Sportpalast speech

The Sportpalast speech (German: Sportpalastrede) or total war speech was a speech delivered by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin Sportpalast to a large but carefully selected audience on 18 February 1943 calling for a total war, as the tide of World War II had turned against Nazi Germany and its Axis allies.

It is considered the most famous of Joseph Goebbels's speeches. The speech was the first public admission by the Nazi leadership that Germany faced serious dangers. Goebbels exhorted the German people to continue the war even though it would be long and difficult because—as he asserted—both Germany's survival and the survival of a non-Bolshevist Europe were at stake.

Compared with the previous year, 1943 started inauspiciously for Germany, with major military problems on all fronts. Following the earlier key Axis defeat three months earlier at the Second Battle of El Alamein in northwestern coastal Egypt, the primary "turning point" of World War II in Europe occurred on 2 February 1943 as the Battle of Stalingrad ended with the surrender of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus and the German 6th Army to the Soviets. At the Casablanca Conference, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill demanded Germany's unconditional surrender, and the Soviets, spurred by their victory, were beginning to retake territory, including Kursk (8 February), Rostov (14 February), and Kharkiv (16 February). In North Africa, the Afrika Korps under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was being brought close to defeat, when German supply ships sailing to Tripoli were sunk by the Allies during January. The Western Desert Campaign had ended with the British victory at El Alamein in November 1942, and the Axis were in Tunisia between two Allied forces—one advancing from Algeria, the other from Libya. The fortunes of Germany's Axis allies were turning as well. Italy's military collapse had made the war in Africa a largely German operation, and in the Pacific, the Americans had just completed their months-long reconquest of Guadalcanal after their victories against Japanese forces at Midway and the Coral Sea.

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