together without inspiration or depth of interest,’ he fulminated over lunch to
Goebbels and a beaming Rosenberg in December. ‘We have in Germany an entire
nation under arms, yet the newsreels take no notice.’ Goebbels protested that Karl
Ritter was making excellent patriotic movies like ‘Pour le Mérite’. ‘Yes patriotic,’
said Hitler, ‘but not National Socialist!’ They went at it hammer and tongs for twenty
minutes before Dr Goebbels lapsed into a stricken silence. ‘His insufferable arrogance,’
gloated Rosenberg, ‘is now too much for even the long-suffering Führer to
bear.’ Goebbels hated being criticized by Hitler. ‘But he has the right to criticize,’ he
loyally noted. ‘He is a genius.’67
One never knew, after all, who might read the diary’s pages.
IN October 1939 his stately home at Lanke, the Haus am Bogensee, is complete.
572 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Worries about financing it still beset him.68 He visits Magda, hospitalized once more
with heart problems, and tells her of these irksome difficulties.69 ‘We have such money
worries,’ he writes. ‘Some of them are anything but agreeable.’70 Of course her wealthy
father Oskar Ritschel has no intention of bailing them out. They are a family again.
Once his stepson Harald comes, now a young paratrooper whose eyes have seen the
horrors of war in Poland. On Goebbels’ birthday Hitler invites them to tea; his face
is lined with worry—the war is not panning out as he had planned.71
Goebbels’ marital problems seem over; at least the endless rows have faded from
the diary’s pages. He takes Magda out to Lanke for an afternoon, and they happily
arrange the furniture.72 Once in November they rake over old embers, ‘of which,’
notes Goebbels, evidently scorched in the process, ‘some are anything but agreeable.’
73 Magda enrols as a Red Cross nurse.74 He puts pressure on his budget chief Dr
Ott to ‘show more initiative’ in dealing with the stubborn ministry of finance; this
evidently works, because Ott shortly tells him that he has ‘sorted out some of the
problems in financing the new buildings.’75 Slowly his domestic worries recede.
November 8, 1939 finds him in Munich listening once more to Hitler’s speech on
the putsch anniversary. From here one year before Goebbels had launched the Night
of Broken Glass. By six P.M. Himmler, Bouhler, Rosenberg, Frank, Ribbentrop and
other dignitaries had joined him in the Bürgerbräu beerhall; this time they were
surrounded by field-grey army uniforms. Hitler delivered an hour-long attack on
Britain, pronounced that he was ready for five years of war if necessary, then finished
abruptly—he had to hurry back to Berlin since his army commanders had asked to
see him urgently the next morning about ‘Yellow,’ the repeatedly postponed western
campaign.
Goebbels rode in Hitler’s special railroad car. At Nuremberg station he saw a telegram
handed to Hitler: a mighty explosion, it said, had ripped through the beerhall
just after they left, killing eight and injuring over sixty.76 Goebbels was agog at his
Führer’s seemingly miraculous escape. If he had not left early, they would all surely
have been killed. He really must be under God’s protection, he privately concluded.
‘He won’t die until his mission is complete.’77
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 573
At the ministry he directed all editors to comment along these lines. ‘Urgent state
business had called him back to Berlin,’ the journalists were told. He forbade them
to incriminate any specific groups inside Germany like monarchists, the clergy or
Jews.78 He did not want any repetition of the November 1938 pogrom. London and
Paris meanwhile blamed the Nazis themselves—‘As is their wont,’ he observed drily
in his diary, with the Reichstag fire allegations in mind.79
There was a bizarre sequel. Hitler showed him a letter received a few days before:
the writer, an astrologer living in the Black Forest, had cast Hitler’s horoscope and
regretted to inform him that he was in mortal danger between the seventh and the
tenth. ‘I’m curious to know what you make of this,’ said Hitler.
‘Wow!’ replied the minister cautiously, knowing Hitler’s aversion to the occult:
‘Wow!’
Himmler pocketed the letter, promising to look into it.80
THAT night there was a mini-pogrom, as rampaging Nazis beat up innocents in Berlin.
‘I have them shipped off to concentration camp,’ recorded Goebbels grandly, but the
outrages continued.81 Goebbels ordered the guards on his ministry reinforced (a sign
that he at least regarded the assassination attempt as genuine.)82 Assured by Hitler
that there was no trace of the culprit, Goebbels groped blindly, flailing first at the
British, then the Americans and Roosevelt. Learning only on the fifteenth that
Himmler’s men had caught ‘the first of the assassins’ on the Swiss border, he shifted
his sights onto his old foe Otto Strasser; Strasser, it turned out, had fled from Switzerland
to England immediately after the bomb blast. ‘We are keeping it all secret,’
he summarized, ‘so as not to tip off the men really behind it.’83 The hunt for accomplices
turned up nothing; but when the government press agency finally announced
the assassin’s arrest on November 21, Goebbels released news of the capture of two
top British agents on the Dutch border at the same time, so that even the dimmest
reader would understand the hint.84
GOEBBELS sent for that astrologer, Karl-Ernst Krafft—a pale, slight fellow with spin-
574 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
dly hands and deepset eyes. He wanted to learn more about his letter to Hitler,
though carefully armouring himself with a veneer of scepticism (as recently as November
2 he had directed the party to keep a watchful eye on seers, astrologers, and
clairvoyants to damp down rumours.85 At his confidential eleven A.M. conference on
November 11 he ordered all astrological publications checked for relevant prophecies.
In fact all such publications had long been banned, but he mentioned casually in
his diary, ‘I’m having a watch kept on astrology. A load of rubbish is talked and printed
about it. And yet, strangely enough, it all speaks in our favour.’86
‘Speaks’ is perhaps too strong a word. As Krafft explained, it depended how one
interpreted the Delphic prophecies, couched in Old French, of Nostradamus (1503–
66). He obligingly interpreted one passage thus for Goebbels: ‘Since the armistice
was a fraud, the great Führer of Hermannsland [le grand duc d’Arménie] will convey
Brabant, Flanders, Gent, Bruges, and Boulogne to Grossdeutschland, and he will
seize Vienna and the Rhineland by surprise.’ Goebbels promptly took him onto the
ministry’s pay roll.87 With Krafft’s help, and with more than a little imagination, they
would hijack Nostradamus’ ancient prophecies to benefit the Reich.
He ordered a new ‘translation’ of the prophecies suitable for use in propaganda to
France, and printed millions of bogus Nostradamus leaflets, with special editions of
the selected passages prophesying the downfalls of, respectively, France and Britain.
88 In December he asked to see the astrological calendars f
or 1940 (and banned
the lot the next day.)89
That winter he turned out millions of propaganda leaflets designed to subvert the
French troops. Some asked the French soldiers how they’d like to die for Danzig.
Others included a famous one shaped like a yellowing autumn leaf, and asking the
soldiers if they intended to die and fade away like this. Two clandestine radio stations
started transmissions in French. He supervised their content closely.90 ‘I direct that
enemy statesmen are no longer to be portrayed as figures of fun,’ he wrote, ‘but as
cruel, vengeful tyrants. This goes for Chamberlain above all.’91 He spared the Duke
of Windsor from this campaign, as a precaution for the future.92 For Churchill he had
both admiration and contempt. ‘Riddled with lies and distortions,’ he wrote after
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 575
one Churchill broadcast. ‘He’s grown really old. But he’s a cunning old fox all the
same.’93
The topics of his ministerial conferences ranged from the ridiculous to the banal,
from the supply of shoes, potatoes, diapers, coal, nail varnish, and cosmetics to the
chronic shortcomings in the forces’ mail.94 When London published an uncomfortably
accurate account of Himmler’s concentration camps, Goebbels commissioned a
riposte about their forerunners, the British camps in the Boer War and other colonial
‘atrocities.’95 ‘The world,’ he recorded, ‘is being flooded with shameless lies and atrocity
myths about Germany … the craziest items, from the cruel persecution of the aristocracy
here and the execution of well-known generals to the imprisonment of Prince
Max of Baden (who in fact died ten years ago) and so on.’96 He published an article
about these ‘myths’ having himself, at Hitler’s suggestion, just ordered the fake
Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion exhumed for a new leaflet against France.97
He remained obsessed with the ‘crime’ of listening to foreign broadcasts. He felt
that the courts were being altogether too lenient in sentencing. Despite draconic
sentences it was clear from Gestapo reports that listening was on the increase.98
British bombers had however now started dropping millions of leaflets including a
miniature Völkischer Beobachter wittily called the Wolkiger Beobachter, the Cloudy Observer.
The first issue declared: ‘The revolver-journalist Goebbels and the young
hacks scribbling at his behest may have destroyed the proud craft of German journalism
but they cannot assuage so easily the thinking man’s natural hunger for news.’ Its
caricatures were apposite—like Hitler reading Karl Marx and Stalin browsing in
‘Mein Kampf’; and there was a moving obituary of General von Fritsch complete
with a black border.99 Goebbels conceded that the British propaganda was becoming
more sophisticated.100
His own press policies were still diffuse. He noted that he had lightened up on the
press a bit, adding: ‘We must allow them a free rein.’101 But the press directives reflect
none of this. After a train crash near Friedrichshafen killed 132 passengers on December
22, and a second rail accident not far away killed fifty more the very next
next day, he ordered both news items suppressed; but the second death toll rose to
576 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ninety-nine and he had to release it several days later.102 He banned press coverage of
several Poles for massacring ethnic Germans, as well as reports on the execution of
rebellious Czech students and other steps against their intelligentsia.103 More enlightened
were his bans on the printing of anonymous film or book reviews and,
conversely, the names of defendants in minor court actions.104 Many of these rules
still hold in Germany today.
On December 16, 1939, he warned editors not to delve into the ancestry of the
Führer, his childhood, or his private life, and he rebuked them for drawing festive
parallels between Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ.
‘The Führer does not desire such comparisons,’ he said.105
1 Testimony of Schirmeister, IMT, vol.xvii, 258f, 275f.
2 Testimony of Fritzsche, ibid., 161.
3 RPA Frankfurt, confidential information, No.197/39, Sep 1 (Oberheitmann collection,
BA file ZSg.109/5); Unpubl. diary, Sep 2, 1939.
4 Interrogation of von Schirmeister, May 6, 1946 (NA film M.1270, roll 19).
5 RPA Frankfurt, confidential information, Sep 3, 1939.
6 JG, 25pp memo for Hitler, ‘Gedanken zum Kriegsbeginn 19193’ (BA file NS.10/37).
Later (diary, Nov 4, 1939) JG would decide not to accept any memos longer than 3pp.
7 Note for Italian minister of popular culture on phone call to JG, Sep 10, 1939 (NA film
T586, roll 415, 6583ff).
8 Unpubl. diary, Sep 7; Hitler’s draft ordinance (Verfügung) of Sep 3 is publ. in ADAP(D),
vol.vii, No.574. On Sep 9, 1939 JG recorded, ‘There’s still no end to Ribbentrop’s mischief.’
9 Hitler had known since Sep 27 that a German submarine was responsible for the sinking,
but he did not tell JG; Heinz Lorenz confirms this in interrog., Dec 3, 1947, part ii (NA film
M.1019, roll 43).
10 Hitler did not tell JG that the assassin Georg Elser had already been caught on Nov 9 and
interrogated.
11 Unpubl. diary, Sep 2, 1939.
12 Ibid., Sep 3, 1939.
13 Ibid., Sep 3, 1939.
14 On Blomberg, see unpubl. diary, Dec 2, 1944; on Fritsch, Jun 14, 1938.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 577
15 Groscurth diary, Sep 29; in unpubl. diary, Sep 24, 1939 JG noted: ‘Fritsch died a
magnificent death. His body had to be recovered by shock-troops. He was right up front. A
true soldier!’
16 JG visited Führer’s HQ on Sep 7 (FHQ war diary, Sep 7; IfZ film MA.272, 0627); and
Sep 14: Bormann diary and JG’s phone conv. with Alfieri that day (loc. cit.)
17 Rosenberg diary, Sep 29, 1939.
18 Darré diary, Sep 9, 1939 (transcript in BA, Darré papers, vol.65a).
19 Unpubl. diary, Sep 3, 1939.
20 See JG to Lammers, Sep 1, 1939 (‘No objections have been raised’) and other documents
in NA film T120, roll 2474, E255273ff; the Mar 1936–Jul 1941 file on listening to
enemy broadcasts in ZStA Potsdam, Rep.50.01, RMVP, vol.630; and C F Latour’s paper
inVfZ, 1963, 418ff.
21 Gürtner to Lammers, Sep 1, 1939 (loc. cit., E.255277f).
22 Lammers minute, Sep 1, 1939 (ibid., E.255279).
23 Ibid., Sep 2 (‘that’s great: we have smitten this weapon from the enemy’s hand’);
Groscurth, official diary, Sep 8;. On Sep 3 (unpubl. diary) JG noted, ‘Big row over the
decree on foreign radio stations. Göring, Frick, and Gürtner don’t want to go as far as I.’ The
law was gazetted in the RGBl on Sep 7, 1939.
24 Hess to members of the Cabinet, Sep 3 (NA film T120, roll 2474, E255295ff); Heydrich,
Schnellbrief of Sep 16, 1939 (Hoover Libr., Lerner papers, file DE.460/DIS.202).
25 JG circular to all gauleiters and gau propaganda directors, Sep 10, 1939 (NA film T581/
16; BA file NS.26/291).
26 Darré diary, Sep 6; and see the entry for Sep 20, 1939.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 94
