On 5 February 1945 Goebbels had issued a directive to all Gau propaganda chiefs, declaring: ‘The great hour has arrived for German propaganda.’ In fact it marked the beginning of the end for Nazi propaganda. Myth need not necessarily be reconcilable with truth, but if such propaganda is to prove effective it must survive the battlefield. Under such adverse military conditions, a ‘propaganda success’ in the spring of 1945 was hardly feasible. The meeting of the Allied leaders in Yalta, 7–12 February, did present Goebbels with the opportunity to draw a historical parallel with the ‘Wilsonian swindle’ of 1918–19 and reveal that the true meaning of Yalta was to destroy Germany. The press (such of it as was still printing) made great capital out of the gains made by the Russians at Yalta and outlined in stark terms what lay in store for Germany (and Europe). For many Germans the greatest fear at this stage was falling into the hands of the Russians. The penultimate Deutsche Wochenschau was released in March and contained the last appearances of Hitler and Goebbels, acting out roles that had changed little over twelve years. While Hitler is seen simply meeting officers and driving off in a car, Goebbels’ speech to a mass rally in Görlitz is worth quoting in full, for it reveals the extent to which the Minister for Propaganda had lost touch with reality:

When our soldiers shoulder their guns and climb into their tanks they will have only their slaughtered children and dishonoured wives before their eyes, and a cry of rage will rise from their breasts (among the crowd, the camera focuses on a nun in habit), that will make the enemy turn pale. (Loud applause) As the Führer achieved victories in the past, so he will in the future. Of this I am firmly convinced; only the other day he said to me: ‘I believe so much that we will overcome this crisis. By placing our forces on to new offences we will beat the enemy and push him back. And I believe as I have never believed in anything in my life that one day we will hoist our flags in victory.’ (Applause)

In the final year of the war ‘heroic death’ (Heldentod) and ‘sacrifice’ figured predominantly in Nazi propaganda; there was no mention or suggestion of surrender. And yet a few days before Hitler and Goebbels were both to commit suicide the Führer’s presence in Berlin was still apparently delaying the end of the war. Slogans such as ‘Where the Führer is – victory is!’ were a continuing expression of defiance. In April 1945, with the Russians encircling Berlin, the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, like other Government departments, was disbanded. Hitler and Goebbels retreated to the Führerbunker, abandoning the German people to their fate, accusing the nation of weakness in the ‘life-and-death’ struggle against ‘Jewish–Bolshevism’. It must be said, however, that the reasons why so many Germans fought to the bitter end in 1945 were only partly due to propaganda. When all other methods of persuasion had failed the Nazis had, for some time, resorted to terror as an antidote to cowardice. On Easter Sunday 1945, for example, broadcasting from its own radio station, the Werwolf issued a ‘Proclamation to the German People’ declaring that this was now a people’s war and that every German citizen was to form part of a new ‘German Freedom Movement’ to repel the invaders. As a postcript, the Werwolf warned that those who refused to fight would be hunted down and dealt with mercilessly. The worse the military situation became, the more unrestrained the threats. On 19 April, the Werwolf was still warning that ‘death awaited the cowardly’. Indeed, it has been suggested that the escalation of terror denoted the collapse of any form of consensus in Germany. This is probably going too far; such terror associated with the Werwolf really only played a significant part in the last months of the war. A more likely explanation for the limited success enjoyed by Goebbels during this final period of fighting lies in a traditional German patriotism and respect for authority, together with a fear of Bolshevism, which led people to defend their country intuitively. This sense of resignation has been described most aptly by the historian Helmut Krausnick, as one of ‘reluctant loyalty’.

Such defiance to the bitter end, which allowed the Russians to enter the German capital, would have profound consequences for the future of Germany. In his final appeal to his troops and the nation just before the Battle for Berlin, Hitler once again alluded to ‘Jewish–Bolshevik hordes intent on exterminating our people’. Declaring that whoever does not do his duty at this moment ‘is a traitor to our people’, Hitler concluded: ‘Berlin will remain German.’ The further the Russians advanced on Berlin, the more intense German propaganda and resistance became. Fear of what awaited Germans at the hands of the Russians ensured that everyone joined the ‘life-and-death’ struggle. This ‘reluctant loyalty’, shaped to no small degree by twelve years of an all-embracing manipulation of the mass-media and education system, resulted in a legacy that would take forty-five years to resolve, before Berlin would become truly German again.