Actions
(82.13 KB, 584x794)
(474.74 KB, 600x1410)
(215.39 KB, 968x1200)
Albert Speer, man and myth In 1942 the German war economy was divided among: -The Reichsbank, RFM and RWM civilian economic administration, which maintained the Reich’s financial stability. -Backe and Darré’s agrarian bloc, centered on the RNS and Food and Agriculture Ministry, administered the continent’s food supply. -Sauckel’s provision of manpower. -The SS served several purposes, providing manpower aswell as discipline and control for foreign workers and the German population itself. -Goering’s and Milch’s Luftwaffe political bloc. -General Thomas’ military-economic office. It would soon lose its power at the same time as Speer rose. -Coal was, since 1941, under Paul Pleiger’s Reichsvereinigung Kohle (RVK) after a conflict between Reich Coal Commissioner Paul Walter, a populist hailing from the DAF, and coal syndicates. Walter’s anti-capitalist rhetoric led to his demise. -Fritz Todt was Minister of Armaments and oversaw mostly the Heer’s industrial base, delving into the Luftwaffe only in the case of ammunition. On the 8th of February Todt died in a plane crash. SS intrigue has been suggested but it was likely an accident. Hitler names Albert Speer as his replacement, and from that point he becomes the “protagonist” of the last third of the book, just as Schacht for the first. Unlike Schacht, Speer propelled himself to international fame and remains a figure of much public interest today. The first thing that must be known about him is how much he was image-savvy and publicity-minded. He was an expert at inserting narratives favorable to himself into public consensus. In wartime he hammered into the home front the tale of the “arms miracle”; his task was as propagandistic as it was economic and as such he worked closely with Goebbels. The need to maintain the momentum of propaganda and to provide “big stories” (the tank, missile, electric submarine programmes and so on) grounded his production decisions. After the war, he successfully rehabilitated himself and presented a tale in which “Speer is presented as an artistic soul, an architect, who was pushed reluctantly to take on wider responsibilities. This was a self-image that Speer shared with Hitler.”; his detractors then took him for an “’unpolitical technician', a man given the task of resurrecting the German war effort, who did his job without asking questions about the wider purpose of his work or the wider activities of the regime that he served.” (p. 552) Both took for granted his narrative of a miraculous reform of the German economy and of himself as an apolitical technocrat, the two forming the “Speer myth”, which Tooze seeks to bring down and pick apart. “Myth” not in the sense he lied about the “Speer miracle”: the data collected by his ministry is valid, there was indeed a great expansion of output in his tenure (in two periods with an interruption from mid 1943 to early 1944) and, save for one case in July 1944, he did not falsify statistics for the public. But Speer’s explanation for why and how this took place must be read critically. The “apolitical” half of the myth is merely wrong. The book doesn’t cover much his ideological fervor but it does question any implication that he was an outsider. He joined the party in 1931, when it wasn’t mainstream yet and soon became a close friend of Hitler. He was then chosen first and foremost because he could be relied upon, and indeed, he remained loyal, not swerving even in moments such as the 20 July coup; this friendship was also his trump card within the Reich’s power struggles.