Goebbels Hetzretze 80 years ago: What did “total war” mean? – Politics

The world is in great danger, said the speaker. A people of 200 million had been prepared for a “war of aggression against Europe”. And: “The onslaught of the steppes against our venerable continent broke out this winter with a force that overshadows all human and historical ideas.” The true intentions of the aggressor are also known, the speaker continued. “The Kremlin can’t fool us.”

Propaganda is back in fashion these days. 80 years ago, on February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels delivered a kind of masterpiece in the Berlin Sportpalast. In complete distortion of who attacked whom, he painted the picture of the oncoming communist hordes on the wall. And the audience enthusiastically followed his two-hour speech, which ended with the notorious question “Do you want total war?”

Hardly any documentation about the Second World War lacks this excerpt from the newsreel in which the Reich Minister of Propaganda hurls his suggestive rhetorical questions into the audience. But what did Goebbels actually want to achieve with the slogan of “total war”?

Internal power struggles as motives

A few years ago, the historian Peter Longerich, who became widely known for his biographies of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, dissected and analyzed a key event of the Nazi era. As with the “Wannsee Conference” (2016, Pantheon) Longerich takes the Sportpalast speech as an opportunity to provide the historical context, reveal the motives of those involved and consider the effect. As at the Wannsee Conference, he interpreted Goebbels’ speech as an internal struggle for power and influence in the Nazi leadership circles.

Without a doubt, in the winter of 1942/43 the regime found itself in its greatest crisis to date Defeat of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad and serious setbacks in Africa could no longer be concealed from the population. And Adolf Hitler had lost the desire to speak to his “national community”. Goebbels now wanted to fill this gap.

“He hoped that a change in public life to harsh wartime conditions would bring a certain amount of psychological relief, distraction from the crisis and a kind of occupational therapy. At the same time, he wanted to expand the regime’s room for manoeuvre. The mobilization for a ‘total war’ should be the authority of the party and strengthen the state and increase its control over the population,” said Longerich. His idea: to maintain the Führer state even without a visible leader.

“Heroic mobilization of the last reserves”

Goebbels meticulously prepared the change of course, but his plan “to no longer deal with the people in such a gentle, bourgeois manner” met with clear resistance, for example from the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, or the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann. But Goebbels now really wanted to start his “campaign for the heroic mobilization of the last reserves”, he confided in his diary: “You can’t push the tube hard enough now.”

Peter Longerich: The Sportpalast speech 1943. Goebbels and the “total war”. Siedler Verlag, Munich 2023. 208 pages, 24 euros. E-book: 19.99 euros.

(Photo: Settlers)

How Goebbels then pressed the tube on February 18, above all against the “world Jewish conspiracy”, can be read in the fully documented (including the reaction of the audience) and commented on speech. Longerich explains the structure and intention of the speech impressively, shows how Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin, announced the deportation of the remaining Jews from the Reich capital and how he, with relatively relentless openness about the war situation, led to the compulsion for “total war”.

The hand-picked NS audience, by no means the people, agreed to everything: the closure of non-war-related businesses, the closure of entertainment venues, the front deployment of all able-bodied men, the labor deployment of all women who were able to do so. That things didn’t turn out that way in the end because the authorities and party slowed Goebbels down in many placesLongerich shows as well as the very restrained reaction of the press to the speech abroad.

In the age of fake news and conspiracy stories, the (renewed) demythologization of the Sportpalast speech is an instructive antidote.

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