Obersalzberg suffering from a mental breakdown after Stalingrad. Extraordinary was the fact that Hitler never even directly mentioned Stalingrad in a ceremony meant to be devoted to the memory of the fallen and at a time where the trauma was undiminished. And his passing reference, at the end of his speech, to a figure of 542,000 German dead in the war was presumed to be far too low and received with rank incredulity.408
Reactions to the speech were a clear indicator that the German people’s bonds with Hitler were dissolving. This was no overnight phenomenon. But Stalingrad was the point at which the signs became unmistakable. There was no rebellion in the air; Hitler was right about that. The mood was sullenly depressed, anxious about the present, fearful of the future, above all else weary of the war; but not rebellious. To all but the few who had served the regime from the inside, had contacts in high places with recourse to the power of the military, and were now actively conspiring to bring about Hitler’s downfall, thoughts of overthrowing the regime could scarcely be entertained. The regime was far too strong, its capacity for repression far too great, its readiness to strike down all opposition far too evident (and becoming even more so as positive support waned and loyalties weakened). The reserves of hard-core Nazi support were still substantial. They could be found especially — though here, too, there were unmistakable signs of erosion — among members of a younger generation that had swallowed Nazi ideals in school, among many ordinary front soldiers desperately clinging to a ray of hope, and, naturally, most of all among Party activists who had combined fervent belief with careerism.409 Fanatical devotees of the Fuhrer cult, who had not wavered in their adulation of Hitler, or who were implicated in the crimes against humanity which he had inspired, remained in control of the home front, itching to resort to any measures, however ruthless, to shore up the regime’s foundations. For the bulk of the population, there was no alternative to struggling on.
In this, at least, the dictator and the people he led were at one. Hitler, as more and more ordinary citizens now recognized, had closed off all avenues that might have brought compromise peace. The earlier victories were increasingly seen in a different light. There was no end in sight. But it now seemed clear to growing numbers of ordinary citizens that Hitler had taken them into a war which could only end in destruction, defeat, and disaster. There was still far to go, but over the next months the miseries of war would rebound in ever greater ferocity on the population of Germany itself. What was revealed after Stalingrad would become over those months ever clearer: for all the lingering strength of support, the German people’s love affair with Hitler was at an end. Only the bitter process of divorce remained.
12. BELEAGUERED
‘We have not only a “leadership crisis”, but strictly speaking a “Leader crisis”!’
‘Germany and its allies were in the same boat on a stormy sea. It was obvious that in this situation anyone wanting to get off would drown immediately.’
‘Herr Feldmarschall: we are not master here of our own decisions.’
‘A glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written… We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.’
‘The English claim that the German people have lost their trust in the Fuhrer,’ Goebbels declared. It was the opening to the fifth of his ten rhetorical questions towards the end of his two-hour speech proclaiming ‘total war’ on the evening of 18 February 1943. The hand-picked audience in Berlin’s Sportpalast rose as one man to denounce such an outrageous allegation. A chorus of voices arose: ‘Fuhrer command, we will obey.’ The tumult lasted for what seemed an age. Orchestrating the frenzied mood to perfection, the propaganda maestro eventually broke in to ask: ‘Is your trust in the Fuhrer greater, more faithful, and more unshakeable than ever? Is your readiness to follow him in all his ways and to do everything necessary to bring the war to a triumphant end absolute and unrestricted?’ Fourteen thousand voices hysterically cried out in unison the answer invited by Goebbels in his bid to quell doubters at home and to relay to the outside world the futility of any hope of inner collapse in Germany. Goebbels ended his morale-boosting peroration — which had been interrupted more than 200 times by clapping, cheering, shouts of approbation, or thunderous applause — with the words of Theodor Korner, the patriotic poet from the time of Prussia’s struggle against Napoleon: ‘Now people, arise — and storm burst forth!’ The great hall erupted. Amid the wild cheering the national anthem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles’ and the Party’s ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ rang out. The spectacle ended with cries of ‘the great German Leader Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.’1
The speech was intended to demonstrate the complete solidarity of people and leader, conveying Germany’s utter determination to carry on, and even intensify, the fight until victory was attained.2 But the solidarity, despite the impression temporarily left by Goebbels’s publicity spectacular, was by this time shrinking fast, the belief in Hitler among the mass of the population seriously undermined. What Goebbels did, in fact, was to solicit from his audience ‘a kind of plebiscitary “Ja” to self-destruction’3 in a war which Germany could by now neither win nor end through a negotiated peace.
The dwindling hopes of victory had already turned, for those with any sense of realism, into the near certainty of ultimate defeat. Over the next months, the German people, the Nazi regime, and its Leader would become ever more beleaguered. Friends and allies would desert, territorial gains crumble, ever-intensifying air-raids lay waste German cities, the insurmountable Allied superiority of manpower and weaponry manifest itself ever more plainly, and indications at home begin to multiply that, whatever Goebbels’s rhetoric might suggest, loyalties towards the regime, and even towards Hitler personally, had become severely weakened. Nevertheless, the defiance and resolve evoked in Goebbels’s Sportpalast speech, shored up by new levels of draconian repression as support for the regime dwindled, helped to rule out any prospect of collapse on the home front. This in turn would drag out the demise of the regime for a further two years, ensuring that death and devastation were to be maximized during a prolonged backs-to-the-wall struggle against increasingly impossible odds.
In the spirit he was attempting to evince through his Sportpalast speech, Goebbels was at one with Hitler. Goebbels’s advocacy of the need to instil the fanatical will to victory in the entire people and to mobilize the home front psychologically into accepting the most radical measures in an all-out struggle for the nation’s survival had met with Hitler’s approval on a number of occasions during the previous months. Whether, as he usually did, the Propaganda Minister had shown the text of his speech to Hitler in advance of the Sportpalast meeting is not altogether clear.4 Hitler was visiting his field headquarters in the Ukraine at the time of the speech. Communication with him, Goebbels remarked, was difficult but, he felt, in any case unnecessary since the main propaganda lines had already been established.5 Though he did not listen to the broadcast, Hitler immediately asked for the text to be sent to him and praised it shortly afterwards to Goebbels in glowing terms. There was, indeed, nothing in the speech to which Hitler might have taken exception.6
However, Goebbels’s hopes that the speech would bring him Hitler’s authorization to concentrate the direction of ‘total war’ in his own hands were swiftly dashed. The Propaganda Minister had long pressed for practical measures to radicalize the war effort. His own approach concentrated, of course, predominantly on
