papers on foreign policy buried in the German foreign ministry archives. Dr Helge
Knudsen corresponded with me in 1975 about the authenticity (or otherwise) of
Rudolf Semler’s ‘diary’, whose publication he prepared in 1947. I corresponded inter
alia with Willi Krämer, Goebbels’ deputy in the Reichspropagandaleitung; Günter
Kaufmann, chief of the Reichspropagandaamt (RPA, Reich Propaganda Agency) in
Vienna; and Wilhelm Ohlenbusch, who directed propaganda in occupied Poland.
Wolf Rüdiger Hess and his mother Ilse Hess gave me exclusive access to the private
papers of his late father, Rudolf Hess, in Hindelang including correspondence with
Goebbels. The late Dr Hans-Otto Meissner discussed with me Ello Quandt and other
members of Goebbels’ entourage, whom he interviewed for his 1950s biography of
Magda Goebbels. Peter Hoffmann, William Kingsford professor of history at McGill
University in Montreal, reviewed my chapter on ‘Valkyrie’, as did Lady Diana Mosley
those pages relating to her own meetings with Goebbels in the Thirties; Robin
Denniston, to whom I owe so much for twenty years, read through the whole manuscript,
offered suggestions and advised me to temper criticism with charity more
often than I had.
DAVID IRVING
LONDON 1994
14 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Prologue: The Mark of Cain
ARE man’s intellectual misfortunes visited upon him before birth, like some
ineradicable mark of Cain, or is he born free of all attributes?
Some basic instincts are inherent, buried deep within the cerebral lobes. That much
is clear. Xenophobia; the urge to mate; the instincts to survive and kill, these are as
much part of the human mechanism as the escapement is part of the clock. But how
is it with the more subtle qualities which, we hope, distinguish man from the lower
orders—his powers to persuade and lead, to cheat and deceive? In short, does the
infant come upon Earth unable to avoid the destiny already implanted in the neurones
of his brain? Is it a genetic lottery? Here, a minute virus ordains that this man
shall compose nine symphonies; there, an excess of dopamine will have him hearing
the devil’s whispered commands for the remainder of an adult life that may well be
curtailed by the hangman’s rope.
Every man has some say in his own fortunes. The tangle of nerves and ganglia is not
just a rack which passively stores data and impressions. It is open to each brain’s
owner to work upon it, to devise by intellectual training the swiftest path between it
and the muscles and voice over which it is to be master.
From the convolutions in the brain’s left frontal lobe springs forth the voice that
commands other men to hate, to march, to dance, to die. Moreover, man can condition
this controlling instrument. Man is what he eats, that is true. But his brain is
more than that—it is what he has seen about him too. The operas, the great works of
art and poetry, the ill-defined sensations of national pride and humiliation, all these
impressions are encoded and stored away by the neurons of the brain. And thus
gradually one man comes to differ from the next.
Since prehistoric times the human brain has remained impenetrable and marvellous.
Surgeons have trepanned into the human cranium in the hope of fathoming its
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 15
secrets. The Greeks, the Romans, and the mediæval Arabs all opened up their fellow
humans’ skulls to gaze upon the brain. In 1945 the American army took Benito Mussolini’s
brain away for examination; they did the same with Dr. Robert Ley’s brain,
and the Russians with Lenin’s. But no instrument has yet explained the brain’s capacity
for evil.
THE BRAIN which indirectly occupies us now has ceased its machinations one evening
in May 1945. Here it is, punctured by a 6·35-caliber bullet, lying in the ruined garden
of a government building in Berlin. Next to its owner are the charred remains of
a woman, the metal fastenings tumbling out of her singed, once-blonde hair. Around
them both, callously grouped for the photographer, stand a Russian lieutenant-colonel,
two majors, and several civilians.
It is May 2, 1945: five P.M., and the building is the late Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.
The lieutenant-colonel is Ivan Isiavich Klimenko, head of Smersh (a Russian
acronym for Soviet Counter-Intelligence) in a Rifle Corps. He has been led here by
the Chancellery’s cook Wilhelm Lange and its garage manager Karl Schneider. It has
begun to pour with rain. Klimenko’s men slide the two bodies onto a large red-andgilt
door torn from the building. They scoop up a fire-blackened Walther pistol found
beneath the man’s body, and another pistol found nearby; a gold badge; an engraved
gold cigarette case, and other personal effects. All will be needed for identification.1
Driving a Jeep, Klimenko leads the way back to Smersh headquarters set up in the
old jailhouse at Plötzensee. On the following day he returns to the Chancellery, still
hunting for the Führer. Below ground, inside the bunker, he finds the bodies of six
children in pretty blue nightdresses or pyjamas. He ships them out to Plötzensee too,
together with the corpse of a burly German army officer, a suicide.
The Russians bring all the guests of the five-star Continental Hotel out to Plötzensee,
including a textiles merchant, a chaplain, and a hospital assistant, and invite them to
identify the cadavers.2 Even if the receding hairline, the Latin profile, the overwide
mouth, and the unusually large cranium are not clues enough, then the steel splint
with its two ringlike clamps to clutch the calf muscles, and the charred leather straps
16 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
still tying it to the right leg leave no room for doubt at all. The foot is clenched like a
dead chicken’s claw: a club foot.
This is all that remains of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the malevolent genius whose oratory
once inspired a nation to fight a total war and to hold out to the very end.
The Germans carry all the bodies outside on tarpaulins, and a Red Army truck
transports them to a villa some ten kilometres north-north-east of Berlin where the
Soviets are equipped to perform autopsies.
Soviet officers bring in Professor Werner Haase, one of Hitler’s surgeons, and
Fritzsche, one of Goebbels’ senior deputies, to view the bodies.3
Haase identifies them; Fritzsche hesitates, but the club foot and the orthopædic
shoe clinch it for him. ‘Check the Gold Party Badge,’ he suggests.
The badge is cleaned of soot and dirt, and reveals the number 8762—Goebbels’
membership number in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi
party).
“It’s Dr. Goebbels,’ Fritzsche confirms.4
This is almost the last public appearance of Dr. Joseph Goebbels. A few days later
the Russians summon Hans Fritzsche out to G.P.U. (secret police) headquarters at
Friedrichshagen, in south-east Berlin and show him a notebook partly concealed by
a metal plate: he recognizes Goebbels’ handwriting, and asks to see more. The Soviet
officer removes the plate and reveals a diary bound in red leather. ‘We found twenty
of these, up to about 1941,
in the vaults of the Reichsbank,’ he says.
The Russians arrange one final identification ceremony. In a copse near
Friedrichshagen that Whitsun of 1945 they show Goebbels’ entire family, now resting
in wooden coffins, to his former personal detective, the forty year old Feldpolizei
officer Eckold. He identifies his former master without hesitation.5
AMONG the personal effects was a gold cigarette case inscribed ‘Adolf Hitler,’ and
dated ‘29.x.34’. That was Paul Joseph Goebbels’ birthday. He had first opened his
eyes and uttered his first scream at No.186 Odenkirchener Strasse in the smoky
Lower Rhineland town of Rheydt on October 29, 1897;6 it was a thousand-year old
textiles centre, set in a landscape of traditionally pious Catholics and hardworking
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 17
country folk. ‘The daily visit to church,’ writes Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels’ most
recent biographer, ‘confession and family prayers at home and their mother making
the sign of the cross on her kneeling children’s foreheads with holy water, were as
much a part of their life as the daily bread for which their father toiled at Lennartz’
gas-mantle factory.’7 Their father Fritz Göbbels—that is the spelling in Paul Joseph’s
birth certificate—was W. H. Lennartz & Co’s dependable, Catholic though certainly
not bigoted bookkeeper.8 It is not over fanciful to suspect that he chose the child’s
second name in honour of Dr Josef Joseph, a revered local Jewish attorney and close
family friend; the child had often been sent round to talk literature with this neighbour.
9 Fritz persevered with the Lennartz company almost until he died, struggling,
through thrift and application, to provide a better life for his family than he had
known himself.
He himself had been born here to a tailor’s family from Beckrath south-west of
Rheydt. He had the same bulbous nose as his father Conrad Göbbels10 and as his
brother Heinrich, a paunchy commercial traveller in textiles with all the ready wit
that Fritz so sorely lacked. Fritz’s mother Gertrud was a peasant’s daughter. From
first to last his relations with his youngest son Joseph were strained. Aware that his
own career would see little more advancement, he made sacrifices for ‘little Jupp’
(Jüppche), which were most inadequately repaid. He struggled painfully for promotion
in the firm from errand boy to clerk, then to bookkeeper with a starched collar,
and finally director in the obligatory stovepipe hat. As his father’s life drew to its
close years later, Joseph would see in him only a ‘petty minded, grubby, beer swilling
pedant, concerned only with his pathetic bourgeois existence and bereft of any imagination.’
11 Among his effects were found blue cardboard account books in which he
had detailed every penny he had spent since marriage.12 Conceding grudgingly that
his father would in all likelihood go to Heaven, Joseph would write: ‘I just can’t
understand why Mother married the old miser.’13 He painted a picture of his father
lying in bed three-quarters of the day, then reading papers, drinking beer, smoking
and cursing his wife, who had already been about her housework since six A.M. His
18 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
sympathies were all with her. ‘I owe her all that I am,’ he once wrote; and he remained
beholden to her all his life.14
He had his mother’s astute features—the face perceptibly flattened at each side,
the nose slightly hooked, the upper front teeth protruding. She had been born
Katharina Maria Odenhausen in the village of Uebach-over-Worms in Holland, and
occasionally she lapsed into Rhenish Plattdeutsch15 when speaking with Joseph.16 Her
father was a muscular Dutch blacksmith with a long beard, a man Joseph would look
back upon as the dearest of his ancestors. He died in the Alexianer monastery at
Mönchen-Gladbach of apoplexy. Her mother had then moved into Germany to serve
as housekeeper to a distant relative, a local rector at Rheindahlen; she had spent her
youth there with all her brothers and sisters except for Joseph Odenbach, Goebbels’s
architect godfather, who had stayed at Uebach. It was at Rheindahlen that Katharina
had met Fritz Göbbels and married him in 1892.
So much for Goebbels’ parents. Two sons had arrived before him, Konrad17 and
Hans.18 Three sisters followed him: two, Maria and Elisabeth, died young, a third,
also christened Maria, was born twelve years after Joseph. We shall occasionally
glimpse Konrad and Hans, struggling through the depression until Joseph’s rise to
power from which they too profited, being appointed to head Nazi publishing houses
and insurance associations respectively. Maria remained the apple of his eye.19
Through living frugally, and thanks to a pay rise to 2,100 marks per annum, in
1900 his father was able to purchase outright a modest house at No.140 Dahlener
Strasse in Rheydt (still standing today as No.156).20 There was no front garden; its
two bare windows beside the front door still overlook a monumental mason’s yard.
Young Joseph had his room under the sloping roof, his mansard window’s view limited
to the skies above. This remained ‘home’ for him, the fulcrum of his life, long
after he left it as a young man.
He remembered his sickly earliest years only dimly. He recalled playing with friends
called Hans, Willy21, Otto (whom he knew as ‘Öttche’) and the Maassen brothers,
and a bout of pneumonia which he only barely survived. He was always a little mite
of a fellow. Even in full manhood he would weigh less than one hundred pounds.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 19
At age six his mother placed him in the primary school (Volksschule) right next to
the house. Bathing little Joseph his mother often found the weals on his back caused
by one particularly sadistic teacher’s cane. Goebbels was a stubborn and conceited
boy. Fifteen or twenty years later he would reveal, in an intimate handwritten note,
how his mental turmoil both delighted and tormented him. ‘Earlier,’ he wrote, ‘when
Saturday came and the afternoon yawned ahead of me, there was no restraining me.
The whole of the past week with all its childish horrors weighed down upon my soul.
I seized my prayer book and betook myself to church; and I contemplated all the
good and the bad that the week had brought me, and then I went to the priest and
confessed everything that was troubling my soul.’22
HIS right leg had always hurt. When he was about seven, a medical disaster befell him
which would change his life. ‘I see before me,’ he would reminisce, ‘a Sunday walk—
we all went over to Geistenbeck. The next day, on the sofa, I had an attack of my old
foot pains. Mother was at the washtub. Screams. I was in agony. The masseur, Mr.
Schiering. Prolonged treatment. Crippled for rest of my life. Examined at Bonn university
clinic. Much shrugging of shoulders. My youth from then on,’ Goebbels mused
piteously, ‘somewhat joyless.’
In adulthood his right foot was 18 centimetres long—3·5 centimetres shorter than
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 3
