Page "Joseph Goebbels" Paragraph 82

Goebbels promised Hitler that he could raise a million new soldiers by means of a reorganisation of the Army, transferring personnel from the Navy and Luftwaffe, and purging the bloated Reich Ministries, which satraps like Göring had hitherto protected.

As it turned out, the inertia of the state bureaucracy was too great even for the energetic Goebbels to overcome.

Bormann and his puppet Lammers, keen to retain their control over the Party and State administrations respectively, placed endless obstacles in Goebbels ’ s way.

Another problem was that although Speer and Goebbels were allies, their agendas conflicted: Speer wanted absolute priority in the allocation of labour to be given to arms production, while Goebbels sought to press every able-bodied male into the army.

Speer, allied with Fritz Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary for the Employment of Labour from 1942, generally won these battles.