One of the most famous speeches of WW II came from one its best orators. While Roosevelt and Stalin preferred to address the nation over the mediums of television and radio, Germany’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels preferred to rouse his people and lift spirits in live speeches given to crowds of thousands (although still broadcast to the nation at large). After the major German defeat at Stalingrad, deep in Russia, Goebbels knew he had to pick up the flagging morale of Germany.

On this day, February 18, in 1943, Goebbels took the stage in front of a carefully-selected crowd in the sports stadium Sportspalast in Berlin. In a calibrated, calculated speech, he called for “total war” against the allies and warned that the price of defeat would be takeover by Russian bolshevism.

Goebbels chose every word and every intonation for maximum effect, and the crowd was roused to near frenzy by the time he was done. Backstage, after the speech, Goebbels approached a fellow Nazi commander Albert Speer and noted with satisfaction that the audience’s response was exactly what he hoped to achieve. Speer compared him to an actor who was delivering lines on cue.