Goebbels’s New Year speech

On New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1939, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, gave his customary end-of-year radio address to the nation, as he had in previous years. This time he began with the caveat that he had never before found it so hard to sum up the passing year – not for lack of material, but because 1939 had been so “dramatic and full of historic glory” that one could fill a library with it. He then set out the official version of events at great length: Germany, encircled by enemies and forced into self-defence by Poland and by a “clique of warmongers” stirring it up from London, had won a victory without precedent in history. He offered no forecasts for the new year except one: “It will be a hard year, and we must be ready for it.” The text of the speech, entitled “Jahreswechsel 1939/40” (“The Turn of the Year 1939/40”), was published in 1941 in a collection of Goebbels’s speeches and articles, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (A Time Without Precedent).

The chronicle according to Goebbels

The speech was in effect a chronology. Goebbels listed dates day by day, which was meant to give an impression of factual sobriety. He began with the Czech lands: according to him, in February and March 1939 the Czechs had persecuted Germans in Prague and Brno until, on 14 March, President Emil Hácha “placed the fate of Bohemia and Moravia in the hands of the Führer”. His listeners did not hear that Hácha had been forced to sign under the threat that Prague would be bombed, or that the Wehrmacht had occupied the country in breach of the Munich Agreement. Then came Memel (Klaipėda) and Poland. In January, he claimed, Adolf Hitler had made Józef Beck proposals for improving relations which “fell on deaf Polish ears”, and from April, after the British guarantee, the Poles had waged a campaign of terror against the German minority. Goebbels cited supposed dates and figures: expulsions, the closure of the German theatre in Bydgoszcz, killings of Germans in Łódź, “55 cases of the most serious Polish attacks” in the last week of August, and “serious border violations” on 31 August. The last of these “violations” were in fact the work of the SS – this was how, among other things, the Gleiwitz provocation was presented.

The war that Germany began on 1 September Goebbels portrayed as a response of “force against force” and as proof of the peaceful intentions of Hitler, who, he said, had waited to the last for a Polish plenipotentiary and had then handed the British ambassador sixteen points – which were never presented to Poland in a form that would have allowed negotiation. He called the September Campaign “unique in history”, listing the capture of Bydgoszcz on 6 September, the fall of Westerplatte, and the capitulation of Warsaw on 27 September and of Modlin. He claimed that more than 700,000 Poles had been taken prisoner, and enumerated huge quantities of booty. Polish studies estimate the number of soldiers taken into German captivity at about 400,000–420,000.

He devoted most space to Britain. Since Munich, he said, a “clique of warmongers” had been gaining the upper hand in London; it had given Warsaw guarantees in the hope that the Poles would provoke the conflict that the “London plutocracy” needed, and then had not lifted a finger to help its ally. On 3 September, after the declaration of war, “the mask fell”, as Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden joined the government. The enemy, said Goebbels, could go on claiming that they were fighting “Hitlerism” and not the German people – “those are phrases for fools”. What they really wanted was to throttle Germany and destroy the German nation, and “90 million” Germans stood in the way of their “brutal plans for world domination”. The speaker did not mention that Hitler had offered peace on 6 October on terms that would have sanctioned the partition of Poland, nor that the Allies had rejected it; he merely stated that all the Führer’s efforts for peace had “borne no fruit”.

What the speech left out

The editor of the English translation, the American scholar of propaganda Randall Bytwerk, drew attention to the most telling gap: Goebbels made no mention whatever of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or of the Soviet Union as an accomplice. Brest “fell on 17 September”, but listeners did not learn that on that day the Red Army had entered Poland, or that the Germans had afterwards handed the city over to the Soviets. The pact with the Soviet Union, for years portrayed as a mortal enemy, was an embarrassment for propaganda, and in December 1939, when the world was condemning the Soviet attack on Finland, it was all the more advisable to pass it over in silence. Russia appeared in the speech only as the object of unsuccessful British efforts to secure an alliance.

Nor was there any mention of Georg Elser’s assassination attempt of 8 November, or of the defeat at sea that had occurred barely two weeks earlier: the scuttling of the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the coast of Uruguay. Also passed over in silence was what Germany was doing in occupied Poland: mass executions, expulsions, ghettos.

Goebbels devoted the final part of the speech to the home front. He recalled that on 28 August rationing of food and everyday goods had been introduced, that on 6 November the rations had been increased, and that on 16 November clothing rationing had been introduced. The front and the homeland, he said, had celebrated Christmas as a “strong and unshakeable community”, and Hitler had spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with the soldiers on the West Wall. Unlike in 1914–1918, Germany was now ready “economically, politically, militarily and spiritually”. Having forecast a hard year, Goebbels added that victory “will not fall into our laps from heaven”; it had to be won “not only at the front but also at home”. He ended with the prayer attributed to the Prussian field marshal Leopold I of Anhalt-Dessau before the Battle of Kesselsdorf in 1745: “Lord, if You cannot or will not help us, at least do not help our accursed enemies!”

Hitler’s New Year proclamations to the Party and to the Wehrmacht were also published at the turn of the year. The tone was the same: the war had been forced on Germany by her enemies, above all – in the language of Nazi propaganda – by the “Jewish-capitalist” world, which had only one aim: to destroy the Reich and the German people. Such formulations, repeated throughout the war, prepared the ground for presenting the Jews as the authors of the war.

The home front in the winter of 1939–1940

Behind the phrases about an “unshakeable community” lay an everyday reality that Germans were discovering for themselves. Rationing had been in force since 28 August, announced a few days before the war; in the autumn it was extended to bread, and from November clothing and footwear were issued against points on a personal clothing card. The War Economy Decree of 4 September froze wages, imposed a war surcharge on income tax and raised taxes on beer and tobacco. From 1 September the cities were plunged into blackout at night, and listening to foreign broadcasts was a crime punishable by imprisonment – and spreading the news heard in them, even by death. The radio, including the cheap people’s receivers that stood in millions of homes, was to be Goebbels’s voice alone; from the autumn it also broadcast the hugely popular Request Concert for the Wehrmacht, which linked the front with home.

The rations were still bearable, as the Reich was living on its stocks, on imports from the USSR and on the plunder of occupied territories. The winter of 1939–1940, however, proved one of the harshest in decades, and the overloaded railways could not keep up with deliveries of coal. In January 1940 many cities ran short of fuel, and the SD’s reports on public morale recorded grumbling. There was none of the enthusiasm of 1914: most Germans had accepted the war with resignation, and the victory over Poland with relief that it had been short. All the more important was it for the propaganda minister to convince them that Britain had started the war and that Germany had no choice but to fight.

Significance

Goebbels’s New Year’s Eve speech is a textbook example of how Third Reich propaganda narrated the first year of the war to the Germans: through carefully chosen dates, silences and a reversal of the roles of perpetrator and victim. The themes of 31 December – “encirclement”, “plutocracy”, Britain as the main enemy, the assurance that Germany would not repeat 1918 – were to return in every subsequent year of the war. One prediction proved accurate. The year 1940 was indeed hard, though not in the way his listeners expected: it brought the conquest of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, which briefly confirmed the Germans in their belief in Hitler’s infallibility, but also the Battle of Britain, in which Britain refused to be beaten. Goebbels gave New Year’s Eve speeches in the following years of the war too, less and less often promising imminent victory and more and more often calling for endurance – until the years when the air war raged over the Reich and Allied armies stood on its borders.