Such restrictions on his powers left Goebbels’s enthusiasm for his new task undimmed. In a radio address on 26 July, the day after his appointment, the Propaganda Minister conveyed the impression that, far from having its manpower reserves exhausted by five years of war, total mobilization was just beginning and would ‘set free, all over the country, so many hands for both the front and the munition factories that it will not be too hard for us to master in sovereign fashion the difficulties that are bound to arise in the war from time to time’.119 The belief that ‘will’ would overcome all problems was immediately put into action as Goebbels, with his usual forceful energy, unleashed a veritable frenzy of activity in his new role. The staff of fifty that he rapidly assembled from a number of ministries, most prominently from his own Propaganda Ministry, prided themselves on their unbureaucratic methods, swift decision-making, and improvisation. As his main agents in ensuring that directives were implemented in the regions, leaving no stone unturned in the quest to comb out all reserves of untapped labour, Goebbels looked to the Party’s Gauleiter, bolstering their already extensive powers as Reich Defence Commissars. They could be relied upon, in his view, to reinvoke the spirit of the ‘time of struggle’, to ensure that bureaucracy did not get in the way of action. (In practice, the cooperation of the Gauleiter was assured as long as no inroads were made into the personnel of their own Party offices. Bormann ensured that they were well protected.)120
Behind the actionism of the Party, Goebbels also needed Hitler’s backing. He ensured that this was forthcoming through a constant stream of bulletins on progress
Nevertheless, Hitler did not give blanket approval to all measures suggested by Goebbels. He could rely upon Bormann to bring to his attention any proposals which his own still sharp antennae would tell him might have an unnecessarily harmful impact on morale, both at home and quite especially among soldiers at the front. He rejected, therefore, the Total War Plenipotentiary’s proposals to save manpower in postal services by ending delivery of small parcels and private telegrams on the grounds that such changes would, for little return, be highly unpopular among families divided in war. Similarly, he blocked suggestions of ending supplies of newspapers and periodicals to the front because soldiers looked forward so much to reading them.123
Elsewhere, Goebbels encountered successful resistance to his proposals when Lammers and Göring combined to head off the suggestion to abolish the office of Minister President of Prussia along with the Prussian Finance Ministry (which had been deflected by Lammers the previous year, but now made enticing through the involvement of the Minister, Popitz, in the conspiracy against Hitler). Measured against the bureaucratic effort to transfer the business elsewhere, even the closure of the Prussian Finance Ministry proved counter-productive as a manpower-saving exercise. The complex problems of administrative reorganization which Lammers raised were the Minister Presidency to be abolished were eventually sufficient for Hitler to decide on its retention.124
An obvious problem was how the labour savings were to be redeployed. As Armaments Minister, Speer wanted to make use of the newly available labour in the factories under his control. Goebbels, on the other hand, saw his main task in freeing up new reserves for service at the front. The short-lived alliance between the two rapidly, therefore, came to grief. Speer saw his own powers now undermined by Goebbels, and by the Gauleiter who, spurred on by the Total War Plenipotentiary and seizing the new opportunities that the revitalization of the Party provided, intervened frequently and arbitrarily in his domain of armaments production. Matters came to a head over Goebbels’s demand to conscript 100,000 men from the armaments industry. On 21 September, Speer presented Hitler with a lengthy letter setting out his demands for restriction of Party intervention in armaments questions.
