Hitler

the catastrophic lack of winter clothing for the troops, and the effect this was having on morale. Goebbels was well aware from the bitter criticism in countless soldiers’ letters to their loved ones of how bad the impact of the supplies crisis was on morale, both at the front and at home. But Hitler’s eyes were already set on the big spring offensive in 1942. And, as always when faced with setbacks, he pointed to the ‘struggle for power’, and how difficulties had at that time been overcome.
    The need to boost morale, in the first instance among those he held responsible for upholding it on the home front, undoubtedly lay behind Hitler’s address to his Gauleiter on the afternoon of 12 December.
    He began with the consequences of Pearl Harbor. If Japan had not entered the war, he would have at some point had to declare war on the USA. ‘Now the East-Asia conflict falls to us like a present in the lap,’ Goebbels reported him saying. The psychological significance should not be underrated. Without the conflict between Japan and the USA, a declaration of war on the Americans would have been difficult to accept by the German people. As it was, it was taken as a matter of course. The extension to the conflict also had positive consequences for the U-boat war in the Atlantic. Freed of restraint, he expected the tonnage sunk now to increase greatly – and this would probably be decisive in winning the war.
    He turned to the war in the east. Both tone and content were much as they had been with Goebbels in private. He acknowledged that the troops had had for the time being to be pulled back to a defensible line, but, given the supplies problems, saw this as far better than standing some 300 kilometres further east. The troops were now being saved for the coming spring and summer offensive. A new panzer army in preparation within Germany would be ready by then.
    It was his firm intention, he declared, in the following year to finish off Soviet Russia at least as far as the Urals. ‘Then it would perhaps be possible to reach a point of stabilization in Europe through a sort of half-peace’, by which he appeared to mean that Europe would exist as a self-sufficient, heavily armed fortress, leaving the remaining belligerent powers to fight it out in other theatres of war.
    He outlined his vision of the future. It was essential after the war was over to undertake a huge social programme embracing workers and farmers. The German people had deserved this. And it would provide – always the political reasoning behind the aim of material improvement – the ‘most secure basis of our state system’. The enormous housing programme he had in mind would, he stated openly, be made possible through cheap labour – through depressing wages. The work would be done by the forced labour of the defeated peoples. He pointed out that the prisoners-of-war were now being fully employed in the war economy. This was as it should be, he stated, and had been the case in antiquity, giving rise in the first place to slave labour. German war-debts would doubtless be 200–300 billion Marks. These had to be covered through the work ‘in the main of the people who had lost the war’. The cheap labour would allow houses to be built and sold at a substantial profit which would go towards paying off the war-debts within ten to fifteen years.
    Hitler put forward once more his vision of the East as Germany’s ‘future India’, which would become within three or four generations ‘absolutely German’. There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the ‘Church Question’. ‘But it is clear,’ noted Goebbels, himself among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, ‘that after the war it has to be generally solved … There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view.’
    Pressing engagements in Berlin prevented Hitler from returning that evening, as he had intended, to the Wolf’s Lair. When he eventually reached his headquarters again, in the morning of 16 December, it was back to a reality starkly different from the rosy picture he had painted to his Gauleiter. A potentially catastrophic military crisis was unfolding.
    VI
    Already before Hitler had left for Berlin, Field-Marshal von Bock had outlined the weakness of his Army Group against a concentrated attack, and stated the danger of serious