nied him, Goebbels lamented that there would have been no problem if the British
had not butted in with their ‘absurd’ guarantee to Poland. ‘Morally, the right to
Danzig is ours,’ he argued. ‘Just as we had a moral right to everything else we have
taken—with the exception,’ he added as a disarming afterthought, ‘of Bohemia and
Moravia. But we had to take those to create a strategic frontier for ourselves.’ The
Poles should learn a lesson from the Czech crisis: each day the Czechs had remained
obdurate, Hitler had upped the ante. Now the British were raising the same song and
dance. They were just bluffing, suggested Goebbels. Hitler’s nerves would prove the
stronger. ‘We know for sure that the stupid English are too weak and too cowardly to
get in our way.’46
‘I know,’ he said with a careless wink, according to a second source, ‘that some of
you are curious as to whether today’s demonstration was truly spontaneous or not.’
In fact their Berlin colleagues had received the text in advance and it had already
been typeset for a special Sunday edition of the party’s Danzig newspaper the day
before.47
On June 20 Hitler summoned him to report on Danzig at the Berghof. He
found Hitler sitting in the teahouse, eager to make prognoses:
Poland will offer resistance at first, but upon the first reverse she will pitifully
collapse. The Czechs are more realistic. The Poles are quite hysterical and unpredictable.
London will leave Warsaw in the lurch. They’re just bluffing. Got too many
other worries… The Führer says, and he’s right, that Britain now has the most
rotten government imaginable. There’s no question of their helping Warsaw. They
led Prague up the garden path as well. This is proved by the files we have captured
in the Czech foreign ministry.
If it comes to an armed conflict, then the Führer believes the Polish business
will be over and done with in fourteen days.
With a trace of scepticism Goebbels wrote, back at the the lodge known as the
Bechstein guesthouse, ‘Amen to that!’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 535
His bellicose speech in Danzig had sounded alarm bells around the world. Ambassador
von Hassell wondered if it was the prelude to a solution of the Polish problem
by brute force.48 The British ambassador heard that Hitler had ordered Goebbels to
make the speech ‘as [the] result of reports of castration of Germans in Poland.’49 But
even Henderson believed that Goebbels was deliberately playing down such incidents.
This was true: on June 23 the propaganda ministry ordered reports of Polish atrocities
played down.50 Goebbels forbade any discussion of Danzig as yet.51 Even kite-
flying items on Danzig printed by British newspapers were not to be picked up.52 He
ordered the press to ignore specific belligerent and anti-German speeches by foreign
statesmen, as well as foreign press items about German troop movements, induction
of reservists, leave cancellations, and British naval manœuvres in the North Sea. He
allowed reports about ‘incidents in Poland [and] expropriations of German property,’
but still subjected them to ‘existing layout guidelines.’ Page Two was still prominent
enough.53 He did however order all those news items to be emphasized which
served to diminish Britain’s prestige—her failing encirclement policy, her floundering
negotiations with Moscow, her fumbling in Palestine, and her citizens’ humiliation at
the hands of Japanese troops in the Far East.54 He made some exceptions: Lord Londonderry,
a personal friend of Göring’s, was to be spared, and Britain’s military
honour was not to be impugned.55 He drafted a biting attack on Britain’s encirclement
efforts himself, but ordered his press to go easier on Britain, while still instructing
editors not to overlook the twentieth anniversary of Versailles on June 28.
‘The German people know only too well what our enemies would do to us if they
got us in their power again.’ ‘So keep hammering it in—hold Britain up to contempt,
depict her as baffled, mendacious, jumpy, and impotent.’56
After touring the western fortifications Goebbels afterwards sought to reassure
the gauleiters and generals secretly assembled in a big Aachen hotel. ‘Gentlemen,’ he
told them, ‘there will be no war with England. Here is a letter from London which
again confirms my opinion.’57 The letter seemed to prove that the British were indeed
bluffing. ‘Believe me, gentlemen,’ said Goebbels, folding away the letter, ‘We’re
536 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
going to see things develop just like last time. A war of nerves without parallel, I
agree, but they’ll end up giving in.’58 Nobody was eager to die for Danzig.
Hitler was now shipping troops to East Prussia, bordering Danzig, under camouflage
of the approaching anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg. Goebbels asked newspapers
to mention the coming anniversary, though ‘without special emphasis.’59
Goebbels was confident that Hitler would pull it off with just propaganda again.
Continuing his delicious feud, he often told Hitler that he had no confidence in
Ribbentrop at all and squabbled with the foreign minister over the management of
the visits of Count Ciano and the Yugoslav royal couple.60 Once, in Vienna, Hitler had
described Ribbentrop to Goebbels as bordering on insanity; when Goebbels told his
diary that the man’s prima-donna vanity got on his nerves he was telling the reader
nothing that he had not long gathered already. Hitler even talked of getting rid of
Ribbentrop.61 To Goebbels’ rage the London Daily Express published an accurate report
on their feud.62 He revived it a few days later, sending Hanke to the Obersalzberg
to wring from Hitler a declaration that radio, press and even press attachés were his
sole domain; Hitler humoured his wish. Goebbels told his diary so often that
Ribbentrop was demented that there is cause to question his own stability.63 When
Ribbentrop took petty revenge on the press attachés, Goebbels got his own back by
regaling Hitler at the Berghof with invented witticisms about this ‘champagne dealer’
and this ‘would-be Bismarck’ until tears of enjoyment ran down the Führer’s face.64
But the foreign ministry kept up its pressure on the press and even a personal meeting
between Ribbentrop and Goebbels, at which they sat facing each other with
white knuckles and clenched teeth assuring each other of their desire for cordial
relations, brought the matter no further. ‘If he’s as flexible as this in our foreign
policy dealings,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘God help us.’65
Hitler was conducting his own foreign policy that summer. Watching the reports
from Moscow, Hitler could see that the British negotiators were in difficulties, but,
he told Goebbels, he could not deduce if Stalin was merely playing hard to get,
holding out for a better price or really intended to hold off altogether as Europe
went to war, in order to scoop the pool at the end.66 On June 10 Hitler confessed to
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 537
Goebbels in Vienna that he was at a loss about what Moscow really wanted.67 That he
did not breath a word to Goebbels about his secret overture
s to Stalin is evident
from the costly anti-Soviet movies to which several of Goebbels’ film studios were
still heavily committed.68
Meanwhile Poland, bolstered by Britain’s guarantee, remained intransigent—or
insolent as Hitler and Goebbels saw it.69 ‘Poland,’ said Hitler, ‘is pursuing a very
stupid political foreign policy. She won’t be able to keep it up for long.’ He mentioned
that in August his own West Wall would be ready.70
After supping with Hitler on July 4, he recorded that the Führer agreed with him
they should nurture hatred against Britain—the German people must recognize her
as their chief obstacle. ‘The Führer wishes he had ten more years. His target is to set
aside the Peace of Westphalia [which concluded the Thirty Years War in 1648]. And
he’ll get his way. He doesn’t take the Poles seriously at all. France and her craze for
hegemony have got to be broken. She wants neither a united nor a powerful Germany.’
71 Over lunch on the fifth, Hitler remarked that in Moscow the British were on
the defensive. He would let them stew in their own juice. If the Poles now came to
him, he would tell them that the instant they tried anything against Danzig, he would
get tough.72
DURING July some British citizens took an initiative which caught Goebbels unawares.
Commander Stephen King-Hall, a retired naval officer, started mailing to thousands
of German addresses cleverly conceived letters attacking the top Nazis. Goebbels
went to extraordinary lengths to answer these ‘schoolboy essays.’ When the first such
letter came, he airily told Hitler that he would publish it in his own press—later a
standard propaganda tactic—with a suitably juicy reply.73 His reply argued for example
that their author, having served in the Royal Navy, had helped starve hundreds of
thousands of German women and children during the blockade. It also recited every
crime committed by the British empire-builders from the slave-trading history of
Liverpool to the bombardment of Zanzibar. He also plotted an undefined ‘masterpiece’
—probably a fake letter sent by ‘prominent Englishmen’. ‘We’ve got to work
538 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
artfully,’ he decided. ‘But seemingly objectively.’ He immediately composed a stinging
‘Reply to Britain,’ but then Hitler announced that he wanted to see it,74 and when
Goebbels set out on July 8 on a prolonged journey to Austria Hitler asked to see him
at the Berghof. He was still working on Goebbels’ reply to King-Hall. Goebbels read
to him the proposed ‘English’ reply he was drafting, but Hitler held that back too.
‘Then we discuss top policy,’ noted Goebbels, adding vaguely: ‘We must wear down
the Poles by further warlike preparations. At the decisive moment their nerves will
crack. Britain will be worn down by ceaseless propaganda. And that’s how we’ll go
on for the time being. There can scarcely be any doubt about the outcome.’75
A second King-Hall letter turned up, and the Führer was still tinkering with the
Goebbels reply to the first.76 He did not finally release the reply until the fourteenth.77
Goebbels ordered it printed in every German newspaper, but it was totally ignored
by the British and French.78 He was disappointed, because he was sure he had hit
home.79 On the twentieth however he noted that the incorrigible King-Hall was
writing yet again.
ALMOST a landed gentlemen now, a man of property like Göring, Goebbels is perceptibly
less eager to risk war than the haggard, penniless agitator he had been in the late
Twenties. He has a wife and family, although he not seen much of Magda since the
spring. She has taken her brood to holiday in the mountains at Bad Gastein on June
28, leaving him disconsolate, guilty, and lonely; alone, he drives out to Lanke to
inspect progress on the lakeside mansion.80 He learns that Hanke has stubbornly
increased his emotional pressure on Magda throughout the year, even showing her a
little lakeside house he has bought, No.13 Gustav-Freytag Strasse, in the Grunewald.
Reaching a sudden decision after seeing Hitler at the Berghof on July 8, Goebbels
leaves at five P.M. and is with Magda and the children at seven. He is determined to
force a total reconciliation with her.
‘The children, the children!’ he writes after reaching Gastein. ‘They rejoice and
dance, because Papa’s arrived.’ He jots proud little cameos of them in his diary—
Helga points out the local landmarks, Hilde is a little mouse, Hellmut a clown, and
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 539
Holde a darling little infant. The spectacular Alpine scenery and climate are made for
romance. He goes for long walks with Magda, and sits far into the night with her
under the starlit skies, drinking in the peaceful sounds of nature, and the steady
rushing of the waterfall.81 He sleeps ten hours and learns that Hitler is still tinkering
with his reply to King-Hall, but all that is far away. He takes the family over to Zell
am See and swaps nostalgic stories with Magda about the years before they came to
power. They pore over architectural blueprints, play games with the children, go
rambling in the mountains, and trundle back home in a pony cart.82 When he leaves
Gastein the children cling to him with tear-stained faces and he suspects that Magda
too is not unmoved.83
He phones her on the sixteenth, and she joins him in Munich for the lavish, ornate,
spectacular, and rain-soaked pageant of German Art.84 Evidently she has told
him something about her persistent suitor, because on the twentieth he has a ‘serious
row’ with Hanke.85 He visits his troubled wife again in Gastein and that evening she
unbends to him. ‘It’s just as I thought,’ snarls Goebbels in his diary. ‘Hanke has turned
out to be a first class rotter. So my mistrust of him has been totally justified.’ Magda,
he decides, is on the horns of a terrible dilemma, and they talk all night about ways of
escape. He stays in bed all the next day while she sits at his bedside talking softly with
him. All the pieces are falling into place, and this alone brings him peace of mind.86
He blames his Staatssekretär for everything, himself for nothing. ‘Hanke is the most
perfidious traitor I ever saw,’ he writes grimly. ‘But he’s going to get his comeuppance.’
87 Magda agrees to accompany him to Bayreuth—scene of the previous
year’s opera scandal—on the twenty-fifth.
On July 25 Hanke sends G.W. Müller to see Goebbels, evidently bearing a mixture
of threats and entreaties; Goebbels is unimpressed and sends Müller back to Berlin
with a flea for Hanke’s ear.88
On the way to Bayreuth Magda, still torn between the two men, faints several
times; she is suffering from the nervous strain. At Bayreuth, Goebbels is phoned by
Müller— ‘Has performed his job relatively well. A few more impudent threats and
sentimentalities.’ Magda is in tears, and Goebbels has difficulty calming her down.
540 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Hitler has other problems on his hands. He is buoyant about their foreign policy.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 88
