Hitler's Sportpalast speech of 1942

On 30 September 1942 Adolf Hitler spoke at the Sportpalast in Berlin at the ceremonial opening of the wartime Winter Relief drive for the winter of 1942/1943. It was his first major public appearance since the April session of the Reichstag and the first since the summer offensive in the East had begun. The speech was broadcast nationwide, and all the newspapers printed it the following day. Hitler spoke for more than an hour. He assured the Germans that the worst ordeal of the war, the winter of 1941/1942, was behind them, listed the summer’s gains, mocked the leaders of Britain and the United States, and announced that Stalingrad would be taken: “you may be sure that no one will ever move us from that spot again”. In the middle of the speech he repeated his “prophecy” about the Jews and threatened that “everywhere they will stop laughing”.

War chronologies tend to record briefly that Hitler “addressed the nation and boasted that Stalingrad would be taken”. That is true, but the speech was more than a boast. Delivered at a moment when the German offensive had stalled in the ruins of Stalingrad and in the foothills of the Caucasus, and when Hitler had, within three weeks, dismissed the commander of Army Group A and the Chief of the Army General Staff, it was meant to reassure the country – and at the same time it heralded the continued murder of the Jews of Europe.

A September of crisis

September 1942 was a month of disappointments for Hitler. The fighting for Stalingrad, which was supposed to last a few days, had turned into a bloody struggle for every street. By the end of the month the 6th Army had taken the city centre and the southern districts, and the Soviet defenders of the grain elevator had held out for a week, but the northern factory districts were still in the hands of the 62nd Army. In the Caucasus, Army Group A had come to a halt at Novorossiysk, on the Terek and in the mountain passes. On 9 September Hitler demanded the resignation of Field Marshal Wilhelm List and took personal command of his army group. On 24 September he removed Colonel General Franz Halder, who had headed the Army General Staff since 1938 and had objected ever more openly to the dispersal of forces between the Caucasus and the Volga. Halder noted in his diary that Hitler had told him both their nerves were frayed and they must part. His successor was the younger General Kurt Zeitzler, reputed to be a resolute optimist, until then chief of staff to the Commander-in-Chief West.

At home the mood was uncertain. British air raids had been growing heavier since the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne in May, food rations had been cut in the spring, and the families of soldiers in the East dreaded a second winter in Russia. The propaganda ministry of Joseph Goebbels, which organised the opening of the winter collection every year, needed the Führer to address the nation in person.

“You may be sure”

Hitler began by explaining why he spoke so rarely: instead of talking, he had to act, and his soldiers spoke for him. He then turned to the war in the East. The winter of 1941/1942, he said, had been the hardest trial the German people had ever undergone, one in which Providence had “weighed” the Germans and their army. Things could not get worse, and they would not. In the spring, he went on, the Wehrmacht had beaten off the Soviet attacks and destroyed more than 75 enemy divisions in three battles, and then gone over to an offensive of its own.

Hitler listed its aims one by one: to take from the Soviet Union its last great grain-growing regions, to take its last coking coal, to reach its oilfields and seize them or at least put them out of action, and finally to cut the Volga, the country’s last great artery of communication. Stalingrad was the objective, he insisted, not because it bore Stalin’s name but because it stood at a strategic point. Some 30 million tons of freight, he claimed, were carried on the Volga in half a year. That route had already been cut, and “the capture of Stalingrad, which will be completed” would tighten the blockade further. “And you may be sure that no one will ever move us from that spot again,” he added. Earlier, mocking opponents who presented every German success as a defeat, he had run through the list: the Germans had reached the Don, then the Volga, and “we shall storm Stalingrad and we shall take it, you can count on that”. Historians often point out that so public a commitment later made it harder for him to agree to any withdrawal from the Volga.

He refused to speak about further objectives in the Caucasus because, he claimed, these were objectives being achieved at that very moment, and Churchill was talking about them on his behalf.

Mocking the enemy

Hitler devoted a large part of the speech to ridiculing the Allies. He scoffed at the British for proclaiming “victories” out of the evacuations from Namsos and Åndalsnes in the Norwegian campaign and from Dunkirk, which the British supposedly regarded as “the greatest victory in the history of the world”. He mocked the promises of a second front and the Dieppe raid: next time, wherever Winston Churchill chose to land, he could count himself lucky if his soldiers stayed ashore for nine hours. He called British politicians windbags, and one of them – “I believe it was Mr Eden”, he said – a “nonentity” of whom one could not even tell who happened to be speaking. He derided the Atlantic Charter as “nonsense” that the facts would soon correct.

He blamed Churchill for the bombing of German cities. It was Churchill, Hitler claimed, who had invented the bombing of civilians and sent the first bombers over Germany in May 1940, and who then, when the Luftwaffe hit back, began to complain of barbarism. This turned the facts upside down: the Luftwaffe had been bombing cities since the first day of the war, Warsaw among them, and on 14 May 1940 it bombed Rotterdam before the RAF began its strategic raids on the Ruhr on the night of 15–16 May. He named Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the chief warmonger. He promised retaliation: “the hour will come when we strike back again”, and the leaders of the war and their “Jewish backers” should not lament if the end for England proved more terrible than the beginning.

“They will stop laughing”

The most menacing passage of the speech concerned the Jews. Hitler recalled that on 1 September 1939, in the Reichstag, he had announced two things: that no power would force Germany to capitulate, and that if Jewry unleashed a world war, it would not destroy the Aryan peoples but would itself be exterminated. In reality he had first delivered the “prophecy” in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, and since 1941 he had been repeating it while shifting its date to the day the war broke out. Now he added that a wave of antisemitism was sweeping one nation after another, and that every state that entered the war would emerge from it an antisemitic state. “The Jews in Germany once laughed at my prophecies. I do not know whether they are still laughing today or whether they have already lost the urge to laugh. But I can give this assurance now as well: everywhere they will stop laughing. And in this prophecy, too, I shall be proved right.”

These words were spoken as the Holocaust was reaching its peak. Between July and mid-September more than 250,000 people had been deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka and murdered; transports from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Slovakia were going to Auschwitz-Birkenau; and in Galicia, the Lublin region and Volhynia one ghetto after another was being liquidated. The American historian Jeffrey Herf, who has studied the propaganda of the Third Reich, argues that for listeners familiar with Hitler’s earlier speeches it was clear that he was talking about the murder of the Jews, not using a figure of speech, and that the word “everywhere” signalled that it would extend to the whole of Europe. Historians rank this passage among Hitler’s most menacing public statements about the Jews. The hall greeted it with applause.

Propaganda was quick to exploit these words. A few weeks later the party’s wall newspaper Parole der Woche, posted in public places throughout Germany in some 125,000 copies, appeared under the headline “They will stop laughing!!!”, with quotations from the speech and a drawing of a laughing Roosevelt surrounded by Jewish advisers.

The winter collection

The pretext for the speech was the annual Winter Relief collection, called the War Winter Relief since 1939. Under that banner, members of the party, the Hitler Youth and the women’s organisations collected money, clothing and fuel in the streets for the needy and for soldiers’ families. In practice the collection was compulsory, and donations became a form of additional tax and a measure of loyalty to the regime. Hitler appealed for generosity towards the soldiers and warned that anyone who embezzled gifts intended for the soldiers and the suffering homeland could expect no mercy whatsoever. In the winter of 1941/1942 Goebbels, responding to an appeal from Hitler, had organised a collection of warm clothing and furs for the army in the East, which revealed how poorly the Wehrmacht had been prepared for winter.

Reception

The speech was carried by every radio station in the Reich and also broadcast to the troops at the front, and the press printed it in full under headlines about certain victory. According to the reports of the SS Security Service (SD), which surveyed public opinion every week and on which historians rely, the speech lifted spirits for a time. Listeners took it as an assurance that the second winter in the East would not repeat the disaster of the first, and that the fall of Stalingrad was a matter of days.

Place in the war

The pledge of 30 September soon turned against Hitler. On 8 November, the anniversary of the Munich putsch, he declared in Munich that Stalingrad was as good as taken and that only a few small pockets of resistance remained. Eleven days later the Red Army launched a counter-offensive that within a few days encircled the 6th Army. Bound by his own words and convinced that giving up the Volga would be a blow to his prestige, Hitler forbade it to withdraw. At the beginning of February 1943 the remnants of the army capitulated. On 18 February 1943, in the same Sportpalast, it was Goebbels, not Hitler, who called on the Germans to wage “total war”. Hitler spoke in public less and less often.

The threat against the Jews was carried out in a way that the listeners of September 1942 could already sense. In 1942 the Germans murdered more Jews than in any other year of the war, and on 17 December the governments of the Allied states, including Britain, the United States and the USSR, condemned in a joint declaration the German policy of exterminating the Jewish people of Europe. The September speech is one of the statements by Hitler that historians cite to show that the Holocaust was no secret in the Third Reich: it was announced publicly, from the platform, in a radio broadcast heard by millions of Germans.