Speer Plan

Speer Plan. In February 1942 Hitler appointed Albert Speer, his chief architect, to the post of minister for armaments and munitions. Hitler wanted a great increase in the output of finished weapons. Under Speer's administration the German war economy expanded military production threefold in two years.

Speer's appointment did not initiate the programme of increased production as Hitler had set the economy very large goals from the start of the war. By the summer of 1941 two-thirds of the German industrial workforce were working on war orders, and civilian consumption had been cut further than in the UK. But with the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) it became clear to Hitler that the war economy was not producing what it was capable of with the large quantity of resources at its disposal. The failure was a result of the poor central direction of the economy, particularly by Göring's Four Year Plan organization, coupled with high levels of unhelpful military intervention in industrial affairs. War output was riddled with inefficiency, waste, and confusion. From early 1941 efforts were being made to rationalize the production of army weapons under Fritz Todt (see Todt Organization); and from May 1941 the rationalization of the aircraft industry was set in motion by Field Marshal Milch, Göring's energetic deputy in the air ministry. But in the end it took the intervention of Hitler himself, who in December 1941 issued a decree which set the framework for the rationalization of production and the simplification of design and production methods. When in February 1942 Todt (1892–1942) was killed in an air crash, Speer was appointed as armaments overlord to put the new decree into effect.

Speer had no master plan: he continued the policies initiated by his predecessor and endorsed by Hitler. However, he had one big advantage over any possible rivals in securing the personal backing of Hitler; he was able to bypass the military leaders and the Four Year Plan and agree policy directly with Hitler in regular ‘Führer Conferences’ held between the two men until 1944. Speer was responsible for important administrative changes to improve war output. In April 1942 he set up Central Planning, an executive board under his direction which decided on the allocation and distribution of raw materials and capital equipment on a national scale. He also set up an interlocking system of production committees for all major weapons, each committee being responsible for all the firms involved in the production of a particular weapon group. The main committees became the forum for planning and supervising all military output, and the system led to great improvements in efficiency, co-operation, and centralized control.

Speer was also successful politically, pushing the armed forces out of their role in the war economy and reducing the level of military interference in industrial matters. At the same time he insisted on bringing industrialists and engineers into the war economic apparatus, so that production could be run by people who knew about it. The principle of ‘industrial self-responsibility’, as Speer called it, brought rich dividends. In two years, and despite the effects of the Allied strategic air offensive, armaments production trebled, and output of aircraft increased almost fourfold, from 11,000 to 39,000. Only intensive bombing from the summer of 1944 brought a gradual decline, and then in the first few months of 1945 a sharp collapse.

There were limitations to Speer's achievement. By 1944 he no longer enjoyed the complete backing of Hitler, and the SS was able to gain a greater say in running war production. Speer did not control aircraft production until 1944, though he co-operated closely with Milch, who shared his aims and methods. Nor did he control labour supply, one of the critical limiting factors for the war economy. Hitler placed this under the Nazi Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, who refused to co-ordinate his plans with Speer's strategy for raw materials and industrial rationalization. Finally, the bombing of Germany hit the rationalization plans by compelling de-centralization of production, and interrupting the delicate web of distribution and sub-contracting set up by the committee system. When Hitler wanted to shift all production underground, Speer was unenthusiastic. The SS promised to complete this programme instead, and this caused the rapid erosion of Speer's standing and the rise of new SS economic leaders, Xavier Dorsch and Hans Kammler. By the end of the war Speer was disillusioned with Hitler. He refused to implement his orders for a scorched earth policy as German forces retreated into the Reich, leaving much of Germany's new military industries to help with the post-war economic revival. See also Germany, 2.

Richard Overy

Bibliography

Mierzejewski, A. C. , The Collapse of the German War Economy 1944–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988).
Overy, R. J. , Goering: the ‘Iron Man’ (London, 1984).
Schmidt, M. , Albert Speer: the End of a Myth (New York, 1982).
Speer, A. , Inside the Third Reich (London, 1970).