that it would be a tough decision to sell to the German people, though no
doubt the Führer would bring it off. The tenor of his coming speech, Hitler had said,
would be magnanimity.
What he did not mention to Goebbels was that he had just begun staff studies on a
war with the Soviet Union.58
They decided that Hitler should stage a triumphant homecoming to Berlin that
Saturday, July 6, and make his Reichstag speech two days later.59
Goebbels hated the idea of offering an easy peace to Britain.
Dramatic events came to his rescue. Under the armistice terms Hitler had just
allowed the defeated French nation to retain is powerful battle fleet, though disarmed
and under German supervision. Concerned that the Nazis might somehow
seize the biggest warships, lying at anchor at Oran (Mers el-Kébir), Churchill ordered
them sunk on July 3, the day after Hitler and Goebbels met. Over a thousand
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 597
French sailors died in the ruthless naval bombardment. This incident dominated a
quarter of Goebbels’ entire domestic propaganda output for the next four days,
while the personal abuse levelled at Churchill equalled the colossal intensity first
reached after the Altmark incident.60 Goebbels’ private admiration for Churchill rose,
as his diary shows. Moreover, the British were still bombing Germany. Hitler however
still restrained his own bomber force.61 ‘The Führer,’ the minister marvelled,
‘has the patience of an angel.’ He directed the press to focus their attack on Churchill
and his clique alone. This was not easy, as the entire British press was ‘chortling with
pleasure’ about Oran.62
BERLIN’S reception for Hitler on Saturday July 6, 1940 was the most spectacular that
Goebbels ever staged.63 He had issued a million swastika flags to the crowds lining
the route, and he himself broadcast the excited running commentary as the train
bearing the conquering warlord hauled into the station at three P.M. to an accompanying
cacophony of church bells, factory sirens, and steam whistles. Once inside the
Chancellery Goebbels asked him what he had decided and learned that the British
fleet’s attack at Oran had unhinged all of Hitler’s plans. ‘He had his speech almost
complete,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘when the attack occurred. It has brought about an
entirely new situation. Churchill is a raving lunatic who has burned all his boats
behind him.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ Hitler lectured him, ‘we must be guided not by hatred
but by common sense.’64
Hitler postponed the speech. He came out to Lanke that Sunday, and played with
the Goebbels children. Several times during the coming week Goebbels lunched at
the Chancellery with Hitler and his ministers, and heard him daydream about his
postwar plans. He was going to build an autobahn from Carinthia in southern Austria
all the way up to Norway’s northernmost cape, with a gigantic new naval base near
Trondheim like Britain’s Singapore. Darré, another lunch guest, recorded, ‘They
couldn’t decide whether to call it Atalantis (Himmler’s suggestion), Atlantis (Frank),
Northern Light (Ley), or Stella Polaris (Goebbels).’65 But these were castles in the
air because, Goebbels noted, Hitler was still unwilling to deliver the final blow. In
598 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
fact, said Hitler, he was now going to retire to the Berghof to think things over; he
left for Bavaria that evening.66
JUST as Hitler hankered after his peacetime hobby of architecture, so Dr Goebbels
dreamed of retiring to a country estate and firing off magisterial newspaper editorials.
67
With the birth of Das Reich, his new national weekly magazine for the intelligentsia,
part of this dream came true. He contributed a highly-paid, regular leading article
which would come to be quoted around the world as a real sensor of Nazi policies.
Appearing every Saturday from May 26, 1940, Das Reich became the flagship of
his journalistic career.68 It was well designed, its prose was literate, its photographs
superb. It was particularly popular with the officer corps.69 Its circulation hovered
around a million—‘a rare publishing success of which I was not entire innocent,’
Goebbels wrote.70
The large circulation involved simultaneous printing in several centres, and this in
turn meant that his manuscript had to be delivered by the previous Monday. He
began drafting it a week ahead, initially with a schoolboy dread, then with growing
enthusiasm as it took shape; he devoted inordinate energy to checking dates, facts,
and quotations from the Greek and Latin classics, until he was ready to dictate the
final draft just before the weekend. One copy went off by courier for Hitler’s approval;
another went to the radio, because from November 7, 1941 each such leader
article would be broadcast in full at 7:45 P.M. on the eve of its publication. Its text
was issued worldwide. Its influence on German morale, as the war progressed, was
unquestionable; it was a weekly shot in the arm—celebrating battles won, explaining
setbacks, justifying persecutions, promising retaliation, predicting victory. Toward
the end, a Goebbels article would present eloquent arguments from antiquity
or parables from the party’s struggle for power which briefly lightened the lowering
darkness of defeat. One Luftwaffe general admitted that after reading Das Reich he
chided himself, ‘Oh, ye of little faith! Perhaps things really are different from how
you, in your puny mind, make them out to be.’ After reading Goebbels in Das Reich
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 599
on the day before Hitler died an army lieutenant-general in British captivity could
only say, ‘They [the Nazis] must have something up their sleeves!’71
While Hitler stayed brooding at the Berghof, his plans upset, Goebbels boosted
Berlin’s uncertain morale by staging a homecoming parade for one of its infantry
divisions. He shrilled words of welcome through loudspeakers, contrasting this scene
with those of 1918: ‘You soldiers return to find your country just as you left it. At
your head stands the same Führer, on your buildings flutters the same flag, your
people are still imbued with the same spirit and the same determination.’ ‘All we
need now,’ he triumphed in his diary afterwards, ‘is Britain’s capitulation, total victory,
and a lasting peace… Who can still harbour any doubt as to the outcome of this
gigantic struggle?’72 The mere statement of the question suggests that, deep in his
own unfathomed depths, Goebbels was himself beginning to doubt.
AS the infantry marched in, Gutterer remarked, the same hordes of Jews were to be
seen loitering up and down Kurfürstendamm.73 Goebbels had to admit it was true.
The Jewish problem still ran like a poisonous thread through all his deliberations. He
had told Gutterer in February 1940 to organize raids on Berlin Jews suspected or
hoarding foodstuffs.74 He detected their hand everywhere, particularly in the ‘Jewish
press’ of America.75 One American put a bounty of a million dollars on Hitler’s head;
‘typical Jew,’ was Goebbels’ reponse.76 He had no qualms about the murderous treatment
that the
S.S. were meting out to the Jews, the clergy, and the intelligentsia in
Poland.77 More than once over the next five years he reflected that for top Nazis like
himself there was now no going back: winning total victory had become literally a
matter of life and death for them. In one cryptic diary entry in January 1940 he
reminded himself, ‘If there were any going back, then one would too easily become
faint-hearted … That goes for our policies in Poland too. We simply must not lose
this war.’78
Like other top Nazis, he was noticeable careful not to spell out what those policies
were. When a well-disposed Polish journalist sent him details of certain ‘episodes’ in
Poland, he noted: ‘These could be pretty lethal for us at this moment,’ and he had the
600 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
informant taken into custody for a while.79 A few weeks later he learned that the
Russians were disposing of the Jews in their half of Poland ‘in their own way.’ ‘So
much the better for us,’ was his cryptic comment.80
Stalin’s ideological radicalism impressed him as much as Churchill’s singlemindedness.
Once, Goebbels decided, after discussing their ruthless Moscow ally
with Hitler, ‘Every year, like a careful gardener, he prunes the more unruly sprouts
in his hedge. And if Stalin does shoot his generals, then we won’t have to do it one day
ourselves. I wonder,’ he mused, ‘whether Stalin is liquidating his Jews as well? Perhaps
he just tells the world they were Trotskyites as a blind. Who can say?’81
He had no misgivings about euthanasia either. After hearing Philipp Bouhler reporting
to Hitler on the ongoing operation to liquidate their hospital population of
mental defectives, Goebbels agreed that this was ‘so necessary,’ but he made a note
that the whole thing was secret and running into difficulties.82 Over lunch a week
later he heard Himmler tell Hitler that in some parts of occupied Poland the Jews
had set up their own administration and were imposing a cruel regime on their own
race. ‘That’s how the Jews are,’ he commented, ‘and that’s how they’ll be for ever
more.’83 Hitler reassured him in June that they would deal swiftly with the Jews after
the war, and Goebbels repeated this to his secret eleven o’clock conference on the
day Hitler returned to Berlin from the Berghof in mid-July.84 Commenting on the
Jews’ disrespectful behaviour during the infantry parade, Goebbels announced that,
no doubt acting in his capacity as gauleiter, he had decided to pack all Berlin’s Jews—
he put their number at 62,000—off to Poland within eight weeks of the cessation of
hostilities. ‘So long as the Jews are living in Berlin,’ he said, ‘they will always exert a
bad influence on public opinion.’ Hans Hinkel, his specialist on Jewish affairs, briefed
Goebbels’ ministerial conference on the Berlin police plans already developed for
clearing out the Jews.85 Later still, Hitler revealed to him that his own preferred final
solution was to deport all of Europe’s Jews after the war to Madagascar, currently a
French colony. ‘That will become a German protectorate under a German police
governor.’86
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 601
HITLER had now put the finishing touches to his Reichstag speech. He returned to
Berlin on July 19, 1940 in high spirits, and outlined its salient points to his lunch
guests including Goebbels. He would issue a short, terse peace offer to Britain without
spelling out any precise terms but with the clear implication that this was his last
word, and it was now for London to decide.87 Goebbels hoped that Churchill might
even resign. That evening, he told his staff, Britain’s fate would be in the balance.88
He directed all his English-language radio stations to soften up British public opinion.
89 He now had no fewer than five black radio stations, among them the ‘New
British Broadcasting Station,’ which beamed William Joyce’s messages to England via
three shortwave transmitters; an ‘amateur’ Radio Caledonia, pumping out Scottish
nationalist propaganda; another transmitter aimed at Welsh nationalists; a mediumwave
transmitter beaming socialist slogans to the British working class; and ‘Concordia
Plan P’, which had soothing words for British Christian pacifists and regularly broadcast
prayer services for peace.90
But all of these megawatts failed to deflect Britain from her purpose. A rude answer
to Hitler’s peace offer was broadcast almost immediately over the B.B.C. by
Sefton Delmer (‘one of Putzi Hanfstaengl’s discoveries,’ as Goebbels labelled him).91
To Hitler’s consternation the British bombing continued that night. ‘For the moment,’
recorded Goebbels, seeing him the next day, ‘the Führer does not want to
accept that that is indeed Britain’s response. He is still minded to wait awhile. After
all, he appealed to the British people and not to Churchill.’92 Agreeing that they
could afford to wait, Goebbels warned editors not to overstate Britain’s rebuff. ‘Given
their totally different, insular mentality,’ he told his department heads, ‘it is just
inconceivable to the English that the offer made in the Führer’s speech was not mere
bluff but meant in dead earnest.’93
So Germany waited. He himself doubted whether Britain really was interested in
peace. She would not come to her senses until she had taken the first blows. ‘She
can’t have any idea of the trouble she’s in,’ he reflected.
Churchill had not responded other than with bombs. But Lord Halifax broadcast a
statement that Goebbels at first mistook for just an unctuous sermon, only to learn
602 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the next day that Hitler regarded it as most definitely Britain’s final outright rejection
of his offer.94
Secretly, Goebbels was rather pleased. ‘Everybody,’ he wrote, meaning himself,
‘was afraid that Britain would grasp the hand of peace extended by the Führer.’95
Hitler told him that he too would ‘very soon’ start massive bombing raids. ‘The big
question,’ Goebbels detected, ‘is when… Only the Führer can decide that.’96 He instructed
his black transmitters to start generating panic in Britain, for instance transmitting
official-sounding English guidelines on what to do when the Nazi mass air
raids began; to add authenticity each bulletin was to start with blistering attacks on
the top Nazis. Once again his announcers were to counsel the enemy public to withdraw
their life savings, hoard foodstuffs, and jewellery and valuables against inflation.97
It was now late July 1940. Everyone was ready for the blitz to begin—except
Hitler.98
1 Diary, Apr 29, 1940.
2 Auguste Behrend, op. cit., No.9, Mar 1, 1952.
3 Diary, Apr 2, 4, 1940; he thought highly of Hitler’s physician.
4 Ibid., Apr 16, 22, 1940.
5 Ritschel to Magda, Jul 7, 1940; in a file of their correspondence (ZStA Potsdam, Rep.90,
Go 2 vol.3).
6 Diary, Apr 4, 1940.
7 Ibid., Aug 11, 1941.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 98
