to Egypt, shadowed by British agents wherever he went.6
Egypt impressed him. ‘Seldom in my life,’ he wrote, seeing the Sphinx for the first
time, ‘has a sight so moved me. Normally one feels cheated. Here, reality surpasses
what one had imagined.’7 He told the German community that he had not come with
pots of gold for propaganda. Germany, he said, again faithfully representing Hitler’s
policies, had no interest in the Mediterranean, and was ‘now fully occupied’ digesting
the territories she had recently acquired.8 At this range, it seemed only a small fly
in the ointment that Warsaw and London had signed a formal pact. ‘One day, perhaps,’
he mused, ‘Poland will have to pay very dear for this.’ Czechoslovakia had,
after all, made the same mistake.9
After a brief stopover in Turkey11 he landed back at Tempelhof on April 14 and
swapped travel anecdotes with Magda, who had returned from her own travels, at
Schwanenwerder that evening. As for foreign affairs he told the diary nothing. Metaxas
had speculated that Goebbels was somewhat out of favour.12 Hitler was certainly in
little hurry to take him further into his confidence; four days passed before they next
met.
On April 18, after gathering with his family and Magda for his mother’s seventieth
birthday (‘she’s the one fixture in this stormy life of mine’) Goebbels was among
those dining with Hitler. Göring was also there, bronzed and fit from a vacation at
San Remo; he would recall Hitler revealing at this dinner his determination to solve
the Danzig question by force if necessary. Goebbels noted in his diary only the words,
‘We talked politics a bit.’13
He was swamped in the preparations for Hitler’s grandiose fiftieth birthday parade.
On the evening of the nineteenth he broadcast a special birthday tribute, then
went immediately afterwards over to the Chancellery to join the leading party officials
assembled in the ceremonial rooms overlooking Hermann-Göring Strasse. Hitler
appeared an hour late, white-faced, as though he had received bad news. Speaking
softly and deliberately, he indicated that he had just had a medical check-up; building
on that remark, he added that he could not say how many years he still had in which
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 529
to achieve his life’s ambition.14 He spoke specifically of the grave risks that he was
prepared now to take.15
More recently retrieved fragments of Goebbels’ hitherto unpublished diary throw
further shafts of light on the development of Hitler’s plans. ‘England wants to mend
her fences with us again,’ Goebbels wrote after lunch with Hitler on the twentythird.
‘Chamberlain has already put out feelers to us. With France we won’t have too
much difficulty. And Poland is none too comfortable in its policy toward us. But for
the time being the Führer doesn’t want to repeat his former offer to them on Danzig
and the autobahn through the Corridor,’ a reference to his offer to settle for an
extra-territorial freeway across the Polish territories to East Prussia. Hitler was now
more confident in his military strength, augmented as it was by the Czech arms
factories like Skoda. ‘Will there be war?’ Goebbels asked his diary. ‘I don’t think so.
At any rate nobody really wants it. And that is our best ally.’ Over dinner Hitler
repeated that London and Paris were just bluffing; Poland would lose her nerve when
the crunch came. ‘Our motto must be: keep arming, lie in wait, and strike when the
iron’s hot.’16
Over the next two weeks Hitler briefed him about Case White (war with Poland ‘if
need be’). On May 1 Goebbels wrote: ‘The Poles are agitating violently against us.
The Führer welcomes it. We are not to hit back for the time being, but to take note.
Warsaw will end up one day the same way as Prague.’17 Two days later he ordered all
editors to go easy on the Soviet Union ‘until further notice.’18 His next Völkischer
Beobachter leader article was widely seen as flinging down the gauntlet to Poland.19
Hitler was away, down at the Berghof; but the two Nazis traded curses about the
Poles on the phone and about how they were getting more insolent by the hour.
Presumably with his Führer’s approval Goebbels now made Britain his prime target.
Speaking without notes in Cologne on May 19 he blasphemed against the democracies,
calling them ‘old whores’ turned sanctimonious nuns in their old age.
‘For one like myself,’ reported a local British diplomat, ‘who had not heard Goebbels
before, the power of his voice was a revelation, coming as it does from such a puny
body.’ He studied Goebbels’ gesticulations with fascination. Referring to the ‘intel-
530 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
lectuals and cowards’ at the time of Munich, Goebbels jeered, ‘Yes, we “only just”
managed to avoid a war’—then he thrust his right hand forward as though fencing
with a sword. For a split second he held the pose; the effect was electric. Poland, he
argued, had no more right to Danzig than had Germany to the Dutch port of Rotterdam.
Twice he said that the deal Hitler had offered Poland was einmalig, ‘unique’—
the kind of offer, he implied, that was not lightly refused.20 The Italian foreign minister
came to Berlin to sign a military pact with Germany. At the dinner for Count
Ciano Hitler told Goebbels that he had fought twenty years for this.21
Preparing Germany for war, Goebbels speeded up work on the cable radio nework,
to release conventional transmitter capacity; he wrote Hitler a letter urging him to
cut the red tape on this project.22 His ministry was also building some of the biggest
transmitters in the world. The new half-megawatt Deutschland-Sender went on the
air on May 19; later, it was to be stepped up to five megawatts. He was also building
four high-powered shortwave transmitters near Hamburg. He wanted the world to
hear his voice.23
He put the cunning and unscrupulous Berndt in charge of this expanding broadcasting
network. Berndt had by now, as he himself admitted to Himmler, the unsavoury
reputation of being in charge of all the dirty tricks necessary in the Nazis’
interests—‘subversion of the enemy, creating the starting-points for political operations,
and so forth.’24 His propaganda fictions had paved the way for Munich. In
Berndt’s place as inland press chief Goebbels appointed Hans Fritzsche, an impressive
intellectual with an educated drawl. Both men held high S.S. rank. Both were
party veterans, with the kind of radicalism that Goebbels applauded—Berndt would
shoot an American airman in cold blood; Fritzsche would turn over to the Gestapo’s
hangmen a simple Nuremberg fireman who sent him a crude paste-up montage as a
one-man protest in 1941.25
UNEXPECTEDLY the Lida Baarova case returns to haunt him that spring. Fleeing Germany,
she has returned to her native Prague, only to find Hitler’s troops invading in
March and herself trapped again within the Reich’s frontiers. She returns to Berlin.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 531
Several times that winter 1938/39 Goebbels has asked Hilde Körber about Lida’s
well-being; he meets Hilde in the woods, terrifi
ed of being followed—once he shows
her a pistol he is carrying—and sends her over to Lida with messages (Lida never
replies). Touched by his concern, Hildes writes little poems to him. Sitting in the
dress-circle once, Lida sees him at a distance, but their eyes do not meet. Emil Jannings
and others come to plead with Goebbels to allow Lida to film again. He replies, ‘It is
out of my hands.’26
Then Alfred Greven, the new general manager of Ufa, secretly signs her up again.
Goebbels blurts out to him: ‘But Baarova is banned by the Führer!’ The film boss
urges him to lift the ban since so much time has elapsed. ‘She can be hired as far as I
am concerned,’ says Goebbels, softening, ‘but I don’t think it will be possible. I must
talk it over with Hanke.’
Hanke however cannot let bygones be bygones. He still has a covetous eye on the
minister’s sorely wronged spouse. Storming into Greven’s office on May 19 he reminds
him of the film star’s notorious affair with ‘higher circles.’
‘Herr Staatssekretär,’ retorts Greven, ‘what about your own little affair?’27 It seems
that everybody knows about Magda.
Hanke swings a punch at Greven—‘because,’ as he writes at once to Himmler, ‘he
countered my allegations with a blatant untruth.’28 Hitler orders Hanke to report to
him.
Aghast at this new episode, Goebbels writes in his unpublished diary, ‘By his unpardonable
assault on Greven of Ufa, Hanke has touched off a hideous scandal. I am
furious. Was that the intent? One doesn’t know whom to trust. It’s left to me now to
try and sort things out. Will I ever manage to get clear of all these Schweinereien?’29
For days the Greven affair clouds his diary’s horizon. ‘It’s sickening. One rumour
after another.’30 Greven retaliates, writing to him as gauleiter and demanding a full
hearing by the party court. ‘He’s stirring things up against Hanke now.’31
On May 17, Mother’s Day, the Berlin Illustrated publishes a cover portrait of Magda
and a family group photo—without Dr Goebbels. Although an operation on Helga’s
throat brings them momentarily closer together, the matrimonial stand-off contin-
532 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ues.32 He plays with the children and regales them with bedtime stories of Germany’s
decline and resurgence; his little treasures ‘listen with gleaming eyes.’33 Occasionally
he has a long talk with Magda about the future and believes he detects common-
sense returning. ‘But,’ he writes after walking with their children in the
Grunewald. ‘she still sees so many things in a false light.’34
One day he takes the ministry staff on three boats across the Wannsee to
Schwanenwerder to shout a big hallo to Magda and the children.35 A couple of days
later he gives her a new car (followed by one of the first Volkswagens for the children.)
36 Magda however has however begun a clean sweep. She sells off the nextdoor
plot, Nos. 12 to 14 Insel Strasse (‘the so-called citadel’), which has brought her
so much unhappiness, and in June she is on the point of selling her present plot too,
to buy an even more beautiful site a few houses further down the road.37 The house
needs total renovation. ‘It will probably take a few months to finish,’ she writes to
her father Oskar Ritschel. ‘I’m looking forward to the job ahead as it will distract me
from the more or less grim thoughts that my fate, indeterminate as it is, still provokes
in me.’ She will take the children to Bad Gastein in Austria for the summer,
where her father, no admirer of the minister’s, can visit them in privacy.38
That summer the Berlin Illustrated also published comparative photos of his study
together with the fantasy version crafted by a Hollywood studio for the film ‘Confessions
of a Nazi Spy.’ The American studio version showed ‘Goebbels’ seated behind a
ten-foot wide desk in front of an eleven-foot Hitler painting, with two huge swastikas
embossed in the marble floor. In reality the portrait was six foot tall, and of
Frederick the Great; a large globe however dominated the room—and his desk still
measured ten feet across.39
MEANWHILE Goebbels methodically stoked up the propaganda fires over Danzig, releasing
the steam in carefully controlled bursts. Via teleprinter and telephone, editors
were told what stories to print and how—how much leeway was allowed, how
big the headline should be.40 ‘The [Berlin] press,’ an American observer would report
to Washington that summer, drawing on the experience of the previous year, ‘passes
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 533
through set stages of invective in preparation for each of the major incidents which
have so far occurred.’ The first stage, he described, merely set forth in general terms
the German point of view. Secondly, there followed attacks on the foreign government
in question. Thirdly, the press attack switched to the ‘acts of terror’ allegedly
perpetrated against the German people by these governments. The fourth and final
stage of this cycle, he said, was marked by ‘lurid tales of German blood being spilled.’
This officer pointed out that the process had begun anew in May 1939, with asseverations
of Germany’s historic right to Danzig.41
This analysis was correct. From May onwards Goebbels had lifted the ban on reporting
anti-German incidents in Poland, though restricted for the time being to
Page Two.42 To imprint Danzig’s character firmly on the world’s mind as a German
city, in June Hitler authorized him to deliver a major speech there—‘a trial balloon,’
Goebbels confidentially informed his editors, ‘to test the international atmosphere
on Danzig.’
With the local gauleiter Forster he plotted a ‘spontaneous’—how he loved and
abused that word—display in Danzig to demonstrate to the foreign journalists travelling
in his party the German character of the city and its people.43 He delivered the
speech ‘spontaneously’ from the balcony of the Danzig state theatre through loudspeakers
which had no less spontaneously materialized. ‘I am standing here on the
soil of a German town,’ he emphasized, motioning to the architectural icons all around.
‘You long to return to the Reich,’ he intoned. The thousands of well drilled young
Nazis chanted in response, ‘We want to see Hitler in Danzig!’ Their town, Goebbels
shouted, had become an international problem. Polish agitators had even begun demanding
the river Oder as their new frontier. ‘One wonders why they do not claim
the Elbe,’ he mocked, ‘—or the Rhine!’ There they would come into contact with
their new allies the English, he added; their frontier, as everybody knew, was also on
the Rhine.44
‘My speech,’ Goebbels told his diary with a conspiratorial air, ‘looked quite improvised
but I had prepared the whole thing in advance.’45 Speaking that evening at the
Casino Hotel at Zoppot, near Danzig, to the foreign journalists who had accompa-
534 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 87
