Hunter Wallace
03-26-2005, 10:40 PM
Hitler on Mass Production
There is no easy explanation. Hitler's Germany was an authoritarian single-party state, dominated by the personal dictatorship of a man who was not only head of state but also the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. By the start of the war Hitler had gathered into this own hands the authority necessary to order the weapons he wanted. But Germany was not the Soviet Union, centrally planned and centrally commanded. Hitler's orders, though they shaped national policy, were refracted and distorted by a system that was poorly coordinated, factious and obstructive. There was no straight line of command between Führer and factory. In between lay a web of ministries, plenipotentiaries and Party commissars, each with their own apparatus, interests and rubber stamps, producing more than the usual weight of bureaucratic inertia. At the end of the line was a business community most of whom remained wedded to entrepreneurial independence, and resented the jumbled administration, the corrupt Nazi Party hacks, the endless form-filling, which stifled what voluntary efforts they might have made to transform the war economy.
No organization was more guilty of limiting Germany's war potential than the military. Answerable only to Hitler, the armed forces treated the German industrial economy as an annexe to the front line. Military priorities dominated arms production, from the design and development of a weapon through to the final factory inspection. Military officials were posted to factories to monitor production. Changes to design and specification were made endlessly in response to every cry for improvement from the battlefield. Production schedules were set by military agencies; consultation with the industrialists and engineers who had to produce the goods was rare and one-sided.
The military domination of production had mixed results. There is no dispute that Germany developed weapons of very high quality, with a level of finish and attention to detail that astonished the Allies when they inspected crashed aircraft or captured guns. By the end of the war German designers had developed many of the weapons that armed NATO a decade later. But the pursuit of advanced weaponry came at a price. Instead of a core of proven designs produced on standard lines, the German forces developed a bewildering array of projects. At one point in the war there were no fewer than 425 different aircraft models and variants in production. By the middle of the war the German army was equipped with 151 different makes of lorry, and 150 different motor-cycles.
With such a variety it was difficult to produce in mass. In 1942 Hitler remarked how industrialists 'were always complaining about this niggardly procedure -- today an order for ten howitzers, tommorrow for two mortars and so on'. But this as the nub of a system in which the military dictated the selection and development of anything that promised battlefield dividends. It produced a situation where a proper sense of priority and evaluation was replaced with a chaos of demands and programme. 'Nobody would seriously believe', complained a group of German engineers in 1944 based on the research centre in Rechlin, 'that so much inadequacy, bungling, confusion, misplaced power, failure to recognize the truth and deviation from the reasonable could really exist.' As long as the military tail wagged the industrial dog, German war production remained inflexible, unrationalised and excessively bureaucratic.
Not surprisingly the experience of mass production in Germany was very different from that of the Soviet Union and United States. The German armed forces shared a widespread prejudice against 'American' production methods. Göring's jibe that all America could produce was razor-blades was not an isolated belief. Mass production was associated with cheap consumer goods and shoddy standards. The German military preferred to establish close links with smaller firms with traditions of skilled craftsmanship, which would be sensitive to frequent design changes and produce a sophisticated custom-built weapon. The great strengths of the German industrial economy had always been high quality, skilled workmanship, the conquest of technical complexity. German weapons were very good, but very expensive -- in skilled manpower, time and materials.
Nothing more clearly reveals these preferences than the story of the German car industry, which during the 1930s became the largest manafacturing sector in Germany. The major names -- Adam Opel, Ford (in Cologne), Auto-Union, Daimler-Benz -- slowly adopted American production methods. Hitler was an enthusiast for the motor-car, so much so that he dreamed of making cheap motoring available for the masses. In 1933 Hitler met with designer Ferdinand Porsche. He asked him to try to develop a low-priced family car 'in which one could go for weekend trips . . . a car for the people'. The design that Porsche came up with was the prototype of one of the century's most famous cars, the Volkswagen. In 1938 work was started at Fallesleben in the Brunswick countryside, not far from the vast new iron and steel complex in Salzgitter; around the Volkswagen plant was to be built one of the new model cities of the Third Reich, Wolfsburg. The factories were planned on a gigantic scale, together capable of turning out half a million cars a year, rising eventually to one and a half million. The central workshop boasted the largest metal press in the world, capable of punching out whole car bodies at a time. By the beginning of the war the installation of machine tools for the production of 200,000 cars was completed. Yet the contribution to the German war effort of the plant designed as one of the largest and most modern mass production factories in the world was absurdly small. Only one-fifth of its capacity was ever utilized, for a hotch-potch of equipment from one and a half million camp stoves to army issue footwarmers. Only a few thousand chassis were produced for a military version of the Volkswagen which the army took with great reluctance. Otto HOchne, who worked at Wolfsburg during the war, later recalled that 'there seemed to be no plans at all'. The works were used haphazardly until they were bombed in 1943.
The rest of the industry suffered something of the same fate. Postwar estimates showed that barely 50 percent of its capacity had been utilised during the war. The largest and most modern producer, Opel, almost disappeared entirely at the start of the war. Opel was owned by the American car giant General Motors, which did not endear it to the German authorities. The directors had clashed with the army in 1936 wehen they closed down a small army supplier; Wilhelm Opel had earned Hitler's displeasure when he introduced his new small car at the 1937 Berlin Motor Show with the words 'This, Herr Hitler, is our Volkswagen'. When war broke out in September the military authorities wanted to break the whole complex up and parcel its tools and workforce out among other smaller producers. There were no orders for war work and no mobolisation plan. The company resisted dispersal, but not until 1942 did it become a major producer after the authorities had dithered for almost three years over what it should make. During the war the productive performance of the Opel workforce dropped by almost half. The systematic conversion of the motorcycle, motor-car and tractor plants only began in 1942 and 1943.
There was more, of course, to the problems of the German war economy than the failure to mobolise the largest mass producing industry in the country, but this was symptomatic of a productive system in which technical sophistication was routinely preferred to turning out large quantities of standard weapons. In the end it took Hitler to break the logjam. Prompted by complaints from industrial leaders, Hitler called military and civilian leaders together to Berchtesgaden in May 1941 and berated the soldiers for burdening industry with unnecessary technical demands. He demanded 'more primitive, robust construction' and the introduction of 'crude mass production'. The military took little notice. In December 1941 Hitler turned his request into an order, a Führer Decree on 'Simplification and Increased Efficiency in Armaments Production'. Citing the success of the Soviet factories, he ordered German industry to embark on 'mass production on modern principles' and insisted on putting industrialists in charge.
The real turning point came a few months later when Hitler appointed as Minister of Armaments the young architect Albert Speer, a close courtier who indulged Hitler's fascination for monumental architecture. He was only 36, a man with no military experience or close knowledge of industry but a sound organiser. He quickly built up a team of young managers and engineers, almost all of them in their thirties or early forties, most of them co-opted from German industry. German industrial resources were at last centrally planned, and in response to Hitler's efficiency decree industrial rationalisation became the driving force of the new structure. A remarkable amount was achieved in three years. By 1944 the number of weapons had been reduced to a few chosen types; 42 aircraft models became five; 151 lorries gave way to just 23; a dozen anti-tank weapons were replaced by just one; and so on throughout the whole range of German weaponry. The shift to mass production, though far from universal, brought an instant increase in efficiency. Weapons output trebled in three years; the productivity of German manpower doubled. Large factories were expanded and small ones closed down. The Messerschmitt-109 fighter was produced at the rate of a thousand a month in three giant plants in 1944, where once 180 had been produced in seven smaller plants. Industrialists now revelled in the freedom to work without the constant fear of military interference.
Under Speer the German economy at last promised to deliver the sort of numbers produced in the Soviet Union and America. It was a promise difficult to redeem. The military continued to disrupt long production runs and standardisation. The army procurement officers regarded Speer as an "inexperienced intruder." Speer recalled ruefully in his memoirs the survival of 'excessive bureaucratisation', which he fought 'in vain'. Göring kept a jealous hold of aircraft production until the spring of 1944, when real mass production was introduced at last. The one thing that kept Speer going was Hitler's backing, but the war economy always threatened to return to the unrationalised, disordered melee of its early years. For all his enthusiasm and sense of urgency, Speer was unable to reap an early harvest. Not until the summer of 1943 did the reforms begin to bear real fruit, long after the Soviet Union and the United States had mass production established. At just the point when German potential was on the point of being realised in large, mechanised, centralised assembly plants, bombing began in earnest.
Bombing was the enemy of rationalisation. Speer's deputy responsible for tank production explained to his postwar interrogators that bombing forced measures that contradicted mass production: 'the breaking down and dispersal of plants, starting up factories on account of their geographical position instead of their technical capacity . . .' As German factories moved into smaller, camoflaged premises, into woods or even underground, it became progressively more difficult to expand production. There was enough momentum in the Speer reforms to carry German industry to a peak in September 1944, but bombing made it impossible for managers and workers alike to achieve the maximum. By the autumn of 1944 the war industries were living off accumulated stocks of materials and components. Under the impact of bombing, conditions on the home front deteriorated rapidly. More and more of the workforce was made up of unwilling labourers forced from their homes across Europe to fill the German workhalls. By 1944 seven million of them -- a quarter of the workforce -- lived and worked in squalid conditions on low pay, regimented by the Nazi authorities, bullied and victimised by German workers whose own conditions in the industrial regions of the Reich were growing steadily worse. Food supplies declined and urban amenities were strained to breaking point; millions of German were made homeless and could not be satisfactorily rehabilitated. Hundreds of hours were spent huddled in shelters and absenteeism rates soared. The more bombing affected the willingness to work, the more the regime resorted to draconian methods to extract the labour. The SS mobolised the population of its empire of concentration and extermination camps, which was literally worked to death. Workers caught pilfering or slacking were taken into the camps and sent on 'work education weekends' organised by the Gestapo; even industrialists who displayed defeatism or obstructed the growing number of SS official recruited to run the bombed economy could follow their employees behind barbed wire. Work was kept going on a basis of fear: dread of the Soviet enemy as the Red Army neared the borders of the Reich and dread of the rule of terror at home.
The German wartime economy was a paradox. Germany possessed a wealth of resources, a large class of competant entrepreneurs and engineers and a highly skilled workforce, all at the disposal of an authoritarian system that brooked no opposition, led by a dictator with delusions of super power grandeur. This was a rich mixture, which promised a great deal more than it could deliver. The German economy fell between two stools. It was not enough of a command economy to do what hte Soviet system could do; yet it was not capitalist enough to rely, as America did, on the recruitment of private enterprise. Only too late was an effort made to do both these things, to coerce more ruthlessly and at the same time to give industry more responsibility for production. Before that German mobolisation was hostage to the ambitions of a highly professional and exclusive military elite which saw war in all its elements as a military affair and clung on to that prerogative with stiffling effects on Germany's industrial effort.
There is no easy explanation. Hitler's Germany was an authoritarian single-party state, dominated by the personal dictatorship of a man who was not only head of state but also the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. By the start of the war Hitler had gathered into this own hands the authority necessary to order the weapons he wanted. But Germany was not the Soviet Union, centrally planned and centrally commanded. Hitler's orders, though they shaped national policy, were refracted and distorted by a system that was poorly coordinated, factious and obstructive. There was no straight line of command between Führer and factory. In between lay a web of ministries, plenipotentiaries and Party commissars, each with their own apparatus, interests and rubber stamps, producing more than the usual weight of bureaucratic inertia. At the end of the line was a business community most of whom remained wedded to entrepreneurial independence, and resented the jumbled administration, the corrupt Nazi Party hacks, the endless form-filling, which stifled what voluntary efforts they might have made to transform the war economy.
No organization was more guilty of limiting Germany's war potential than the military. Answerable only to Hitler, the armed forces treated the German industrial economy as an annexe to the front line. Military priorities dominated arms production, from the design and development of a weapon through to the final factory inspection. Military officials were posted to factories to monitor production. Changes to design and specification were made endlessly in response to every cry for improvement from the battlefield. Production schedules were set by military agencies; consultation with the industrialists and engineers who had to produce the goods was rare and one-sided.
The military domination of production had mixed results. There is no dispute that Germany developed weapons of very high quality, with a level of finish and attention to detail that astonished the Allies when they inspected crashed aircraft or captured guns. By the end of the war German designers had developed many of the weapons that armed NATO a decade later. But the pursuit of advanced weaponry came at a price. Instead of a core of proven designs produced on standard lines, the German forces developed a bewildering array of projects. At one point in the war there were no fewer than 425 different aircraft models and variants in production. By the middle of the war the German army was equipped with 151 different makes of lorry, and 150 different motor-cycles.
With such a variety it was difficult to produce in mass. In 1942 Hitler remarked how industrialists 'were always complaining about this niggardly procedure -- today an order for ten howitzers, tommorrow for two mortars and so on'. But this as the nub of a system in which the military dictated the selection and development of anything that promised battlefield dividends. It produced a situation where a proper sense of priority and evaluation was replaced with a chaos of demands and programme. 'Nobody would seriously believe', complained a group of German engineers in 1944 based on the research centre in Rechlin, 'that so much inadequacy, bungling, confusion, misplaced power, failure to recognize the truth and deviation from the reasonable could really exist.' As long as the military tail wagged the industrial dog, German war production remained inflexible, unrationalised and excessively bureaucratic.
Not surprisingly the experience of mass production in Germany was very different from that of the Soviet Union and United States. The German armed forces shared a widespread prejudice against 'American' production methods. Göring's jibe that all America could produce was razor-blades was not an isolated belief. Mass production was associated with cheap consumer goods and shoddy standards. The German military preferred to establish close links with smaller firms with traditions of skilled craftsmanship, which would be sensitive to frequent design changes and produce a sophisticated custom-built weapon. The great strengths of the German industrial economy had always been high quality, skilled workmanship, the conquest of technical complexity. German weapons were very good, but very expensive -- in skilled manpower, time and materials.
Nothing more clearly reveals these preferences than the story of the German car industry, which during the 1930s became the largest manafacturing sector in Germany. The major names -- Adam Opel, Ford (in Cologne), Auto-Union, Daimler-Benz -- slowly adopted American production methods. Hitler was an enthusiast for the motor-car, so much so that he dreamed of making cheap motoring available for the masses. In 1933 Hitler met with designer Ferdinand Porsche. He asked him to try to develop a low-priced family car 'in which one could go for weekend trips . . . a car for the people'. The design that Porsche came up with was the prototype of one of the century's most famous cars, the Volkswagen. In 1938 work was started at Fallesleben in the Brunswick countryside, not far from the vast new iron and steel complex in Salzgitter; around the Volkswagen plant was to be built one of the new model cities of the Third Reich, Wolfsburg. The factories were planned on a gigantic scale, together capable of turning out half a million cars a year, rising eventually to one and a half million. The central workshop boasted the largest metal press in the world, capable of punching out whole car bodies at a time. By the beginning of the war the installation of machine tools for the production of 200,000 cars was completed. Yet the contribution to the German war effort of the plant designed as one of the largest and most modern mass production factories in the world was absurdly small. Only one-fifth of its capacity was ever utilized, for a hotch-potch of equipment from one and a half million camp stoves to army issue footwarmers. Only a few thousand chassis were produced for a military version of the Volkswagen which the army took with great reluctance. Otto HOchne, who worked at Wolfsburg during the war, later recalled that 'there seemed to be no plans at all'. The works were used haphazardly until they were bombed in 1943.
The rest of the industry suffered something of the same fate. Postwar estimates showed that barely 50 percent of its capacity had been utilised during the war. The largest and most modern producer, Opel, almost disappeared entirely at the start of the war. Opel was owned by the American car giant General Motors, which did not endear it to the German authorities. The directors had clashed with the army in 1936 wehen they closed down a small army supplier; Wilhelm Opel had earned Hitler's displeasure when he introduced his new small car at the 1937 Berlin Motor Show with the words 'This, Herr Hitler, is our Volkswagen'. When war broke out in September the military authorities wanted to break the whole complex up and parcel its tools and workforce out among other smaller producers. There were no orders for war work and no mobolisation plan. The company resisted dispersal, but not until 1942 did it become a major producer after the authorities had dithered for almost three years over what it should make. During the war the productive performance of the Opel workforce dropped by almost half. The systematic conversion of the motorcycle, motor-car and tractor plants only began in 1942 and 1943.
There was more, of course, to the problems of the German war economy than the failure to mobolise the largest mass producing industry in the country, but this was symptomatic of a productive system in which technical sophistication was routinely preferred to turning out large quantities of standard weapons. In the end it took Hitler to break the logjam. Prompted by complaints from industrial leaders, Hitler called military and civilian leaders together to Berchtesgaden in May 1941 and berated the soldiers for burdening industry with unnecessary technical demands. He demanded 'more primitive, robust construction' and the introduction of 'crude mass production'. The military took little notice. In December 1941 Hitler turned his request into an order, a Führer Decree on 'Simplification and Increased Efficiency in Armaments Production'. Citing the success of the Soviet factories, he ordered German industry to embark on 'mass production on modern principles' and insisted on putting industrialists in charge.
The real turning point came a few months later when Hitler appointed as Minister of Armaments the young architect Albert Speer, a close courtier who indulged Hitler's fascination for monumental architecture. He was only 36, a man with no military experience or close knowledge of industry but a sound organiser. He quickly built up a team of young managers and engineers, almost all of them in their thirties or early forties, most of them co-opted from German industry. German industrial resources were at last centrally planned, and in response to Hitler's efficiency decree industrial rationalisation became the driving force of the new structure. A remarkable amount was achieved in three years. By 1944 the number of weapons had been reduced to a few chosen types; 42 aircraft models became five; 151 lorries gave way to just 23; a dozen anti-tank weapons were replaced by just one; and so on throughout the whole range of German weaponry. The shift to mass production, though far from universal, brought an instant increase in efficiency. Weapons output trebled in three years; the productivity of German manpower doubled. Large factories were expanded and small ones closed down. The Messerschmitt-109 fighter was produced at the rate of a thousand a month in three giant plants in 1944, where once 180 had been produced in seven smaller plants. Industrialists now revelled in the freedom to work without the constant fear of military interference.
Under Speer the German economy at last promised to deliver the sort of numbers produced in the Soviet Union and America. It was a promise difficult to redeem. The military continued to disrupt long production runs and standardisation. The army procurement officers regarded Speer as an "inexperienced intruder." Speer recalled ruefully in his memoirs the survival of 'excessive bureaucratisation', which he fought 'in vain'. Göring kept a jealous hold of aircraft production until the spring of 1944, when real mass production was introduced at last. The one thing that kept Speer going was Hitler's backing, but the war economy always threatened to return to the unrationalised, disordered melee of its early years. For all his enthusiasm and sense of urgency, Speer was unable to reap an early harvest. Not until the summer of 1943 did the reforms begin to bear real fruit, long after the Soviet Union and the United States had mass production established. At just the point when German potential was on the point of being realised in large, mechanised, centralised assembly plants, bombing began in earnest.
Bombing was the enemy of rationalisation. Speer's deputy responsible for tank production explained to his postwar interrogators that bombing forced measures that contradicted mass production: 'the breaking down and dispersal of plants, starting up factories on account of their geographical position instead of their technical capacity . . .' As German factories moved into smaller, camoflaged premises, into woods or even underground, it became progressively more difficult to expand production. There was enough momentum in the Speer reforms to carry German industry to a peak in September 1944, but bombing made it impossible for managers and workers alike to achieve the maximum. By the autumn of 1944 the war industries were living off accumulated stocks of materials and components. Under the impact of bombing, conditions on the home front deteriorated rapidly. More and more of the workforce was made up of unwilling labourers forced from their homes across Europe to fill the German workhalls. By 1944 seven million of them -- a quarter of the workforce -- lived and worked in squalid conditions on low pay, regimented by the Nazi authorities, bullied and victimised by German workers whose own conditions in the industrial regions of the Reich were growing steadily worse. Food supplies declined and urban amenities were strained to breaking point; millions of German were made homeless and could not be satisfactorily rehabilitated. Hundreds of hours were spent huddled in shelters and absenteeism rates soared. The more bombing affected the willingness to work, the more the regime resorted to draconian methods to extract the labour. The SS mobolised the population of its empire of concentration and extermination camps, which was literally worked to death. Workers caught pilfering or slacking were taken into the camps and sent on 'work education weekends' organised by the Gestapo; even industrialists who displayed defeatism or obstructed the growing number of SS official recruited to run the bombed economy could follow their employees behind barbed wire. Work was kept going on a basis of fear: dread of the Soviet enemy as the Red Army neared the borders of the Reich and dread of the rule of terror at home.
The German wartime economy was a paradox. Germany possessed a wealth of resources, a large class of competant entrepreneurs and engineers and a highly skilled workforce, all at the disposal of an authoritarian system that brooked no opposition, led by a dictator with delusions of super power grandeur. This was a rich mixture, which promised a great deal more than it could deliver. The German economy fell between two stools. It was not enough of a command economy to do what hte Soviet system could do; yet it was not capitalist enough to rely, as America did, on the recruitment of private enterprise. Only too late was an effort made to do both these things, to coerce more ruthlessly and at the same time to give industry more responsibility for production. Before that German mobolisation was hostage to the ambitions of a highly professional and exclusive military elite which saw war in all its elements as a military affair and clung on to that prerogative with stiffling effects on Germany's industrial effort.