The dwindling hopes of victory had already turned, for those with any sense of realism, into the near certainty of ultimate defeat. Over the next months, the German people, the Nazi regime, and its Leader would become ever more beleaguered. Friends and allies would desert, territorial gains crumble, ever-intensifying air-raids lay waste German cities, the insurmountable Allied superiority of manpower and weaponry manifest itself ever more plainly, and indications at home begin to multiply that, whatever Goebbels’s rhetoric might suggest, loyalties towards the regime, and even towards Hitler personally, had become severely weakened. Nevertheless, the defiance and resolve evoked in Goebbels’s Sportpalast speech, shored up by new levels of draconian repression as support for the regime dwindled, helped to rule out any prospect of collapse on the home front. This in turn would drag out the demise of the regime for a further two years, ensuring that death and devastation were to be maximized during a prolonged backs-to-the-wall struggle against increasingly impossible odds.
In the spirit he was attempting to evince through his Sportpalast speech, Goebbels was at one with Hitler. Goebbels’s advocacy of the need to instil the fanatical will to victory in the entire people and to mobilize the home front psychologically into accepting the most radical measures in an all-out struggle for the nation’s survival had met with Hitler’s approval on a number of occasions during the previous months. Whether, as he usually did, the Propaganda Minister had shown the text of his speech to Hitler in advance of the Sportpalast meeting is not altogether clear.4 Hitler was visiting his field headquarters in the Ukraine at the time of the speech. Communication with him, Goebbels remarked, was difficult but, he felt, in any case unnecessary since the main propaganda lines had already been established.5 Though he did not listen to the broadcast, Hitler immediately asked for the text to be sent to him and praised it shortly afterwards to Goebbels in glowing terms. There was, indeed, nothing in the speech to which Hitler might have taken exception.6
However, Goebbels’s hopes that the speech would bring him Hitler’s authorization to concentrate the direction of ‘total war’ in his own hands were swiftly dashed. The Propaganda Minister had long pressed for practical measures to radicalize the war effort. His own approach concentrated, of course, predominantly on psychological mobilization. Others, prominent among them Speer and the Wehrmacht leadership, focused their attention more squarely on the manpower needs of the armed forces and armaments industry, and the problem of how to squeeze out remaining reserves of labour. What they understood by ‘total war’ included the deployment of still unused female labour in industrial production, which they knew their enemies had accomplished. Hitler, shored up by Göring, had, however, resisted imposing increased hardship and material sacrifice on the civilian population. He was conscious as ever of the collapse of morale on the home front during the First World War, certain that this had undermined the military effort and paved the way for revolution.7 His anxiety about the impact on morale of their men-folk at the front, coupled with his traditionalist views about the domestic role of women, had led him to oppose the conscription of female labour to work in the hard-pressed armaments industries.8 Nevertheless, during the Stalingrad crisis he had finally conceded the aim of the complete mobilization of all conceivable labour and resources of the home front, and some initial measures had been introduced.9
