vism triumphs!... We cannot say how much use the
European nations will be. Spain perhaps; France, torn
inside out, won’t help, she will rise against us when it
comes to the crunch; the same goes for Norway. We
have not one of the nations we have occupied on our
side. Italy’s weakness is undeniable, its military
strength is zero. Domestically, defeatism rules su-
preme, just a few Fascists are holding the whole thing
together, nobody else is working, let alone fighting.
The awful thing is that the Duce cannot even trust his
own son-in-law [Ciano] and had to sack him....
The next biggest danger is southern Russia.
Stalingrad: the question was whether or not to pull
out. At first there was no reason to, we were entitled
to the view that our troops were strong enough there
to hold on until relieved.... If the men had fought
harder, particularly in Stalingrad itself, we should still
have the city today and it would not have been cap-
tured. Paulus was too weak, he didn’t turn Stalingrad
into a proper fortress. Thousands of Russian civilians
were fed along with his troops. He should have sac-
rificed them ruthlessly so that his soldiers had enough
to survive, and that goes for the hopelessly injured
they shouldn’t have been dragged along but allowed
to fade away. The Paulus army just relied on the
Luftwaffe and expected miracles from it... And then
this army’s chief of staff General [Arthur] Schmidt
has the gall to say, “The Luftwaffe has committed the
biggest treachery in history because it could not man-
age to supply the Paulus army.” The army lost its air-
fields how on earth was a mass airlift supposed to be
possible after that?That spring Hans Thomsen, the new Nazi ambassador to Swe-
den, visited Göring. He found the Reichsmarschall wearing his
golden dagger, leather jerkin, and puffy silk sleeves. After driv-
ing Thomsen around his Carinhall estate, Göring changed into