Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

by Roger Manvell; Heinrich Fraenkel

  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

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  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

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  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

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  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