Background: Goebbels launched a weekly German journal of opinion called Das Reich in May 1940. Das Reich was immediately popular. A 1941 item in the German files says that 900,000 copies were sold weekly, but that 2,000,000 could be sold were the necessary paper available.
This article is dated 14 March 1943, a month after his famous total war speech. It is typical of many of Goebbels’s essays. He says very little other than that the previous winter had been very difficult, but that the leadership had drawn the necessary conclusions and was now preparing for summer offensives. He says nothing that might be embarrassing later.
The source: Der steile Aufstieg (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1943), pp. 221-227.
The Winter Crisis and Total War
by Joseph GoebbelsOne must get used to seeing the war in a larger framework than we ordinarily do. Its daily, weekly, and monthly problems, no matter how significant they may be, are mostly the results of deeper causes. Only he who has the ability to see the entire war in its material, intellectual, and spiritual unity will over the long term be able to understand the ever new difficulties of the moment or situation. One may not think that crises come from nowhere and return to nowhere. They fit within the larger framework of the war, are manifestations of world history, and find their solution within a larger framework. It is no accident that in the East we are always on the offensive during the summer, but in winter fall back on the defensive, with all its painful results. The important thing is to draw the proper consequences from the course of things that will in the future at least protect us from a similar situation to what we endured during the past winter months.
A military crisis is a problem at the front that is not limited to a day or two, but rather has a serious character. That was undoubtedly the case during the past two winters in the East. In the most recent crisis we lost significant territory that we had previously conquered, as well as the loss of munitions and, most importantly, people. They are not high enough to have a decisive role in the victorious continuation of the war, but are high enough to cause us significant difficulties. There is no point in concealing that from the German people, for it must find the strength to overcome the results of this crisis as rapidly and thoroughly as possible. We can today speak openly and courageously about these things, since we have reason to believe that the rolling Bolshevist offensive in the East has been stopped, for the moment at least. And our troops have been reinforced from the reserves and to a significant degree are able to undertake limited local counter offensives.
It would be fundamentally wrong, displaying careless self-deception, if one assumed that we intentionally painted the situation in the East as worse than it in fact was, that we had practiced a kind of useful pessimism as our enemies said, in order to make total war more pallatable. We do not need to frighten our people. If we need to propose decisive measures for the war effort to the public, we have sufficient honest and eloquent reasons. We do not need deceitful means. The situation in the East in the past months was exactly as we said; now it has changed significantly, and to our advantage. Obviously we do not hesitate to say that openly to the public.
We will speak at another time of how the situation became complicated and has now become clearer. When one has recovered from a serious illness, it is not the right time to go into every detail of the disease; it is more important to do everything, using the full strength of the body, mind, and spirit to overcome the last remnants of the illness, and above all to ensure that its causes and possibilities for recurrence are eliminated. When during the middle of the winter crisis we proclaimed total war, it was not a matter for the moment, but rather a long term program. It requires enormous effort in every area, and its results naturally are not visible immediately, but rather only after a certain period. Total war, as we begin to sense now and which we are preparing for in the future, can hardly be expected to overcome the present crisis. Instead, its goal is to avoid such and similar crises in the future. That is the great lesson we have learned from the previous winter.
Nothing could be worse than a self-deception that would lead us during the first sunny days of the approaching spring to toss the lessons of winter overboard. The pain and burdens that we endured during the dark winter months, both during the day and deep into the night, must be our comrades in the coming weeks and months. We are not over the mountain, we are still facing it. An enormous distance remains to be travelled, indeed the hardest stretch. He who falls into careless illusions proves only that he has not understood the hard winter crisis that lies behind us. He would certainly fall into a new, even worse crisis were we not to warn him in time. We do not want that to happen. We were shaken by a misfortune that almost knocked us unconscious, and while it was battering us we swore: Never again!
There is but one way to overcome the crisis, and that is the full use of our entire national strength. It must be exploited to its fullest extent. Spring may smile and summer charm us, but we may think only of the winter that will come and that we must survive without significant losses. The capacities of the enemy will also diminish. His reserves in men and material are limited. That will reduce his offensive force, as we are seeing now in the East. Unfortunately, we do not know when his resources will run out. It seems to us better to overestimate rather than underestimate his resources.
In the end, every war was decided by the last battalion that was left in the reserves, and that is what we must have. In the decisive battle one must have enough strength to take each of the opponent's blows and respond with a harder blow. To us, total war is much more than carrying out organizational policies that exploit all of our inner strength. Total war is the complete abandonment of peace for the purpose of waging war, leading to a restoration of a genuine and ordered peace. That has nothing to do with changing seasons and changing crises; it is a thing in itself that goes beyond time and space and class and social standing, a matter for the whole people. This is the way to victory, the only way to victory.
No one welcomes the easing of the situation in the East as much as we do. The slowly lessening military burden gave us worries and burdens we had never known before. We occasionally envied those observers of political and military events who had no responsibility. We never doubted that we should master them sooner or later, but nonetheless they were there.
If one or another grumbles that we forbid him during the war to become the target of enemy propaganda, we believe we did him a particular service over the past winter. This war is not only a war of weapons, but also a war of nerves. We are proud to protect our people from this war of nerves by keeping it from the filthy airwaves of enemy agitation. We have not kept the people from knowing what it had to know, and what had to remain unsaid for military reasons will be said after the conclusion of the current operations. The German leadership can and may look the people straight in the eye. It has the right to demand increased sacrifices and efforts from the nation, which after all is for the good of the nation. Leading this war is a high honor for those involved in it, but also a heavy burden and one sometimes wonders who is better off, the leaders or the governed. In any event, as one example, we would find it easier to stand in line at the grocery store rather than organize the food supply for a city of five million. Reading the OKW report [the daily military communique] is probably much more pleasant than a careful study of the situation at the front in all its details each afternoon and evening.
Be that as it may, war brings with it an immense amount of work, worry, burdens, and responsibility for both leadership and followers, and whoever proves unequal to the task will not master the war — the war will master him. War has no pity. It pays no heed to our happiness or even our lives. On the morning after the last British terror attack on the Reich capital, we visited a number of damaged areas including a hospital that the English humanitarians had reduced to smoke and ruins. Under an archway was the body of a young nurse. As an air raid warden, she had brought patients during the air raid alert to the basement and was hit by a deadly bomb. We raised the shroud and looked into the peaceful, unmarred face of a young girl. Blond hair spilled out from beneath the steel helmet, which sat slightly askew on her head. Beneath it two blue, now glazed eyes stared half-open and the arms hung limp and lifeless at the sides of a slender female body.
One might ask what this innocent girl had to do with the war. This question must be asked of our enemies, perhaps that 22-year-old Canadian lout who took off from an English airbase to drop his bombs on Berlin. Perhaps he could not even find Germany on the globe. He comes from a rich part of the earth, but its people and government are not able to make use of the treasures so richly available. They have too much, we have too little. Instead of giving us from their plenty, they want to take the little that we have. We are defending against that, however long it takes or how hard and terrible it seems. That nurse probably knew that, and died with a clear smile. If during the last moment of her small and undemanding life she thought of her parents or her boyfriend or fiancée she found consolation in the thought that she, too, had to die for a great and good cause.
Last edited 26 July 2026
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