to intervene to back more radical measures.54
On his return to Berlin on 18 March after some days away in the ‘Ostmark’ and Bavaria, Goebbels had been appalled at a ‘scandalous scene’ in the station where soldiers travelling to the eastern front were having to stand in the corridors of trains ‘while fine ladies, returning sunburnt from holiday, naturally had their sleeping- compartments’. What was needed, he claimed, was a law under which ‘all offences against known National Socialist principles of leadership of the people in war will be punished with corresponding retribution’.55 That, too, he was going to put before Hitler during his visit to the Fuhrer Headquarters. But Goebbels felt that, as things were, a radical approach to the law, necessary in total war, was being sabotaged by representatives of the formal legal system. He approved of Bormann’s demands for tougher sentences for black-marketeering.56 And he took it upon himself to press Hitler to change the leadership of the Justice Ministry, which since Gurtner’s death the previous year had been run by the State Secretary, Franz Schlegelberger. ‘The bourgeois elements still dominate there,’ he commented, ‘and since the heavens are high and the Fuhrer far away, it’s extraordinarily difficult to succeed against these stubborn and listlessly working authorities.’57 It was in this mood — determined to persuade Hitler to support radical measures, attack privilege, and castigate the state bureaucracy (above all judges and lawyers) — that Goebbels arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on the ice-cold morning of 19 March.58
He met a Hitler showing clear signs of the strain he had been under during the past months, in a state of mind that left him more than open to Goebbels’s radical suggestions. He needed no instruction about the mood in Germany, and the impact the reduction in food rations would have.59 Lack of transport prevented food being brought from the Ukraine, he complained. The Transport Ministry was blamed for the shortage of locomotives. He was determined to take tough measures. Goebbels then lost no time in berating the ‘failure’ of the judicial system. Hitler did not demur. Here, too, he was determined to proceed with ‘the toughest measures’. Goebbels paraded before Hitler his suggestion for a new comprehensive law to punish offenders against the ‘principles of National Socialist leadership of the people’. He wanted the Reich Ministry of Justice placed in new hands, and pressed for Otto Thierack, ‘a real National Socialist’, an SA-Gruppenfiihrer, and currently President of the notorious People’s Court
For now, Hitler placated Goebbels with a suggestion to prepare the ground for a radical assault on social privilege by recalling the Reichstag and having it bestow upon him ‘a special plenipotentiary power’ so that ‘the evil-doers know that he is covered in every way by the people’s community’. Given the powers which Hitler already possessed, the motive was purely populist. An attack on the civil servants and judges, and upon the privileged in society — or, as Hitler put it, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘neglecters of duty in public functions’ — could not fail to be popular with the masses. Up to this point, judges could not be dismissed — not even by the Fuhrer. There were limits, too, to his rights of intervention in the military sphere. The case of Colonel-General Erich Hoepner still rankled deeply. Hitler had sacked — Hoepner in January and dismissed him from the army in disgrace for retreating in disobedience to his ‘Halt Order’. Hoepner had then instituted a law-suit against the Reich over the loss of his pension rights — and won. With Hitler’s new powers, this could never happen again. Examples could be set in the military and civilian sector to serve as deterrents to others and ‘clear the air’.62
‘In such a mood,’ wrote Goebbels the next day, ‘my suggestions for the radicalization of our war-leadership naturally had an absolutely positive effect on the Fuhrer. I only need to touch a topic and I have already got my way. Everything that I put forward individually is accepted piece for piece by the Fuhrer without contradiction.’63
The encouragement of Hitler to back the radicalization of the home-front continued after Goebbels’s return from the Wolf’s Lair. Apart from the Propaganda Minister, it came in particular from Bormann and Himmler. On 26 March, the SD reported on a ‘crisis of confidence’ resulting from the failure of the state to take a tough enough stance against black-marketeers and their corrupt customers among the well-placed and privileged. Himmler, it seems, had directly prompted the report; Bormann made Hitler aware of it. Three days later, Goebbels castigated black-marketeering in
It was on this same evening, that of 29 March, Hitler treated his small audience in the Wolf’s Lair to a prolonged diatribe on lawyers and the deficiencies of the legal system, concluding that ‘every jurist must be defective by nature, or would become so in time’.65
This was only a few days after he had personally intervened in a blind rage with acting Justice Minister Schlegelberger and, when he proved dilatory, with the more eagerly compliant Roland Freisler (later the infamous President of the People’s Court as successor to Thierack but at this time Second State Secretary in the Justice Ministry), to insist on the death penalty for a man named Ewald Schlitt. This was on no more solid basis than the reading of a sensationalized account in a Berlin evening paper of how an Oldenburg court had sentenced Schlitt to only five years in a penitentiary for a horrific physical assault — according to the newspaper account — that had led to the death of his wife in an asylum. The court had been lenient because it took the view that Schlitt had been temporarily deranged. Schlegelberger lacked the courage to present the case fully to Hitler, and to defend the judges at the same time. Instead, he promised to improve the severity of sentencing. Freisler had no compunction in meeting Hitler’s wishes. The original sentence was overturned. In a new hearing, Schlitt was duly sentenced to death, and guillotined on 2 April.66
Hitler had been so enraged by what he had read on the Schlitt case — which matched all his prejudices about lawyers and fell precisely at the time when the judicial system was being made the scapegoat for the difficulties on the home front — that he had privately threatened, should other ‘excessively lenient’ sentences be produced, ‘to send the Justice Ministry to the devil through a Reichstag law’.67 As it was, the Schlitt case was brought into service as a pretext to demand from the Reichstag absolute powers over the law itself.
Hitler rang Goebbels on 23 April to tell him that he had now decided to deliver the speech to the Reichstag he had for long had in mind. Goebbels undertook to make the necessary arrangements to summon the Reichstag for 3p.m. on Sunday, 26 April.68
Goebbels went round to the Reich Chancellery for lunch shortly after Hitler’s arrival in Berlin at midday on the 25th. He found him looking well and feeling in good form, though in a particularly sour mood at the failure of air- defences to protect the Heinkel works in Rostock from damage in a bombing raid, following the opening of the British bombing offensive with a devastating attack on Lubeck at the end of March.69 Hitler extended his criticism from the Luftwaffe to the lack of initiative of the ‘unmodern’ navy and its lack of any ‘leadership of stature’.70 But, as regards the eastern front, he was confident that the lessons of the winter had been learned and full of optimism about the coming offensive, now in an advanced stage of preparation. Reports had been handed to him detailing starvation and cannibalism among the army and civilian population of the Soviet Union, and the abysmal level of equipment of the Red Army’s soldiers.71 It seemed — something he would persistently claim throughout 1942 — that the Soviet Union was almost on its last legs. Goebbels was clearly less certain that Germany would attain decisive successes in the summer. And Hitler himself gave an indication that total victory in the east would not be attained in 1942, speaking of building a more solid line of defence in the coming winter, when supplies for the German troops would no longer pose a problem.72
He soon launched into one of his favourite obsessions — vegetarianism. Much of the remainder of the ‘discussion’ consisted of a lecture on the dangers of meat-eating.73 In the war, Hitler remarked, there was little to be done about upturning eating methods. But he intended to see to the problem once the war was over. Similarly with the question of the Christian Churches — one of Goebbels’s pet themes, which he brought up once more: it was necessary for the time being, commented Hitler, not to react to the ‘seditious’ actions of the clergy; ‘the showdown’ would be saved for a ‘more advantageous situation after the war’ when he would have to come as the ‘avenger’.74
In a shortened lunch next day, just before Hitler’s Reichstag speech, a good deal of the talk revolved around the devastation of Rostock in a renewed British raid — the heaviest so far. Much of the housing in the centre of the Baltic harbour-town had been destroyed. But the Heinkel factory had lost only an estimated 10 per cent of its productive capacity.75 German retaliation to British raids had consisted of attacks on Exeter and Bath. Goebbels favoured the complete devastation of English ‘cultural centres’.76 Hitler, furious at the new attack on Rostock, agreed, according to Goebbels’s account. Terror had to be answered with terror.
