Hitler

Gauleiter, bolstering their already extensive powers as Reich Defence Commissars. They could be relied upon, in his view, to reinvoke the spirit of the ‘time of struggle’, to ensure that bureaucracy did not get in the way of action. (In practice, the cooperation of the Gauleiter was assured as long as no inroads were made into the personnel of their own party offices. Bormann ensured that they were well protected.)
    Behind the actionism of the party, Goebbels also needed Hitler’s backing. He ensured that this was forthcoming through a constant stream of bulletins on progress (
Führer-Informationen
), printed out on a ‘Führer-Machine’ – a typewriter with greatly enlarged characters which Hitler’s failing eyesight could cope with – recording successes and couching general recommendations (such as simplifying unnecessary bureaucratic paperwork) in such a way that, given Hitler’s frame of mind, approval would be as good as automatic, thereby opening up yet further avenues for intervention. Nevertheless, Hitler did not give blanket approval to all measures suggested by Goebbels. He could rely upon Bormann to bring to his attention any proposals which his own still sharp antennae would tell him might have an unnecessarily harmful impact on morale, both at home and quite especially among soldiers at the front.
    Goebbels certainly produced a new, extreme austerity drive within Germany in the first weeks in his new office as Total War Plenipoteniary. But a large proportion of the 451,800 men sifted out of the administration and economy were too old for military service. Goebbels was forced, therefore, to turn to fit men in reserved occupations – work thought essential for the war-effort, including skilled employment in armaments factories or food production. Their replacement, where possible, by older, less fit, less experienced, less qualified workers was both administratively complicated and inefficient. And the net addition of women workers numbered only little over quarter of a million. Athough, partly through Goebbels’s measures, it proved possible to send around a million men to the front between August and December 1944, German losses in the first three of those months numbered 1,189,000 dead and wounded. Whatever the trumpeting by Goebbels of his achievements as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort, the reality was that he was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
    And among the most bizarre aspects of the ‘total war’ drive in the second half of 1944 was the fact that at precisely the time he was combing out the last reserves of manpower, Goebbels – according to film director Veit Harlan – was allowing him, at Hitler’s express command, to deploy 187,000 soldiers, withdrawn from active service, as extras for the epic colour film of national heroism,
Kolberg
, depicting the defence of the small Baltic town against Napoleon as a model for the achievements of total war. According to Harlan, Hitler as well as Goebbels was ‘convinced that such a film was more useful than a military victory’. Even in the terminal crisis of the regime, propaganda had to come first.
    The evocation of heroic defence of the fatherland by the masses against the invading Napoleonic army – the myth enunciated in
Kolberg
– was put to direct use in the most vivid expression of the last-ditch drive to ‘total war’: the launching by Heinrich Himmler of the Volkssturm, or people’s militia, on 18 October 1944, the 131st anniversary of the legendary defeat of Napoleon in the ‘Battle of the Peoples’ near Leipzig, when a coalition of forces under Blücher’s leadership liberated German territory from the troops of the French Emperor once and for all. The Volkssturm was the military embodiment of the party’s belief in ‘triumph of the will’. It was the party’s attempt to militarize the homeland, symbolizing unity through the people’s participation in national defence, overcoming the deficiencies in weapons and resources through sheer willpower.
    Though Goebbels continued to harbour the belief that he would incorporate in his ‘total war’ commission the organization of the ‘Volkswehr’ (People’s Defence), as it was initially to be called, leaving the military aspects to the SA, Bormann and Himmler had come to an agreement to divide responsibility between them. Drafts for a decree by Hitler were put forward in early September. He eventually signed the decree on 26 September, though it