Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

On his return to Berlin on 18 March after some days away in the ‘Ostmark’ and Bavaria, Goebbels had been appalled at a ‘scandalous scene’ in the station where soldiers travelling to the eastern front were having to stand in the corridors of trains ‘while fine ladies, returning sunburnt from holiday, naturally had their sleeping-compartments’. What was needed, he claimed, was a law under which ‘all offences against known National Socialist principles of leadership of the people in war will be punished with corresponding retribution’.⁵⁵ That, too, he was going to put before Hitler during his visit to the Führer Headquarters. But Goebbels felt that, as things were, a radical approach to the law, necessary in total war, was being sabotaged by representatives of the formal legal system. He approved of Bormann’s demands for tougher sentences for black-marketeering.⁵⁶ And he took it upon himself to press Hitler to change the leadership of the Justice Ministry, which since Gürtner’s death the previous year had been run by the State Secretary, Franz Schlegelberger. ‘The bourgeois elements still dominate there,’ he commented, ‘and since the heavens are high and the Führer far away, it’s extraordinarily difficult to succeed against these stubborn and listlessly working authorities.’⁵⁷ It was in this mood — determined to persuade Hitler to support radical measures, attack privilege, and castigate the state bureaucracy (above all judges and lawyers) — that Goebbels arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on the ice-cold morning of 19 March.⁵⁸

He met a Hitler showing clear signs of the strain he had been under during the past months, in a state of mind that left him more than open to Goebbels’s radical suggestions. He needed no instruction about the mood in Germany, and the impact the reduction in food rations would have.⁵⁹ Lack of transport prevented food being brought from the Ukraine, he complained. The Transport Ministry was blamed for the shortage of locomotives. He was determined to take tough measures. Goebbels then lost no time in berating the ‘failure’ of the judicial system. Hitler did not demur. Here, too, he was determined to proceed with ‘the toughest measures’. Goebbels paraded before Hitler his suggestion for a new comprehensive law to punish offenders against the ‘principles of National Socialist leadership of the people’. He wanted the Reich Ministry of Justice placed in new hands, and pressed for Otto Thierack, ‘a real National Socialist’, an SA-Gruppenfiihrer, and currently President of the notorious People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) — responsible for dealing with cases of treason and other serious offences against the regime — to take the place left by Gürtner.⁶⁰ Five months later, Hitler would make the appointment that Goebbels had wanted, and, in Thierack’s hands, the capitulation of the judicial system to the police state would become complete.⁶¹

For now, Hitler placated Goebbels with a suggestion to prepare the ground for a radical assault on social privilege by recalling the Reichstag and having it bestow upon him ‘a special plenipotentiary power’ so that ‘the evil-doers know that he is covered in every way by the people’s community’. Given the powers which Hitler already possessed, the motive was purely populist. An attack on the civil servants and judges, and upon the privileged in society — or, as Hitler put it, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘neglecters of duty in public functions’ — could not fail to be popular with the masses. Up to this point, judges could not be dismissed — not even by the Führer. There were limits, too, to his rights of intervention in the military sphere. The case of Colonel-General Erich Hoepner still rankled deeply. Hitler had sacked — Hoepner in January and dismissed him from the army in disgrace for retreating in disobedience to his ‘Halt Order’. Hoepner had then instituted a law-suit against the Reich over the loss of his pension rights — and won. With Hitler’s new powers, this could never happen again. Examples could be set in the military and civilian sector to serve as deterrents to others and ‘clear the air’.⁶²

‘In such a mood,’ wrote Goebbels the next day, ‘my suggestions for the radicalization of our war-leadership naturally had an absolutely positive effect on the Führer. I only need to touch a topic and I have already got my way. Everything that I put forward individually is accepted piece for piece by the Führer without contradiction.’⁶³