On Feb. 18, 1943, Dr. Joseph Goebbels gave his famous “Total War” speech at the Berlin Sportpalast. Meant to shore up popular support at home in World War II as Germany's military situation deteriorated, the speech was perhaps the most successful of Goebbels' career.
A leg slightly crippled from birth prevented the diminutive Paul Joseph Goebbels from fighting in the trenches of World War I. After the war, he had been an early supporter of the Nazi Party in Germany and, as a part of the northern branch of the party, had challenged the dominance of the Bavarian wing, led by Adolf Hitler, in 1926. The two soon reconciled and Goebbels quickly became one of Hitler's most trusted lieutenants and was awarded with the post of Nazi party leader for Berlin.
Not long after Hitler came to power in 1933, Goebbels was appointed to the post of Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. From this position, Goebbels manipulated the German media and arts and ensured that the radical Nazi messages of German racial superiority and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory became commonplace and accepted. Goebbels was also the foremost Nazi leader responsible for the 1938 Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which saw devastating anti-Semitic programs launched throughout Germany.
Goebbels' propaganda was not limited to attacks on the Jews, however. Socialists, communists, Free Masons, Christian churches and foreigners all felt the sting of Goebbels' vitriol, all meeting with the general approval and support of the Führer. When World War II broke out, Goebbels turned his persuasive powers toward the war effort, constantly trumpeting German success in the early years of the war.
The first years of the war made Goebbels' job easy, as the Wehrmacht did indeed meet with victory after victory. In 1939, Poland fell, followed by Norway, Denmark and Low Countries the following year. It was the fall of France in June 1940 that provided Goebbels with his biggest propaganda boon of all, however. Paris, the city that had held out for four years against the Imperial German army in World War I, had fallen to the armies of Adolf Hitler. Goebbels sent his own army of photographers and writers to accompany Hitler to the City of Lights during his victory tour, and public support for the Nazi leadership soared to new heights.
German popular feelings were mixed with the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, so Goebbels worked hard to paint the conflict as one between Germanic civilization and Bolshevik destruction. Again, Goebbels' propaganda reaped the benefit of initial Wehrmacht victories over the Soviets until Hitler's army was ground to a halt before Moscow in November and December of 1941. Re-equipped and refreshed, the summer 1942 offensive against the Soviets had every appearance of succeeding, and Goebbels once again trumpeted initial victories that year.
However, 1942 ended in disaster for Germany. The August 1942-February 1943 Battle of Stalingrad was a game-changer for the Reich. The battle saw the destruction and capture of the Sixth Army, the Wehrmacht's largest fighting formation. During the battle, the trickster Goebbels had produced a radio broadcast, reportedly from the front lines of Stalingrad, of German soldiers singing Christmas carols. In fact, the chorus came from a studio in Berlin. By Christmas 1942, the German soldiers defending the Stalingrad pocket were scarecrows who could barely fight for lack of food, let alone sing joyfully.
The fall of the Sixth Army was a disaster of such magnitude that even the skilled Goebbels could not ignore it or play down its significance. Suddenly, Goebbels had to adopt a new tactic in order to maintain popular support for the war effort, which was slipping every day.
On Feb. 18, 1943, only a few weeks after the German surrender at Stalingrad, Goebbels staged a massive rally at the Berlin Sportpalast with an audience carefully chosen from among the Nazi party's die-hard supporters. In his book “Landmark Speeches of National Socialism,” historian Randall L. Bytwerk wrote:
“Goebbels for months had been trying to increase his control over the war effort, and the defeat at Stalingrad was his opportunity. He prepared a vivid speech to rouse the German resistance and persuade Hitler to give him more power. He chose the Berlin Sport Palace, the site of many previous Nazi rallies. It held about 14,000 people. Goebbels selected them carefully, securing the most fanatic audience he could find. It was a media event.”
In the speech, Goebbels stated: “We currently face a military challenge in the East. … There is no point in disputing the seriousness of the situation. I refuse to give you a false impression of the situation that could lead to false conclusions, perhaps giving the German people a false sense of security that is altogether inappropriate for the present situation. … It is understandable that, as a result of wide-ranging deceptions and bluffs by the Bolshevist government, we did not properly evaluate the Soviet Union's war potential. Only now do we see its true scale. That is why the battle our soldiers face in the East exceeds in its hardness, dangers and difficulties all human imagining. It demands our full national strength.”
This was an unprecedented admission by the Nazi government that it had failed to correctly judge its enemy's ability. It is also the first time that such horrible news was not sugar-coated for the German people. Goebbels' usually rose-tinted prognostications were nowhere to be found. Goebbels went on to paint Germany as the only thing standing between the Soviet Union and a Bolshevised Europe, perhaps intimating that Britain should come to terms in the West, lest it face a powerful Soviet threat to replace its Nazi enemy.
The speech further details Goebbels' and the Nazi leadership's obsession with the supposed Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. Goebbels stated, “We see Jewry as a direct threat to every nation. … Jewry is a contagious infection. Germany, in any event, has no intention of bowing before this Jewish threat, but rather intends to act at the right moment, using if necessary the most total and radical measures to deal with Jewry. … Terrorist Jewry had 200 million people to serve it in Russia.”
Goebbels concluded the speech by asking his audience if they would support the most radical means to win the war, to which the audience shouted in the affirmative. He asked several specific questions to the audience, including whether or not war shirkers and black marketeers should be executed, women be fully mobilized for the war effort, and workers put in up to 16 hours a day to support the war effort.
One of the most important questions Goebbels asked, one which encompassed all of the other ideas of the speech and more, was this: "Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?"
To this, as to the questions posed before and after it, the audience cheered wildly. The idea of “total war,” completely mobilizing everything in the nation for the war effort, was nothing new, going back as far as the French Revolution. In World War I, the German government talked constantly of “total war” as well. Goebbels' passionate appeal, however, promised that Nazi radicalism would be taken even further. And now, with a carefully staged mandate from the “people,” Goebbels was going to push the limits in of power in the Third Reich as never before.
The last line of the speech was a call to arms: “People, rise up, and storm, break loose!”
Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister for Armaments and War Production, noted later in his memoirs “Inside the Third Reich,” that Goebbels had many motivations for the speech beyond addressing the obvious military defeat and calling for more government control. Goebbels saw in this event a way to push through his own radical agenda against entrenched Nazi bureaucrats who enjoyed Hitler's favor. Also, Speer noted, Goebbels had longed to replace Joachim von Ribbentrop as Hitler's foreign minister. By addressing the international situation and appealing to the West to wake up to the Bolshevik threat, Goebbels was trying to sell himself to Hitler himself as a man with a foreign policy plan. In large part, the “Total War” speech was Goebbels' personal power play.
Speer wrote: “Except for Hitler's most successful public meetings, I had never seen an audience so effectively roused to fanaticism. Back in his home, Goebbels astonished me by analyzing what had seemed to be a purely emotional outburst in terms of its psychological effects — much as an experienced actor might have done. He was also satisfied with his audience that evening.”
Speer also noted that Goebbels said to him that “it was the politically best-trained audience you can find in Germany.”
Bytwerk noted that after the initial radio broadcast of the speech, it was aired a second time in its entirety, and the text was soon published in newspapers and pamphlets. Newsreels of the speech appeared before movies. “No one in the Third Reich escaped this speech,” Bytwerk noted.
In his biography of the propaganda minister, “Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death,” Toby Thacker wrote: “Goebbels had ordered his propaganda departments around Germany to report back urgently to him on reaction to the speech, and in the preliminary response which reached him the next day his 'handling of the Jewish question' was signaled out for praise.” By the end of the month, renewed actions to deport Jews still working in Germany began. Just under 11,000 were sent to death camps in Poland in an operation launched on Feb. 27.
After the speech, Hitler did award Goebbels new powers over the economy and German public life, though he retained the inept Ribbentrop as foreign minister, to Goebbels' chagrin. Whatever success Goebbels had with his speech, the die was already cast, however, and Germany's days were numbered.
With the Red Army invested in Berlin and closing in on the Reich Chancellery building, in April 1945 Adolf Hitler committed suicide. On May 1, Goebbels and his wife shot themselves after poisoning their six children.
Cody K. Carlson holds a master's degree in history from the University of Utah and currently teaches at SLCC. Cody has also appeared on many local stages including Hale Centre Theatre and Off Broadway Theatre. Email: ckcarlson76@gmail.com