Manpower and foreign labor
Essentially the entire German workforce was employed in September 1939, either on the civilian sector or in activities necessary for the war effort – agriculture, mining and the military-industrial complex. For a peacetime economy the latter was already a large segment of the population. Mobilization transferred millions to a third sector, the Wehrmacht. The Reich’s leadership now had to carefully reallocate workers between the three sectors.
Emptying civilian industry in favor of the other two was a no-brainer and began already in 1939. The Wehrmacht received workers through conscription. Useful industries were bolstered in a number of ways. With higher wages they had a magnetism and many workers moved on their own, particularly new entrees to the workforce. Civilian firms received contracts from the Wehrmacht or transferred employees to military contracts they already had. And the regime had many tools to force reallocation, from its rationing systems to assigning compulsory service (Dienstverpflichtung) to workers. On the first year it also tried to close down small businesses to release their resources, but this was ditched as it was unpopular and ineffective.
In the likely inflated Reich Group for industry’s figures, the share of the industrial workforce under Wehrmacht contracts rose from 22% in 1939 to 50,2% a year later. 750,000 men were on civilian contracts in summer 1940, compared to 1,3 million in May 1939.
Consumer goods industries managed to resist with their powers of bribery, their products being scarce and desired, and from 1943 onward a renewed effort was made to “comb” them out through coercion by Speer and the SS. However the extent of undermobilization in the first years of the war was greatly overstated by Speer and early historians; as soon as the war began the Reich was already working hard towards economic mobilization.

The real dilemma was not civilian vs. military but between the frontlines and the war economy. Mobilization drew extensively on teenage cohorts entering majority, which only had an indirect impact, but employers soon found themselves in competition with conscription authorities for prime manpower, both young and old. The Wehrmacht needed not just cannon fodder, which could be drawn from unqualified workers, but also skilled mechanics, fitters and electricians for the engineering corps, in army repair shops, as Luftwaffe ground crew and in naval engine rooms; they were thus also in competition for experienced workers. Employees in firms directly under Wehrmacht supervision were exempted from the draft, but further down the production chain sub-contractors and raw materials providers were caught up in mobilization. Even where no net loss of workers took place, the best young men were unavailable for hire. This was one of the reasons for struggling coal output in 1941.
The contradiction became grave once the Eastern Front was opened, with a substantial number of fatalities which had to be replenished on top of the need to expand the military. By the first half of 1942 teenage cohorts could barely cover losses and conscription advanced over 200,000 armaments workers.
There was less leeway to increase the workforce by mobilizing women than is commonly assumed. In 1939 German women already had a high rate of employment, higher even than in Britain and America at the end of the war. This was particularly the case in agriculture, but major centers such as Berlin and Hamburg had a large proportion of women at work.
One thing that could be done was increasing the work load of existing employees. This was done in two high-priority cases: in the coal fields of the Ruhr from spring 1941, with the usage of Sunday shifts, and in tank factories after the Adolf Hitler Panzer programme of late 1942, with 72-hour work weeks. Workers and their families were generously rewarded. Henschel’s Tiger tank plant in Kassel worked 24/7 in two daily shifts.