Nevertheless, Hitler’s mightiest subjects were determined to do everything they could to sabotage a development which they saw as inimical to their own power-positions — and from which they had been excluded. The first notions of a challenge to the role of the ‘Committee of Three’ were intimated during the reception in Goebbels’s residence following his ‘total war’ speech on 18 February. Nine days later, Funk, Ley, and Speer met again over cognac and tea in Goebbels’s stately apartments — gloomy now that the light-bulbs had been removed to comply with the new ‘total war’ demands — to see what could be done.43 Soon afterwards, at the beginning of March, Goebbels travelled from Berlin down to Berchtesgaden to plot with Göring a way of sidelining the Committee. Speer had already sounded him out.44 In talks lasting five hours at Göring’s palatial villa on the Obersalzberg, partly with Speer present, the Reich Marshal, dressed in ‘somewhat baroque clothes’,45 was quickly won over.
The ‘Committee of Three’, which he scornfully labelled ‘the three kings’,46 was a worry to him too. He detested Lammers as a ‘super bureaucrat’ who wanted to put the Reich leadership back in the hands of the government officials. Hitler, thought Göring, had not seen through Lammers. It was necessary to open the Führer’s eyes. Bormann was, of course, following his own ambitious ends. Keitel was a complete nonentity.47 Former differences between Göring and Goebbels were waved aside. Göring’s considerable ego had been much deflated through losing favour with Hitler on account of the Luftwaffe’s failure to prevent the bombing of German cities. Goebbels flattered him, and at the same time reproached him for allowing the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich to fall into disuse. The Propaganda Minister’s plan — actually it had initally been suggested by Speer48 — was to revive the Ministerial Council, under Göring’s chairmanship, and to give it the membership to turn it into an effective body to rule the Reich, leaving Hitler free to concentrate on the direction of military affairs. Goebbels spoke of ‘the total lack of a clear leadership in domestic and foreign policy’.49 Göring said that the Führer seemed to him to have aged fifteen years since the start of the war. He had shut himself off too much, and had a mentally and physically unhealthy lifestyle. But there was probably nothing to be done about that.50
Goebbels couched his arguments in terms of loyalty to Hitler, and the need to relieve him of oppressive burdens to free him for military leadership. Hitler’s depressed mood — he had indicated from time to time that death held no fears for him — was, said Goebbels, understandable; all the more reason, then, for his ‘closest friends’ to form ‘a solid phalanx around his person’. He reminded Göring of what threatened if the war were lost: ‘Above all as regards the Jewish Question, we are in it so deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that’s good. A Movement and a people that have burnt their boats fight, from experience, with fewer constraints than those that still have a chance of retreat.’51 The Party needed revitalizing.52 And if Göring could now reactivate the Ministerial Council and put it in the hands of Hitler’s most loyal followers, argued Goebbels, the Führer would surely be in agreement.53
Goebbels suggested that he and Göring approach the appropriate persons. But none of these should be initiated into the actual intention of sidelining the ‘Committee of Three’ and transferring authority to the Ministerial Council. They would choose their moment to put the proposition to Hitler himself. This would, they knew, not be easy, despite Goebbels’s repeated protestations that the Führer would be happy about the idea. Goebbels and Speer undertook to work on Hitler in the interim. Göring and Goebbels would meet again in a fortnight. They did not doubt that they would swiftly master the problem of ‘the three kings’.54
