of Stalingrad. The genial strategy of the World War [I] corporal has senselessly and irresponsibly driven
It was a highly courageous show of defiance. But it was suicidal. Hans and Sophie Scholl were denounced by a porter at the university (who was subsequently applauded by pro-Nazi students for his action), and quickly arrested by the Gestapo. Christoph Probst was picked up soon afterwards. Their trial before the ‘People’s Court’, presided over by Roland Freisler, took place within four days. The verdict — the death-sentence — was a foregone conclusion. All three were guillotined the same afternoon. Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, and Alexander Schmorell suffered the same fate some months later. Other students on the fringe of the movement were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.385
The regime had been badly stung. But it was not at the point of collapse. It would lash back without scruple and with utter viciousness at the slightest hint of opposition. The level of brutality towards its own population was about to rise sharply as external adversity mounted.
If Hitler felt any personal remorse for Stalingrad or human sympathy for the dead of the 6th Army and their relatives, he did not let it show. Those in his close proximity could detect the signs of nervous strain.386 He hinted privately at his worry that his health would not stand up to the pressure.387 His secretaries had to put up with even longer nocturnal monologues as his insomnia developed chronic proportions. The topics were much the same as ever: his youth in Vienna, the ‘time of struggle’, the history of mankind, the nature of the cosmos. There was no relief from the boredom for his secretaries, who by now knew his outpourings on all topics more or less off by heart. There were not even any longer the occasional evenings listening to records to break up the tedium. Hitler, as he had told Goebbels some weeks earlier, now no longer wanted to listen to music.388 Talking was like a drug for him. He told one of his doctors two years later that he had to talk — about more or less anything other than military issues — to divert him from sleepless nights pondering troop dispositions and seeing in his mind where every division was at Stalingrad.389 As Below guessed, the bad news from the North African as well as from the eastern front must have led to serious doubts, in the privacy of his own room in the bunker of his headquarters, about whether the war could still be won.390 But outwardly, even among his entourage at the Wolf’s Lair, he had to sustain the facade of invincibility. No crack could be allowed to show. Hitler remained true to his creed of will and strength. A hint of weakness, in his thinking, was a gift to enemies and subversives. A crevice of demoralization would then swiftly widen to a chasm. The military, and above all else the Party, leaders must, therefore, never be allowed a glimmer of any wavering in his own resolution.
There was not a trace of demoralization, depression, or uncertainty when he spoke to the Reichs — and Gauleiter for almost two hours at his headquarters on 7 February.391 He told them at the very beginning of his address that he believed in victory more than ever. Then he described what Goebbels referred to as ‘the catastrophe on the eastern front’.392 Hitler did not look close to home for the failings. While he said he naturally accepted full responsibility for the events of the winter,393 he left no doubt where in his view the real fault lay. From the beginning of his political career — indeed, from what is known of his earliest remarks on politics — he had cast around for scapegoats. The trait was too embedded in his psyche for him to stray from it now that, for the first time, an unmitigated national disaster had to be explained. Addressing the Party leadership, as in his private discussion with Goebbels a fortnight or so earlier, he once more placed the blame for the disaster at Stalingrad squarely on the ‘complete failure’ of Germany’s allies — the Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians — whose fighting powers met with his ‘absolute contempt’.394 The consequence of the collapse of Germany’s allies in the defensive front had been to endanger the Caucasus army. This had necessitated the ‘extraordinarily difficult order, involving much sacrifice’, that the 6th Army should stand fast and bind in the Red Army ‘to prevent the catastrophe gripping the entire eastern front’. Dreadful weather conditions, he said, had prevented it being supplied from the air, as had been presumed possible. Hitler took the view that the crisis, in broad terms, could be taken to be mastered. ‘The Caucasus army had been saved through the sacrifice of the 6th Army in Stalingrad.’395
Not just the search for scapegoats, but the feeling of treachery and betrayal was entrenched in Hitler’s thinking. Another strand of his explanation for the disaster at Stalingrad was the prospect of imminent French betrayal, forcing him to retain several divisions, especially SS-divisions, in the west when they were desperately needed in the east.396 But Hitler had the extraordinary capacity, as his Luftwaffe adjutant Below noted, of turning negative into positive, and convincing his audience of this.397 A landing by the Allies in France would have been far more dangerous, he claimed, than that which had taken place in North Africa and had been checked through the occupation of Tunis.398 He saw grounds for optimism, too, in the success of the U-boats, and in Speer’s armaments programme enabling better flak defence against air-raids together with full-scale production by the summer of the Tiger tank.399
Much of the rest of Hitler’s address was on the ‘psychology’ of war. Goebbels had shrewdly played on Hitler’s instincts in demanding the rad-icalization of the ‘home front’ and the move to ‘total war’. The urgings of the Propaganda Minister found their echo in Hitler’s rallying-call to his Gauleiter. The crisis was more of a psychological than a material one, he declared, and must therefore be overcome by ‘psychological means’. It was the Party’s task to achieve this. The Gauleiter should remember the ‘time of struggle’. Radical measures were now needed. Austerity, sacrifice, and the end of any privileges for certain sectors of society was the order of the day. The setbacks but eventual triumph of Frederick the Great — the implied comparison with Hitler’s own leadership was plain — were invoked.400 The setbacks now being faced — solely the fault of Germany’s allies — even had their own psychological advantages. Propaganda and the Party’s agitation could awaken people to the fact that they had stark alternatives: becoming master of Europe, or undergoing ‘a total liquidation and extermination’.401
Hitler pointed out one advantage which, he claimed, the Allies possessed: that they were sustained by international Jewry. The consequence, Goebbels reported Hitler as saying, was ‘that we have to eliminate Jewry not only from Reich territory but from the whole of Europe’. Goebbels noted approvingly that Hitler had again adopted his own viewpoint, and that within the foreseeable future there would be no more Jews in Berlin. ‘The ruthlessness towards Jewry which [Hitler] impresses on all Gauleiter,’ Goebbels added, ‘has long since been the political order of the day in Berlin.’402
Hitler categorically ruled out, as he always had done, any possibility of capitulation.403 He stated that any collapse of the German Reich was out of the question. But his further remarks betrayed the fact that he was contemplating precisely that. The event of such a collapse ‘would represent the ending of his life’, he declared. It was plain who, in such an eventuality, the scapegoats would be: the German people themselves. ‘Such a collapse could only be caused through the weakness of the people,’ Goebbels recorded Hitler as saying. ‘But if the German people turned out to be weak, they would deserve nothing else than to be extinguished by a stronger people; then one could have no sympathy for them.’404 The sentiment would stay with him to the end.
To the Party leadership, the backbone of his support, Hitler could speak in this way. The Gauleiter could be rallied by such rhetoric. They were after all fanatics as Hitler himself was. They were part of his ‘sworn community’. The responsibility of the Party for the radicalization of the ‘home front’ was music to their ears. In any case, whatever private doubts (if any) they harboured, they had no choice but to stick with Hitler. They had burnt their boats with him. He was the sole guarantor of their power.
The German people were less easily placated than Hitler’s immediate viceroys. When he spoke in Berlin to the nation for the first time since Stalingrad, on the occasion (which this year, of all years, he could not possibly avoid) of Heroes’ Memorial Day on 21 March 1943, his speech gave rise to greater criticism than any Hitler speech since he had become Chancellor.405
The speech was one of Hitler’s shortest. Goebbels was pleased that it was only fifteen pages long; it lessened the chances of being interrupted by the British air-raid that was feared and predicted.406 Hitler told Goebbels that he wanted to use the speech for another fierce attack on Bolshevism. He felt like an old propagandist, he said: propaganda meant repetition.407 Perhaps it was the anxiety, as Goebbels had hinted, about a possible air-raid which made Hitler race through his speech in such a rapid and dreary monotone. Whatever the reason, the routine assault on Bolshevism and on Jewry as the force behind the ‘merciless war’ could stir little enthusiasm. Disappointment was profound. Rumours revived about Hitler’s poor health — along with others that it had been a substitute who had spoken, while the real Fuhrer was under house-arrest on the
