Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
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and relished the irony of the situation. Fatter than ever and aglitter with medals,
Göring showed him round Paris. They swapped pet-hate stories about Ribbentrop;
Goebbels noticed how many German uniforms there were as they strolled along the
boulevards and enjoyed the sensation their presence was creating. At the Casino de
Paris the crippled gauleiter goggled at the open display of such statuesque nudity.
‘We could never put on a show like that in Berlin,’ he decided. Visiting Field Marshal
Hugo Sperrle, the bulky, monocled Third Air Fleet commander at Deauville, Goebbels
decided that like Göring he too was a real comrade, a devil of a fellow, and his men
were just fabelhaft.56
It is worth emphasizing those contemporary words, because in July 1944 he would
recall only the sumptuousness of this peacetime international watering hole—how
Sperrle had crammed his face with caviar canapés and roared, ‘In fourteen days all
life in London will have been extinguished… I am telling you. They’ll suffocate in
their own crap.’ He plied the propaganda minister with agents’ reports, one of which
spoke of the fine ladies being forced to pee in Hyde Park as London’s water mains
ran dry. Goebbels voiced scepticism (or so he claimed in 1944) that that would be
sufficient inconvenience to bring down a great world empire.57
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 615
WHILE Dr Joseph Goebbels is staring at naked showgirls in October 1940 in Paris, his
wife, pregnant in Berlin with their sixth child, has had to return to the clinic with
heart problems.58 It is mid November before she is discharged. Her father writes to
her: facing renewed surgery, he is obliged to draw up a will; he is leaving her the
estate at Remagen—he does not mention Joseph at all.59
Magda’s life is anything but easy, and for all his attempts at camouflage Goebbels’
diary cannot conceal it. A candle still glows dimly in her heart for Karl Hanke. Her
son Harald is now a troublesome adolescent; perhaps the paratroops will make a
man out of him.60 Goebbels privately reflects that it could do wonders for his image
if Harald should die in action . Of his daughters, his favourite is still Helga.61 For
more mature female company, he invites the Countess Faber-Castell out to Lanke
with her husband as soon as Magda has gone; the countess is a captivating twentythree
years old whom he has known for many years. She entertains him with chansons
and music—‘She is bewitching,’ writes Goebbels wistfully.62
Once Magda struggles briefly out of bed to rejoin him. ‘When you see eye to eye
with her,’ writes Goebbels, ‘she is a regular guy and a real comrade.’63 It is the kind of
praise his diary has lavished only on Göring or Sperrle before. On his forty-third
birthday she presents him with a fifth daughter, Heide. His family is now complete.
On Magda’s birthday in November 1940 Hitler himself turns up for her little dinner
party And they proudly show him over their now finished ministerial mansion at
No.20 Hermann Göring Strasse. No fewer than 117 construction workers have been
labouring on it during these historic weeks.64 Thick carpets and velvet or silken wall
hangings supplied by the exquisite United Workshops of Munich deaden every sound.
In the largest salon are seats for 140; the same number can sit at tables in the Blue
Gallery, with eighty-two more at the top table. Tapestries hang everywhere. The
huge desk in his study has cost 8,417 marks, around two thousand dollars.65 The
globe of the world is modelled on one he has seen in the radio building but—given
his waiflike, five-foot-four stature—it is a more lowslung model. In the garden are
marble sculptures by Professor Fritz Klimsch and a bronze nude by Arno Breker. All
616 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the telephones are white; on his instructions all have had their ‘engaged’ indicatorlamps
removed. He does not want it to be known when he is telephoning.66
He has commissioned no less lavish works in the ministry building itself, on Wilhelms
Platz. Work is suspended briefly in November as the interior decorators are called
away to work on the special luxurious trains of Hitler and Göring. Goebbels orders
that there are to be no flushing toilets in the space next to his personal radio studio,
to avoid inappropriate noises during his broadcasts to the Greater German Reich.67
He has a new private dining room installed in the ministry, furnished in mahogany
with a round extending table, two soft easy chairs upholstered in white velvet, and
twelve armchairs covered in green Morocco leather. The estimated cost, including
bulbs for the chandelier, is 19,414 marks.
At the same time nearly two hundred sub-contractors, employing currently 123
workmen, have laboured to complete his mansion at Lanke, the ‘Haus am Bogensee’
(which still stands to this day). He is converted the former guardhouse used by his
bodyguard Kaiser into a handsome oblong wood cabin fifty feet long and thirty feet
wide, as a guesthouse for two families. The architect’s file contains his instructions
dated August 6, 1940 for incubators and bird-tables to be erected in the surrounding
woods. The new gate-house will cost thirty thousand marks; alterations to the cinema,
drawing room, and Magda’s private bedroom one hundred thousand; a twenty-
five foot by sixty-five foot swimming pool, twenty-four thousand; and a children’s
wing, 140,000. By the end of October 1940 the grand total cost of work in hand is
2,663,052.58 marks. Mosquito suppression, road building, and radio equipment will
bring the total to three million. Understandably his diary betrays a certain nervousness
as the bills mount.68
‘If only I had a fraction of the sums the enemy credits me with,’ he expostulates.
The diary cannot conceal his eighteenth century tapestries purchased from France
and the Low Countries, nor the paintings by Van Dyke, nor the Goya obtained from
‘French private property’; but all these are no doubt paid for by the ministry.69
Ministers it seems are endemically blind to their own corruption. Through his
friend Max Winkler, Dr Goebbels controls the film industry. Early in November he
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 617
notes that Winkler has seen Göring and has taken care of the Lanke problem.70 At
about the same time Winkler gives him a ‘belated’ birthday present of two magnificent
black Trakehn geldings, with a matching carriage. No doubt coincidentally Goebbels
‘in conjunction with the film industry’ donates to Winkler a garden cottage worth
fifty thousand marks upon his birthday.71 By November 30 cheques totalling 2·3 million
marks have been paid toward the cost of Lanke. Thus he settled his debts over
Lanke and his tax liabilities at one stroke. ‘It was high time,’ he wrote. ‘If I were to die
now, I’d just about break even. A fine reward for twenty years’ service to the fatherland.
My family would be in for quite a shock.’72
RETURNING from France, Goebbels had dictated to his staff his belief that London was
bluffing.73 But each side was wallowing in self-deception. Ward Price announced that
the British raids had now killed 1,700 Berliners; Goebbels told his overseas services
had killed seven thousand Londoners during September alone. But as Goebbels
privately realized, the British were tough: ‘They’re still holding out.’75 Touring public
shelters on the first night of November he found signs that nerves were getting more
frayed.76 Once again he could only hope that Hitler knew what he was up to.
Hitler did know, but again he had not initiated Dr Goebbels. He had decided as
early as July 1940 to attack Russia. Even in December Goebbels still regarded Britain
as ‘our last remaining enemy.’77 After their Black Forest conference on July 2,
when Hitler had evidently voiced to him his annoyance that Stalin had annexed parts
of Romania, Goebbels mused in his diary: ‘The Slavs are spreading out right across
the Balkans… Perhaps we shall have to go to war again later, against the Soviets.’78 At
the end of that month he had warned the gauleiters to squelch any such rumours.79
He and Hitler were both intrigued by the newsreel images of the Soviet-Finnish
winter war just ended: the Red Army seemed temptingly primitive.80 ‘Bolshevism is
World Enemy No.1,’ Goebbels told Hitler. ‘We are bound to collide sooner or later.’81
Hitler agreed, but still he lied to Goebbels, saying that he was transferring army
divisions to the east only on a better-safe-than-sorry basis.82 ‘He says quite spontane-
618 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ously,’ recorded Goebbels after Hitler had revealed his contempt for Moscow, ‘that
he trusts blindly and implicitly in our future.’ The time was coming, Goebbels gathered,
when old scores with Moscow were to be settled.83
To forestall Stalin Hitler packed German troops into Romania and Finland in September.
‘The Führer is determined,’ observed Goebbels, ‘not to relinquish any more
of Europe to Russia.’84 During October 1940 his diary revealed no hint of the intensive
military preparations already afoot. Learning, to his surprise, that Hitler had
invited the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov to Berlin, Goebbels saw it
only in terms of a slap in the face to Britain.85 He did not approve of Molotov. He
instructed Berlin’s S.A. not to provide guards of honour, and he did nothing to mobilize
the cheering crowds that Ribbentrop had requested.86 Hitler invited him to
lunch with their Soviet guests on November 13. The Russian foreign minister seemed
clever, even artful; his skin was of a waxy, yellow pallor. He listened politely to
Goebbels through an interpreter for two hours, but scarcely even grunted in reply.
After lunch Goebbels let fly to his private staff his scorn of Molotov, with his ‘school
janitor’s face’; he paced angrily up and down behind his desk, mimicking his own
fruitless attempt at making conversation.
‘The Soviets,’ he snapped, in a dismissive generalisation that was to prove fateful
for Germany, ‘are like their suits. They are cheap, and off-the-peg.’87
1 Diary, Aug 1, 1940.
2 MinConf., Aug 5, 1940.
3 Diary, Aug 8, 1940.
4 MinConf., Aug 8, 1940.
5 Diary, Aug 18, 1940.
6 Ibid., Aug 3, 8, 9; MinConf., Aug 8, 1940.
7 MinConf., Aug 10, 1940.
8 Ibid.., Aug 17, 1940.
9 Diary, Aug 2–3, 1940.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 619
10 MinConf., Aug 3; diary, Aug 4; Louis Lochner, letter, Aug 9, 1940 (FDR Libr., Toland
papers, box 52).
11 Diary, Aug 1, 21, 1940.
12 Ibid., Sep 26, Oct 2, 4, 1940.
13 Ibid., Aug 4; cf. Meldung, Aug 15, 1940 (NA film T175, roll 259, 2178f).
14 Diary, Aug 5, 6, 1940.
15 Ibid., Aug 7, 1940.
16 Ibid., Aug 9, 1940.
17 MinConf., Aug 9, 10; diary, Aug 10–13, 1940.
18 Ibid.., Aug 12, 1940.
19 Diary, Aug 13, 1940.
20 Ibid., Aug 14, 1940.
21 Ibid., Aug 23, 1940. On the nineteenth JG noted, ‘It makes you sick!’
22 Ibid., Aug 21, 22, 1940.
23 See the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) study, Development of German Propaganda,
Aug. 1940, p.9 (PRO file FO.898/30).
24 Churchill’s phoned directive of Aug 25 is in Air Ministry papers, PRO file AIR14/775;
the VB headline on Aug 27 read, ‘London dresses up attack on Berlin as a “reprisal”.’
25 Diary, Aug 26, 27, 1940.
26 Ibid., Aug 29, 30, 1940.
27 Ibid., Aug 31, 1940.
28 Titel had organised Goebbels’ biggest Berlin displays like the May Day rally of 1933: it
was his task to ensure that the columns of marchers converged simultaneously on the stadiums,
and that they were not too wide for the bridges en route, etc.
29 For the reports to JG on Churchill’s air raids on Berlin Sep–Dec 1940, see ZStA Potsdam,
Rep.50.01, RMVP, vol.896.
30 MinConf., Sep 8, 1940.
31 The real figure was bad enough, 360.
32 Diary, Sep 9, 1940.
33 Ibid., Sep 10; on Sep 11, 1940 he added: ‘We’re hyping up the raid on Berlin; reverse of
hitherto.’
34 Diary, Sep 11, 1940.
35 MinConf., Sep 11; diary, Sep 12; on Sep 18, 1940 he confirmed: ‘After all, we invented
the blazing Brandenburg Gate too.’
36 MinConf, Sep 15, 1940.
37 Diary, Sep 13, 1940.
38 Ibid., Sep 12, 1940.
39 Ibid., Sep 14, 1940.
40 Ibid., Sep 15, 1940.
41 Ibid., Sep 17, 1940.
42 MinConf., Sep 6, 1940.
43 Diary, Sep 15; as Berndt pointed out, this benefited only the BBC. Ibid., Oct 5, MinConf.,
Oct 7. On Nov 11, JG’s diary noted the ‘colossal propaganda damage’. Hadamowsky put the
RMVP case to Hitler, without success; see Diary, Nov 16, and MinConf., Nov 25, 1940.
620 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
44 MinConf., Sep 17; diary, Sep 18, 1940.
45 Ibid. and diary, Sep 17; in general, see the PWE fortnightly survey, Development of
German Propaganda, Sep 16–30, 1940 (PRO file FO.898/30).
46 Diary, Sep 20, 1940.
47 MinConf., Sep 20, 1940.
48 Milch diary, Sep 14 (Author’s film DI-59); and diaries of Halder, OKW WFSt, and naval
staff, Sep 14, 1940.
49 Diary, Sep 24, 1940.
50 Ibid., Sep 25; JG used the boxing analogy in his article in VB, Dec 28, 1940.
51 Oven, ‘Jul 6, 1944’, 380f.
52 Diary, Sep 26, 1940.
53 Ibid., Oct 2, 3, 1940.
54 Ibid., Oct 3, 4, 1940.
55 MinConf., Oct 9; diary, Oct 5, 1940.
56 Diary, Oct 18; diary of General Hoffmann von Waldau, Oct 16, 1940 (Author’s film DI-
75b).
57 Diary, Oct 19, 1940.
58 Ibid., Oct 20, 1940: ‘Göring is running a tight ship.’
59 Oven, ‘Jul 6, 1944’, 380f: ‘I returned from this visit to Deauville with the worst possible
impressions.’ And see the May 6, 1946 interrogation of Schirmeister, who accompanied JG