Goebbels
Goebbels
GOEBBELS
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 1
David Irving
Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third Reich
“David Irving is in the first rank of Britain’s
historical chroniclers”—THE TIMES
© Parforce Ltd, London, 1996
A Note on the Internet Edition.Ê Ê This biography went through half a dozen drafts between the
handwritten original and the printed book. The final typescript was completed on September 7,
1994, and submitted to St Martins Press (SMP) that winter. That is the full-length text reproduced
here.
After the contract was signed, the biography went through the normal editing processes, being
appraised, according to SMP’s editor John Douglas, by seven different editors.
At SMP’s suggestion the earlier chapters were substantially cut back in editing. In February 1996
the “Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith,” a New York based Jewish body, began agitating
against SMP and Doubleday Inc., who had announced this work as their History Book Club selection
for May 1996. The publishers initially announced that they would not surrender to the ADL intimidation,
but on April 6, 1996 they did just that. The book never appeared in the United States. [For more
detail: http://www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/SMPIndex.html].
This Internet edition is the gift of the author and his publishing imprint Focal Point to the academic
and student world. We ask only that the intellectual and copyrights be respected.
2 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Copyright © 1996, Parforce (UK) Ltd.
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This edition first published 1996 by FOCAL POINT PUBLICATIONS,
81 Duke Street, London W1M 5DJ
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1 872197 13 2
Paper edition printed and bound in Great Britain by
Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London; and by Biddles Ltd, Guildford,
Surrey
IN MEMORY OF
MICHAEL SHEPPARD
WHO CLIMBED TOO FAR
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 3
Contents
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... 5
Prologue: The Mark of Cain ................................................................. 14
I: The Hater of Mankind
1: Eros Awakes ............................................................................... 23
2: Prodigal Son .............................................................................. 41
3: ‘A Wandering Scholar, I’ ................................................................ 48
4: The Little Agitator ....................................................................... 64
5: God Disposes Otherwise ............................................................... 76
II: The Gauleiter of Berlin
6: The Opium Den .......................................................................... 90
7: Fighting the Ugly Dragon ............................................................. 113
8: Anka is to Blame........................................................................ 129
9: Conjuring up Spirits ................................................................... 139
10: A Rather Obstinate Gentleman .................................................... 154
11: The Nightmare ........................................................................ 165
12: Hold the Flag High ................................................................... 175
13: His Week in Court ................................................................... 192
14: A Blonde in the Archives ............................................................ 206
15: Maria Magdalena Quandt ........................................................... 216
16: The Stranger and the Shadow....................................................... 235
17: The Man of Tomorrow ............................................................... 253
18: Follow that Man ...................................................................... 268
19: ‘It’s all Fixed!’ ......................................................................... 284
III: The Reich Minister
20: The Big Lie ............................................................................. 290
21: Bonfire of the Books ................................................................. 304
22: Twilight of the Gods and Tally-ho .................................................. 322
23: Inkpot Hero ........................................................................... 343
24: While Crowds Exult below.......................................................... 361
25: A Man of Property ................................................................... 385
26: Femme Fatale ......................................................................... 394
4 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
27: The Round Table ...................................................................... 408
28: Something about March ............................................................. 427
29: The Gambler .......................................................................... 447
30: Duty put on Hold .................................................................... 465
31: The Real Chum ....................................................................... 477
32: Broken Glass .......................................................................... 488
33: On the Verge .......................................................................... 509
34: Put Poland on Page Two ............................................................. 527
IV: The Propaganda Warrior
35: Pact with the Devil ................................................................... 545
36: War ...................................................................................... 561
37: Propaganda Means Repetition...................................................... 581
38: Knocking out Front Teeth ........................................................... 590
39: Breaking Even ......................................................................... 606
40: A Few Choice Drops of Poison ..................................................... 622
41: The Malodorous Thing ...........................................................
.... 640
42: No Room for Two of Us ............................................................. 651
43: Exodus ................................................................................. 671
44: A Fate which Beggars all Description ............................................. 688
45: At any Price ........................................................................... 705
46: The Road to Stalingrad .............................................................. 717
47: Things have not Panned out ......................................................... 733
48: Sin Will Pluck on Sin ................................................................. 750
49: The Katyn Massacre .................................................................. 766
50: The First Battle of Berlin ............................................................ 780
51: The White Suit Bespattered ........................................................ 794
52: When the Going gets Tough ......................................................... 808
53: The Long-Awaited Day .............................................................. 825
54: Valkyrie ................................................................................. 839
55: Total War ............................................................................... 853
V: The Loyal Henchman
56: The Spectre of the Hangman........................................................ 869
57: Kill off the Prisoners ................................................................. 883
58: Death of Another Empress .......................................................... 896
59: The Man of the Century ............................................................. 905
Epilogue: ‘Ever at your Side’ ............................................................. 927
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 5
Acknowledgements
WRITING THIS BIOGRAPHY, I have lived in the evil shadow of Dr Joseph Goebbels for
over six years.
Four years into the ordeal, I had the immense good fortune to become the first—
and so far only—person to open the complete microfiche record, made by the Nazis
in 1944/1945, of Goebbels’ entire private diaries and papers from 1923 to 1945;
the Red Army had placed these in the secret Soviet state archives in Moscow. There
they languished until the ninety or so original Agfa boxes containing the 1,600 glass
plates, on which Goebbels had had the diaries filmed for safety, were discovered by
the Goebbels Diaries expert Dr Elke Fröhlich in March 1992. (On behalf of all historians
of the period I place on record here our gratitude for the work she has done
on the diaries.) I was able to use them myself in June and July of the same year,
probably the first person to have untied the string on those boxes since 1945. With
the support of Dr VÊ P Tarasov, chief of the Russian federation’s archives, and Dr V N
Bondarev, chief of the former Soviet secret state archives, I was able to retrieve or
copy some five hundred pages of the most important missing passages of the diary,
including Goebbels’ first diary, begun in 1923, the 1933 Reichstag fire, the 1934
Röhm Putsch, the 1938 Kristallnacht, the months before the outbreak of war in
1939 and many other historically significant episodes. The conditions in these archives
in Moscow’s Viborg street were, it must be said, challenging: Soviet archives
were designed for keeping things secret, and the very notion of a public research
room was alien to them. This one had no microfilm or microfiche reader. After struggling
to read the 1,600 fragile glass microfiches (some 80,000 pages) with a thumbnail-
sized 12x magnifier on my first visit, I was able, through the generosity of the
London Sunday Times, to donate a sophisticated film and fiche reader to the Russians
on my second; the bulky machine arrived back in London, without explanation, one
day after I did in July 1992.
6 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
What followed was a less enlightened episode. I provided extracts from these diaries
to Times Newspapers Ltd in Britain. The Sunday Times published them along
with Der Spiegel in Germany and other major newspapers around the world. I also
donated complete sets to the German federal archives in Koblenz and to the archives
of Goebbels’ native city Mönchengladbach. Nevertheless, while the international
press celebrated the retrieval of the long-lost diaries many rival historians registered
something approaching a cry of pain.
Their injured professional amour propre proved infectious. While spending half a
million pounds promoting its serialization of the diaries’ scoop, the Sunday Times
mentioned the name of the person who acquired them in the smallest type-size known
to man; Der Spiegel printed the series for five weeks without mentioning him at all. A
Berlin university historian, whose team has been labouring for years on the other
volumes of the diaries, reported at length on the ‘new find’ to a symposium in the
United States, again without reference to either Dr Fröhlich, the discoverer—to
whom all real credit is due—or to myself.* The directors of Piper Verlag, Munich,
who a few weeks later published an abridged popular edition of the other Goebbels
Diaries,† deplored in a German television news bulletin that ‘Mr Irving of all people’
should have exclusively obtained these sensational missing diaries—and failed
to mention either then or in their publication that without reward he had at the last
minute made one hundred pages available with which they had filled aching gaps in
their publication.
Even more lamentable have been the actions of the German government’s federal
archives, the Bundesarchiv, to whom I also donated many Goebbels documents including
a set of all the diaries I retrieved in Moscow. On the instructions of the
* Dr Jürgen Michael Schulz, of the Berlin Free University, ‘Zur Edition der Goebbels
Tagebücher,’ a paper presented to the German Studies Association conference, 1992.
See its Newsletter, vol.xvii, No.2, winter 1992, 34ff.
† Dr Ralf Georg Reuth (ed.), Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, five vols. (Munich, Zürich,
91992).
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 7
minister of the interior, on July 1, 1993 the archives banished me forever from their
halls, without notice, two hours before the conclusion of my seven years of research
on this subject. They had earlier provided a hundred photos at my expense—but on
the minister’s instructions they now also refused to supply caption information for
them. When I requested the Transit-Film Corporation, who inherited the copyrights
of Third Reich film productions, to provide still photographs of the leading actors
and actresses who play a part in the Goebbels story, the firm cautiously inquired of
Professor Friedrich Kahlenberg, head of the Bundesarchiv, whether ‘special considerations’
might apply against helping me! (A copy of their letter fortuitously came
into my hands, but not the pictures I had requested.) The background can only be
surmised. Professor Kahlenberg had hurried to Moscow in July 1992—too late to
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 1
