Video: 'When Goebbels Signed Germany's Suicide Pact - WW2 Special'

(Thursday, February 18, 1943, broadcast by Berlin at 8:15-10:27 p.m. Central European Time; during The Holocaust, part of World War II) — 16 days after the Battle of Stalingrad ended with the surrender of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus and the German 6th Army to the Soviets, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels called for “total war” (German: totalen Krieg) in the Sportpalast speech today at the Berlin Sportpalast to a large but carefully selected audience.

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 was at stake.

Video: 'The World at War: Inside the Reich: Germany - 1940-1944 (16 of 26)' (Feb. 18, 1943 at 24:56)

The speech was the first public admission by the Nazi leadership that Germany faced serious dangers following the German surrender at Stalingrad and the call for unconditional surrender by the Americans and British.

The speech is particularly notable as Goebbels almost mentions The Holocaust when he begins saying “Ausrotten” (using the German word for extermination), but quickly changes it to Ausschaltung (i.e. exclusion).

This was the same word Heinrich Himmler used on Dec. 18, 1941, when he recorded the outcome of his discussion with Adolf Hitler on the Final Solution, wherein he wrote: “als Partisanen auszurotten” (“exterminate them as partisans”).