Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 2
prevent the Russians from granting me access to the coveted microfiches of the
Goebbels diaries. (There was no reason why the Russians should have denied me
access: Several of my books, including those on Arctic naval operations and on Nazi
nuclear research, have been published by Soviet printing houses.) The Bundesarchiv
has justified its banishment, which is without parallel in any other archives, on the
grounds that my research might harm the interests of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The ban has prevented me from verifying my colleagues’ questionable transcriptions
of certain key words in the handwritten diaries. I had a list of twenty such
words which I wished to double-check against the original negatives; pleading superior
orders, the Bundesarchiv’s deputy director, Dr Siegfried Büttner, refused to
allow even this brief concluding labour. As one consequence, evidently unforeseen
by the German government, the Bundesarchiv has had to return to England its ‘Irving
Collection,’ half a ton of records which I had deposited in its vaults for researchers
over the last thirty years. These include originals of Adolf Eichmann’s papers, copies
of two missing years of Heinrich Himmler’s diary, the diaries of Erwin Rommel,
Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Canaris, Walther Hewel, and a host of other papers not available
elsewhere.
I HASTEN to add that with this one exception every international archive has accorded
8 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
to me the kindness and unrestricted access to which I have become accustomed in
thirty years of historical research. I would particularly mention the efforts of Dr
David G Marwell, director of the American-controlled Berlin Document Center
(BDC), in supplying to me 1,446 pages of biographical documents relating to
Goebbels’ staff. However these now, like the collections formerly archived in Moscow
and in the DDR, also come under the arbitrary ægis of the Bundesarchiv.
Marwell’s predecessor, the late Richard Bauer, provided me with the BDC’s file on
Goebbels (my film DI–81).* In the German socialist party’s Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
in Bonn, deputy archivist Dr Ulrich Cartarius generously granted to me privileged
access to the original handwritten diary of Viktor Lutze, chief of staff of the S.A.
(1934–43), on which he was currently working. Karl Höffkes of Essen kindly let me
use the Julius Streicher diary and papers in his private archives.
The Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in New York also allowed me to exploit
their fine Record Group 215, which houses a magnificent collection of original files
of propaganda ministry documents, including Goebbels’ own bound volumes of press
clippings. I must also mention my Italian publishers, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore,
and their senior editor Dr Andrea Cane, who made available to me for transcription
Goebbels’ entire handwritten 1938 diary—it was a two-year task, but without that
‘head start’ in reading Goebbels’ formidable script I should have been unable to
make the sense of the Moscow cache that I did. This is also the proper place to thank
my friend and rival Dr Ralf Georg Reuth, author of an earlier Goebbels biography,
for unselfishly transferring to me a copy of Horst Wessel’s diary and substantial parts
of the 1944 Goebbels diary, to which I added from Moscow and other sources.
The attitude of the other German official archives was very different from that of
the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. Dr Hölder, president of the German federal statistics
* A listing of the author’s relevant microfilmed records is on pp. n of this work.
Most can be ordered from Microform Academic Publishers Ltd., Main Street, East
Ardsley, Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF3 2AT, England (tel. +44 924 825 700; fax
829 212).
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 9
agency (Statistisches Bundesamt) in Wiesbaden, provided essential data on Jewish
population movements with reference to Berlin. Two staff members (Lamers and
Kunert) of the Mönchengladbach archives provided several of the early school photos
and snapshots of girlfriends reproduced in this work. André Mieles of the Deutsches
Institut für Filmkunde (German Institute of Cinematography) provided many of the
original movie stills and other fine photographs of filmstars. I owe thanks to Tadeusz
Duda and the Jagiellonski Library of University of Kraków, Poland, for the photographs
reproduced from Horst Wessel’s diary in their custody. Dr Werner Johe of the
Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Research Office for
the History of National Socialism) in Hamburg volunteered data from the diary of
Gauleiter Albert Krebs. Karl Heinz Roth of the Hamburg Stiftung für Sozialgeschichte
des 20. Jahrhunderts (Foundation for the Social History of the Twentieth Century)
assisted me in dating certain episodes in 1934. The state archives of Lower Saxony
(Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv) in Wolfenbüttel let me read Leopold Gutterer’s
papers and I am glad to have been able to interview Dr Gutterer, now over ninety, on
several occasions for this book. I was fortunate to obtain access to the papers of
Eugen Hadamowsky as well as those of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and of the propaganda
ministry itself at the Zentrales Staatsarchiv in Potsdam while it was still in the
communist zone of Germany; most of the files—e.g., vol.765, Goebbels’ letters to
his colleagues at the Front—had remained untouched since last being used by Dr
Helmut Heiber in 1958. In those last dramatic days before November 1989, archivist
Dr Kessler gave me unlimited access despite cramped circumstances; those files
too have now passed under the less liberal control of the Bundesarchiv.
Although any biographer of Goebbels owes a debt to Dr Helmut Heiber, who first
trod the paths to the papers in Potsdam, he will forgive me for not using his otherwise
excellent published volumes of Goebbels’ speeches; often important phrases—
faithfully reported by local British and other diplomats in the audiences—were omitted
from the published texts on which Heiber relies; these diplomatic records, as
well as other important documents, I have extracted from the holdings of the Public
Record Office in London, capably helped by Susanna Scott-Gall as a research assist-
10 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ant. Shortly before its completion Manfred Müller, an expert of the early years of
the Goebbels family, generously commented on my manuscript and let me read his
own biography of Hans Goebbels, the brother of the Reichminister.
The Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) in Munich gave me the run of its library and
archives and made available to me its files of press clippings on Nazi personalities.
But here too a possessiveness, an unseemly territorialism came into play as the IfZ
contrived to protect its virtual monopoly in unpublished fragments of the Goebbels
diaries. Before coming across the Moscow cache, I had asked the IfZ, while researching
there in 1992, for access to its Goebbels diaries holdings for the two years 1939
and 1944; on May 13 the director of the IfZ refused in writing, stating that it was the
institute’s strict and invariable practice not to make available ‘to outsiders’ collections
that it was still processing. This was why—since I could not conceive of completing
the biography properly without those volumes—I travelled to Moscow, where
I had learned that the original Nazi microfiches were housed; here I accessed, to the
Munich institute’s chagrin, not only the volumes for 1939 and 1944 but the entire
diaries from 1923 to 1945—but not before the institute, in an attempt to secure my
eviction, had urgently faxed to Moscow on July 3, 1992 the allegation, which they
many weeks later honourably withdrew†, that I was stealing from the Soviet archives.
Foul play indeed—methods of which Dr Goebbels himself would probably
have been proud. That was not all. A few days later, hearing that the Sunday Times
intended to publish the diaries which I had found in Moscow, the same institute, with
a haste that would have been commendable under other circumstances, furnished to
journalists on the Daily Mail, a tabloid English newspaper, the diary material which it
had denied to me two months earlier: as of course they were entitled to. There was
one pleasing denouement. The tabloid newspaper—which had paid out £20,000 in
anticipation of its scoop—found that neither it nor its hired historians could read the
minister’s notoriously indecipherable handwriting. It abandoned its serialisation in
impotent fury two days later.
† Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 22, 1992
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 11
Of course this biography is not based on Dr Goebbels’ writings alone. In no particular
sequence, I must make mention of Andrzej Suchcitz of the Polish Institute and
Sikorski Museum in London who provided to me important assistance on the provenance
of Goebbels’ revealing secret speech about the Final Solution of September
1942; the George Arents library at the University of Syracuse, N.Y., who allowed me
to research in the Dorothy Thompson papers; and to Geoffrey Wexler, Reference
Archivist of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, who gave access to Louis P
Lochner’s papers, copies of some of which are also housed in the Franklin D Roosevelt
Library at Hyde Park, N.Y. I also owe thanks to the latter library for the use of other
collections including William B Donovan’s papers and the ‘presidential safe files’; I
used more of Donovan’s papers at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle,
Pa.
Dr G Arlettaz of the Swiss federal archives in Berne, Dr Sven Welander of the
League of Nations archives at the United Nations in Geneva, and Didier Grange of
the Geneva city archives provided valuable information and photographs on Goebbels’
‘diplomatic’ visit to Geneva in 1933. In Germany I was greatly helped by the officials
of the Nuremberg state archive which houses reports on the post-war interrogations
of leading propaganda ministry and other officials (some of which I also read at the
National Archives in Washington D.C., where my friends John Taylor and Robert
Wolfe provided the same kindly and expert guidance as they have shown for several
decades.)
Dr Howard B Gotlieb, director of the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University
drew my attention to their collection of the former Berlin journalist Bella Fromm’s
papers. Archivist Margaret Petersen and assistant archivist Marilyn B Kann at the
Hoover Library at Stanford University, Ca., allowed me to see their precious trove
of original Goebbels diaries as well as the political-warfare papers of Daniel Lerner
and Fritz Theodor Epstein. The Seeley Mudd Library of Princeton University let me
see their precious Adolf Hitler collection, although they were not, alas, permitted to
open to me their Allen Dulles papers which contain several files on Goebbels and the
July 1944 bomb plot. Bernard R Crystal of the Butler Library of Columbia Univer-
12 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
sity, N.Y., found several Goebbels items tucked away in the HÊ R Knickerbocker collection.
Dr Jay W Baird, of Miami University, Ohio, volunteered access to his
confidential manuscripts on Werner Naumann, whom he had interviewed at length
on tape in 1969 and 1970; the manuscripts are currently held at the IfZ, which failed
to make them available despite authorisation from Baird. The late Marianne Freifrau
von Weizsäcker, mother of the later President Richard von Weizsäcker, provided to
me access to her husband’s then unpublished diaries and letters (later published by
Leonidas Hill). The late Freda Rössler, née Freiin von Fircks, talked to me at length
about her murdered husband Karl Hanke, Goebbels’ closest colleague, rival in love,
and gauleiter of Breslau, and supplied copies of his letters and other materials.
Major Charles E Snyder, USAF (retired), gave me a set of the precious original
proofs of the moving Goebbels family photos reproduced in this work; as in Hitler’s
WarÊ (London, 1991) some colour photographs are from the unique collection of
unpublished portraits taken by Walter Frentz, Hitler’s HQ film cameraman, to whom
my thanks for entrusting the original transparencies to me. Other photographs were
supplied by the U.S. National Archives—I scanned around 40,000 prints from its
magnificent collection of glass plates taken by Heinrich Hoffmann’s cameramen—
and by Leif Rosas, Annette Castendyk (daughter of Goebbels’ first great love Anka
Stalherm’s), and Irene Prange, who also entrusted to me Goebbels’ early correspondence
with Anka. Among those whom I was fortunate to interview were Hitler’s
secretary Christa Schroeder, his adjutants Nicolaus von Below, Gerhard Engel,
Karl-Jesco von Puttkamer, his press staff officials Helmut Sündermann and Heinz
Lorenz, his minister of munitions Albert Speer, and Goebbels’ senior aide Immanuel
Schäffer, all of whom have since died, as well as Traudl Junge, Otto Günsche, both of
Hitler’s staff, Gunter d’Alquèn, the leading S.S. journalist attached to the propaganda
ministry, film director Leni Riefenstahl—who privately showed me her productions
of the era—and film star Lida Baarova (now Lida Lundwall). I am grateful
to Thomas Harlan for talking to me about his mother the late film star Hilde Körber,
and to Ribbentrop’s secretary Reinhard Spitzy and Admiral Raeder’s adjutant the
late Captain Herbert Friedrichs for anecdotes about Joseph and Magda Goebbels.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 13
Gerta von Radinger (widow of Hitler’s personal adjutant Alwin Broder Albrecht),
reminisced with me and provided copies of Albrecht’s letters to her, and of her correspondence
with Magda. Richard Tedor provided to me copies of rare volumes of
Goebbels’ articles and speeches. Dr K Frank Korf gave me supplemental information
about his own papers in Hoover Library. Fritz Tobias supplied important papers
from his archives about the Reichstag fire and trial, and notes on his interviews with
witnesses who have since died. Israeli researcher Doron Arazi gave me several useful
leads on material in German archives. Ulrich Schlie pointed out to me to key Goebbels