Who is to blame

Clearly Hitler’s demise was directly linked with his lack of success to carry out a peaceful (at least at home) and quick war. Hitler made the poor choice of taking over military leadership in the east. As a result, the failure could only be linked to him. Goebbels did his best to try and change the propaganda strategy to cast Hitler as similar Frederick the Great, however without success this could not happen. Hitler by casting himself as the great Fuhrer was able to convince the nation for awhile that he was the savior. As a result when he did anything wrong the people quickly pointed the finger to other military leaders. They would claim the Hitler was given poor information. For awhile the discourse of the German party was “The fuhrer yes, the party, no”. Kershaw notes, “Furthermore, while logically it might appear that at least from summer 1941, only Hitler could be blamed for the extension and prolongation of the war, a sufficient platform had been constructed by years of propaganda and ideological indoctrination to buttress the transfer of the blame to Germany’s external enemies…” (p. 172)

This discourse changes as Hitler assumes leadership of the military. With repeated failures with Hitler at the Front, the people now could see that Hitler was to blame. Now most of the Germans lost faith in Hitler, yet they were still careful in expressing this publicly. Kershaw notes that “It was squarely concluded that Hitler, through the over-estimation of his own strength and rejection of all overtures for from neutral sites, ‘ bears himself in the last resort the blame for the retrograde development which has now set in.’” (p. 194)

I wonder whether Hitler could have avoided being linked to the failure of war and still continue to lead the Nazi party. Maybe Hitler could have pinned the failure of the war on someone else and still kept his nation’s support.