hostile language for Churchill, Eden, and Chamberlain; he asked that if he issued a
denial, the Italian press should give it prominence too; to counter the Polish atrocity-
claims, he urged the Italians to report fully the Polish massacre of thousands of
German civilians at Bromberg in Poland on the first Sunday of the war.31
At air staff headquarters outside Potsdam on the fifth, and Göring assured him that
they would soon have a strategic breakthrough in Poland. He was livid with
Ribbentrop, who had been too inflexible in stating German demands; and outraged
at the Italians, telling Goebbels that they deserved only contempt. Sitting under the
trees, the two Nazis discussed Germany’s plight if a full scale world war resulted.
Churchill’s appointment had shocked them both—but Goebbels hoped the British
might still be bluffing.32 On the seventh he flew in a bomber to Hitler’s headquarters
near Gross-Born to discuss Ribbentrop’s take-over of foreign propaganda:
The Führer [he recorded] is living in an armoured train in the middle of a forest…
He looks magnificent and is in good humour. He at once sets out the situa-
566 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
tion. The Poles are in a state of complete military collapse… Their situation is
hopeless. Our tanks are pushing on without stopping.
The western powers are powerless. The Führer intends to smash Poland first.
Then he’ll try for peace in the west. He may well succeed in that. Above all the
Polish debacle is a deterrent to any attacker.
Goebbels broached the touchy business—the extraordinary decree granting
Ribbentrop control of foreign propaganda. Hitler asked him to deal with the foreign
minister direct. Goebbels tried and not surprisingly failed; he found the next day
that Hitler had dictated a brief decree once again defining the two squabbling ministers’
areas of responsibility.33 Although Goebbels was broadly satisfied to find his own
ministry left intact, the decree remained a thorn in the flesh for the next four years.34
The prospect of a long war unsettled Goebbels, and he registered with alarm each
statement by Chamberlain warning that Britain was resolved to fight to the finish of
Nazis.35 He made a brief foray into foreign policy when Dino Alfieri phoned from
Rome on the ninth with word that Mussolini proposed that the Italian press ventilate
a possible solution whereby the Polish government resigned in favour of ministers
willing to make peace; to fight a war in the west, the Duce felt, would be nonsense.
‘I treat the matter dilatorily,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘then phone the Führer. He is very
interested in the offer, but suspects that Mussolini is aiming at a general European
peace conference. He therefore asks me to skirt around the subject for the time
being; I am to thank Alfieri for any support, but say that I cannot reach the Führer.’36
He explained to Alfieri the next day that the war in Poland would be over in three
weeks and that Germany was being very careful not to say anything which the western
powers might interpret as a sign of weakness. ‘Italy,’ he however hinted, ‘is in a
different position as she is not at war.’ Italy might like therefore to ventilate certain
political proposals to the Poles: when Alfieri asked what Moscow was doing, Goebbels
stated that he had no official word, but ‘something was evidently afoot in Russia.’37
(Stalin’s troops invaded eastern Poland three days later ‘to protect her minorities’
and ‘because a Polish state no longer existed’.38) Ribbentrop shortly asked him to
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 567
desist from further telephone conversations with Alfieri. ‘The Führer does not want
to tie himself down.’39
Hitler phoned him the next evening and asked to see him.
Morning flight to Upper Silesia… Discussed the situation with him. Britain is
to be kept under sharp attack. Try to detach the British government from its
people and Britain from France. France is to be spared.
They agreed that the fall of Warsaw would be a psychological blow to the enemy.
Moscow would probably then intervene. Italy seemed passive, even downright hostile.
‘Mussolini seems to be annoyed,’ Hitler told Goebbels. ‘Even so we want to
preserve our friendship. So I am to keep the channel to Alfieri open.’ Goebbels showed
him his coming speech: Hitler asked him to sharpen the attack on Britain’s warmongering
role. ‘The Führer’s looking good… Once we’ve dealt with the east he wants
to sort out the west. He has no use for a long war. If there’s got to be war, then short
and sharp. We mustn’t let London get away with forcing a protracted hunger crisis
upon us once again.’
In Warsaw the Poles put up a heroic resistance. The city’s Polish commandant called
the city’s population to arms, and told them to ‘resort to every means of combat.’
On the sixteenth Goebbels warned Rome that the Wehrmacht would therefore issue
an ultimatum and bombard Warsaw. ‘There will be an avalanche of protests and defamations
from London and Paris,’ he predicted. ‘We ask for the support of the Italian
press and propaganda.’40
Warsaw held out for eight more days under a ruinous air and artillery bombardment.
Concerned about Germany’s image, Goebbels resorted to legalisms and an
appeal to baser human instincts. He directed the platoons of Nazi war reporters and
newsreel cameramen:
1. Never refer to Warsaw as a city in reports, but always as a fortress.
2. Use much more film footage than hitherto of Jewish types from Warsaw and
the entire occupied area including both character studies and the Jews at forced
568 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
labour. This material should service to reinforce our anti-semitic education drive
both at home and abroad.41
On September 23 Dr Dietrich, visiting Berlin for two days from Hitler’s HQ, told
Goebbels that Hitler still intended to take Warsaw, although the generals feared the
bloodshed this would entail. Hitler would then try for peace if London would allow
it. He did not want war in the west yet. But three days later Dietrich told him Hitler
was in two minds now: peace with honour seemed further away than ever, and Britain’s
attitude was stiffening. ‘We shall have to fight on—and with all our might.’42
As the phoney war began Hitler, back in Berlin, became more approachable again.
Goebbels attended lunch almost every day. On the twenty-seventh he found Hitler
optimistic. He hoped the enemy would see reason. (‘It depends on London,’ he said
at lunch on October 10, ‘whether the war goes on.’43 Gradually however his hopes of
peace faded, and he authorised Goebbels to turn up heat on Chamberlain. Churchill
seemed the more rewarding target—easy to identify with the English plutocracy.
‘He lives in the Sixteenth Century,’ Hitler would agree. ‘Totally out of touch with
the real needs of his people.’44 Since Churchill’s speeches were at this time necessarily
economical with the truth, ridiculing him was too great a temptation for Goebbels
to resist.45
As the propagandist for an as yet undefeated belligerent Goebbels saw no need to
lie. His untruths were stil
l unintentional: relying on Luftwaffe claims, he declared as
sunk not only the battleship Royal Oak (sunk that October) but also the aircraft
carrier Ark Royal and the cruiser Repulse.46
Egged on by Hitler—who knew very well that one of his own U-boats had sunk
the liner—Goebbels reverted to the Athenia mystery in the third week of October.47
‘Perhaps,’ he noted, ‘we’ll even succeed in sinking him [Churchill]. That would be
worth more than sinking two battleships.’48 He wrote a big article accusing the Englishman
of having had the Athenia scuttled himself, and broadcast this libel worldwide,
calling him a criminal who should now be called to the bar of world opinion.
(‘I’m working flat out to overthrow this man,’ he admitted privately.49 Churchill
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 569
retorted that Goebbels’ charge was simply laughable. ‘He won’t be laughing soon,’
snapped Goebbels in the privacy of his diary.50
THE PROPAGANDA ministry had rapidly adjusted for war. At eleven each morning
Goebbels held a ‘ministerial’ conference with his department heads and their advisors,
about thirty to fifty officials all told, in his private office.51 At a quarter to noon
Hitler’s press officer Otto Dietrich or his hardnosed deputy Alfred-Ingemar Berndt
would hold a further conference elsewhere in the same building to coordinate
Goebbels’ decisions with requests submitted by other ministries. After 1940 this
later conference would end with the dictation to a stenographer of formal Tagesparolen,
themes for the day which were read out to the general press conference immediately
following at twelve-fifteen P.M., attended by one or two hundred German journalists
(but only rarely by Goebbels).
About one third of his men had been drafted into uniform. Karl Hanke, whom he
had not seen since the summer, found himself spirited away to the Polish front in a
Panzer lieutenant’s uniform. In September 1939 the ministry employed 9,762 professional
orators, and these would address precisely 156,143 political meetings over
the first eleven months of war.52 He would have nearly three hundred mobile cinemas
by the end of 1940. His printing presses spun off 560,000 poster-sized portraits
of Hitler, and millions of leaflets, placards, banners, and wall-newspapers; eight
million copies of the Slogan of the Week wall-newspaper would be printed by the
end of 1940, along with war posters like WITH OUR FLAGS IS VICTORY, and, less famously,
THE ETERNAL JEW and STAR OF DAVID.
Two years earlier, Goebbels had banned one anti-Jewish film as being too shrill.53 It
was only now, after the war began, that he started work on his own major antisemitic
films. The first, ‘The Eternal Jew’, was produced by Franz Hippler and the Party’s
movie company DFG. Using photo- and film-montage techniques that mixed documentary
shots filmed in the squalor of the Warsaw ghetto and sequences from the
feature movies of former big name ‘Jewish’ movie personalities like Max Reinhardt,
Ernst Lubitsch, and Charlie Chaplin this hour-long production had an undeniable
570 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
emotional appeal. From October 1939 the Goebbels Diary reveals him personally
supervising the filming, and checking the harrowing footage shot in the Polish synagogues
and ghettos. ‘Ones blood runs cold,’ he noted. ‘One recoils involuntarily
from the spectacle of so much filth,’ reads one entry. And another: ‘We are working
hard on all this … to make a propaganda masterpiece of it all.’54
By mid November a rough cut of ‘The Eternal Jew’ was ready, and Dr Goebbels
turned his attention to the Terra studios’ remake of the 1935 British film ‘Jew Süss’,
which film star Veit Harlan was to direct. His cameramen had filmed the Jewish
ritual slaughter of cattle, and Goebbels was undecided whether to use this revolting
footage in ‘Jew Süss’ or ‘The Eternal Jew.’55 ‘This will be the antisemitic film,’ predicted
Goebbels after reading Harlan’s treatment: a Jew, Süss Oppenheimer, becomes
the Duke of Württemberg’s crooked financial adviser and tax collector: involves
him in swindles on a Maxwellian scale: is condemned to death.56 Replete with
scenes of rape and torture this film, released in 1940, would become one of the most
insidious propaganda films of all time.57
His personal vendetta against the world’s Jews, which had eased perceptibly, had
been rekindled by one of their less felicitous moves as their leader Dr Chaim Weizmann
formally declared war on their behalf against Nazi Germany in September 1939.58
Jewish cartoonists abroad poked fun at Goebbels’ lame foot, and when he turned
forty-two Jewish radio commentators in England snarled over the airwaves at him.
‘They already lost this dumb fight against me once,’ he philosophized, ‘in Berlin.’59 A
few days later the Daily Sketch printed a cartoon showing him with Hitler and Göring,
all hanging from gibbets surrounded by skulls, he consoled himself by repaying them
in ways that were petty rather than profound, ordering the Nazi newspapers to publish
a cartoon showing Chamberlain in slippers and persuading Hitler to reduce the
food allowances for Jews and to withhold chocolate from them altogether.60
A visit to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz left an indelible imprint on his mind. ‘Those
are not human beings any longer,’ he wrote after leaving his car to inspect it closer.
‘Those are animals. So our task isn’t a humanitarian, but a surgical one… Otherwise
one day Europe will succumb to the Jewish pestilence.’61 Back in Berlin he reported
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 571
his impressions to Hitler. ‘He thoroughly endorses my description of the Jewish problem,’
he claimed in his diary. ‘The Jews are a waste-product. They are more of a
clinical than a social issue.’62
He found Hitler planning far ahead, already crashing into France with his Panzer
divisions in his mind’s eye. A genius, decided Goebbels again, and he made a mental
note that—like the Jews—the French had made a serious blunder by their declaration
of war.63 After visiting the eastern territories again he told Hitler about the
unwholesome spectacles he had witness there. ‘We must outlaw the Jewish danger,’
he recorded afterwards. ‘But it will surface again in a few generations. There’s just no
antidote.’64
His diary veered ever further from the truth. It noted for example that Hitler
expressed admiration of his latest speech attacking Churchill over the Athenia. Göring
however told Rosenberg that Hitler had in fact remarked sarcastically that ‘not even
the entire Reichstag’ had risen to such heights of rhetoric.65 There are also discrepancies
about the latest newsreel. ‘The Führer,’ Goebbels claimed in the diary, ‘finds it
very good.’ But other sources reveal that Hitler found it tedious, with its mindnumbing
sequences on a dance group in the opera, Queen Wilhelmina visiting the
Dutch air raid defences, and the Hungarian labour service.66 ‘The newsreels are put
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