Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

But by early 1943, the labour situation had worsened to the extent that Hitler was compelled to concede that the conscription of women could no longer be avoided. Even the forced labour of, by this time, approaching 6 million foreign workers and prisoners-of-war could not compensate for the 11 million or so men who had been called up to the Wehrmacht.³³ The most he could do to limit what he regarded as a move likely to damage morale was to raise the age of eligibility from sixteen years, as agreed by the government ministers involved, to seventeen.³⁴ In an unpublished Führer Decree of 13 January 1943, women between seventeen and fifty years old were ordered to report for deployment in the war effort.³⁵ There was little enthusiasm among those affected. Women made use of the exemption criteria — including responsibility for children, and employment in agriculture or the civil service — and any personal connections to avoid duty where they could. Where that was impossible, they headed in the main for light desk jobs, leaving the armaments industries still short of women employees.³⁶

Even before Hitler signed the decree, the wrangling over spheres of competence had begun in earnest. In order to retain a firm grip on the ‘total war’ measures and prevent the dissipation of centralized control, Lammers, backed by the leading civil servants in the Reich Chancellery, Leo Killy and Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, suggested to Hitler that all measures should be taken ‘under the authority of the Führer’, and that a special body be set up to handle them. The idea was to create a type of small ‘war cabinet’; the ‘Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich’, as we noted in an earlier chapter, had potentially constituted such, but had never functioned as one in practice, and had long fallen into desuetude. Lammers thought the most appropriate arrangement would be for the heads of the three main executive arms of the Führer’s authority — the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the Reich Chancellery, and the Party Chancellery — to act in close collaboration, meeting frequently, keeping regular contact with Hitler himself, and standing above the particularist interests of individual ministries. Hitler agreed. He evidently saw no possible threat to his position from such an arrangement. On the contrary: the three persons involved — Keitel, Lammers, and Bormann — could be guaranteed to uphold his own interests at the expense of any possible over-mighty subjects. An indication that this was, indeed, Hitler’s thinking was the exclusion of Göring, Goebbels, and Speer from the coordinating body — soon known as the ‘Committee of Three’ (Dreierausschuß).³⁷ This was to last until the autumn before withering away — a further casualty of Hitler’s refusal to concede any actual power that might conflict with his authority as Führer, and of his unsystematic, dilettante style of rule.

From the very outset, the Committee was only empowered to issue enabling ordinances in accordance with the general guidelines he had laid down. It was given no autonomy.³⁸ Hitler reserved, as always, the final decision on anything of significance to himself. It was an exaggeration when Speer later claimed that it had been the intention of the three members of the Committee to control Hitler’s power.³⁹ The loyalty of all three, and their subservience to Hitler’s will, was beyond question. They did nothing in practice which might have conflicted with Hitler’s wishes. And, though Speer emphasized Bormann’s plans to use the Committee to further his own power-ambitions, the head of the Party Chancellery seems to have been largely content in practice to leave the bulk of the routine business to Lammers — hardly a man aiming to take over the Reich.⁴⁰

The ‘Committee of Three’ had, in all, eleven formal meetings between January and August 1943. The heads of government departments were invited, but the meetings did not amount, as Speer later claimed, to a revival of the cabinet.⁴¹ The Committee, for all its potential for aggrandizement of power as a body operating in close proximity to the Führer, rapidly ran up against deeply ingrained vested interests both in government ministries and in Party regional offices concerned to hold on to their personnel and to their spheres of competence which might have been threatened in any move to centralize and simplify the regime’s tangled lines of administration.⁴² It had little chance of breaking down the fiefdoms on which Nazi rule rested, and soon revealed that any hopes of bringing any order to the Third Reich’s endemic administrative chaos were utterly illusory.