Hitler

autumn prove more than a match for Rommel’s limited forces.
    In the Reich itself, the British nightly raids had intensified. Munich,Bremen, Düsseldorf, and Duisburg were among the cities that now suffered serious destruction. Hitler said he was glad his own apartment in Munich had been badly damaged; he would not have liked it spared – obviously it would not have looked good – if the rest of the city had been attacked. He thought the raid might have a salutary effect in waking up the population of Munich to the realities of the war. Air-raids had another good side, he had told Goebbels in mid-August: the enemy had ‘taken work from us’ in destroying buildings that would in any case have had to be torn down to allow the improved post-war town planning.
    At the end of September, Hitler flew back to Berlin. He had promised Goebbels to use the opening of the Winter Aid campaign to address the nation during the second half of September. Once more, it was important to sustain morale at a vital time.
    His Sportpalast speech on 30 September combined a glorification of German military achievements with a sarcastic, mocking attack on Churchill and Roosevelt. This was nothing new, though the hand-picked Sportpalast audience lapped it up. He went on to repeat his prophecy about the Jews – by now a regular weapon in his rhetorical armoury – in the most menacing phrases he had so far used: ‘The Jews used to laugh, in Germany too, about my prophecies. I don’t know if they’re still laughing today, or whether the laughter has already gone out of them. But I, too, can now only offer the assurance: the laughter will go out of them everywhere. And I will also be right in my prophecies.’ But the speech was most notable of all for his assurances about the battle for Stalingrad. The metropolis on the Volga, bearing the Soviet leader’s name, was being stormed, he declared, and would be taken. ‘You can be sure,’ he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’
    His public display of optimism was unbounded, even in a more confined forum, when he addressed the Reichs- and Gauleiter for almost three hours the following afternoon. ‘The capture of Stalingrad,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘is for him an established fact,’ even if it could still take a little time. Surveying the position of his enemies, Hitler came to the remarkable conclusion that ‘the war was practically lost for the opposing side, no matter how long it was in a position to carry it on’.
    Hitler’s absurd optimism at the beginning of October scarcely accorded with the growing anxieties of his military advisers about the situation in Stalingrad. Winter was now no longer far off. Paulus, Weichs, Jodl, and Zeitzler all favoured pulling back from a target which,largely in ruins, had by now lost all significance as a communications and armaments centre, and taking up more secure winter positions. The only alternative was to pour in heavy reinforcements. Hitler’s view was that this time winter had been so well prepared for that the soldiers in the east would be living better than most of them had done in peacetime.
    On 6 October, after Paulus had reported a temporary halt to the attack because his troops were exhausted, Hitler ordered the ‘complete capture’ of Stalingrad as the key objective of Army Group B. There might indeed have been something to be said for choosing the protection of even a ruined city to the open, exposed steppes over the winter had the supplies situation been as favourable as Hitler evidently imagined it to be, had the supply lines been secure, and had the threat of a Soviet counter-offensive been less large. However, only insufficient winter provision for the 6th Army had been made. Supply-lines were now overstretched on an enormously long front, and far from secure on the northern flank. And intelligence was coming in of big concentrations of Soviet troops which might pose real danger to the position of the 6th Army. Withdrawal was the sensible option.
    Hitler would not hear of it. At the beginning of October, Zeitzler and Jodl heard him for the first time, in outrightly rejecting their advice about the danger of being bogged down in house-to-house fighting with heavy losses, stress that the capture of the city was necessary not just for operational, but for ‘psychological’ reasons: to show the world the continued strength of German arms, and to boost the morale of the Axis allies. More than ever