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By Root 961 0

duties, millions of boys and elderly men were now spending six hours a week training with their local Volkssturm home defence units, usually in icy huts or warehouses. They practised judging distances, deployment in open order and simple infantry tactics. All of this seemed worthless, however, when arms were chronically short. “What is lacking is familiarity with weapons,” a disgruntled Volkssturm father wrote to his son at the front. This was a deficiency that would never be fully remedied. Among the elderly, there was no eagerness to die in the futile defence of one’s town or village. The dangerous people were the children, whose entire conscious lives had been spent under Nazism. Goebbels had succeeded all too well with a generation of young Germans. A dreadful number were now ready to sacrifice themselves, ancient rifle or Panzerfaust in hand, in a rite of passage which they embraced with awful enthusiasm.

Helmut Fromm, who was serving as a teenage telephonist with a flak battery outside Heidelberg, once went to the cinema with some fellow gunners. They were in the midst of watching a movie entitled Der Katzenstag when the manager appeared at the end of their row, and ordered them out. “This film is not for young people,” he said sternly. Back at the battery, the boys pinned up a notice beside their 88mm gun proclaiming “This is not for young people.” Fromm, who had already been wounded by a near-miss from a British bomb, observed that it was typical of the Nazis to allow you to die for the fatherland at sixteen, but not to watch adult movies until you were eighteen. A friend of his old headmaster, a major on the General Staff, said to Fromm crossly: “You should be doing your exams, not going to the front.” Yet the bespectacled boy soon afterwards found himself posted to an infantry regiment in Poland.

For the average German family, the cost of living had risen by some 13 per cent since 1939. Rural people seldom went hungry, but city-dwellers found it difficult to buy an increasing range of commodities, on or off ration. The bread allowance did not much diminish throughout the war, until April 1945. But a weekly allocation of 400 grams of meat in June 1941 had fallen to 362 grams in 1944, and would descend to 156 grams in February 1945. The fats ration, 269 grams a week in June 1941, fell to 156 grams by January 1945. “Well, my dear Hans,” Julius Legmann of Zittau in Saxony wrote in October to an NCO friend at the front, “we were very glad to learn from your letter that you are well and fit, and also that all you good fellows in the army are well fed and not getting such dreary food as we do in the homeland . . . Here it’s a case of a lot of work and not much to eat . . . We should like something with some fat in it for once in a way, instead of just potatoes with nothing to go with them.”

Albert Speer, as armaments minister, was still accomplishing monthly miracles. In October 1944, Germany built more than five tanks and assault guns for each one that had been manufactured in January 1942. Production even increased towards the end of the year, as winter weather hampered Allied bombing. Yet after the war, amid Speer’s orgy of self-abasement, he acknowledged the recklessness of his forecasts, especially those concerning future aircraft production. He perceived “something grotesque” about his efforts in the last months of the war to convince subordinates that new industrial exertions might yet arrest the Allied tide. As factories were destroyed by bombing and sources of raw materials were overrun by the Russians, production would inexorably shrink. It was one of the paradoxes of the Second World War that, while Speer directed industry to tremendous effect, Germany’s war economy was incomparably less efficient than those of the Allies, including Russia’s. The efforts of some brilliant managers and industrialists, the dogged achievements of their workforces, were set at naught by massive policy failures. Speer’s performance was less remarkable in overcoming difficulties created by Allied bombing and raw-material shortages