JG (MinConf., Jan 24, 1943.)
60 SS Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger to Himmler, Jan 29, 1943 (NA film T175, roll
124, 9596); see too MinConf., Jan 24, and naval staff war diary, Jan 24, 1943.
61 See JG’s comments on this in MinConf., Jan 24; in his speech to the gauleiters on Feb 7,
1943 Hitler borrowed JG’s comparisons with the winter of 1932/33.
62 Diary, Jan 23, 1943.
63 Dittmar diary, Jan 23, 1943 (Author’s film DI-60); at his conference on Jan 27, 1943, JG
referred to similar speeches of Caesar and Frederick the Great. ‘The few sentences about
the saga of Stalingrad must be clear, devoid of pathos, and modest, as though hewn from
solid rock.’
64 JG to all propaganda agencies, Jan 24, 1943 (NA film T84, roll 24, 1959ff).
65 Mallet (Stockholm) to FO, Jan 28, 1943 (PRO file FO.371/34454); Göring had evidently
tipped off his Swedish contact Birger Dahlerus.
66 Diary, Jan 28; Semler, ‘Jan 14, 1943.’
67 Press directives in BA, Sänger collection.
68 OSS report, Feb 10, 1943 (NA file RG.226, CRR, entry 16, box 2456, file 28480).
69 JG, ‘Die harte Stunde,’ in Das Reich, Feb 7; public reaction to it in SD report, Feb 11,
1943 (NA film T175, roll 264, 8686f).
70 Regulations on male and female recruiting for Reich defence duties, Jan 27, in RGBl., I,
1943, 67; JG’s commentary on this in MinConf., Jan 29, 1943.
71 JG to Hitler, Jul 18, 1944 (BA file NL.118/107); see his diary, Jan 26, 29, 1943.
72 Diary, Jan 28; and see Semler, ‘Jan 29, 1943.’
73 Frölich (RPL), circular No.179 to all gau propaganda officers, Jan 30, 1943 (NA film
T81, roll 24, 1960f).
74 Diary, Feb 1, 1943.
75 FO (Bruce-Lockhart) to Cairo and Bowes-Lyon to Washington, Feb 1 (PRO file FO.371/
34454). The former considered that Göring spoke effectively to the younger generation, the
latter commented that Hitler, Göring, and JG refrained from attacking the USA and harped
instead on the bolshevik menace. Dittmar (diary, Jan 30, 1943), rated JG’s speech as the
better.
76 Diary, Dec 7, 12, 1942.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 749
77 BBC Monitoring Report, transcript of JG’s speech, Jan 30, 1943 (PRO file FO.371/
34454).
78 US Federal Communications Commission, Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, Special
Report No.49, Feb 1, 1943: ‘The Nazi anniversary speeches of Jan 30, 1943,’ 16pp (NA
file R.226, entry 16, box 234, file 27843).
79 Borresholm, 9.
80 In a useful analysis of the speech’s defensive utterances the Americans also found that
27% were appeals to nostalgia (past anniversaries, trials, successes), 18% were praise of
Nazi reconstruction, 14% were exculpatory statements about Versailles, Hitler having sought
peace, etc., 9% were protestations of faith in, and the mission of, the Führer, 9% were
taunts, 7% were admissions (‘this is a crisis’), 7% were glorification of the troops, 5% were
quasi-mystical (Providence etc.), 2% were exhortations (must try harder), and 2% were
promises of future rewards.—For the German public’s response see SD report, Feb 1, 1943
(NA film T175, roll 264, 8587ff).—It is worth commenting that in his MinConf on Dec 22,
1942 JG had forbidden the use of words like grave and critical ‘since if we use the word grave
in our propaganda the enemy will make catastrophic Ê out of it.’
81 Diary, Feb 1, 1943.
82 Krämer, 210f.
83 MinConf., Feb 1–2; diary, Feb 2; Dittmar wrote on Feb 2, ‘Went at noon to Fritzsche’s
conf. in propaganda ministry. I’ve never seen him so upset as today. The Russian report has
put the cat among the pigeons… Obviously we can’t check if it’s true. General indignation
that P. didn’t commit suicide. All well and good, but what do we know of the final dramatic
hours?’
84 Diary, Feb 4, 1943. Dittmar: ‘Now even the dullest amongst us can see what’s what.’—
Hinkel to JG, Feb 3, 1943 (BA file R.55/1254).
85 Hitler’s speech is summarised in Ursula Backe’s diary, Feb 8, 1943. The Russian official
historians state that more than one million Soviet soldiers were killed during the Stalingrad
battle, with 13,500 executed for cowardice.
86 Diary, Feb 8, 1943.
750 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels
48: Sin Will Pluck on Sin
AFTER Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels revealed to Schirmeister that if worse came
to worst he was going to kill himself and his entire family.1 His contemptuous
remarks about Paulus showed that he regarded self-immolation as the prerequisite
for entry to Valhalla.2 Besides, as he often said, for the top Nazis there was no
going back; the enemy had often warned that they could expect nothing but the
gallows.
This lethal resolve concentrated his mind, and he threw his puny frame into reviving
Germany’s fortunes with a fervour lacking in those colleagues who had less cause
to fear retribution. His days became even longer. He spoke to workers on the tank
assembly lines of the Alkett plant, gauleiters at Posen, army adjutants from every
theatre of war.
In his view government officials presented a special problem. His own Staatssekretär
Gutterer had privately decided months earlier that the war was lost, and hundreds
more thought like him. In mid February Goebbels addressed the entire government
in 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,’ he
told 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 stiff
upper lip and view the overall situation without carping or criticism or defeatism.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 751
Our people,’ he continued, ‘look to us for leadership. They must not gain the impression
that we are not taking up this energy which they are offering to us. From thousands
if not millions of letters, this want emerges,’ added Milch, quoting Goebbels.5
Göring, 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 to
give up several thousand of his ministry’s staff toward the promised 800,000 new
troops. General von Unruh swooped on Goebbels’ office flanked by General Friedrich
Olbricht—of whom more later—and several other officers, and called on him to
justify his non-fulfilment of his 3,400 man quota. ‘From what I was told,’ related an
S.S. Obersturmbannführer gleefully to Himmler, ‘the Reichsminister threw a fit and
intimated to General von Unruh that the Wehrmacht would do well to make a clean
sweep in Bendler Strasse first [the war department HQ] and see to it that their fat
and well-fed majors there were put to sensible work.’7 The row left feelings ruffled
everywhere.
On February 12, after a conspiratorial meeting with Speer and Ley, Goebbels decided
&nbs
p; to go ahead with his Big Meeting idea. Just six days later he would pack the
Sports Palace with his trusty Berliners and stage the most important mass meeting of
his life; he would deliver to them a white-hot speech on Total War, and broadcast it
worldwide.8 He banked on his audience’s response to show the out-of-touch bigwigs
like 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 stop
the faint-hearts beating a path to his door and pleading for moderation.’9
He began dictating the historic Total War speech two days later. Over the next days
he trimmed and modulated its tone, and even checked passages on foreign policy
with 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.11
Structured in three parts the speech drew on Goebbels’ twenty years of experience
as a demagogue. He selected mawkish, abstract phrases that had not failed him
before (‘I want to speak to you from the depths of my heart, to the depths of your
heart’). He conjured with holy earnest, with utter candour, with historic missions, with
752 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
devout 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’) and
finally unite orator and listening public into one all-embracing, gigantic, multimillionfold
first-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 is
just radical enough, and the most total is just total enough, to see us through to
victory.’ The speech would take as its starting point the nation’s eagerness for Total
War and follow through with warnings that a bolshevik victory would entail the
liquidation of their entire intelligentsia. Spectres of ‘Jewish liquidation squads,’ terrorism,
starvation, and anarchy haunted the pages of his script, as did more complex
and inbred hatreds too, as he drew an angry picture of an upper class who must now
be compelled to ‘sully their dainty hands’ along with the rest. In short he saw in this
appeal for total war his chance to rededicate the party to its former socialist ideals.12
On the morning of the big speech, February 18, his ministry telexed the entire
text to newspapers, forewarning editors that Dr Goebbels intended to ask the audience
Ten Questions. ‘In your front page make-up,’ the newspapers were instructed,
‘their response is to be reported as the express will of the entire nation.’13 While
there were no claqueurs in the vast auditorium, Goebbels had arranged for the usual
canned applause and laughter to be trickled into the loudspeakers to trigger audience
response at the proper moments.
The demand for tickets was colossal. Fifteen thousand packed in, just as in the
good old days before 1933, ordinary people coming together in a mood of selfdoubt.
14 Here in Germany’s undoubted hour of crisis they were to rediscover their
community of purpose and sense of power. The hall was sparsely decorated. Just one
huge banner hung above the podium, reading TOTAL WAR: SHORTEST WAR. As Goebbels
skilfully whipped them up, his audience had an overwhelming sense of release. He
had deliberately chosen the amplitude, intonation, and rhythm of each passage. The
newsreels captured extraordinary scenes of emotion. Within minutes the audience
was leaping to its feet, saluting, screaming, and chanting (‘Führer command! We
obey!’) ‘Goebbels’ delivery,’ wrote one postwar analyst of this famous speech, ‘was
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 753
grave, imploring, moralising, stern, provocative, mocking, derisive, ironic, and even
monotonous as need dictated.’ ‘Key words, particularly superlatives, were drawn
out and acccentuated. He paused deliberately before important passages. Embarking
on a particular challenge he increased the tempo so that the words came out in a
rush, and he leaned closer to the microphone to increase the volume. He was particularly
adept at the trick of building on applause by briefly carrying on speaking
despite it. He augmented the shouts of assent to his questions by hurling words into
the applause like “Is that what you want?” or “Are you willing?”’15 Over two hundred
times his audience interrupted with exclamations, shouts of approval, applause, and
laughter; soon they were cheering every sentence, sometimes every phrase. One
seasoned journalist later described the audience as being in a kind of euphoria. ‘Even
the foreign and neutral journalists were excitedly jumping up and down applauding
Goebbels.’16
The audience included most of the government and party leadership. The newsreels
show the front rows filled with war-wounded with attendant Red Cross nurses
and bemedalled soldiers. Behind them, as Goebbels remarked during the speech, sat
Berlin’s ordinary munitions workers, doctors, scientists, artists, engineers, architects,
teachers, and civil servants (‘Of course,’ he pointed out, ‘the Jews are not
represented here.’*) Camera operators picked out popular film stars like Heinrich
George—he was seen in close up cheering, leaping to his feet and saluting excitedly
—and several children in the front rows including Helga and Hilde Goebbels,
allowed their first glimpse of such a mass meeting.17 Between them sat their mother
who had just been discharged from the clinic.
Addressing this huge multitude Goebbels promised an unvarnished picture of the
crisis—he flattered the ‘schooled and disciplined German people’ that they could be
trusted with the truth. He was not going to apportion blame for Stalingrad, he said:
the future would show why the sacrifice had not been in vain. The last bulkhead of
* This sentence was cut from the published transcript.
754 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
‘our venerable continent’, he said, to tactful applause, were Germany and her allies.
18 Toward the end he hurled at them the Ten Questions, challenging their belief in
victory, their willingness to fight, and their determination to work if need be sixteen
hours each day and to ‘give all they had for victory.’ The orgiastic climax was reached
by the question: ‘Do you want total war? Do you want war more total, if need be,
and more radical than we can even begin to conceive of today?’ And then, almost
casually, ‘Do you agree that anybody who injures our war effort should be put to
death?’19 The bellow of assent each time was deafening.
He dined that evening with Milch, Paul Körner, Wilhelm Stuckart, Thierack, Ley,
and Speer. Somebody remarked that the speech had been a kind of ‘silent coup d’état’
by Goebbels. He quoted this phrase with satisfaction in his diary, while hastening to
add that the coup was ‘against bureaucracy.’20
This speech was his greatest achievement in a lifetime of speaking. Curiously, neither
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 123
