Elsewhere, too, the news was less than encouraging. Rommel’s offensive at El Alamein in the direction of the Suez Canal had to be broken off already on 2 September, only three days after it had begun. Rommel remained confident, both publicly and in private, over the next weeks, though he reported on the serious problems with shortages of weapons and equipment when he saw Hitler on 1 October to receive his Field-Marshal’s baton.254 In reality, however, the withdrawal of 2 September would turn out to be the beginning of the end for the Axis in North Africa.255 Its morale revitalized under a new commander, General Bernard Montgomery, and its lost, out-of-date armour replaced by new Sherman tanks, the 8th Army would by autumn prove more than a match for Rommel’s limited forces.256
In the Reich itself, the British nightly raids had intensified. Munich, Bremen, Dusseldorf, and Duisburg were among the cities that now suffered serious destruction.257 Hitler said he was glad his own apartment in Munich had been badly damaged; he would not have liked it spared — obviously it would not have looked good — if the rest of the city had been attacked. He thought the raid might have a salutary effect in waking up the population of Munich to the realities of the war.258 Air-raids had another good side, he had told Goebbels in mid-August: the enemy had ‘taken work from us’ in destroying buildings that would in any case have had to be torn down to allow the improved post-war town planning.259 Such remarks scarcely betrayed much feeling for the suffering of ordinary people in the raids. For these, the wail of the sirens, disturbed nights in air-raid shelters, and rumours — exaggerated or not — of the horrors in other cities tore at the nerves. And the helplessness of the Luftwaffe to defend their cities shook people’s confidence in the leadership.260 Hitler felt his own impotence to respond as he would have liked: by revenge through even greater destruction of British cities. But there was a shortage of German bombers. The Heinkel 177 had, as Hitler had long predicted, proved unsuccessful, with repeated engine failures preventing its active use. And the Junkers 88 could not be produced in sufficient numbers, since priority had to be accorded to fighters. Powerless to do much against the mounting threat from the skies, Hitler said he trusted Goring’s assurances that things would soon be improved in the Luftwaffe.261
At the end of September, Hitler flew back to Berlin. He had promised Goebbels to use the opening of the Winter Aid campaign to address the nation during the second half of September.262 Once more, it was important to sustain morale at a vital time.
He looked well when Goebbels saw him at a late lunch on 28 September, after speaking to 12,000 young officers in the Sportpalast. He was more optimistic than Goebbels had imagined he would be about Stalingrad. The city would soon be taken, Hitler claimed. Then the advance on the Caucasus could proceed again, even during the winter. Goebbels did not share the optimism.263 It was as if Hitler felt unable to deviate, even in private, from the fiction that all was going well in the eastern campaign. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Below, thought Hitler was by now starting to deceive himself about the realities of the situation.264
Next day, Hitler spoke to a small group of generals, along with Goring and Speer, about the dangers of an invasion in the west. Fiasco though it had been, the attempted landing of Canadian troops in Dieppe in mid-August had been a new reminder of the threat. But by the spring, when the new Atlantic Wall with its 15,000 bunkers was constructed, the Reich would be immune, he claimed.265
Hitler’s Sportpalast speech on 30 September combined a glorification of German military achievements with a sarcastic, mocking attack on Churchill and Roosevelt.266 This was nothing new, though the hand- picked Sportpalast audience lapped it up. They, and the wider audience listening to the broadcast of the speech, took especial note when Hitler suggested that, after the perils of the last winter had been surmounted, the worst was now behind them, and the economic benefits of the occupied territories would soon be flowing to Germany to improve the standard of living.267 He went on to repeat his prophecy about the Jews — by now a regular weapon in his rhetorical armoury — in the most menacing phrases he had so far used: ‘The Jews used to laugh, in Germany too, about my prophecies. I don’t know if they’re still laughing today, or whether the laughter has already gone out of them. But I, too, can now only offer the assurance: the laughter will go out of them everywhere. And I will also be right in my prophecies.’268 But the speech was most notable of all for his assurances about the battle for Stalingrad. The metropolis on the Volga, bearing the Soviet leader’s name, was being stormed, he declared, and would be taken. ‘You can be sure,’ he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’269
His public display of optimism was unbounded, even in a more confined forum, when he addressed the Reichs — and Gauleiter for almost three hours the following afternoon. He felt at ease, he told the gathering, in the company of his most long-standing Party comrades.270 ‘The Gauleiter,’ he had told Goebbels in mid-August, ‘never cheat me’ — unlike, he had said, his generals. ‘They are my most loyal and reliable colleagues. If I lost trust in them I wouldn’t know whom to trust.’271 He outlined the plans to thrust to the Caucasus, to cut the Soviet Union off from its oil. He said he had wanted to undertake that the previous year, but Brauchitsch had pushed the campaign in a completely different direction, towards Moscow ‘which is relatively uninteresting for us’. But he was certain that Germany would now gain possession of the oil-fields of Grozny, while a first priority was to get those oil-wells captured in a ruined state in Maykop flowing again. ‘The capture of Stalingrad,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘is for him an established fact,’ even if it could still take a little time. Once that was attained, Astrakhan would be the next target, then the destruction by the Luftwaffe of the key Soviet oil-fields of Baku. Thereafter, as he had already told Goebbels several weeks earlier (when he had spoken of overrunning Iraq, Iran, and Palestine), his sights were set on the British oil supplies from Mesopotamia and the Middle East.272 Surveying the position of his enemies, Hitler came to the remarkable conclusion that ‘the war was practically lost for the opposing side, no matter how long it was in a position to carry it on’. Only an internal upheaval in Germany could snatch victory for the enemy. It was the Party’s job to see that that could never happen. He had effusive praise for the Party’s work. The longer the war went on, commented Goebbels, the closer the Fuhrer came to the Party.273
Hitler’s absurd optimism at the beginning of October scarcely accorded with the growing anxieties of his military advisers about the situation in Stalingrad. Winter was now no longer far off. Paulus, Weichs, Jodl, and Zeitzler all favoured pulling back from a target which, largely in ruins, had by now lost all significance as a communications and armaments centre, and taking up more secure winter positions. The only alternative was to pour in heavy reinforcements.274 Hitler’s view — he had said so to Goebbels in mid-August — was that this time winter had been so well prepared for that the soldiers in the east would be living better than most of them had done in peacetime.275
On 6 October, after Paulus had reported a temporary halt to the attack because his troops were exhausted, Hitler ordered the ‘complete capture’ of Stalingrad as the key objective of Army Group B.276 There might indeed have been something to be said for choosing the protection of even a ruined city to the open, exposed steppes over the winter had the supplies situation been as favourable as Hitler evidently imagined it to be, had the supply lines been secure, and had the threat of a Soviet counter-offensive been less large. However, the indicators are that only insufficient winter provision for the 6th Army had been made. Supply-lines were now overstretched on an enormously long front, and far from secure on the northern flank. And intelligence was coming in of big concentrations of Soviet troops which might pose real danger to the position of the 6th Army. Withdrawal was the sensible option.277
Hitler would not hear of it. At the beginning of October, Zeitzler and Jodl heard him for the first time, in outrightly rejecting their advice about the danger of being bogged down in house-to-house fighting with heavy losses, stress that the capture of the city was necessary not just for operational, but for ‘psychological’ reasons: to show the world the continued strength of German arms, and to boost the morale of the Axis allies.278 More than ever contemptuous of generals and military advisers who lacked the necessary strength of will, and convinced that he alone had prevented an ignominious full-scale retreat through his unbending insistence on standing fast the previous winter, he now refused to countenance any suggestion of withdrawal from Stalingrad. But his ‘halt order’ of the previous winter had had tactical merit. This time, it had none. Fear of loss of face had taken over from military reasoning. Hitler’s all too public statements in the Sportpalast and then to his Gauleiter had meant that taking Stalingrad had become a matter of prestige.279 And, though he claimed the fact that the city bore Stalin’s name was of no significance,280 retreat from precisely this city would clearly compound the loss of prestige.
In the meantime, Hitler was starting to acknowledge mounting concern among his military advisers about the build-up of Soviet forces on the northern banks of the Don — the weakest section of the front, where the Wehrmacht was dependent on the resolution of its allied armies — the Romanians, Hungarians, and
