At the end of September, Hitler flew back to Berlin. He had promised Goebbels to use the opening of the Winter Aid campaign to address the nation during the second half of September.262 Once more, it was important to sustain morale at a vital time.
He looked well when Goebbels saw him at a late lunch on 28 September, after speaking to 12,000 young officers in the Sportpalast. He was more optimistic than Goebbels had imagined he would be about Stalingrad. The city would soon be taken, Hitler claimed. Then the advance on the Caucasus could proceed again, even during the winter. Goebbels did not share the optimism.263 It was as if Hitler felt unable to deviate, even in private, from the fiction that all was going well in the eastern campaign. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Below, thought Hitler was by now starting to deceive himself about the realities of the situation.264
Next day, Hitler spoke to a small group of generals, along with Göring and Speer, about the dangers of an invasion in the west. Fiasco though it had been, the attempted landing of Canadian troops in Dieppe in mid-August had been a new reminder of the threat. But by the spring, when the new Atlantic Wall with its 15,000 bunkers was constructed, the Reich would be immune, he claimed.265
Hitler’s Sportpalast speech on 30 September combined a glorification of German military achievements with a sarcastic, mocking attack on Churchill and Roosevelt.266 This was nothing new, though the hand-picked Sportpalast audience lapped it up. They, and the wider audience listening to the broadcast of the speech, took especial note when Hitler suggested that, after the perils of the last winter had been surmounted, the worst was now behind them, and the economic benefits of the occupied territories would soon be flowing to Germany to improve the standard of living.267 He went on to repeat his prophecy about the Jews — by now a regular weapon in his rhetorical armoury — in the most menacing phrases he had so far used: ‘The Jews used to laugh, in Germany too, about my prophecies. I don’t know if they’re still laughing today, or whether the laughter has already gone out of them. But I, too, can now only offer the assurance: the laughter will go out of them everywhere. And I will also be right in my prophecies.’268 But the speech was most notable of all for his assurances about the battle for Stalingrad. The metropolis on the Volga, bearing the Soviet leader’s name, was being stormed, he declared, and would be taken. ‘You can be sure,’ he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’269
His public display of optimism was unbounded, even in a more confined forum, when he addressed the Reichs — and Gauleiter for almost three hours the following afternoon. He felt at ease, he told the gathering, in the company of his most long-standing Party comrades.270 ‘The Gauleiter,’ he had told Goebbels in mid-August, ‘never cheat me’ — unlike, he had said, his generals. ‘They are my most loyal and reliable colleagues. If I lost trust in them I wouldn’t know whom to trust.’271 He outlined the plans to thrust to the Caucasus, to cut the Soviet Union off from its oil. He said he had wanted to undertake that the previous year, but Brauchitsch had pushed the campaign in a completely different direction, towards Moscow ‘which is relatively uninteresting for us’. But he was certain that Germany would now gain possession of the oil-fields of Grozny, while a first priority was to get those oil-wells captured in a ruined state in Maykop flowing again. ‘The capture of Stalingrad,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘is for him an established fact,’ even if it could still take a little time. Once that was attained, Astrakhan would be the next target, then the destruction by the Luftwaffe of the key Soviet oil-fields of Baku. Thereafter, as he had already told Goebbels several weeks earlier (when he had spoken of overrunning Iraq, Iran, and Palestine), his sights were set on the British oil supplies from Mesopotamia and the Middle East.272 Surveying the position of his enemies, Hitler came to the remarkable conclusion that ‘the war was practically lost for the opposing side, no matter how long it was in a position to carry it on’. Only an internal upheaval in Germany could snatch victory for the enemy. It was the Party’s job to see that that could never happen. He had effusive praise for the Party’s work. The longer the war went on, commented Goebbels, the closer the Führer came to the Party.273
