A few days earlier, Hitler had been more outwardly optimistic in a three-hour conversation with Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister remarked on how well Hitler was looking — almost unscathed from the pressures of the war, he thought. At first the discussion ranged over the situation in North Africa, where Hitler was more pessimistic than Army High Command about holding the position, given the inability to transport sufficient troops and material to that front. He foresaw setbacks there, and advised Goebbels not to raise expectations of military success. But his eyes were so fixed on the east, Goebbels recorded, that he regarded events in North Africa as no more than ‘peripheral’, and unable to affect events on the Continent itself.266 Hitler then turned to the eastern campaign. Once more he repeated his intention of destroying Leningrad and Moscow. ‘If the weather stays favourable, he still wants to make the attempt to encircle Moscow and thereby abandon it to hunger and devastation.’267
Whether an advance to the Caucasus would prove successful depended on the weather. But the improvement in weather and road conditions — on the frozen surfaces, instead of mud — had at least allowed motorized units to operate again. The supplies problems were serious. But he remained confident that the troops would master the situation. Goebbels asked him if he still believed in victory. Typically, he answered that ‘if he had believed in victory in 1918 when he lay without help as a half-blinded corporal in a Pomeranian military hospital, why should he not now believe in our victory when he controlled the strongest armed forces in the world and almost the whole of Europe was prostrate at his feet?’ He played down the difficulties; they occurred in every war. ‘World history was not made by weather,’ he added.268
Three days later, Goebbels was telephoned from FHQ and told to be cautious in his propaganda about the exhibition of winter clothing for the troops. It was proving scarcely possible to transport the provisions to the front. In these circumstances, such an exhibition at home could stir up ‘bad blood’.269 The caution was justified. Within weeks, the start of an emergency winter-clothing collection in Germany would give the most obvious sign that propaganda reassurance about provisions for the troops had been misplaced. It pointed unmistakably to a serious failure in planning.270
On 29 November, with Hitler once again briefly in Berlin, Goebbels had a further chance to speak with him at length. Hitler appeared full of optimism and confidence, brimming with energy, in excellent health.271 He professed still to be positive, despite the reversal in Rostov, where General Ewald von Kleist’s panzer army had been forced back the previous day after initially taking the city.272 Hitler now intended to withdraw sufficiently far from the city to allow massive air-raids which would bomb it to oblivion as a ‘bloody example’. The Führer had never favoured, wrote Goebbels, taking any of the Soviet major cities. There were no practical advantages in it, and it simply left the problem of feeding the women and children. There was no doubt, Hitler went on, that the enemy had lost most of their great armaments centres. That, he claimed, had been the aim of the war, and had been largely achieved. He hoped to advance further on Moscow. But he acknowledged that a great encirclement was impossible at present. The weather uncertainty meant any attempt to advance a further 200 kilometres to the east, without secure supplies, would be madness. The front-line troops would be cut off and would have to be withdrawn with a great loss of prestige which, at the current time, could not be afforded. So the offensive had to take place on a smaller scale.273 Hitler still expected Moscow to fall. When it did, there would be little left of it but ruins. In the following year, there would be an expansion of the offensive to the Caucasus to gain possession of Soviet oil supplies — or at least deny them to the Bolsheviks. The Crimea would be turned into a huge German settlement area for the best ethnic types, to be incorporated into the Reich territory as a Gau — named the ‘Ostrogoth Gau’
