The chief innovations made after Speer’s appointment were organizational. He joined Milch, Goering’s secretary, Kehrl, Sauckel, Backe and others in the Zentrale Planung, an overarching organization for discussing the allocation of raw materials and hence the war economy as a whole. Within his field, Todt had already set up five Main Committees to manage industries in each sector (e.g. Tanks, Electrical Equipment); Speer added two more and had Karl Otto Saur command them as head of the Technisches Amt. Saur was ideologically committed and Speer’s successor in Hitler’s last will and testament. Alongside the Main Committees, Speer created Rings to handle subcomponents and raw materials and had them overseen by Walther Schieber, ideological like Saur.

An example of the gap between the Ministry’s rhetoric and what could be achieved was its intervention in the Mark XXI U-boat program. In the spring of 1943 the navy expected it’d take until March 1945 before series production could begin. Speer believed that the possibility of doing away with piece-by-piece construction, implementing mass production and replicating the success of America’s Liberty ship program was open and all that stood in its way were conservative bureaucrats and industrialists. As such, Otto Merker, an outsider to shipbuilding, was assigned to revolutionize submarine production. He had the hull divided in eight sections made by inland firms -mobilizing additional capacity and allowing economies of scale- and only used the dry docks, which were a bottleneck, at a short final phase of assembly. A fleet of 30 U-boats was promised by the end of summer 1940, with the same number every month. The conservatives balked at his outsider status and did not believe German industry was ready for this kind of mass production; Rudolf Blohm, the naval patriarch, opposed the program and had to be sacked from his Main Committee and Business Group. They were right. The hull sections delivered by inexperienced inland firms were grossly deficient. The administrative apparatus needed to handle multi-stage production was not ready. The Mark XXI design itself needed time for fine-tuning. Merker’s timetables were not fulfilled. The U-boat could only be used in the final days of the war.

Productivity did significantly spike in one field -the Luftwaffe’s, which was outside Speer’s authority and yet responsible for much of the increase in arms output during the “miracle”. In 1942-3 output doubled with a negligible increase in labor and aluminum inputs. Germany remained with less per capita productivity than America but in aircraft the gap was shortened.
Milch set up Rings in Speer’s manner. Investments started in autumn 1940 began to pay off. A rhetoric of “more for less” appeared and had in its proponents William Werner, who complained that the aeroengine industry produced more waste chips than engines; this fact, however, was not a German failure but the norm throughout the world; the industry was just advancing in technique.
But the central pillar of Milch’s success was the exploitation of economies of scale: the concentration of production into fewer models, larger batches and the accumulation of experience. The aircraft industry had long sought “American-style” success by concentrating production into larger new or expanded plants, with both successes or failures, but this led to internecine competition. Milch instead cut the big firms down to size, taking direct control of Junkers, Messerschmitt and Heinkel.
But economies of scale weres at odds with the adoption of new designs, which dispersed efforts and caused lags. In the previous year Udet had waited for new aircraft designs and did not commit to any; the Me 210 and He 177 were then finally pushed into production, but their performance was gravely disappointing.