Hitler

to eliminate Jewry not only from Reich territory but from the whole of Europe’.
    Hitler categorically ruled out, as he always had done, any possibility of capitulation. He stated that any collapse of the German Reich was out of the question. But his further remarks betrayed the fact that he was contemplating precisely that. The event of such a collapse ‘would represent the ending of his life’, he declared. It was plain who, in such an eventuality, the scapegoats would be: the German people themselves. ‘Such a collapse could only be caused through the weakness of the people,’ Goebbels recorded Hitler as saying. ‘But if the German people turned out to be weak, they would deserve nothing else than to beextinguished by a stronger people; then one could have no sympathy for them.’ The sentiment would stay with him to the end.
    To the party leadership, the backbone of his support, Hitler could speak in this way. The Gauleiter could be rallied by such rhetoric. They were after all fanatics as Hitler himself was. They were part of his ‘sworn community’. The responsibility of the party for the radicalization of the ‘home front’ was music to their ears. In any case, whatever private doubts (if any) they harboured, they had no choice but to stick with Hitler. They had burnt their boats with him. He was the sole guarantor of their power.
    The German people were less easily placated than Hitler’s immediate viceroys. When he spoke in Berlin to the nation for the first time since Stalingrad, on the occasion (which this year, of all years, he could not possibly avoid) of Heroes’ Memorial Day on 21 March 1943, his speech gave rise to greater criticism than any Hitler speech since he had become Chancellor.
    The speech was one of Hitler’s shortest. Perhaps anxiety about a possible air-raid made Hitler race through it in such a rapid and dreary monotone. The routine assault on Bolshevism and on Jewry as the force behind the ‘merciless war’ could stir little enthusiasm. Disappointment was profound. Rumours revived about Hitler’s poor health – along with others that it had been a substitute who had spoken, while the real Führer was under house-arrest on the Obersalzberg suffering from a mental breakdown after Stalingrad. Extraordinary was the fact that Hitler never even directly mentioned Stalingrad in a ceremony meant to be devoted to the memory of the fallen and at a time when the trauma was undiminished. And his passing reference, at the end of his speech, to a figure of 542,000 German dead in the war was presumed to be far too low and received with rank incredulity.
    Hitler, as more and more ordinary citizens now recognized, had closed off all avenues that might have brought compromise peace. The earlier victories were increasingly seen in a different light. There was no end in sight. But it now seemed clear to increasing numbers of ordinary citizens that Hitler had taken them into a war which could only end in destruction, defeat, and disaster. There was still far to go, but what was revealed after Stalingrad would become ever clearer: for the vast majority of Germans, the love affair with Hitler was at an end. Only the bitter process of divorce remained.

23
Beleaguered
    I
    ‘The English claim that the German people have lost their trust in the Führer,’ Goebbels declared. It was the opening to the fifth of his ten rhetorical questions towards the end of his two-hour speech proclaiming ‘total war’ on the evening of 18 February 1943. The hand-picked audience in Berlin’s Sportpalast rose as one man to denounce such an outrageous allegation. A chorus of voices arose: ‘Führer command, we will obey!’ The tumult lasted for what seemed an age. Orchestrating the frenzied mood to perfection, the propaganda maestro eventually broke in to ask: ‘Is your trust in the Führer greater, more faithful, and more unshakeable than ever? Is your readiness to follow him in all his ways and to do everything necessary to bring the war to a triumphant end absolute and unrestricted?’ Fourteen thousand voices hysterically cried out in unison the answer invited by Goebbels in his bid to quell doubters at home and to relay to the outside world the futility of any hope of inner collapse in Germany. Goebbels ended his morale-boosting peroration – which had been interrupted more than 200 times by clapping, cheering, shouts of approbation, or thunderous applause – with the words of Theodor Körner, the