Goebbels48: Sin Will Pluck on SinAFTER Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels revealed to Schirmeister that if worse cameto worst he was going to kill himself and his entire family.1 His contemptuousremarks about Paulus showed that he regarded self-immolation as the prerequisitefor entry to Valhalla.2 Besides, as he often said, for the top Nazis there was nogoing back; the enemy had often warned that they could expect nothing but thegallows.This lethal resolve concentrated his mind, and he threw his puny frame into revivingGermany’s fortunes with a fervour lacking in those colleagues who had less causeto fear retribution. His days became even longer. He spoke to workers on the tankassembly lines of the Alkett plant, gauleiters at Posen, army adjutants from everytheatre of war.In his view government officials presented a special problem. His own StaatssekretärGutterer had privately decided months earlier that the war was lost, and hundredsmore thought like him. In mid February Goebbels addressed the entire governmentin the Chancellery building—a ‘somewhat leaden’ audience, he found them.3‘Goebbels told us,’ wrote Ribbentrop’s Staatssekretär von Weizsäcker afterwards,‘that we’re too defeatist—we know too much to have faith, and too little to comprehend.’4 Göring’s Staatssekretär Milch was more impressed. ‘Minister Goebbels,’ hetold his colleagues afterwards, ‘using incredibly apt and clear, convincing language,indicated that the leadership of a state has the obligation during a crisis to keep a stiffupper lip and view the overall situation without carping or criticism or defeatism.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 751Our people,’ he continued, ‘look to us for leadership. They must not gain the impressionthat we are not taking up this energy which they are offering to us. From thousandsif not millions of letters, this want emerges,’ added Milch, quoting Goebbels.5Göring, the real culprit, had taken to his bed after Stalingrad.6 The army’s generals,sensing themselves also under attack, pointed out that Goebbels too was supposed togive up several thousand of his ministry’s staff toward the promised 800,000 newtroops. General von Unruh swooped on Goebbels’ office flanked by General FriedrichOlbricht—of whom more later—and several other officers, and called on him tojustify his non-fulfilment of his 3,400 man quota. ‘From what I was told,’ related anS.S. Obersturmbannführer gleefully to Himmler, ‘the Reichsminister threw a fit andintimated to General von Unruh that the Wehrmacht would do well to make a cleansweep in Bendler Strasse first [the war department HQ] and see to it that their fatand well-fed majors there were put to sensible work.’7 The row left feelings ruffledeverywhere.On February 12, after a conspiratorial meeting with Speer and Ley, Goebbels decidedto go ahead with his Big Meeting idea. Just six days later he would pack theSports Palace with his trusty Berliners and stage the most important mass meeting ofhis life; he would deliver to them a white-hot speech on Total War, and broadcast itworldwide.8 He banked on his audience’s response to show the out-of-touch bigwigslike Lammers and Bormann which way the wind was blowing. ‘The Führer,’ he dictated,‘is much more radical than he’s generally given credit for—if only we can stopthe faint-hearts beating a path to his door and pleading for moderation.’9He began dictating the historic Total War speech two days later. Over the next dayshe trimmed and modulated its tone, and even checked passages on foreign policywith Ribbentrop’s officials.10 He was planning to present Hitler with a fait accompli.Probably for the first time, he did not even show him the script.11Structured in three parts the speech drew on Goebbels’ twenty years of experienceas a demagogue. He selected mawkish, abstract phrases that had not failed himbefore (‘I want to speak to you from the depths of my heart, to the depths of yourheart’). He conjured with holy earnest, with utter candour, with historic missions, with752 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHdevout faith, and with solemn and sacred oaths. He would begin in the third person(‘they’), glide imperceptibly up into the oily-familiar second (‘ich frage euch’) andfinally unite orator and listening public into one all-embracing, gigantic, multimillionfoldfirst-person we (‘we all, the children of our nation…’). Heroic, steel,gigantic—the adjectives were all there, as were the clichés: ‘Today the most radical isjust radical enough, and the most total is just total enough, to see us through tovictory.’ The speech would take as its starting point the nation’s eagerness for TotalWar and follow through with warnings that a bolshevik victory would entail theliquidation of their entire intelligentsia. Spectres of ‘Jewish liquidation squads,’ terrorism,starvation, and anarchy haunted the pages of his script, as did more complexand inbred hatreds too, as he drew an angry picture of an upper class who must nowbe compelled to ‘sully their dainty hands’ along with the rest. In short he saw in thisappeal
