Beyond the crisis in public finances, the labour shortage which had been growing rapidly since 1937 was by this time posing a real threat both to agriculture and to industry. The repeated plaintive reports of the Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture, Richard Walther Darré, left no doubt of the severity of the difficulties facing farming.35 There had been a 16 per cent drop in the number of agricultural workers between 1933 and 1938 as the ‘flight from the land’ to better-paid jobs in industry intensified.36 No amount of compulsion or propaganda could prevent the drain of labour. Nor was mechanization the answer: scarce foreign exchange was needed for tanks, guns, and planes, not tractors and combine-harvesters. Signs of falling production were noted. That meant further demands on highly squeezed imports.37 Women, many of them members of the farmer’s household, were already employed in great numbers in agricultural work. Girls’ labour service on the land and drafting the Hitler Youth in to help with the harvest could help only at the margins.38 The only remedy for the foreseeable future was the use of ‘foreign labourers’ that war and expansion would bring. It was little wonder that when the first ‘foreign workers’ were brought back after the Polish campaign and put mainly into farm work, they were initially regarded as ‘saviours in a time of need’ (‘
Industry was faring no better than agriculture, despite the influx of labour from the land. By 1938, reports were regularly pouring in from all sectors about mounting labour shortages, with serious implications for the productive capacity of even the most crucial armaments-related industries.40 A sullen, overworked, and — despite increased surveillance and tough, state-backed, managerial controls — often recalcitrant work-force was the outcome.41 One indication among many of the dangerous consequences for the regime of the labour shortage was the halt on coal exports and reduction in deliveries to the railways in January 1939 on account of a shortage of 30,000 miners in the Ruhr. By that time, the overall shortage of labour in Germany was an estimated 1 million workers. By the outbreak of war, this had risen still further.42
Economic pressures did not force Hitler into war. They did not even determine the timing of the war.43 They were, as we have noted, an inexorable consequence of the political decisions in earlier years: the first, as soon as Hitler had become Chancellor — naturally, with the enthusiastic backing of the armed forces — to make rearmament an absolute spending priority; the second, and even more crucial one, in 1936 to override the objections of those pressing for a return to a more balanced economy and revived involvement in international markets in favour of a striving for maximum autarky within an armaments-driven economy focused on war preparation. The mounting economic problems fed into the military and strategic pressures for expansion. But they did not bring about those pressures in the first place. And for Hitler, they merely confirmed his diagnosis that Germany’s position could never be strengthened without territorial conquest.
Hitler’s regrets over the Munich Agreement and feeling that a chance had been lost to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia at one fell swoop had grown rather than diminished during the last months of 1938.44 His impatience to act had mounted accordingly. He was determined not to be hemmed in by the western powers. He was more than ever convinced that they would not have fought for Czechoslovakia, and that they would and could do nothing to prevent Germany extending its dominance in central and eastern Europe. On the other hand, as he had indicated to Goebbels in October, he was certain that Britain would not concede German hegemony in Europe without a fight at some time.45 The setback which Munich had been in his eyes confirmed his view that war against the West was coming, probably sooner than he had once envisaged, and that there was no time to lose if Germany were to retain its advantage.46
