By 7 November, when Hitler travelled to Munich to give his traditional address in the Löwenbräukeller to the marchers in the 1923 Putsch, the news from the Mediterranean had dramatically worsened.
Hitler immediately gave orders for the defence of Tunis. But the landing had caught him and his military advisers off-guard. And Oran was out of reach of German bombers, which gave rise to a new torrent of rage at the incompetence of the Luftwaffe’s lack of planning.287 Further down the track, at Bamberg, Ribbentrop joined the train. He pleaded with Hitler to let him put out peace feelers to Stalin via the Soviet embassy in Stockholm with an offer of far-reaching concessions in the east. Hitler brusquely dismissed the suggestion: a moment of weakness was not the time for negotiations with an enemy.288 In his speech to the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ on the evening of 8 November, Hitler then publicly ruled out any prospect of a negotiated peace. With reference to his earlier ‘peace offers’, he declared: ‘From now on there will no more offer of peace.’289
It was hardly the atmosphere which Hitler would have chosen for a big speech. Not only had he nothing positive to report; the speech had to take place in the midst of a military crisis. Goebbels even had difficulty in pinning down exactly when the speech should start. Hitler needed time after his arrival in Munich to orientate himself on the Allied landing in North Africa and decide what to do.290 He was still uncertain when he arrived in the Brown House at 4p.m. He discussed the position of France and Italy with Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Keitel. Telephone calls were made to Paris, Rome, and Vichy. No decision could be arrived at in the brief time before the speech, which had been put back from its scheduled time to begin, eventually, at 6p.m.291
According to Goebbels, the news on the radio of the Allied landing in Africa had ‘electrified’ the Party gathering. ‘Everyone knows that, if things are pushed down a certain path, we are standing at a turning-point of the war.’292 But if the Party’s ‘Old Fighters’ expected any enlightenment from Hitler on the situation, they were to be disappointed. The usual verbal. assaults on Allied leaders and blustering parallels with the internal situation before the ‘seizure of power’ were all he had to offer. Refusal to compromise, the will to fight, determination to overcome the enemy, the lack of any alternative to complete success, and the certainty of final victory in a war for the very existence of the German people formed the basis of the message. Unlike the Kaiser, who had capitulated in the First World War at ‘quarter to twelve’, he ended, so he stated, ‘in principle always at five past twelve’.293 He again held out the prospect of imminent victory in Stalingrad. ‘I wanted to take it and, you know, we are modest: we have it. There are only a few tiny places there.’ If it was still taking a little time, it was because he wanted to avoid a second Verdun. He did not touch upon the Allied landings in North Africa. And the retreat forced upon Rommel’s Afrika Korps by the British 8th Army was passed over in a single sentence: ‘If they say they advanced somewhere in the desert; they’ve already advanced a few times and have had to pull back again.’294
