The Jazz War by Studdert Will;

Author:Studdert, Will;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

TOTAL RADIO WARFARE': FEBRUARY 1943 — MAY 1945

The simplest and most effective of all ‘black’ operations is to spit in a man’s soup and cry ‘Heil Hitler!’

Sefton Delmer, PWE1

On the night of 3 February 1943, Goebbels met with Hinkel and Fritzsche to discuss how to break the news of the German surrender at Stalingrad to the populace. The special announcement was to be ‘very realistic, very sober and quite lacking in pathos’ in order to reflect what the Propaganda Minister felt to be the current mood of the German people.2 Nonetheless, the SD reported that the information caused ‘a fairly extensive shock to public opinion’.3 Goebbels had already planned to cancel radio entertainment for an unspecified period of time, claiming that ‘the populace doesn’t want light entertainment today, it wants gravity and practicality’,4 and at his morning press conference earlier that day he had decreed that ‘immediately after the announcement of the termination of the fighting in Stalingrad, a national remembrance of three times 24 hours will be observed. During this time, all places of entertainment, including theatres and cinemas, will be closed.’5

The decision of Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus to be taken alive as a prisoner of war created a serious problem for Goebbels in his attempts to forge a sense of post-Stalingrad national unity. By ignoring Hitler’s orders to commit suicide, Paulus had defied the regime’s increasingly nihilistic demands for the ‘harshest personal sacrifice’ in the service of the Nazi war effort,6 and Goebbels suggested in his diary that it represented ‘a serious moral defeat for the army. One cannot overlook the potential psychological complications that will result.’7 This was exacerbated by Soviet propaganda, which the Propaganda Minister noted on the night of the meeting with Hinkel and Fritzsche was

making every effort to make it clear to the German soldiers and also the German people that the generals are being taken prisoner while the soldiers must die. This is of course a very unpleasant and not very gratifying message, which we must urgently counter. But right now [. . .] I do not know whether or not this message corresponds to the facts. The Bolsheviks certainly will not help us to check its veracity. Together with the British, they are announcing that the fall of Stalingrad was the biggest defeat in German military history. Numerically speaking, this may be true. 8

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