The encouragement of Hitler to back the radicalization of the home-front continued after Goebbels’s return from the Wolf’s Lair. Apart from the Propaganda Minister, it came in particular from Bormann and Himmler. On 26 March, the SD reported on a ‘crisis of confidence’ resulting from the failure of the state to take a tough enough stance against black-marketeers and their corrupt customers among the well-placed and privileged. Himmler, it seems, had directly prompted the report; Bormann made Hitler aware of it. Three days later, Goebbels castigated black-marketeering in
It was on this same evening, that of 29 March, Hitler treated his small audience in the Wolf’s Lair to a prolonged diatribe on lawyers and the deficiencies of the legal system, concluding that ‘every jurist must be defective by nature, or would become so in time’.65
This was only a few days after he had personally intervened in a blind rage with acting Justice Minister Schlegelberger and, when he proved dilatory, with the more eagerly compliant Roland Freisler (later the infamous President of the People’s Court as successor to Thierack but at this time Second State Secretary in the Justice Ministry), to insist on the death penalty for a man named Ewald Schlitt. This was on no more solid basis than the reading of a sensationalized account in a Berlin evening paper of how an Oldenburg court had sentenced Schlitt to only five years in a penitentiary for a horrific physical assault — according to the newspaper account — that had led to the death of his wife in an asylum. The court had been lenient because it took the view that Schlitt had been temporarily deranged. Schlegelberger lacked the courage to present the case fully to Hitler, and to defend the judges at the same time. Instead, he promised to improve the severity of sentencing. Freisler had no compunction in meeting Hitler’s wishes. The original sentence was overturned. In a new hearing, Schlitt was duly sentenced to death, and guillotined on 2 April.66
Hitler had been so enraged by what he had read on the Schlitt case — which matched all his prejudices about lawyers and fell precisely at the time when the judicial system was being made the scapegoat for the difficulties on the home front — that he had privately threatened, should other ‘excessively lenient’ sentences be produced, ‘to send the Justice Ministry to the devil through a Reichstag law’.67 As it was, the Schlitt case was brought into service as a pretext to demand from the Reichstag absolute powers over the law itself.
Hitler rang Goebbels on 23 April to tell him that he had now decided to deliver the speech to the Reichstag he had for long had in mind. Goebbels undertook to make the necessary arrangements to summon the Reichstag for 3p.m. on Sunday, 26 April.68
Goebbels went round to the Reich Chancellery for lunch shortly after Hitler’s arrival in Berlin at midday on the 25th. He found him looking well and feeling in good form, though in a particularly sour mood at the failure of air-defences to protect the Heinkel works in Rostock from damage in a bombing raid, following the opening of the British bombing offensive with a devastating attack on Lübeck at the end of March.69 Hitler extended his criticism from the Luftwaffe to the lack of initiative of the ‘unmodern’ navy and its lack of any ‘leadership of stature’.70 But, as regards the eastern front, he was confident that the lessons of the winter had been learned and full of optimism about the coming offensive, now in an advanced stage of preparation. Reports had been handed to him detailing starvation and cannibalism among the army and civilian population of the Soviet Union, and the abysmal level of equipment of the Red Army’s soldiers.71 It seemed — something he would persistently claim throughout 1942 — that the Soviet Union was almost on its last legs. Goebbels was clearly less certain that Germany would attain decisive successes in the summer. And Hitler himself gave an indication that total victory in the east would not be attained in 1942, speaking of building a more solid line of defence in the coming winter, when supplies for the German troops would no longer pose a problem.72
He soon launched into one of his favourite obsessions — vegetarianism. Much of the remainder of the ‘discussion’ consisted of a lecture on the dangers of meat-eating.73 In the war, Hitler remarked, there was little to be done about upturning eating methods. But he intended to see to the problem once the war was over. Similarly with the question of the Christian Churches — one of Goebbels’s pet themes, which he brought up once more: it was necessary for the time being, commented Hitler, not to react to the ‘seditious’ actions of the clergy; ‘the showdown’ would be saved for a ‘more advantageous situation after the war’ when he would have to come as the ‘avenger’.74
