Goebbels’s decisive action to put down the uprising on 20 July unquestionably weighed heavily in his favour when Hitler looked for the man to supervise the radicalization of the home front. And where before he had faced a hesitant Hitler, he was now pushing at an open door in his demands for draconian measures. The decision had in effect already been taken when, at a meeting of ministerial representatives along with some other leading figures in the regime two days after Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, head of the Reich Chancellery Lammers proposed the bestowing of wide-ranging powers on the Propaganda Minister to bring about the reform of the state and public life. Himmler was given extensive complementary powers at the same time to reorganize the Wehrmacht and comb out all remaining manpower.111 The following day, 23 July, the regime’s leaders, now joined by Göring, assembled at the Wolf’s Lair, where Hitler himself, heavily leaning on Goebbels’s memorandum of the previous week, confirmed the new role of the Propaganda Minister. Hitler demanded ‘something fundamental’ if the war were still to be won. Massive reserves were available, he claimed, but had not been deployed. This would now have to be done without respect to person, position, or office. He pointed to the Party in the early days, which had achieved ‘the greatest historic success’ with only a simple administrative apparatus. Goebbels noted with interest the change in Hitler’s views since their previous meeting a month or so earlier. The assassination attempt and the events on the eastern front had produced clarity in his decisions, Goebbels noted in his diary.112 To his own staff, the Propaganda Minister laconically remarked that ‘it takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see reason’.113
Hitler’s decree of 25 July, appointing Goebbels to his new position, indicated that the proposal for the establishment of a ‘Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort’ had come from Göring, in his long-standing (but wholly ineffectual) capacity as Chairman of the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich.114 In fact, the formulation had been suggested by Goebbels himself, then carefully drafted by Lammers, to save face for Göring, who had objected to the further diminution of his own authority and, as usual, been able to rely on Hitler’s unwillingness to dent his prestige. Even so, the Reich Marshal retreated in high dudgeon to his East Prussian hunting estate at Rominten and could not be persuaded for weeks to return to the Wolf’s Lair.115 Goebbels relished his moment of triumph. He appeared to have finally achieved what he had desired for so long: control over the ‘home front’ with ‘the most extensive plenipotentiary powers… that have up to now been granted in the National Socialist Reich’, with rights — the decisive factor in his view — to issue directives to ministers and the highest-ranking governmental authorities.116 To his staff, he spoke of having ‘practically full dictatorial powers’ within the Reich.117
However, nothing was ever quite what it seemed in the Third Reich. The decree itself limited Goebbels’s powers in some respects. He could issue directives to the ‘highest Reich authorities’. But only they could issue any consequential decrees and ordinances. And these had to be agreed with Lammers, Bormann, and Himmler (in the capacity he had adopted when becoming Interior Minister, as Plenipotentiary for Reich Administration). Any directives related to the Party itself had to have Bormann’s support (and, behind Bormann, to correspond with Hitler’s own wishes). Any unresolved objections to Goebbels’s directives had to pass to Lammers for Hitler’s own final decision. Beyond the wording of the decree itself, Hitler let Goebbels know that those authorities directly responsible to him — those involved in the rebuilding plans for Berlin, Munich, and Linz, his motor-vehicle staff, and the personnel of the Reich Chancellery, Presidential Chancellery, and Party Chancellery — were also excluded from the directives. 118 The Wehrmacht, under Himmler’s authority, had been exempt from the outset.
