At their first meeting, over lunch, Hitler, looking tired but otherwise well, and more lively than of late, launched as usual into a bitter onslaught on the generals who, he claimed, were cheating him wherever they could do so.62 He carried on in the same vein during a private four-hour discussion alone with Goebbels that afternoon. He was furious at Göring, and at the entire Luftwaffe leadership with the exception of the Chief of the General Staff Hans Jeschonnek. Characteristically, Hitler thought the best way of preventing German cities being reduced to heaps of rubble was by responding with ‘terror from our side’.63 Despite his insistence to Speer that they had to go ahead with their proposal, Goebbels evidently concluded during his discussion with Hitler that it would be fruitless to do so. ‘In view of the general mood,’ he noted, ‘I regard it as inopportune to put to the Führer the question of Göring’s political leadership; it’s at present an unsuitable moment. We must defer the business until somewhat later.’64 Any hope of raising the matter, even obliquely, when Goebbels and Speer sat with Hitler by the fireside until late in the night was dashed when news came in of a heavy air-raid on Nuremberg. Hitler fell into a towering rage about Göring and the Luftwaffe leadership. Speer and Goebbels, calming Hitler only with difficulty, postponed their plans. They were never resurrected.65
Goebbels and Speer had failed at the first hurdle. Face to face with Hitler, they felt unable to confront him. Hitler’s fury over Göring was enough to veto even the prospect of any rational discussion about restructuring Reich government. But the problem went further. Goebbels and Speer, blaming distraction through the command of military strategy and Bormann’s deviousness, thought that Hitler was unable or unprepared to sweep through the jungle of conflicting authorities and radicalize the home front as they wanted him to. In this, they were holding to the illusion that the regime was reformable, but that Hitler was unwilling to reform it. What they did not fully grasp was that the shapeless ‘system’ of governance that had emerged was both the inexorable product of Hitler’s personalized rule and the guarantee of his power.
In a modern state, necessarily resting on bureaucracy and dependent upon system and regulated procedure, centring all spheres of power in the hands of one man — whose leadership style was utterly unbureaucratic and whose approach to rule was completely unsystematic, resting as it did on a combination of force and propaganda — could only produce administrative chaos amid a morass of competing authorities. But this same organizational incoherence was the very safeguard of Hitler’s power, since every strand of authority was dependent on him. Changing the ‘system’ without changing its focal point was impossible. Hitler was incapable of reforming his Reich; nor, in any case, could he have any interest in doing so. He continued, as ever, to intervene wilfully and arbitrarily in a wide array of matters, often of a trivial nature, undermining as he did so any semblance of governmental order or rationality.
Goebbels and Speer did not immediately give up their efforts. Together with Ley and Funk, they met Göring for three hours on 17 March, going over much of the same ground that they had covered when they had met the Reich Marshal earlier in the month in Berchtesgaden. The upshot was no more than an agreement that Göring would propose to the Führer in the near future that he ‘activate somewhat the German leadership at home’ by resurrecting the Ministerial Council and adding to it Speer, Ley, Himmler, and Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister even manipulated Göring into accepting him as his deputy in the running of the intended weekly meetings.66 Predictably, nothing came of it. During April, Göring was included by Lammers, with Hitler’s approval, in two meetings of the ‘Committee of Three’, dealing with the application of the Führer Decree on Total War to the occupied territories. His antagonism to the Committee seems thereafter largely to have evaporated.67 As so often, Göring’s initial energy soon gave way to lethargy. In any case, his star had sunk so deep in the wake of further heavy air-raids that he must have realized how little realistic hope he had of gaining Hitler’s backing for any new position of authority. A diplomatic illness — whether or not associated with his sizeable daily intake of narcotics is not known — came to his aid.68 April ended with him prescribed bed-rest by his doctor.69 As Speer was to comment laconically, it was only in Nuremberg, on trial for his life, that Göring came fully to life again.70
