Dortmund, Germany, A crowd listening to a speech delivered by Goebbels, December 1943.

Dortmund, Germany, A crowd listening to a speech delivered by Goebbels, December 1943.

December 1943: Despite the disasters of 1942, Goebbels predicts ... q Total War: In his most famous speech delivered shortly after the defeat at Stalingrad, ... q "The Matter of the Plague": Why Germans may not listen to the BBC (5 October 1941). ...... part of the crowds on Berlin's Unter den Linden.

The Sportpalast speech (German: Sportpalastrede) or total war speech was a speech delivered byGerman 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.^[1] 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.