her father wastes away, losing forty pounds. But he has evidently imbibed the evil
draughts brewed by his son-in-law. ‘So these weeks,’ Ritschel writes afterwards to
his daughter, ‘we’re turning against the arch-enemy England, so that peace returns at
last. Of course it isn’t really a war against Britain and France at all, but a war between
the Judaic and Germanic races; that is the quintessence of this gigantic struggle.’5
MANY desks at Goebbels’ ministry were empty; half of his staff were away at the
wars.6 Goebbels encouraged this war service, both for the battlefield experience that
men like Gunter d’Alquèn would bring back to the ministry and for the ideological
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 591
stiffening that they brought to the front lines.7 Goebbels sent out regular hectographed
letters to all his men in uniform disbursing the latest ministry gossip, chocolates, and
cigarettes to each man.8 The propaganda company suffered heavy losses in Norway.
Hanke fought through France as Erwin Rommel’s adjutant; Berndt succeeded him in
Africa.9 Werner Naumann, an officer in Hitler’s S.S. Leibstandarte, would return
with a wound badge and other decorations from the Balkan campaign.10 Herbert
Heiduschke, another Goebbels adjutant, would meet a paratrooper’s death in Crete,
shot through the head.11 G.W. Müller would be wounded in the Nazi advance on
Murmansk in North Russia.12 Moritz von Schirmeister, Goebbels’ press officer since
1938, would not return from the eastern front to his desk until January 1942.13
The Norwegian campaign provide one coup for Goebbels, the capture of British
documents proving that Churchill had himself, for all his talk about invasions of
neutral countries, intended to invade Norway. ‘That is a gift from the gods,’ wrote a
jubilant Goebbels. ‘We missed disaster by hours. Churchill was waiting for reports
of the English invasion—and the accursed Germans had got there first.’14 Scoffing,
Hitler told him that Mr Churchill had given each man only fifty rounds of ammunition.
‘Staff headquarters in a hospital,’ commented Goebbels. ‘Pure Churchill!’15 Incriminating
British documents were rushed into print. He ordered the press to follow
up with leader articles, and had the captured British officers interviewed on the
newfangled tape recorder lest Mr Churchill deny the story.16 The British expeditionary
force had behaved despicably, Hitler told Goebbels, looting and pillaging everywhere.
In contrast to the Polish campaign, however, the Norwegians had not committed
one atrocity—‘They are after all a Germanic breed’—and he ordered the
release of all Norwegian prisoners by way of recognition.17
Unlike Goebbels, Hitler had no special animus against the British. While Goebbels
broadly defined their war aims as ‘victory over the western plutocracies’18, he often
heard Hitler speak, within the four walls of his Chancellery, of his fondness for the
British and their empire. ‘The Führer’s intention is,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘to administer
one knockout punch. Even so, he would be ready to make peace today, on condition
that Britain stay out of Europe and give us back our colonies… He does not
592 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
want at all to crush Britain or to destroy her empire.’19 ‘There is no need,’ wrote
Goebbels a few days later, again quoting Hitler, ‘for Britain to lose her overseas possessions.’
20 Hitler described the Englishmen in charge as criminals. ‘They could have
had peace on the most amicable of terms,’ he privately assured Goebbels. ‘Instead
they are fighting a war and shattering their empire to the core.’21 ‘We are neither able
nor willing to take over their empire,’ he added, reverting to this bitter theme. ‘There
are some people whom you can talk sense into only after you’ve knocked out their
front teeth.’22
With Yellow imminent, there was one odd interlude: Goebbels decided that since
they had an interest in weakening Chamberlain’s government their overseas broadcasts
should back Mr Churchill against him. Hitler evidently thought this wrong,
because on May 9 Goebbels ordered this tactic abandoned.23
That night, May 9, 1940, Hitler boarded his train, bound for the western front.
Goebbels showed up conspicuously at Göring’s side at the première of Mussolini’s
play ‘Cavour’ in Berlin, then returned to his deserted ministry building. At 5:35 A.M.
Yellow began, with Hitler’s tanks and airborne troops invading the Low Countries.
At eight Goebbels himself broadcast appeals to them not to resist. ‘Our entire public
must be convinced that Holland and Belgium did violate their neutrality,’ he told his
staff.24 Learning that Churchill had now replaced Chamberlain, Goebbels penned
this jubilant comment in his diary: ‘Decks cleared!’25 Churchill launched the air war
immediately, with raids on the Ruhr. Elsewhere twenty-four people, mostly children,
were killed by bombs in Freiburg; in fact a stray Luftwaffe plane was to blame,
but the harrowing stories from Freiburg were grist to Goebbels’ mill.26
He ordered the media to ignore Churchill’s new cabinet except for the minister of
information Duff Cooper. On Hitler’s instructions the popular Queen Wilhelmina
of the Netherlands was also spared.27 As the powerful transmitter at Luxemburg fell
into German hands Goebbels offered a substantial reward for the return of its missing
valves; it later became one of his mightiest weapons in the radio propaganda
war.28 Initially he laid down the principle of total restraint in their reporting: there
was to be no sensationalizing of the Wehrmacht’s victories.29 Hitler had briefed him
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 593
on his real secret strategy, later known as the Manstein Plan, because as it unfolded
on May 16 Goebbels noted that their mission now was to dupe the enemy into expecting
a rehash of the old Schlieffen Plan.30 He spread rumours about fresh airborne
landings, and took care not to rebut enemy stories about Nazi secret weapons.31
Already he was preparing a new recording of massed choirs singing the Netherlands
Thanksgiving Prayer, ready for victory.32 As Hitler’s armies began their historic
wheel toward the north-west Goebbels reflected unabashedly: “Since 1938 we have
conquered seven European countries.”33 As the King of Belgium conceded defeat
Churchill broadcast his famous warning that Britain would fight on the beaches.
‘He’s still insolent,’ decided Goebbels,’but you can hear the perspiration trickling
out of every frightened pore.’34 He ordered it brought home to the British and the
French that it was their governments who had declared this war on Germany, and he
commissioned a special England victory fanfare for the German radio.35 ‘They declared
this war,’ said Hitler, informing Goebbels of his intention of battering the
French into submission. ‘Now let them whimper for peace.’36
GENERAL Reichenau would tell the ministry’s staff, after Hitler appointed his fieldmarshals,
‘The one who really won the French campaign was Goebbels.’37 Although a
biography is not the place to analyse propaganda methods in detail, there was something
in that. As the British expedit
ionary force fell back in disarray towards the
beaches around Dunkirk, Goebbels’ black transmitters were softening up the French
public and doing all they could to generate amongst the poilus the feeling that they
were already done for. He himself wrote many of the scripts for ‘Concordia’ and
‘Humanité’, including a religious service of cunningly pacifist flavour. His purpose
was simple: to spread despondency and dismay among the French. This he did by
reporting rumours that Paul Reynaud’s regime was fleeing Paris; by urging all French
patriots to withdraw their bank savings immediately lest the Nazis confiscated the
banks; and by broadcasting meaningless code-phrases to a non-existent French underground;
Hitler directed him to talk freely about this fictitious ‘Fifth Column.’38
His transmitters gave helpful advice to the French on surviving the cholera epidemic
594 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
(there was none); and how to hoard scarce food supplies. No true Frenchman, they
warned, should trust the perfidious English. He spread rumours of peace talks, then
claimed a day later that Britain had torpedoed them. Gutterer and Raskin faked the
diary of a British soldier describing his sexual exploits among the wives of Paris.
Other stations spread word of appalling atrocities, designed to choke the French
roads with panic-stricken refugees. He brought to bear the main transmitters of
Radio Cologne, Leipzig, and Stuttgart, to beam these poisonous messages into enemy
territory.39
Learning that the turgid communist jargon of ‘Humanité’s’ scripts was turning off
its listeners, Goebbels retrieved Wilhelm Kasper and Karl-Loew Albrecht from concentration
camp.40 Together with Ernst Torgler they helped Goebbels to foment communist
unrest among the Paris working class. ‘Magnificent,’ he congratulated himself.
‘Keep tipping oil onto the flames.’41 Over the half-megawatt Deutschland Sender
his broadcasters warned that many of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to
France and England were really Hitler agents in disguise.42 Churchill ordered the
internment of over twenty thousand Jewish refugees, a spectacular success for
Goebbels’ evil tongue.43 Settling scores with the exiled Otto Strasser and Hermann
Rauschning, he had his ministry issue ‘official denials’ that they too were members of
the Nazi Fifth Column. Then he arranged for an anonymous well-wisher’s telegram
to reach Strasser tipping him off that the game was up.44
As the black propaganda campaign gathered momentum, the roads behind the
French lines were choked with terror-stricken refugees. Twice Hitler mentioned to
Goebbels how moved he was by the French ‘refugee misery’ that he had seen.45 The
minister instructed his staff never to tell outsiders of the part their tactics had played—
‘Even after the war,’ he directed, ‘it will be necessary to keep our operations secret.’
46
He stepped up the pressure on Britain too. William Joyce toured prison camps
recruiting English speakers.47 Goebbels was in doubt that Churchill would prove a
tougher opponent than Reynaud. ‘He will be England’s gravedigger,’ he prophesied.
He warned the media not to speculate on Churchill’s parentage without cast-iron
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 595
evidence.48 Normal libels would not suffice against this man: perhaps monster-libels
would. He told Joyce to announce that Churchill was planning to torpedo the liner
carrying fleeing Americans back to the United States (‘I wouldn’t put it past the old
rogue anyway,’ he commented, as though that were justification enough.)49
In Churchill, Goebbels had met his match. Before his marvelling eyes, the ‘old
rogue’ converted the disaster of Dunkirk into a propaganda triumph for England.
Churchill’s legend of the Little Ships fired the imagination of the world. ‘You can’t
help admiring the brazen effrontery with which they are putting out this monstrous
lie,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘There’s no doubt that they’ve managed to halt the avalanche in
public opinion that was developing.’50 Goebbels was dismayed to hear from d’Alquèn
and Hippler that not only were the French troops loyally covering the British retreat,
but that whatever the French was saying to the contrary the Tommies were fighting
with unexpected bravery. ‘The British,’ he realized, ‘are going to be a tough nut to
crack.’51
Hitler staged the surrender talks in the forest at Compiègne, the site of Germany’s
humiliation in 1918. Telephoning Goebbels that evening he described with relish the
French delegation’s consternation upon finding him there in person. Later Goebbels
listened to the secret recordings of the peace negotiations.52
Broadcasting over the B.B.C., Churchill announced that Britain would fight on
alone. ‘That idiot is plunging all England into misfortune,’ wrote Goebbels. He ordered
his ‘black’ transmitters realigned on England. He did not share his Führer’s
maudlin affection for the English. He found the early British war movie ‘The Lion
has Wings’ so ludicrous that he had it shown to the press corps and public audiences
in Berlin for laughs.53
Hitler however hesitated. Goebbels could see that he hated the idea of pursuing
the defeated British army across the English Channel. In an interview with American
journalist Karl von Wiegand the Führer once again insisted, for English listeners’
consumption, that he did not desire the destruction of their empire. This conciliatory
attitude suited neither Dr Goebbels nor Mr Churchill, who sent his bombers to
Berlin on the night of the Compiègne armistice ceremony. Goebbels drove over to
596 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
see the resulting damage at Babelsberg and admitted at the next morning’s press
conference that there had been fatalities. When Hitler phoned later that day Goebbels
pleaded in vain for retaliatory raids.54 He had to content himself with mocking Churchill’s
‘frightened stutterings’ in his diary: ‘But it is a pity that we can’t get at him yet.’
The big question, he added, was how now to proceed against Britain? ‘The Führer
does not really want to press on. But he may well have to. If Churchill stays on,
assuredly.’ Göring set up a plan for a mass air attack on Britain, but Hitler kept
postponing it.55 The British air force kept poking at Germany. ‘Churchill,’ fumed
Goebbels at the end of June, ‘is just trying to provoke us. But the Führer doesn’t
intend to respond, yet.’56
A telegram from Hitler curtailed his tour of the battlefields in France—he was to
report to the interim Führer HQ in the Black Forest the next day, July 2, 1940.
It was their first meeting in a month. He found that Hitler was planning to offer
Britain one last chance in a speech to the Reichstag. He still believed that he could
defeat Britain in four weeks. ‘The Führer however does not want to destroy the
Empire,’ Goebbels noted, ‘because everything it loses will accrue to foreign powers
and not to us.’57 Goebbels was clearly unhappy with Hitler’s prevarication: he recorded
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 97
