The drive to mobilize all remaining reserves from the home front — what came to be proclaimed as ‘total war’ — had its roots in the need to plug the huge gap in military manpower left by the high losses suffered by the Wehrmacht during the first months of ‘Barbarossa’. As early as December 1941, Keitel had demanded a weeding out of superfluous personnel from the bureaucracies of government ministries, the economy, and the Wehrmacht itself.22 This had led to attempts to release personnel for the army by simplifying the extraordinarily unwieldy and cumbersome governmental administration. The proliferation of ‘special authorities’ alongside government ministries and the Party-State dualism — direct products of the Führer state — alongside the new administrative tasks created by the demands of the war had led to a colossal expansion of bureaucracy, churning out hundreds of regulations, decrees, and ordinances. The amount of red tape involved was suffocating. There was huge resentment at what was dubbed a ‘paper war’.
Hitler’s tirades against government bureaucracy were well known to all those who came into contact with him. His scorn for legally minded administrators knew no bounds. He took the view that their number could be cut by two-thirds.23 So there was no difficulty in pandering to his prejudices. It was easy to gain his support for the action to reduce bureaucracy. To implement any such measures was a different matter. Hitler’s own stance was in practice often hesitant, contradictory, and ultimately, in the main, conservative. And despite Hitler’s backing, attempts to cut the personnel of government offices rapidly ran up against powerful vested interests. The results were predictably meagre.24 The manpower demands of the front inevitably, however, forced renewed efforts to squeeze out any surplus personnel back home. In the autumn of 1942, Hitler had commissioned General Walter von Unruh, who had earlier been relatively successful in freeing personnel from military and civilian bureaucracies in the eastern occupied territories, to sift through the civil administration and even the armaments economy.25 But this, too, had produced little as government ministers successfully fended off the worst inroads into their personnel. And when General von Unruh attempted to claw back some of those engaged on the Führer’s grandiose building projects (including sixty-eight men aged thirty-five or under employed in the planning office for the intended rebuilding of much of the centre of Munich), Hitler predictably decided that they could not be released.26
Before the failure of Unruh’s efforts had become clear, Hitler had, at Christmas 1942, given the orders for more radical measures to raise manpower for the front and the armaments industries. Martin Bormann was commissioned to undertake the coordination of the efforts, in collaboration with Head of the Reich Chancellery Hans-Heinrich Lammers.27 Goebbels and Sauckel were immediately informed. The aim was to close down all businesses whose trade was in ‘luxury’ items or was otherwise not necessary for the war effort, and to redeploy the personnel in the army or in arms production. Women were to be subject to conscription for work. Releasing men for front-service was impossible, it was agreed, unless women could replace them in a variety of forms of work. According to the Propaganda Ministry, the number of women working had dropped by some 147,000 since the start of the war.28 And of 8.6 million women in employment at the end of 1942, only 968,000 worked in armaments.29 In the spring of 1942, Hitler had rejected outright the conscription of women to work in war industries. Industrialists had been pressing for this, and Speer had taken up their demand. But Sauckel, jealously guarding his own province and claiming responsibility for labour deployment was his alone, had held Speer at bay, backed by Goring and calling upon the support of the Führer. Probably, as Speer suggests, Sauckel had therefore solicited Hitler’s rejection of female conscription.30 According to Sauckel’s version, Hitler’s reasons had been ideological.31 The birth-rate of the nation would be threatened and as a consequence Germany’s racial strength undermined. He also thought that women would be exposed to moral danger.32
