Fantasy, Reality, and Modes of Perception in Ludendorff’s and Goebbels’s Concepts of “Total War”

Abstract

When Germans think of total war, they usually think of Allied strategic bombing and the Russian front after Stalingrad. When they recall the protagonists of total war, they think first of Joseph Goebbels and his notorious speech in the Sport Palace in Berlin on February 18, 1943, and of Erich Ludendorff, whose tract Total War appeared in 1935. Ludendorff styled himself as the authoritative leader, the warlord who could draw on his experiences in the First World War for lessons about the total war of the future. Goebbels, on the other hand, regarded himself in the winter of 1942-43 as the great tribune whose role was to exhort and enforce the totalization of war. When he delivered his speech in the Sport Palace, the Second World War had already lasted longer than the period that separated the outbreak of the First World War from the establishment of the third Supreme Command of the Army (Oberst Heeresleitung, or OHL) under Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the summer of 1916. At this point in the conflict, Ludendorff began to undertake what he later understood to be total war, but it was more accurately the most that he could achieve given the political, social, and economic conditions that he faced. In his own eyes, Goebbels's speech represented an attempt to put into practice at last what he himself understood as the need for total war.