Berlin at War (70 page)

gourmets once again’, he mocked, ‘when the war is over.’ In the mean-

time, thrift and austerity was to be the order of the day. ‘Life may

not be as pleasant as it is during peace. But we are not at peace, we

are at war . . . we must sacrifice our comforts to gain victory.’

With that grim forecast, which had been met by the crowd with

rapturous cheers and shouts of approval, Goebbels reached the

conclusion of his speech. Whipping his audience into a frenzy, he

posed a number of questions in response to British allegations that

the German people had no stomach for the war and had lost faith

in victory.

‘Do you believe in the final total victory of the German people?’

‘Yes!’ they bayed, with one voice.

‘Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total

and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?’

‘Yes!’ they replied, drowning out the speaker with an avalanche of

applause.

‘Are you determined to follow the Führer through thick and thin

to victory and are you willing to accept the heaviest personal burdens?’

In response, the audience rose as one, shouting ‘Führer command,

we follow!’

‘You have given me your answers’, Goebbels concluded, ‘you have

told our enemies what they needed to hear.’ Amid a cacophony of

applause and cheering, he proclaimed the nation’s new slogan in its

struggle for final victory: ‘
Nun Volk steh auf, und Sturm bricht los!
’ ‘People, rise up and let the storm break loose!’5

Goebbels regarded his speech as a tremendous success. ‘The atmos-

phere recalled a wild mood of mass hysteria’, he wrote in his diary

the following day:

My speech made a profound impression. Even in the opening passages,

it was interrupted by wild applause. The public’s reaction was inde-

scribable. The Sportpalast has never witnessed such scenes as there

were at the end, when I posed my questions to the audience . . . I think

that this speech will make an impression, not only on the Reich, but

also on the neutral countries and even on our enemies . . . It could not

have gone better.6

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berlin at war

Albert Speer, who had been present at the Sportpalast, recalled that

he had never seen an audience ‘so effectively roused to fanaticism’ –

with the exception of Hitler’s most successful public meetings.

Speaking with Goebbels later that evening, Speer had been regaled

with the Propaganda Minister’s pseudo-psychological assessment of

the crowd’s response: ‘Did you notice?’ Goebbels asked him, ‘they

reacted to the smallest nuance and applauded at just the right moments.

It was the politically best-trained audience you can find in Germany.’7

For all the brilliance of his oratory, Goebbels allowed himself to

forget that the audience at the Sportpalast had been minutely stage-

managed. Not only had those attending the speech been hand-picked,

but the hall had also been rigged with a loudspeaker system, through

which gramophone recordings of ovations and cheers had been surrep-

titiously relayed, so as not only to enthuse the audience present, but

also to provide them with all the appropriate cues.8 Such sleight of

hand, however, should not detract from the remarkable scenes

witnessed in the Sportpalast that evening. The audience had certainly

been manipulated and encouraged, but their fervour was no less

genuine for that. Ursula von Kardorff noted how grimly infectious

the fanaticism could be. ‘One of our editors’, she wrote,

who was there as a reporter, told us how the masses had raved. He is

a calm, thoughtful man and an anti-Nazi, yet he found himself jumping

up with the others and came within a hair’s breadth of shouting out

along with the others, until he sat back down in shame. He said, if

Goebbels had asked ‘Do you all want to die?’, they would have roared

the same answer ‘Yes!’9

The reaction among those Germans listening in their homes on

their radios is more difficult to fathom. Some would have been un -

impressed by Goebbels’ oratory and would have seen through the

propagandistic bombast. Foreign Ministry official Hans-Georg von

Studnitz, for instance, though largely loyal to the regime, questioned

the wisdom of raising the nation’s morale by ‘instilling people with

a terror of bolshevism’.10 Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, meanwhile, was

more damning, describing the speech as a ‘demonstration of fanatical

will’. ‘Total, totaler, totalest’, she mocked, ‘I didn’t know that even

ultimates could have superlatives. Probably people who are unsure of

to unreason and beyond

341

themselves have to fall back on such things.’11 Listening to the speech

at home that night, Josepha von Koskull was outraged. ‘What were

they thinking?’ she wondered of Goebbels’ audience.12

There were many more, however, who had been deeply moved to

hear their fellows so enthused, and shared the wave of hysteria. The

weekly mood report compiled by the Nazi security service testified

to the positive reception that the speech had enjoyed among the

German people. ‘Its effect’, it reported, ‘was unusually large, and on

the whole very favourable. . . . In spite of its honest assessment of the

seriousness of the situation, it has eased tensions and strengthened

anew the people’s optimism and their trust in the leadership.’13

It would be wrong to assume, therefore, that the German people had

simply been manipulated by Goebbels. They knew very well that they

had been seduced that night – but crucially, once their ardour had cooled,

they realised that the essential thrust of the speech had been absolutely

correct. If Germany
was
to win the war – and it was very clearly now

an ‘if’, not a ‘when’ – a massive and fundamental mobilisation of the

home front would be required, sacrifices would have to be made and

privations endured. This was the ‘total war’ that they had agreed to.

This, too, is why there was a surge in public morale in the after-

math of what was otherwise an apparently grim message. Traditionally,

the Nazis had been unwilling to present unglossed or ‘unspun’ truths

to the German population: every setback was dismissed as temporary,

every defeat couched as a ‘tactical withdrawal’. Now, with Goebbels’

unusual candour in the Sportpalast, the government had finally ‘come

clean’ with the people; moreover, it had presented concrete measures

by which the situation might be remedied. This new openness seems

to have been widely welcomed.14

Yet, for all their new-found enthusiasm and determination, the German

people realised full well that difficult times lay ahead. And the question

remained to be answered how robust public morale would prove to be

should German forces stumble to a string of further defeats. How would

the German population react when they began to feel the force of ‘total

war’ being visited upon
them
? It would not take long to find out.

Nineteen forty-three would prove to be a catastrophic year for

Germany, with setbacks and defeats in every theatre of the war. The

bad news began in the Atlantic, where German U-boats had been

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berlin at war

busily sinking Anglo-American supply convoys, in an attempt to disrupt

the British war effort. The first half of the war had gone well for

Admiral Dönitz’s U-boat ‘wolf packs’, with the tonnage of Allied ship-

ping lost far outstripping German losses, and the technological and

tactical counter-measures of the Allies being slow to take effect. In the

spring of 1943, however, a decisive shift occurred, most notably when

long-range Allied aircraft closed the ‘gap’ in the mid-Atlantic, where

convoys had previously not been covered by air patrols, and where the

wolf packs had enjoyed their most fruitful hunting. Already by May,

more U-boats were lost than Allied ships, losses that Dönitz conceded

made the continuation of U-boat warfare ‘impossible’.15 Germany had

lost the Battle of the Atlantic.

It is doubtful that the minutiae of the war in the Atlantic were fully

appreciated by the Berlin public. But the tailing off of positive news

reports from that theatre did not go unnoticed. The capital’s rumour

mill was alive with theories explaining the secret operations in which

the U-boat fleet was now engaged. Some considered that the wolf

packs were being massed for a decisive attack; others were more

fanciful, believing that they were to be used to launch an invasion of

Britain, or that they were ferrying much-needed rubber to Germany

from Japan. Only the soberest and best-informed observers would have

concluded that the U-boat war had actually been lost.16

For the majority, however, it was events in other theatres that

dominated their thoughts that summer. In the war in the east, the

Battle of Kursk that July was to prove a salient reverse for German forces.

Intended as a return to the glory days of the
Blitzkrieg
, Kursk was envisaged by the Germans as an enormous pincer movement, to pinch off

a bulge in the front line. Yet, German commanders soon discovered

that the Soviet positions facing them were heavily reinforced, and the

intended swift advance quickly became bogged down in a static tank

battle of unimaginable and unprecedented ferocity. Though Kursk had

been supposed to wrest the initiative from the Soviets, the sheer scale

of heavy armour sacrificed there would spell the end of the

Wehrmacht’s offensive capacity. Thereafter, for the rest of the war,

German armies would be engaged in a slow, torturous retreat towards

their own capital.

To the south, meanwhile, the Allied invasion of Sicily that same month

of July would also prove to be of profound significance. Not only did it

to unreason and beyond

343

help to make the central passage of the Mediterranean safe for Allied

shipping, it also opened a long-awaited ‘second front’ in Nazi-occupied

Europe. Nazi propaganda sought to downplay such developments,

stressing the peripheral location of Sicily and boasting of the swift defeat

that would be inflicted on the invaders. But few were fooled.

In time, the ramifications of the invasion of Sicily would prove even

more critical. On 25 July, Mussolini was deposed. Two weeks after that

Italy announced an armistice with the Allies, forcing the German High

Command to commit large numbers of troops to the theatre in an

effort to shore up its former ally. On the home front, meanwhile, the

many thousands of Italian labourers working in German industry –

and especially prevalent in a city such as Berlin – were no longer to be

treated as friends and allies. Almost overnight, they became prisoners

of war.

The true significance of the surrender of Nazi Germany’s primary

ally was kept from the German public. The event was treated by the

German press as a minor development, with the
Deutsche Allgemeine

Zeitung
, for instance, devoting only a single column to the story.17 Hans-Georg von Studnitz noted the strange silence of the German media.

‘Tomorrow is Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday’, he wrote on 28 July, ‘but

not a line about him will appear in the German papers. The man who

has been presented to the German people as the greatest statesman

in the world after Hitler disappears from the German scene unher-

alded and unsung.’18

While the news of Mussolini’s fall and the defeat at Kursk was being

digested by Berliners, another development – one whose implications

affected the home front much more directly – filled them with fore-

boding. Though the RAF had been exercising its improved capacity for

air warfare over Germany for much of the previous year, the fire-

bombing of Hamburg in the final week of July 1943 brought home the

stark realities of modern warfare to the German people.19 In the after-

math of the attack, as Hamburg struggled to come to terms with the

destruction, the rest of Germany was whipped into a frenzy by the

horror stories emanating from the city, spread in many instances by

shell-shocked refugees. Many would have wondered if this was what

Goebbels meant when he spoke about ‘total war’.

More seriously, the coincidence of these three developments caused

a loss of public faith in the regime itself. Some still managed to fool

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berlin at war

themselves into believing that Germany would be better off without

the Italians, or that the destruction of Hamburg would prove to be

exceptional. Others found solace in the supernatural. Ursula von Kardorff

recalled a horoscope reading that did the rounds of the capital that

summer, which predicted that the worst air raid on Berlin would come

on 27 August, followed by ‘a sensational decision’ in mid-September –

and, from May 1944, Germany would again have a king. ‘Such is the

nonsense’, Kardorff wrote in her diary, ‘to which the people cling.’20

This almost mystical belief in salvation dovetailed neatly with the

growing popular desire for revenge. In the summer of 1943, rumours