rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

THE TURN OF POLAND 445White.” 533 The Fuehrer, after studying it, agreed with it ”in the main” butordered that ”so as not to disquiet the population by calling up reserves on alarger scale than usual . . . civilian establishments, employers or other privatepersons who make inquiries should be told that men are being called up for theautumn maneuvers.” Also Hitler stipulated that ”for reasons of security, theclearing of hospitals in the frontier area which the Supreme Command of theArmy proposed should take place from the middle of July must not be carriedout.”The war which Hitler was planning to launch would be total war and wouldrequire not only military mobilization but a total mobilization of all the resourcesof the nation. To co-ordinate this immense effort a meeting of the ReichDefense Council was convoked the next day, on June 23, under the chairmanshipof Goering. Some thirty-five ranking officials, civil and military, includingKeitel, Raeder, Haider, Thomas and Milch for the armed forces and the Ministersof the Interior, Economics, Finance and Transport, as well as Himmler,were present. It was only the second meeting of the Council but, as Goeringexplained, the body was convoked only to make the most important decisionsand he left no doubt in the minds of his hearers, as the captured secret minutesof the session reveal, that war was near and that much remained to be doneabout manpower for industry and agriculture and about many other mattersrelating to total mobilization. 534Goering informed the Council that Hitler had decided to draft some sevenmillion men. To augment the labor supply Dr. Funk, the Minister of Economics,was to arrange ”what work is to be given to prisoners of war and to the inmatesof prisons and concentration camps.” Himmler chimed in to say that ”greateruse will be made of the concentration camps in wartime.” And Goering addedthat ”hundreds of thousands of workers from the Czech protectorate are to beemployed under supervision in Germany, particularly in agriculture, and housedin hutments.” Already, it was obvious, the Nazi program for slave labor wastaking shape.Dr. Frick, the Minister of the Interior, promised to ”save labor in the publicadministration” and enlivened the proceedings by admitting that under the Naziregime the number of bureaucrats had increased ”from twenty to forty fold – animpossible state of affairs.” A committee was set up to correct this lamentablesituation.An even more pessimistic report was made by Colonel Rudolf Gercke, chiefof the Transport Department of the Army General Staff. ”In the transportationsphere” he declared bluntly, ”Germany is at the moment not ready for war.”Whether the German transportation facilities would be equal to their taskdepended, of course, on whether the war was confined to Poland. If it hadto be fought in the West against France and Great Britain it was feared thatthe transport system would simply not be adequate. In July two emergencymeetings of the Defense Council were called ”in order to bring the West Wall,by August 25 at the latest, into the optimum condition of preparedness withthe material that can be obtained by that time by an extreme effort.” Highofficials of Krupp and the steel cartel were enlisted to try to scrape up thenecessary metal to complete the armament of the western fortifications. Foron their impregnancy, the Germans knew, depended whether the Anglo-Frencharmies would be inclined to mount a serious attack on western Germany whilethe Wehrmacht was preoccupied in Poland.