Next day, the Party leaders travelled to the Wolf’s Lair. Hitler limply held out his uninjured left hand as he greeted each of them individually. They then trooped into the film-projection room where he addressed them about the consequences of the assassination attempt. He said nothing that he had not said to his closest circle immediately after the event. He told them he was necessary for the nation, which ‘needs a man who does not capitulate under any circumstances but unswervingly holds high the flag of faith and confidence’. He would in the end settle with his enemies, he said. But the basis of this, he added, appealing, as always, to the support of his most trusted comrades, was to know that he had behind him ‘absolute certainty, faithful trust, and loyal cooperation’. Once more, his words were sufficient to impress his audience and to bolster their morale.103 This was crucial. Increasingly over the next months, as the threads of state administration started to fray and ultimately fell apart, the Party chieftains — especially those who acted as Reich Defence Commissars in their regions — were decisive in holding together in the provinces what was left of Nazi rule.104
Extended scope for propaganda, mobilization, and tightened control over the population — the overriding tasks of the Party as most people looked beyond the end of the regime and looming military defeat into an uncertain future — fell to the Reich Defence Commissars in the last desperate drive to maximize resources for ‘total war’. The shortages of available men to be sent to the front, and workers for the armaments industries, had mounted alarmingly throughout the first half of 1944. Hitler’s authorization in January to Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, to make up the manpower shortages through forced labour extracted from the occupied territories, while at the same time according Speer protection for the labour employed in his armaments plants in France had done nothing to resolve the difficulty and merely sharpened the conflict between Sauckel and Speer.105 Apart from Speer, the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the Party had also proved adept at preventing any inroads into their personnel. Bormann had even presided over a 51 per cent increase in the number of ‘reserved occupations’, exempt from call-up, in the Party administration between May 1943 and June 1944.106
Meanwhile, the labour shortage had been greatly magnified through the double military disaster in June of the Allied landing in Normandy and the Red Army’s devastating offensive on the eastern front. This had prompted Goebbels and Speer to link their efforts to persuade Hitler to agree to a drastic radicalization of the ‘home front’ to comb out all remaining manpower for the war effort.107 Both had sent him lengthy memoranda in mid-July, promising huge labour savings to tide over the situation until new weaponry became available and the anti-German coalition broke up.108 But before the Stauffenberg bomb, Hitler had, as we have noted, shown little readiness to comply with their radical demands. Whatever the accompanying rhetoric, and the undoubted feeling (which Goebbels’s own propaganda had helped feed) among the under-privileged that many of the better-off were still able to escape the burdens of war, and were not pulling their weight in the national cause, such demands were bound to be unpopular in many circles, antagonize powerful vested interests, and also convey an impression of desperation. And, as the state administration rushed to point out, the gains might well be less than impressive; only one in twelve of those in the civil service who had not been called up was under forty-three, and more than two-thirds were over fifty-five years old.109
Hitler had told his Propaganda Minister as recently as June that the time was not ripe for ‘a big appeal to total war in the true meaning of the word’, that the crises would be surmounted ‘in the usual way’, but that he would be ready to introduce ‘wholly abnormal measures’ should ‘more serious crises take place’.110 Hitler’s change of mind, directly following the failed assassination attempt, in deciding to grant Goebbels the new authority he had coveted, as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort
