In this, at least, the dictator and the people he led were at one. Hitler, as more and more ordinary citizens now recognized, had closed off all avenues that might have brought compromise peace. The earlier victories were increasingly seen in a different light. There was no end in sight. But it now seemed clear to growing numbers of ordinary citizens that Hitler had taken them into a war which could only end in destruction, defeat, and disaster. There was still far to go, but over the next months the miseries of war would rebound in ever greater ferocity on the population of Germany itself. What was revealed after Stalingrad would become over those months ever clearer: for all the lingering strength of support, the German people’s love affair with Hitler was at an end. Only the bitter process of divorce remained.
‘We have not only a “leadership crisis”, but strictly speaking a “Leader crisis”!’
‘Germany and its allies were in the same boat on a stormy sea. It was obvious that in this situation anyone wanting to get off would drown immediately.’
‘Herr Feldmarschall: we are not master here of our own decisions.’
‘A glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written… We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.’
‘The English claim that the German people have lost their trust in the Führer,’ Goebbels declared. It was the opening to the fifth of his ten rhetorical questions towards the end of his two-hour speech proclaiming ‘total war’ on the evening of 18 February 1943. The hand-picked audience in Berlin’s Sportpalast rose as one man to denounce such an outrageous allegation. A chorus of voices arose: ‘Führer command, we will obey.’ The tumult lasted for what seemed an age. Orchestrating the frenzied mood to perfection, the propaganda maestro eventually broke in to ask: ‘Is your trust in the Führer greater, more faithful, and more unshakeable than ever? Is your readiness to follow him in all his ways and to do everything necessary to bring the war to a triumphant end absolute and unrestricted?’ Fourteen thousand voices hysterically cried out in unison the answer invited by Goebbels in his bid to quell doubters at home and to relay to the outside world the futility of any hope of inner collapse in Germany. Goebbels ended his morale-boosting peroration — which had been interrupted more than 200 times by clapping, cheering, shouts of approbation, or thunderous applause — with the words of Theodor Körner, the patriotic poet from the time of Prussia’s struggle against Napoleon: ‘Now people, arise — and storm burst forth!’ The great hall erupted. Amid the wild cheering the national anthem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ and the Party’s ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ rang out. The spectacle ended with cries of ‘the great German Leader Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.’1
The speech was intended to demonstrate the complete solidarity of people and leader, conveying Germany’s utter determination to carry on, and even intensify, the fight until victory was attained.2 But the solidarity, despite the impression temporarily left by Goebbels’s publicity spectacular, was by this time shrinking fast, the belief in Hitler among the mass of the population seriously undermined. What Goebbels did, in fact, was to solicit from his audience ‘a kind of plebiscitary “Ja” to self-destruction’3 in a war which Germany could by now neither win nor end through a negotiated peace.
