The German War (58 page)

Third year of the war: we must win.

Fourth year of the war: we cannot be defeated.

The principal target of this critique could only be Goebbels himself. As he considered what might most motivate the German people, he turned for the first time to holding up the spectre of defeat, what a British observer aptly dubbed ‘Strength through fear’ – instead of ‘Strength through joy’, the pre-war slogan of the Nazi leisure organisation. But Goebbels knew that fear alone could not galvanise the nation.

On 18 February, he addressed a hand-picked crowd of Party members at the Berlin Sportpalast. Once more, the speech was amplified through the national megaphone of all radio stations. This time references to ancient Greece had nothing to do with Thermopylae. ‘We now know what we have to do,’ Goebbels assured his audience. ‘The German people wants a Spartan way of life for everybody. For high and low, for poor and rich.’ Goebbels himself had great hopes for his speech, considering it one of his best rhetorical efforts. It culminated in ten questions which turned the audience of loyal Nazis into a classical chorus, roaring their approval and standing in for the German nation as a whole. By the time he reached his tenth and final question, they were in a frenzy:

Is it your wish that even in wartime, as the Party programme requires, equal rights and equal duties shall prevail [cries of ‘Yes!’], that the home front shall give evidence of its solidarity and take the same heavy burdens of war upon its shoulders, and that the burdens be distributed equitably, whether a person be great or small, poor or rich?

It was a declaration of ‘total war’. At the end, Goebbels turned to the words of the soldier-poet Theodor Körner: ‘Now let the nation arise, let the storm break.’ Amid wild cheers, the audience began singing the German national anthem and the Party’s ‘Horst Wessel Song’.
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Goebbels was delighted with the immediate reaction and felt it was a speech like no other he had given. The responses gathered by the SD’s monitoring service, however, were less encouraging. Many felt that the wild enthusiasm of the audience looked too stage-managed to be genuine; some wondered why the regime had not taken such measures long ago; others questioned whether the speech had altered anything. During the coming weeks, Goebbels had to accept that little had changed. He had hoped to use the opportunity to persuade Hitler to vest new powers in him to override other agencies and mobilise the home front, but the management of the German war effort was not radically restructured. Hitler was not prepared to encroach on family life. The evacuation of children from bombed areas remained voluntary, to the growing frustration of officials attempting to co-ordinate civil defence. At the top of the regime, however, quiet shifts in power continued. Enraged by the Luftwaffe’s failure in both east and west, Hitler did not want to hear Göring’s name mentioned in his presence for days on end. But ever sensitive to the outward appearance of unity, he insisted that Göring remained ‘indispensable to the supreme leadership of the Reich’. Instead of a major shake-up of the regime, the influence of some key figures grew sporadically and far beyond their functional spheres: that of Albert Speer over the war economy, Heinrich Himmler’s over the agencies of coercion, and Martin Bormann’s over the Party. Their competitors – Hans Lammers, Fritz Sauckel, Robert Ley, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Alfred Rosenberg – would all gradually lose ground in this war of attrition for control of key committees, bureaucracies and access to Hitler.
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Goebbels failed to have himself appointed ‘Plenipotentiary for Total War’, but in January Hitler had appointed him to the chairmanship of the Interministerial Committee for Air Raid Damage, which allowed him to intervene and instruct other Gauleiters in civil defence matters. With this new, practical focus to the war effort, Goebbels abandoned his ‘politeness campaign’ to encourage model behaviour on the home front, declaring on 9 April 1943 that

it is not important that the population should be in a good mood, but that it should preserve its bearing . . . After the fourth year of war, all men think differently of war than they did at the beginning . . . Expressions such as patriotism and enthusiasm are quite out of place. The German people simply does its duty – that is all.

Increasingly, political propaganda and popular entertainment moved in opposite directions, the one becoming harder and bleaker as Goebbels emphasised the danger of defeat, while the other became lighter and fluffier. At the time of Goebbels’s ‘total war’ speech, the three main films showing in Berlin were two romantic comedies,
Two Happy People
and
Love Me,
and a circus revue on ice,
The Big Hit.
The best hope of the Nazi leadership was that ordinary people would continue to defer their domestic utopias until after a German victory, just as the
Request Concert
had encouraged them to do in the first years of the war. The 1942 film
The Great Love
updated the story of romantic but deferred love to the eastern front and became the greatest blockbuster of Nazi cinema, mainly because of the songs of Zarah Leander, the Swedish actress who took on the role of the femme fatale with her near-baritonal voice and androgynous sexuality. After Stalingrad, one of its great hits, in which Leander brings the audience in to accompany her singing ‘The world is not going to end because of that’, remained enduringly popular. Its carefree and raunchy, cabaret-style sense of being in it together continued to appeal. The SD noted at this time that women in Berlin had started wearing trousers as a provocative fashion statement.
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Stalingrad was a major defeat. For a second time, Hitler had been tempted into declaring that a crucial battle was as good as won. In military terms, Moscow in 1941 was the more critical turning point: if the Wehrmacht had conquered Moscow, it would have been very difficult for the Red Army to fight on; whereas it could have surrendered Stalingrad and continued the war. In symbolic terms, Stalingrad was worse for Hitler’s reputation: in December 1941, he had taken personal command of the German armies from Brauchitsch and reaped the credit for stemming the panic through his ‘halt order’; a year later, his very role as Commander-in-Chief led many Germans to question their Führer’s military genius for the first time. To make matters worse, Hitler had refused to follow Goebbels’s advice and allow the media to give a bleaker and more downbeat gloss to the battle in the critical months from October to December 1942. Nor had the grandiose attempt to portray the ‘sacrifice’ of the 6th Army as an ‘epic struggle’ worked either, and in February Hitler ordered that all military lectures and commentaries on the battle should cease until he had approved an official version. When the Afrika Korps surrendered at Tunis in May 1943, a press directive ordained that ‘in no circumstances are references to Stalingrad to be made in the commentaries’. By June 1943, Goebbels felt confident enough to declare insouciantly, in one of his lead articles in
Das Reich
which was also read over the radio, that it was unreasonable to expect the government ‘to predict the future accurately and correctly’. As he pointed out, no one had imagined in 1939 either that the war would last so long or that German troops would have fought their way to such distant fronts. Arguing that ‘intentional as well as unintentional and involuntary errors are justified by victory alone’, he asserted ‘the leadership’s sovereign right to make occasional mistakes’. A dictatorship led by a self-styled ‘prophet’ could not resort to this argument often. On 3 February 1944, the first anniversary of the epic battle which Göring had predicted would still be spoken of ‘in a thousand years in religious awe’ was passed over in silence.
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It was no longer clear when or how the German conquest of the Soviet Union could be achieved. Instead, people began to countenance an endless war of attrition. Goebbels’s call to wage ‘total war’ might fall flat, but that was because in 1943, just as in 1942, Germans already had a tried and tested language for ‘holding out’ which had seen them through the horrors and rigours of the previous war. Popular humour was not slow to catch up, and the Münster journalist Paulheinz Wantzen picked up the latest jokes:

In 1999, two panzer grenadiers on the Kuban bridgehead are chatting. One of them has read the word ‘Peace’ in a book and would like to know what that means. No one in the bunker knows and so they ask the Sarge. He doesn’t know either and so they ask the Lieutenant and company commander. ‘Peace?’ he asks shaking his head. ‘Peace? I even attended a Gymnasium, but I don’t know that word.’ Next day, he is at battalion HQ and asks the commander. He doesn’t know but has a recently published dictionary and there they finally discover: ‘Peace, way of life unfit for human beings, abolished in 1939’.

In one crucial respect, the botched attempt to create an instant myth around Stalingrad left an enduring and painful legacy. The Wehrmacht bulletin on 3 February had contained a crucial lie: that ‘Generals, officers, NCOs and ordinary soldiers fought shoulder to shoulder to the last bullet.’ Within a week, rumours were circulating that in fact German commanders, including Field Marshal Paulus, and many of their men had surrendered and entered Soviet captivity. Exploiting the fact that before the outbreak of hostilities the Soviet Union had not signed up to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners, the Wehrmacht insisted that it had no information that could be verified by neutral third parties and stipulated that all soldiers lost at Stalingrad should simply be classified as ‘missing in action’.
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It was not the dead of Stalingrad who ‘lived on’, but the missing. Hildegard Probst was without news of her husband. Fritz had written to her on Christmas Day and again on New Year’s Day, assuring her that although there was no wood to warm the shelter, they were still managing: ‘The day must come when we are free and things get better again.’ Her own letters and parcels were returned to her, undelivered. By 1 April, she had received four letters and six small, 100-gram airfreight packets back. It was the same for all the other families of men serving in his company: the last letters had been written in early January. Hoping that relatives of Fritz’s comrades would come forward with news, Hildegard wrote to German radio’s Comrades service and a month later heard her husband’s name read aloud on the airwaves. On 29 May, she registered him with the local Red Cross office, only to receive the news that he must be regarded as ‘missing’.
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News spread that the German embassy in Ankara, headed by the former Chancellor Franz von Papen, had successfully located a junior officer for his well-connected mother, and people turned also to the Turkish Red Crescent for help in locating their relatives. The Wehrmacht Information Office, on the other hand, did its best to block communication and suppress the fact that 113,000 German and Romanian soldiers had been taken prisoner. The Wehrmacht High Command even ordered that the few sacks of letters it had should not be delivered, so as not to spoil the choreography of the heroic last stand.
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But the information vacuum could not be sustained. Radio Moscow was already broadcasting ‘the figure of ninety-one thousand prisoners’, an official in the Press and Information Office of the Foreign Ministry noted on 2 February 1943, predicting that ‘Not everyone will be able to resist the temptation to try and get news by listening to enemy broadcasts . . . In the eyes of the simple masses, “taken prisoner” is very different from “killed”, no matter how many times they are told that the Russians murder all prisoners taken.’ The SD agreed, charting the take-up of Soviet propaganda leaflets dropped over Germany and the pick-up of information which could only have been gleaned by listening to Radio Moscow. Both local and national reports confirmed that ‘black listening’ increased at this time, with both Radio Moscow and the BBC reading out the names of German prisoners. In Stuttgart, Gauleiter Murr threatened that those who ‘listen to the voice of the enemy [and thus] weaken the defensive and resistance capability of our people’ would be ‘prosecuted and mercilessly punished’. But the local SD did not see things in such stark terms, regarding the practice as a natural response to the lack of information.
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As usual the Gestapo tried to discriminate in dealing with such cases, forming a view of the offender as well as the offence. In March 1943, a woman started writing to the families of German soldiers whose names and addresses were listed on a Soviet leaflet that her son had brought home on leave. She simply wanted to pass on the news that they were alive and ‘doing well’. Eventually, she came to the notice of the Gestapo, which established that she was motivated by the fact that she had lost two brothers in the First World War, and her youngest son the previous year. ‘I wanted to help the affected persons, and I felt sorry for them that they did not have any news of their relatives,’ she explained. Instead of punishing her for ‘defeatism’ or ‘spreading enemy propaganda’, the Gestapo let her go with a warning, impressed by her unblemished record of service in Nazi mass organisations.