There was not a trace of demoralization, depression, or uncertainty when he spoke to the Reichs — and Gauleiter for almost two hours at his headquarters on 7 February.391 He told them at the very beginning of his address that he believed in victory more than ever. Then he described what Goebbels referred to as ‘the catastrophe on the eastern front’.392 Hitler did not look close to home for the failings. While he said he naturally accepted full responsibility for the events of the winter,393 he left no doubt where in his view the real fault lay. From the beginning of his political career — indeed, from what is known of his earliest remarks on politics — he had cast around for scapegoats. The trait was too embedded in his psyche for him to stray from it now that, for the first time, an unmitigated national disaster had to be explained. Addressing the Party leadership, as in his private discussion with Goebbels a fortnight or so earlier, he once more placed the blame for the disaster at Stalingrad squarely on the ‘complete failure’ of Germany’s allies — the Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians — whose fighting powers met with his ‘absolute contempt’.394 The consequence of the collapse of Germany’s allies in the defensive front had been to endanger the Caucasus army. This had necessitated the ‘extraordinarily difficult order, involving much sacrifice’, that the 6th Army should stand fast and bind in the Red Army ‘to prevent the catastrophe gripping the entire eastern front’. Dreadful weather conditions, he said, had prevented it being supplied from the air, as had been presumed possible. Hitler took the view that the crisis, in broad terms, could be taken to be mastered. ‘The Caucasus army had been saved through the sacrifice of the 6th Army in Stalingrad.’395
Not just the search for scapegoats, but the feeling of treachery and betrayal was entrenched in Hitler’s thinking. Another strand of his explanation for the disaster at Stalingrad was the prospect of imminent French betrayal, forcing him to retain several divisions, especially SS-divisions, in the west when they were desperately needed in the east.396 But Hitler had the extraordinary capacity, as his Luftwaffe adjutant Below noted, of turning negative into positive, and convincing his audience of this.397 A landing by the Allies in France would have been far more dangerous, he claimed, than that which had taken place in North Africa and had been checked through the occupation of Tunis.398 He saw grounds for optimism, too, in the success of the U-boats, and in Speer’s armaments programme enabling better flak defence against air-raids together with full-scale production by the summer of the Tiger tank.399
Much of the rest of Hitler’s address was on the ‘psychology’ of war. Goebbels had shrewdly played on Hitler’s instincts in demanding the rad-icalization of the ‘home front’ and the move to ‘total war’. The urgings of the Propaganda Minister found their echo in Hitler’s rallying-call to his Gauleiter. The crisis was more of a psychological than a material one, he declared, and must therefore be overcome by ‘psychological means’. It was the Party’s task to achieve this. The Gauleiter should remember the ‘time of struggle’. Radical measures were now needed. Austerity, sacrifice, and the end of any privileges for certain sectors of society was the order of the day. The setbacks but eventual triumph of Frederick the Great — the implied comparison with Hitler’s own leadership was plain — were invoked.400 The setbacks now being faced — solely the fault of Germany’s allies — even had their own psychological advantages. Propaganda and the Party’s agitation could awaken people to the fact that they had stark alternatives: becoming master of Europe, or undergoing ‘a total liquidation and extermination’.401
Hitler pointed out one advantage which, he claimed, the Allies possessed: that they were sustained by international Jewry. The consequence, Goebbels reported Hitler as saying, was ‘that we have to eliminate Jewry not only from Reich territory but from the whole of Europe’. Goebbels noted approvingly that Hitler had again adopted his own viewpoint, and that within the foreseeable future there would be no more Jews in Berlin. ‘The ruthlessness towards Jewry which [Hitler] impresses on all Gauleiter,’ Goebbels added, ‘has long since been the political order of the day in Berlin.’402
