That all ways out were closed off was made plain once again during these weeks. Hints had come from Japan in late August that Stalin might entertain ideas of a peace settlement with Hitler’s Germany. Japan was interested in brokering such a peace, since it would leave Germany able to devote its entire war effort to the western Allies, thereby, it was hoped, draining the energies of the USA away from the Pacific. With massive casualties on the Soviet side, the territories lost since 1941 regained, and a presumed interest in Stalin wishing to harness what was left of German industrial potential for a later fight with the West, Tokyo thought prospects for a negotiated peace were not altogether negligible.221 On 4 September, Oshima, the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin, travelled to East Prussia to put the suggestion to take up feelers with Stalin directly to Hitler. The response was predictable. Germany would soon launch a fresh counter-offensive with new weapons at its disposal. And there were, in any case, no signs that Stalin was entertaining thoughts of peace. Only a block on his advance might make him change his mind, Hitler realistically concluded. He wanted no overtures to be made by the Japanese for the present.222
Oshima evidently did not give up. Later in the month, he used the pretext of a discussion with Werner Naumann, State Secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, about the ‘total war’ effort to bring the suggestion of a separate peace with the Soviet Union to Goebbels’s ears. He could be certain that by this route the proposal would again reach Hitler, perhaps with the backing of one who was known to carry influence at Führer Headquarters.
Naumann’s report was plainly the first Goebbels had heard of the Japanese suggestion. The Propaganda Minister called the discussion between his State Secretary and the Japanese Ambassador ‘quite sensational’.223 Oshima told Naumann, according to Goebbels’s summary, that Germany should make every attempt to reach a ‘special peace’. Such an arrangement would be possible, he led Naumann to believe. He was frank about the Japanese interest, forced by its own problems in the war, in giving Germany a free hand in the west. He thought Stalin, a realist, would be open to suggestions if Germany were prepared to accept ‘sacrifices’, and criticized the inflexibility of German foreign policy. Goebbels noted that Oshima’s proposal amounted to a reversal of German war policy, and was aware that the position of the pro-German Japanese Ambassador at home had been seriously weakened as the fortunes of war had turned. But, as Oshima had presumed, Goebbels immediately passed on the information to Bormann and Himmler, for further transmission to Hitler himself.224
Goebbels decided that more must be done. But rather than try to put the case verbally to Hitler, he decided to prepare a lengthy memorandum. By midnight on 20 September, after he had worked all afternoon and evening on it, the memorandum was ready. It was couched in the form of a letter to Hitler. Goebbels was evidently so pleased with it that he dictated the entire text for entry in his diary.
The letter was cleverly attuned to Hitler’s mentality. The events of the summer had cast all their hopes overboard, he began. He pointed to the way Hitler had divided his opponents at the end of 1932 and beginning of 1933 in order to win a ‘limited victory’ on 30 January that then paved the way for the full conquest of power that was to follow. He drew an analogy with the need now to settle for something less than the original war aims in order to divide an alliance already showing distinct signs of fractiousness. Germany had never won a two-front war, he frankly pointed out. There was little prospect of coping with western and eastern enemies simultaneously. ‘We can neither conclude peace with both sides at the same time nor in the long run successfully wage war against both sides at the same time,’ he argued. He came to the main part of his case. Rehearsing what he had heard from Oshima, he suggested that Stalin’s cold realism, knowing that he would sooner or later find himself in conflict with the west, offered an opening since the Soviet leader would not want either to exhaust his own military strength or allow the German armaments potential to fall into the hands of the western powers. He pointed to Japan’s self-interest in brokering a deal. An arrangement with Stalin would provide new prospects in the west, and place the Anglo-Americans in a position where they could not indefinitely continue the war. ‘What we would attain,’ he stated, ‘would not be the victory that we dreamed of in 1941, but it would still be the greatest victory in German history. The sacrifices that the German people had made in this war would thereby be fully justified.’
