thumb|upright=1.5|Nazi rally on 18 February 1943 at the [[Berlin Sportpalast; the sign says ("Total War – Shortest War").]]
The speech () or Total War speech was a speech delivered by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin to a large, carefully selected audience on 18 February 1943, as the tide of World War II was turning against Nazi Germany and its Axis allies.
It is considered the most famous of Goebbels's speeches. At the Casablanca Conference in January, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had demanded Germany's unconditional surrender, and the Soviets, encouraged by their victory, were beginning to retake territory, including Kursk (8 February), Rostov-on-Don (14 February), and Kharkov (16 February). After the Axis defeats in Egypt and the subsequent loss of Tripoli (23 January 1943), military setbacks shook Axis morale. In the Pacific, the Americans had just completed their months-long reconquest of Guadalcanal.
left|thumb|[[Joseph Goebbels|Goebbels, April 1937]]
Hitler responded with the first measures that would lead to the all-out mobilisation of Germany. Prior to the speech, the government closed restaurants, clubs, bars, theatres, and luxury stores throughout the country so that the civilian population could contribute more to the war. Despite this, the measures taken did not go as far as Goebbels wanted, and other ministers such as Hermann Göring and Hans Lammers succeeded in watering the measures down.
Setting and audience
The setting of the speech in the placed the audience behind and under a big banner bearing the all-capital words ("total war – shortest war") along with Nazi banners and swastikas, as seen in pictures and film of the event.
Although Goebbels claimed that the audience included people from "all classes and occupations" (including "soldiers, doctors, scientists, artists, engineers and architects, teachers, white collars"), the propagandist had carefully selected his listeners to react with appropriate fanaticism. Goebbels said to Albert Speer that it was the best-trained audience one could find in Germany. However, the enthusiastic and unified crowd response recorded in the written version is, at times, not fully supported by the recording.
- If the was not in a position to counter the danger from the Eastern Front, the German Reich would fall to Bolshevism and the rest of Europe shortly afterwards.
Regarding the word there was a slight pause when Goebbels said , means 'elimination', which fits the context of the speech.
Reception
Millions of Germans listened to Goebbels on the radio as he delivered this speech about the "misfortune of the past weeks" and an "unvarnished picture of the situation." By amassing such popular enthusiasm, Goebbels wanted to convince Hitler to give him greater powers in running the war economy.