His public statements naturally betrayed none of his private doubts. And during December and January, he had taken the vital steps in conjunction with industry in drastically rationalizing and concentrating armaments production. Hitler, who had been made aware of the gross inefficiencies in the production of weaponry and was anxious to maximize the turn-out of armaments during 1942, backed the changes.18 The decisive alteration was to give greater scope and incentive to industry to improve its own efficiency as well as freeing armaments production from intervention from the military and Four-Year Plan Organization and some of the stifling bureaucratic controls which had been imposed on it.19 At the same time, the priorities that had been accorded the Luftwaffe and navy, when it was presumed the war in the east would easily and quickly be won, were reversed to favour the army.20
On the morning of 7 February, Todt flew to Rastenburg to put to Hitler proposals which had arisen from his meeting a few days earlier with representatives of the armaments industries.21 What else transpired during his meeting with Hitler that afternoon is not known. No one else was present, and no notes or minutes were made. Later speculation that Todt demanded more extensive powers than Hitler was prepared to grant him, threatened resignation, or expounded defeatist views on the war rested on guesswork and some unreliable evidence.22 But the meeting was plainly anything but harmonious. In depressed mood, and after a restless night, Todt left next morning to head for Munich in a twin-engined Heinkel in. His own plane, a Junkers 52, was currently under repair, and he had borrowed the Heinkel — the personal plane of Field-Marshal Sperrle — from the Luftwaffe. It was flown by Todt’s usual pilot, who took it on a brief test-flight shortly before take-off.23
Shortly after leaving the runway, the plane turned abruptly, headed to land again, burst into flames, and crashed. The bodies of Todt and four others on board were yanked with long poles from the burning wreckage. An official inquiry ruled out sabotage.24 But suspicion was never fully allayed.25 What caused the crash remained a mystery. Hitler, according to witnesses who saw him at close quarters, was deeply moved by the loss of Todt, whom, it was said, he still greatly admired and needed for the war economy.26 Even if, as was later often claimed, the breach between him and Todt had become irreparable on account of the Armaments Minister’s forcefully expressed conviction that the war could not be won, it is not altogether obvious why Hitler would have been so desperate as to resort to having Todt killed in an arranged air-crash at his own headquarters in circumstances guaranteed to prompt suspicion. Had he been insistent upon dispensing with Todt’s services, ‘retirement’ on ill-health grounds would have offered a simpler solution. The only obvious beneficiary from Todt’s demise was the successor Hitler now appointed with remarkable haste: his highly ambitious court architect, Albert Speer. But Speer’s relationship with Todt had been excellent. And the only ‘evidence’ later used to hint at any involvement by Speer was his presence in the Führer Headquarters at the time of the crash and his rejection, a few hours before the planned departure, of an offer of a lift in Todt’s aeroplane.27 Whatever the cause of the crash that killed Todt — and the speed with which Hitler had the investigation hushed up naturally fuelled suspicion — it brought Albert Speer, till then in the second rank of Nazi leaders and known only as Hitler’s court-architect and a personal favourite of the Führer, into the foreground.
