wish anyone; but Speer would have killed the Fuehrer and the Par- ty leaders with his bare hands rather than accept the senseless loss of the machines that would keep the threadbare sur- vivors of the war alive. He intended to kill Himmler, Goebbels, and Bomann, the chief advocates of scorched earth along with Hitler ; he organized the automatic pistols and the cars that would ambush them and he planned to drive one of the cars himself. But the plot failed when Speer found no way to get at Hit- ler and these others at the same time. He came to the same conclusions as the conspirators of July 20, but in terms of his specialty, which had more to do with the efficient manufacture of goods than of ideas.

Some of the people around Hitler, including Speer, thought Speer enjoyed a special freedom with the Fuehrer because he was an architect-a brilliant practition- er of the profession that Hitler had once chosen for himself and to which the Fuehrer gave his full amateur talents when he set out to rebuild the Reich after he became Chancellor. Speer became Hitler’s chief architect in 1934, when he was only twenty-nine years old. He was born in

Mannheim on March 19, 1905, the son and grandson of architects. After taking his Abitur he studied architecture at Karlsru- he, Munich, and Berlin, where, when Hit- ler took power, he was an assistant at the Technische Hochschule and practicing his profession at the same time. He deeply impressed the Fuehrer with his new Reich- stag, which not only was designed in the heroic style the Fuehrer so doted on, but also was erected in a shorter time than anyone would have thought likely. Speer then, as later, was prodigal with workers and used twice as many as more economical architects might have demanded. Hitler gave him the task of replanning Berlin and along with it the spiritual home of the Par- ty-Nuremberg. Speer told the court that if he had been free to carry out his blue- prints, the Reich would have had some of the largest buildings in the world and the whole earthshaking plan would have cost less than two months of war.

Speer thought that if Hitler had permitted himself to have a friend Speer might have been the one chosen because of their common interest. For whatever reason, Speer was able to talk to the Fuehrer in words no one else dared use without in- curring any of the penalties inflicted on the generals, for example, who dared to be critical. “Off with their heads” was for doubtful military men and politicians; Speer was neither but he was otherwise everything Hitler had once dreamed of be- coming himself. He told the Fuehrer the task given him was nonpolitical; it had to be carried out by technicians and experts of all descriptions, including the 6,000 “honorary co-workers,” many of whom took a dim view of the Party. He recalled this pronouncement to Hitler over and over again when the Party, the Gauleiters, and the SS tried to invade his domain where they thought high treason lurked.

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Speer began his rearguard action, his one-man resistance movement, late in the war, after the invasion of Germany had started, but once he began to resist he was ready to go just as far as the men of July 20. Although he never joined them, he was highly enough regarded by the conspirators to be their choice for Minister of Eco- nomics in the new regime that would succeed Hitler’s, and the Fuehrer not only knew about this but was constantly reminded of it by Bormann and the others who never had believed in Speer’s loyalty. In his meetings with Hitler, as well as in the memoranda he sent him, Speer became increasingly defeatist, and in mid-March, 1945, he wrote a long report to the Fueh- rer, telling him plainly that German industry would collapse within four to eight weeks with certainty and that the war could not be continued after this break- down.

+ * + * It was on March 29, that Speer

wrote Hitler a stinging letter summing up their conversation of the day before:

If I write to you again it is because I am not in the position on emotional grounds to share my thoughts with you by word of mouth. First I must tell you how proud and happy I would be if I might continue to work for Germany as your collaborator. To leave my post, even if you ordered me to do so, in this decisive time would seem like desertion to the German people and to my loyal co-workers. Nevertheless I am in duty bound to tell you, without regard to any personal consequences, plainly and una- dornedly what my inner feelings are with regard to the situation. I have always told you-as one of the few co-workers-openly and honorably what I think and I shall continue to do so. You distinguished yesterday between the recognition of realities through

which one can be convinced that the war no longer may be won and the belief that despite everything it may all come out all right. . . . My belief in a happy turn of fate for us was unbro- ken up to March 18. . . .I am an artist and as such was given a job that was completely alien and difficult. I have done much for Germany. Without my work the war might have been lost in 1942-43. I mastered the job not as a specialist but with the characteristics proper to an artist: with the belief in his task and in success, with the instinct for what is right, with a sense for generous solutions, with an inner integrity without which no artist can find proper solutions.

I believe in the future of the German people. . . . I was desolate when I saw in the days of victory in 1940 how we in the broadest circles of our leadership lost our bearing. Here was the time when providence demanded of us deco- rum and inner modesty. Then victory wodd have been ours. . . . A precious years was lost for armament and development through easy-going ways and laziness and then, as though providence wanted to warn us, bad luck trailed our military accomplish- ments . . . The frost before Moscow, the fog at Stalingrad and the clear sky over the winter offensive of 1944 [Speer is here talking of the German Ardennes offensive, where the weather played a role, but certainly not a decisive one, in bringing the attack to a halt] . . . When on March 18 I gave you my memoran- dum I was sure you would approve completely the conclusions I had drawn for the preservation of our people. For you yourself once said that the task of the leadership of a state is to prevent its people at the end of a lost war from coming to an heroic end. Nevertheless you said on that evening, if we have not mis- understood you, clearly and unmistaka- bly: “If the war is lost, the people are lost too. . . . It is not necessary to bother about the fundamentals that the people

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will need for its most primitive future existence. On the contrary it would be better to destroy these things. For the people have shown themselves weaker and the future belongs entirely to the stronger peoples of the East. Those who survive the war will in any event be only the inferior ones, the best have fallen.” Hearing these words, I was most deeply shaken. . . . Up to then I had believed with all my heart in a good end to this war. I hoped that not only our new weapons and planes but above all the fanatical, growing belief in our future would rouse the people and the leadership to the last sacrifices. 1 was then myself determined to take a glider and fly against the Russian power stations and through my personal involvement to help out, to change fate and at the same time to set an example.

I can, however, no longer believe in the success of our affairs if in these decisive months at the same time, and according to plan, we destroy the substance of our people. That is so great an injus- tice against our people that fate could never again mean well by us.

Speer then repeated what he had written in a letter of March 15:

What generations have built up we are not permitted to destroy. If the enemy does so and thus exterminates the German people then the historic guilt is his alone. . . . I can only continue my work with inner probity and with conviction and belief in the future when you, my Fuehrer, acknowledge, as you have before, the necessity for main- taining the substance of our people. . . . Your order of March 19, 1945, takes away the last industrial possibilities and knowledge of it will throw the population into the greatest d e ~ p a i r . ~ . . . I ask you therefore not to complete this act of destruction against your people. Should you be able to make this decision in whatever form then I will again

have the faith and the courage to be able to work with the greatest ener- gy.... And he closed the letter not with “Heil

Hider” but with “May God Protect Ger- many.”

Speer did succeed in getting Hitler to modify this insane order. He drew up what became the Fuehrer decree of March 30, which declared that since the destruction order was given to prevent the use of the installations by the enemy, demolitions were only to be carried out under immediate threat of capture and were not to weaken the German ability to fight. Bridges and traffic installations were to be destroyed entirely but supply plants need only be paralyzed. Total destruction of especiaIly important plants was only to be carried out with the approval of Speer; and the Party, State, and Armed Forces were to assist him. This document was a remarkable trib- ute to Speer’s influence on Hitler. In addition, Speer was enabled to issue a directive under his own signature on the same date to accompany the Hitler decree, declaring that his previous orders for paralyzing industrial and supply plants were still in effect. Total destruction of the most important plants and of their essential parts was to be carried out only by order of the Fuehrer transmitted through him, and Speer would name such factories with the counsel of the chairman of the armament committees.

Speer’s victory was the more astonishing for its taking place at a time when Hitler suspected high treason on every side, when he was ordering death penalties for his closest former collaborators, and when the hopeless battles of the remnants of the Ger- man armies were being fought only to give him a few more weeks of life. At this time, when Hitler was identifying the fate of the German people with his own, Speer succeeded in breaking through the impene- trable barriers of fantasy; he forced

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the Fuehrer to change his mind. Speer was the only man who succeeded in doing this, and Hitler seemingly bore him no ill will.

A radio speech Speer wanted to make early in April, 1945, was canceled by Goebbels, who thought it defeatist, but on April 16 in Hamburg, Speer made a re- cording of another speech which he planned to have broadcast when the time came-after Hider’s death. In it he said that further destruction or even “paralyzing” operations were not to be carried out, that they were forbidden i n Germany and the occupied territories. No bridges were to be blown up and their demolition charges were to be removed; protection was to be provided for factories, railroads, and communication installations. Anyone who resisted the order was to be dealt with by the Army and the Volkssturm (in which only volunteers were henceforth to serve), if necessary by force of arms. Prisoners of war and foreign workers were to remain in their camps, but if they were already on the road toward their homes they should be sent on their way. Political prisoners and Jews in concentration camps were to be separated from the asocial prisoners and be turned over unharmed to the Allies when the occupying troops appeared. Any Were- wolf activity was to stop.

Although this speech was never deliv- ered, all Speer’s orders were given in its spirit. He made no secret of his implacable opposition to Himmler, Ley, Bormann, Sauckel, Goebbels, and all the other down- the-line Party men who interfered with his job of supplying Germany with weapons and, while hope remained, of obtaining a stalemate or somehow tolerable conditions for Germany’s survival.

* * * * Speer’s remarkable success in increasing

production came from his gift of improvisa- tion and his clear sense of how to organize. He used beltlines and manufactured stand-

ardized parts in scattered factories so that if one factory was destroyed, the finished tanks, or whatever, could still be produced. He gave bonuses, threatened punishments, and got rid of as many administrative bureaucrats as he could. The last accomplish- ment was close to his heart; he was grate- ful for the fire that destroyed thousands of documents in his ministry, and he used the occasion, he told his co-workers, to drop a long list of officials from their jobs. “We cannot expect occurrences of this kind will continuously bring new vigor to our work,” he told his colleagues. He was opposed to large aggregates, preferring a large number of smaller enterprises; huge factories, he thought, produced huge bureaucracies. He ran his vast production empire with a minimum of manpower; he had twenty-one main committees, which were responsible for the finished products of the armament industry, and twelve so-called “rings” to provide for the delivery of raw materials. The committees and rings had the task of streamlining production and deciding on what the factories should concentrate and on how any improvements in manufacture or use of materials might be made. The committees and rings did the planning, working closely with the over-all Planning Commission, and Speer kept emphasizing that their chairmen must keep in close personal touch with the multifarious web of assignments that had to be carried out according to the directives.

The job of the committees, Speer said, was mainly to back up the factory manager. Exchange of information between plants was constant, and secret material, including patents, was made available to all factories, as were any new discoveries. Speer gave the German plants what they always tended to lack: flexibility and a plant-wide morale, a sense of comradeship and of working for the general cause with enthusiasm without regard to salary and social differ-

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ences. The main incentives for the workers were provided, to be sure, by the war, but they also knew that only in this, in Speer’s fashion, could the previous methods of co- ercion be kept out of the plants. Al- ways lurking in the background was the Party and its hostility to business and industry and anything it did not directly control. Both the committees and the rings were composed of mixed groups from the Wehrmacht and technical experts from industry. The decision on the development of new weapons was in the hands of the chairmen of the committees, who were company officials, engineers, and construction men, and any decision they made could be overruled only by Speer, or by the Wehrmacht, or by Hitler himself. The plant managers had complete authority in their own plants as far as Speer could give it to them and keep them free from Party interference.

His remarkable record was by no means owing to the underground factories of which so much was later to be heard. They provided but a small fraction of Ger- man production; at the end of the war only 300,000 square meters of such plants exist- ed, although there were plans for three million square meters more to come. Both Speer and Field Marshal Milch, who was one of the chief men responsible for the production of fighter planes, for which the underground plants were mainly built, and who sat with Speer on the Central Planning Board as well as on the Jaeger Staff,4 were against the building of these plants because the idea, they said, had occurred to Goering too late in the war and the time and manpower needed for their building would be better utilized to produce planes in the factories already available.

Speer gladly hired anyone who was able to do the kind of job he needed, and Goeb- bels, Kaltenbrunner, and Bormann called

his ministry a nest of anti-Party sentiment and activity, which it undoubtedly was by their standards in view of the ceaseless attempts of its chief to step up production re- gardless of the race or political sentiments of his producers and his single-minded efforts to circumvent the destruction orders. Speer was glad to employ Jews or Slavs, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, and Russians, all the hated inferior people, if only they could produce. He gratefully put concentration-camp inmates and prisoners of war to work for his enterprises. Foreign workers of all nationalities (volunteers, forced laborers, concentration-camp workers, and prisoners of war) made up 40 per cent of the personnel of the German war factories. More than two and a half million French- men worked for Germany-of the more than one million French prisoners of war, only some 48,000 were unemployed. There were over a half million Dutchmen and 150,000 Belgians, and workers came by the millions from the East.5 Speer wanted them treated well and paid on scales that compared with the Germans, otherwise they would not work properly. He never hesitat- ed either to make use of the SS or to fight it. He elbowed Himmler out of setting up more concentration camp factories, bringing these workers as far as he could under his own authority, and he merely agreed to supply Himmler’s Waffen SS divisions with more war material in proportion to the concentration camp workers the Reichsfuehrer SS made available. Speer forbade the Ges- tapo making arrests in his factories, and protested against their practice of hold- ing prisoners for months because of some minor defect in their papers when they might otherwise be working. His battle was against whatever they or anyone eIse did that lost workers for the Reich.

In June, 194, Speer made use of his close relationship with Hitler to protest to him the stupid misuse of Russian prisoners

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of war by the SS, pointing out that thousands of them had been shipped to SS factories from plants where they had been use- fully employed and that most of them were skilled Specialists? Speer’s protest was a direct attack on Himmler, who was extending his empire as far as it would go. The SS had begun to produce goods on its own account with a woodworking plant in Dachau; this was successful enough from Himmler and Pohl‘s point of view to warrant extending the SS enterprises to other concentration camps-to Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Neu- engamme. In addition, concentration-camp labor was supplied on a rental basis to outside factories that needed it. Himmler wanted to keep all concentration-camp labor available for these SS factories alone, but Speer was able to convince the Fuehrer that war production would be damaged by such a wide-scale diversion of Germany’s scarce machine tools. Himmler, in his efforts to recruit labor, ordered that 35,000 Eastern workers who had breached their labor contract be sent “by the quickest means” to one of these concentration camps where he could make use of them.’ The only ones to be exempt were those in solitary confinement awaiting further interrogation.

Speer stormed against both the attempts of Sauckel to take workers from the pro- tected industries he had set up in the occupied countries and the SS practice of arrest- ing German and foreign workers on some trivial pretext and sending them to concentration camps. Such workers, he said, like the prisoners of war, never came back to the places where they had been employed and their services were lost as they disap- peared into the labyrinths of Himmler’s domains, for the SS used them in any kind of work. He complained to Hitler that 30,- 000 to 40,000 workers a month were thus kidnapped out of the economy by Himmler. He told the Fuehrer, too, that the Russians, especially the women workers, if decently

treated were usually content with their lot. He wanted humane treatment for the same reasons he wanted coal and oil for his machines, but he loved machines better than people. In one conference he suggested that in order to obtain French specialists who were prisoners of war for German factories the rumor be spread that such men would be freed if they volunteered. The French would have a list of such experts and once the Germans had it on hand they could sim- ply conscript the specialists. There was no great harm in Speer, but he was a machine man, an efficiency expert, and the human beings were essential counters in his task.

His admiration for the order of the machines that he understood so well even led him at the end of the war to try to stop the manufacture of explosives to prevent their being used to blow up the factories Germany would so desperately need after the fight- ing was over. Once he recognized the war was lost, he threw in his hand; his factories had to play a role in the future; production for its own sake had no meaning for him. Nor did he have any confidence in the mir- acle weapons, the V-1s and V-2s. He fought against the manufacture of the new and po- tent gases Tabun and Sarin, which German chemists had succeeded in producin and against which no gas masks were saic to be effective. Tabun and Sarin were five: times more powerful than the former war gases, and Goebbels and Bormann and a handful of scorched-earth fanatics wanted to use them to stop the Allied advance. Hitler, however, came to agree with the arguments of Speer and the generals that it would be catastrophic for Germany to use poison gases in view of the Allied control of the air and their almost unhindered ability to hit the German cities with bombs-including gas bombs-in retaliation and Speer was finally able to stop the manufacture of the gases.

With the proclamation by Hitler of total

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war on July 25, 19M, German men from the ages of sixteen to sixty-five and women from seventeen to fifty had to register for work. At long last Speer’s contention that German man and especially woman power was not being adequately employed was acknowl- edged in the Fuehrer decree. Speer had always wanted the factories manned by Ger- man rather than foreign labor, largely because indigenous labor would not increase the demand on the food supplies. But the decree came too late for Speer’s purpose; the millions of foreign workers were already in Germany, and it was precisely at this time that the Allied bombardments of the synthetic oil plants made much of the production useless. German cities had long been under heavy bombardment, and no care- ful canvass of how many women were working and whether their jobs were indispensable could be made. Whole blocks of houses were disappearing at a time; the task of finding living quarters, lining up for food, and getting to and from work if a woman had a job took strength enough; and the “combing-out” squads sent by the Par- ty only increased anxieties without adding much to the labor force. Many women with children were sent to the comtry, and some- times whole schools were evacuated. The working mother stayed at her job. But what she did and how long she worked could no longer be efficiently controlled.

Speer acted on behalf of his own technoc- racy; he gladly took what labor he could from whatever source; he was gratified by the good performance of concentration- camp workers in his factories, and he would have wanted more of them except for the constant threat of Himmler’s interference. He estimated at Nuremberg that not more than 33,000 to 36,000 inmates of these camps were at work in the war factories, although they put in much more time than the others-from seventy-two to even a hundred bows a week. Under some of the

camp commanders, Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl told his chief, Heinrich H i d e r , there were no limits to the hours of concentration-camp labor. The camp commander alone decided how long the prisoners had to work, but in any event work breaks must be kept to a minimum. “Noon intervals,’’ said Pohl, “only for the taking of meals are forbidden.”

Since the concentration-camp laborers Speer had in his factories were for the most part mixed in with other workers, their bows were likely to be limited, and in any event he was against long hours because they were inefficient. But he highly ap- proved of concentration-camp labor for his war industries, as he did prisoners of war, volu,nteers, and forced laborers. In none of his countless r e p o r t s, memoranda, or speeches, however, did he write or say anything other than to urge that they be adequately fed and rewarded for their performance. In the environment of hostility and violence in which he operated, he was one of the mildest of the top government officials. His country was, as he saw it, in a life-or-death struggle with its enemies; every German must do his share either at the front or in the factories, and the people in the occupied countries must work too, hopefully in their own plants where they would do their jobs more efficiently. Speer did not think it his concern to decide the legality of what was being done, but his improvised system was based far more on rewards than on punishments, and the typical Nazi exhortations to be ruthless and to take no a c c o u n t of the suffering of foreigners never appear in anything Speer wrote or said. He conceded in his reports that a small majority of his workers, both German and foreign, needed to be disciplined on occasion, to be sent for a period to special camps or even to concentration camps if they deliberately committed major infrac- tions of the work rules or sabotage. But on

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the whole he used the carrot rather than the stick. He had worked closely with the SS when he took over the Organization Todt, which was then operating in the Crimea, where repairs of all kinds had to be made to roads and bridges and buildings. Speer used Russian conscript labor under SS guards, but no charges were ever made that he was responsible for any mis- treatment of the workers.

Speer too turned over all his documents to the Allies while he was still free, in the belief that he had nothing to hide; he had been assigned an important technical task and had carried it out. Thus the Allies had possession of his entire correspondence, and the picture that emerged from it was that of a man for whom nothing was more important than his objectives. He hovered busily over his employees, writing a sharp letter to Ribbentrop when his co-workers were slighted at an official function and the Par- ty brass stepped out in front to take the bows, leaving the Speer contingents who actually did the work in the background. “You know,” he wrote Ribbentrop, “that I personally set little store by such things as table order or the distribution of awards; I never attend such occasions if it is not absolutely essential.” Nevertheless, Speer commented, those who did the work should have a place next to the chief functionaries at the ceremonies celebrating what they had built. “You know how I dislike dis- cussions of these matters,” he wrote, “but I cannot tolerate a situation where my closest associates who have volunteered to work on their own time are pushed to one side.”

In the same vein, Speer reprimanded his own co-workers who seemed to him in any way lax in their departmental loyalties. If under the pressure from outside agencies colleagues appeared to be in the slightest degree diverted from the jobs he had

the warpath. Here again he used his re-

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I

I assigned them, Speer was immediately on I

ward-and-punishment formula, telling them that they could not serve two masters but if they carried out the assignments he gave them they could call themselves “Deputy Architects of the General Building Inspec- tor of the German Capital.” If, however. they did not immediately promise to work for him alone, he pointed out that he had the power and would use it to abrogate their contracts in whole or in part. When one of his assistants, unknown to Speer, wrote a strongly unfavorable letter to Bormann on a man Speer wanted to appoint a minister- ial adviser, Speer demanded that his assistant be sent to a concentration camp and he discharged another member of his staff who was implicated.

Speer had a continual and lively correspondence with the entire Nazi hierarchy, beginning with Goering, who, always concerned with his prerogatives even when he no longer was capable of carrying out a sizable fraction of his assignments, complained bitterly of decisions that had been taken in the economic sphere without consulting him. Since he was head of the Four- Year Plan, no important step, said the Reichsmarschall, could properly be taken without consulting him, and Speer replied that he doubtless had enemies in the Reichs- marschall’s entourage who cast a false light on what he was doing but he had to make decisions to perform his job properly, and he reminded Goering that a higher authority was over them both, that they too must work patriotically together for the Fuehrer. Goering was evidently appeased, for the main tenor of his correspondence with Speer was friendly after that and he made no further remonstrances. Speer had to deal with everyone in the higher echelons-with the Reichskommissar Terboven in Norway, with Hans Frank in Poland, with Karl Her- mann Frank in Czechoslovakia, with the Army and Navy and Air Force, with Gaul- eiters and Party leaders of all condition-

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and as long as they did not interfere with his task he was equally courteous to them all, even the malodorous Heydrich.

But Speer was quick to sense any en- croachment on his territory-whether an attempt on Ley’s part to undertake a project Speer thought should be under himself or the actions of any of the other muddle- headed Nazi functionaries out to extend their satrapies. One speech of Sauckel’s immediately caused him to protest because, Speer said, Sauckel used the occasion as a platform to state his pretensions to con- trolling what use was made of the labor he recruited.* More than once Speer corn. plained to Hitler that he thought Sauckel needed to be kept in line by more powerful weapons than he himself had immediately at hand. Sauckel was unwilling Speer said, to use the Hungarian Jews or even to permit them to enter his Gau of Thuringia; and this Speer deplored, for these concentration-camp workers were industrious and other Gauleiters might fol- ]low Sauckel’s bad precedent and refuse to admit the Jews into their Gaue, which would badly hurt German production. The presence of the Jews, Speer said, perhaps for the record, was disturbing to him too, but this was an emergency, and since the Jews were in concentration camps they could not offend the sensibility of the German people or damage them in any way.

Of one transport of 509 Eastern workers Sauckel sent, Speer wrote in indignation on January 25, 1944, 161 were children from one month to fourteen years old; forty- nine men and sixty-nine women were in such a physical state as to be incapable of working, and thus 53 per cent of the entire group could not be employed. Some months ’later he denied Sauckel’s request for 7,000 workers to be taken temporarily from the

armament factories and to be used in manufacturing sugar, telling Sauckel he certainly must be able to round UP workers for a short time without disrupting an essential branch of German industry. He could write a twelve-page letter to the Fueh- rer to buttress his position against Sauckel. Sauckel must regard himself as Speer’s assistant, Speer told Hitler ; Speer himself must decide how workers were to be employed. And he turned down Field Marshal Keitel‘s request for his key workers as coolly as Sauckel’s, for by 194cE he had convinced Hitler that production was as important as the front.

He was equally sharp with Frank, who planned useless projects for the General Government, and told Frank that only if he was certain he could finish a building (a bank that could be used as temporary sleeping quarters for two hundred people) with local labor that could not be used else- where might he proceed with the project. Otherwise the labor was needed in the Reich. On other occasions he reprimanded Frank for his extravagant use of materials. Speer made many visits to the front after which he was accustomed to writing long memoranda recommending improvements in weapons and tanks and on one occasion he noted placards in store windows of the Radom district which he considered extravagant. “I must ask you to see to it that the planning and carrying out of all measures is done with the least expense of work and material,” he told the Governor, who took no such parsimonious view of his rights and privileges.

+ * + +

But even Speer’s innumerable jobs, his constant speechmaking and journeys to the front, his conferences with Hitler, depart- ment heads, generals and admirals did not wholly fill his time. He continued all during the war to plan for grandiose future cities

*Sauckel waa in charge of the pfocurement of Ilabor

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with green belts, sports facilities, and underground railway stations, and where the occupants of apartment houses would not have to leave their immediate neighbor- hood to shop for everything they needed; he foresaw vast projects where traffic would be rerouted through congested areas like the Ruhr and through cities. On Janu- ary 10, 1944, he wrote that a million workers would be needed to rebuild German cities after the war. Apartments in huge barracks would be built for young married people ; 400,000, maybe 600,000, would be provided in a year, and in addition two and a half million dwellings would be con- structed on conventional lines so that the housing crisis would be solved in three years.

Speer asked Goering to use his influence with Terboven in Norway to make sure the cutting of a natural stone available there would continue, despite the demands of the war, so it could be shipped to the Reich.

garden figures, 500,000 RM to a sculptor for the monumental and heroic statues he and Hitler so admired) despite his dedica- tion to channeling German resources into war production. For the training of artisans in Germany, Speer wanted 400 RM a year to be given apprentices; to make sure of the interest of the young workers he asked that they invest 100 RM in their training, in re- turn for which they would get from the State 500 RM a semester.

He could overlook everything that marred his ideal picture of a rationally functioning European economy buttressed with vast building projects and integrated industries. Only a few weeks before the end of the war, on April 9,1945, he said that Germany had built up in the occupied territories a European economy in the real sense. France, Belgium, and Holland had been permitted to manufacture the kinds of goods for which their factories were best

I He paid out large sums (150,000 RM for

equipped and they had even been enabled to rebuild when rebuilding was possible. It was tragic, Speer thought, that this cooper- ative work was now being broken down, but he was hopeful that the future would restore this European integration. For he saw clearly, as he told the court at Nuremberg, that the future would produce interconti- nental rockets capable of destroying cities anywhere on the globe and that the nations of the new and old worlds must collaborate or perish. What he failed to notice was the effect of the Pandora’s box of hatred he, with his magic enterprises, had helped to open on the world.

i t * * *

What was Speer’s guilt? At Nuremberg he accepted, he said, the common responsibility of German leaders even in an au- thoritarian system for what had been done and certainly his own for what had gone on in the area of his authority. Speer was self- confident and composed on the witness stand. He refused, in answer to a prosecu- tion demand, to name the people in Hitler’s entourage of whom he was critical-this was no time for professional or personal re- cr iminat ioneand the Russian prosecutor questioning him had no success against his quiet self-assurance. Soviet prosecutors tended to repeat questions which their Western colleagues had already asked and to which adequate answers had already been given by the defendants-whether because the Russians did not follow the trial closely or, which is more likely, because they wanted their own record of their patriotic role in the court proceedings to be clear when they returned to Moscow. The Soviet prosecutor who cross-examined Speer, Raginsky, at one point told Speer that if he did not wish to he need not answer a question truthfully, but the Presi- dent of the Court intervened to say that Speer had already and properly answered

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the question. Speer told Raginsky, when asked how he had come to work so closely with the Fuehrer despite his nefarious character, that the Russians too had read Mein Kampf and yet had made their pact with Hitler. The dialogue became lively with implications. Raginsky asked him if it was not true that he had given himself without reservations to his war tasks.

SPEER: “Yes, I believe that was the custom in your State, too.”

RAGINSKY: “I am not asking you about our State. We are now talking about your State.. .”

SPEER: “Yes. I only wanted to explain this to you, because apparently you do not appreciate why in time of war one should accept the post of Armament Minister. If the need arises that is a matter of course, and I cannot understand why you do not appreciate that and why you want to reproach me for it.”

RAGINSICY: “I understand you per- fectly.”

SPEER: “Good.”

Speer defended the concerns that employed concentration-camp labor ; he pointed out that the firms had no control over the camps, which were run by the SS, and the company officers were not even al- lowed to inspect them. And to this statement he added with true German entrepre- neurial grandeur, “The head of a plant could not bother about conditions in such a camp.”

Almost the whole of German production by 1944 was in his hands, including the de- fense plants for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as those manufacturing con- sumer goods; only the SS plants were outside his authority. In addition, Speer acted as chairman of the Jaeger Staff, with Field Marshal Milch as co-chairman. This committee of three members with equal powers and votes had infringed, as Hitler intended

it should, on the last remnants of Goering’s former empire, but the Reichsmarschall by 194, when the Jaeger committee was es- tablished, had to parcel out most of the territory over which he had formerly ruled. Speer, though, until June 20, 19M, when Goering finally turned over the plants to him, had only limited authority over the factories producing for the Luftwaffe, which were manned in part by half-starved Russian workers, because the Reichsmar- schall to the end clung to every prerogative as long as he could. Speer tried to improve the Russians’ rations, as well as those of the other working prisoners, and he always opposed the barbed wire around the work camps because of its bad effect on morale. From time to time he succeeded in getting supplementary meals for these workers, and after he got those he tried to have con- sumer goods made available to them, but any such successes were short-lived. The scarcity of food as a result of the bombardments and the subsequent derangement of transport was genuine enough, although there was always enough for the civilian population, and whatever Speer managed to obtain for his workers, the Russians always got less than the others who labored for the Germans, except for the Jews.

The final malign effect of the Fuehrer- prinzip, Speer said at Nuremberg, was that every order, even if it was criminal or insane, was supposed to be carried out un- conditionally, without criticism. But obvi- ously he only became aware of this at the very end of the war; up to the scorched- earth order he was concerned solely with his enormous assignment. Secure in his own sense of the correctness of what he was doing, he visited countless factories and talked with the men, including forced laborers, with no escort such as accompanied other Nazi ministers. A wide cross section of Ger- mans always had confidence in him, from members of the Resistance to Guderian and

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Jodl, both of whom talked openly to him about Hitler’s arbitrary and unreasonable decisions. When they complained to Speer they no longer had much will left to cross Hitler face to face. Speer confessed at Nuremberg that he did not try more than once or twice to approach the Fuehrer directly with criticisms either; the scenes, he said, could be too painful.

German war production, despite Speer’s efforts, was always complicated by the in- cessant battle for power within the State and Party apparatus. Before Speer became Minister of Armaments and instituted his system of self-responsibility for industry, a plant manager faced being sent to a concentration camp if he failed to meet his arbi- trarily set norms of production. I t had been a coercive system, and Speer tried with success to find a substitute for the rewards and punishments of the competitive, free-enter- prise system under the conditions of the war economy. He spent hours talking to meetings of Gauleiters, and the statistics of what he accomplished were so overwhelming that these upholders of the true faith often broke out in loud applause despite their suspicions of him. His speeches were skill- fully adapted to the Gauleiters’ mentality. Before procurement was coordinated, he told one meeting of Gauleiters at Posen on August 3, 1944, the amount of copper demanded by separate departments was more than the total supply in the world. He gave them astonishing figures on production : in 1941,75 million shells had been turned out; in 1944, 408 million would be made. Then he gave the figures of fighter-plane production under his Jaeger committee: 3,115 fighter planes and interceptors were con- structed despite the Allied bombings in July. He added that new U-boats that had been only sketches in September were being actually put in service in May, with a promise of forty-four a month to come later in the year. These were statistics the most

stupid among the Gauleiters could understand. And Speer told them too of the bu- reaucratic troubles they themselves knew so well, for they often caused them. He re- lated how he had found 180,000 gasoline cans in Breslau lying unused because they had been classified as drinking canteens destined for Rommel’s army in Africa and had never been returned to their status as containers for gasoline. He had found trucks immobilized because tires were lacking and had got them on the road within hours; he found other trucks in Army ga- rages--l,000 of them in Vienna-while Panzers could not be shipped to the front for lack of them. Even the Gauleiters were enthusiastic, at least while they were under his spell. But the Party never gave up the battle.

Sauckel, in the chain of command under Speer, tried constantly to expand and strengthen his own organization at Speer’s expense. Himmler tried to do the same thing with his SS factories; the Gauleiters under Bormann were always pressing for increased authority over the plant managers and Speer’s “honorary co-workers,” whom they regarded as well-heeled saboteurs. Goering gave up his authority reluctantly, retreating step by step. On April 22, 1942, he announced that within the framework of the Four-Year Plan, which he directed, the Central Planning Board would be set up with three members, Speer, Milch, and Koerner, as his personal representatives. The board was to have the responsibility of administering the entire economy; al- locating raw materials, especially iron, met- als, and coal; and deciding on how many workers would be needed for the agreed- on production. These decisions had to be flexible since the Fuehrer’s ideas changed on priorities; one month anti-aircraft de- fense took first place; another, tanks and bombers or fighters had the highest priorities and materials had to be shifted ac-

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cordingly. The members of the Central Planning Commission theoretically had equal voices in the decisions-the one important exception to the Fuehrerprinzip, it was pointed out at Nuremberg. A unani- mous vote was required for a decision and thus any of the three could cast a veto. The committee was dominated, however, by Speer, to whom both Milch and Koerner were entirely ready to turn over the important decisions on production, and as time went on Goering too had been glad to see Speer take charge after he found his own accumulating failures harder and harder to explain.

Speer and the Central Planning Board continually demanded of Sauckel that he conjure up more thousands of workers, and Sauckel, struggling to carry out his part of the patriotic effort, once promised a million fresh workers. He was only able to produce 20,000. But this happened toward the end of the war, when all supplies were failing, including manpower and the means for getting it, and up to 1944 he produced his millions of workers. Furthermore Sauckel had increasingly stiff competition in the battle for obtaining manpower, and Speer was one of his chief competitors. For while Speer demanded the vast contingents of new workers, he at the same time made it impossible for Sauckel to get them from the blocked factories where they were concen- trated. Speer insisted that Sauckel keep out of these factories. Sauckel, complaining to the Fuehrer that Speer was hoarding in these enterprises labor that was bitterly needed in Germany, demanded the right to investigate Speer’s use of manpower ; to send his own men into the blocked factories to determine whether, how, and if what they were producing was really essential to the total war effort. Speer was able on the whole to defend his blocked factories suc- cessfully, for when it come to a showdown, Hitler knew that Speer was indispensable

and that his methods had worked miracles. Sauckel, on the other hand, was ordered to get hold of so and so many millions of workers, and not only Speer was a competitor but Himmler, the Army, which needed workers in the rear areas, and the Luft- waffe, which recruited civilian helpers and before 1944 gathered its own labor for aircraft production. Sauckel had other prob- lems as well: he needed millions of workers for agriculture. Here, too, Speer demanded that those qualified be released for factory work between harvest time and spring. But, as Sauckel resentfully pointed out, many of them never returned for the spring planting but stayed on in Speer’s factories.

Speer, the court found, had not been guilty of planning or waging aggressive warfare but he was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He had known, the court said, that his war factories were using slave labor; he had been pres- ent at the conference with Hitler where it was agreed that Sauckel was to bring in foreign labor by force and at the meeting where Sauckel had been told to supply at least four million new workers from foreign countries. Speer had also asked for specific nationalities to be provided-Russians for example-and his blocked factories too were illegal, although the tribunal conceded that because of them thousands of foreign workers had been enabled to stay in their own countries. The court also noted that Speer had wanted to use as few concentration-camp workers as possible-because, it said, he mistrusted Heinrich Himmler’s am- bitions. The judgment declared that he had not been directly concerned with the cruel- ty of the slave-labor system but he had known of it and knew his demands for labor meant that violence would be used in recruiting manpower. He had also complained about malingering, and the court quoted his saying: “There is nothing to be said against the SS and police taking dras-

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tic steps and putting those known as slack- ers in concentration camps.” But again, the judgment pointed out, he had insisted on adequate food and working conditions being provided the labor force so that it could

‘An article by Alan S. Milward pointed out that many of Speer’s organizational reforms had already been introduced by Todt ( Vierteljahrshef- te fuer Zeitgeschichte, Vol. XIV, No. 1, 1966, pp. 40-58).

*“Paralysis” meant partial dismantling, remov- ing essential parts ffom the machinery, shipping them from the plants, hiding them, but not damaging the machinery which must begin as soon as possible to work again for whatever kind of Ger- many might survive the war.

”Hitler’s order of March 19 repeated that everything must be done to weaken the enemy and to prevent his further advance. Every possibility of damaging the striking power of the enemy directly ’or indirectly must be utilized. In- dustrial installations should not be paralyzed but destroyed :

It is a mistake to believe that traffic, com- munications, industrial, and supply centera left undamaged or paralyzed for a short time can be used again when they are recaptured. The enemy in his retreat [this was Hitler‘s answer to Speerl will leave us scorched earth with no regard for the population. Therefore I order: all military, traffic, information, industrial, and supply centers as well as stocks in- side Germany that could be of any use to the enemy . . . are to be destroyed.

The order was to be sent to troop commanders with the greatest possible speed ( N XLI, p. 430).

‘Milch, when he started the Jaeger Staff in March, 1944, was given the task of deciding on the new models and at the same time raising the production of German fighter planes from 1000 to 3000 a month, but he immediately called in Speer and thus the two of them sitting both on the Cen- tral Planning Board and the Jaeger Staff almost completely replaced Goering in the economio sphere. Milch was always ready to subordinate himself to Speer, whom he regarded with unstint- ing admiration.

*A decree issued by the Chief of Staff of OKH on February 6, 1943, declared it was the duty of everyone-male and female-from the ages of fourteen to sixty-five to work in the operational areas of the East. Special rules were to be estab- lished for the Jews, and a work period of fifty. four hours per week was to be standard, with over- time, night and Sunday work a possibility. Re* lar sickness benefits, however, were to apply. At a later meeting in Rovno bn March 10 it was

work efficiently. And last of all the tribunal mentioned without comment that he had told Hitler the war was lost and that he had opposed the scorched-earth policy. Then the court sentenced him to twenty years.

noted that “a million or more workers were to be shipped out within the next four months,” largely for agricultural work-the Speer enterprises would get the factory labor from the West. Such was the need for labor that the SD on March 19, 1943, was directed by Sturmbannfuehrer Christen- sen to relax its most brutal measures in the warfare against the partisans, which resulted in so many of the civilian population joining the bands. The harsh practices Christensen listed were the shooting of the Hungarian Jews, farm workers, and children, and the burning down of villages. He ordered that such measures be curtailed, that “special treatment” be limited. For the time being, Communist Party functionaries, activists, etc. were only to be listed but neither they nor their close relatives were to be arrested. Members of the Comsomols were to be apprehended only if they held leading positions. When villages were burned down the entire population must be put at the disposal of the German authorities, and Christen- sen added this classical statement on behalf of more humane measures: “As a rule no more children will be shot” ( N XXXI, 3012-PS, pp. 481- 95).

‘Speer testified at Nuremberg that OKW had opposed using prisoners of war, except for Rus- sians and Italian internees, in the armament industries because the Geneva Convention forbade the use of captured military personnel in such work. The prohibition, however, did not apply to the Soviet Union, which had never signed such international agreements. His reasoning again wm entirely pragmatic; he explained that the prisoners of war were mainly producing goods that were not specifically military according tb the Geneva Convention; he did not regard the work the French prisoners of war were doing as armament production since in modem war almost any prod- uct could have a military use. Some 400,000 prisoners of war, he testified, were used directly in the armament industry, but of these from 200,000 to 300,000 were Italian, the rest Rus- sian ( N XVI, p. 452).

‘The contracts the workers signed stated that they agreed not to disclose what they had seen in Germany when they returned home; that they were to report any propaganda or espionage immediately to the German management; and that they cbvenanted to work conscientiously and well and to be punished, if the necessity should arise, under German law (June, 1943, BDC).

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