Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 105
of argument. He was furious that Hitler had not asked his advice.2 The blow to the
party’s prestige could be fatal. He immediately ordered the Hess item removed from
the weekly newsreel.
He hoped that Hess was dead, but he was not. On Tuesday the British revealed that
the Nazi leader had landed by parachute. Goebbels told his secret morning conference
to keep a stiff upper lip.3 He had been summoned to Hitler that afternoon with
all the other gauleiters, he said.4 ‘We’ll get to the bottom of the affair this afternoon
and I shall dictate more detailed instructions from the Obersalzberg after that,’ he
added. Meanwhile they were to concentrate on the air war—on anything but Hess.5
At the Berghof Hitler showed him two letters that Hess had left behind, mapping
out a ‘peace programme’ drafted in October.6 He was going to England to make her
plight plain to her, to get the Duke of Hamilton to overthrow the Churchill regime
and to bring about peace without any loss of face for Britain. The two letters oozed
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 641
half-baked occultist theories. ‘That’s the kind of men we have ruling Germany,’ wrote
Goebbels perhaps incautiously. ’The whole business is only explicable in the light of
his nature-healing and herb-munching foibles.’ Perhaps Hitler’s communiqué calling
Hess ‘demented’ was not so far off base after all.7 Goebbels quailed at the prospect of
what the enemy would make of this. He repeatedly said later that he wished he had
been in the enemy’s shoes. He would have published whatever he liked in Hess’s
name.8 He described Duff Cooper & Co as dimwitted dilettantes.9
When Hitler spoke to all the gauleiters that afternoon, May 13, he was visibly
shaken.10 After driving Goebbels back to the local airfield S.A.-chief of staff Viktor
Lutze remarked in his diary that the public announcement about Hess would lead to
a leadership crisis, because the public must ask how such sick men could be retained
at the highest level; how could he even have been named ‘second man’ after Hitler,
given that he had been hobnobbing with occultists, astrologers, and hypnotists.11 In
an impotent frenzy Goebbels banned all such charlatans.12 If explaining Barbarossa
was going to be tricky for Goebbels, explaining the Hess affair seemed impossible.
He found his department heads waiting for him on the tarmac at Tempelhof.13 ‘Any
doctor will tell you,’ he said, taking them aside, ‘that there are crazy people who
seem all along to be perfectly normal and lucid, but at a certain time of life fall prey
to irrational, mad delusions.’ It was as simple as that: Hess had deluded himself that
he could single-handed make peace with the British people. Goebbels had persuaded
Hitler, he continued, that they should not breathe one more word about it, and he
offered to his dubious colleagues this analogy: a society hostess gives a dinner party;
just as they all enter the dining room, her darling whippet dumps a sizeable dogpooh
on the priceless Persian carpet. What now? Taking her escort’s arm, she strides
over to the table acting as though the Malodorous Thing does not exist. ‘The Malodorous
Thing in our case,’ he concluded, ‘is the befuddled Mr Hess. He no longer
exists.’14
He repeated this in more clinical language the next morning.15 ‘Remember the
Röhm affair,’ he said. ‘We shot our mouths off on that occasion with the result that
642 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the public talked of little else for years… In any case something is about to happen in
the military sphere, and this will district attention from Hess.’16
AFTER the Hess incident Goebbels spends two days at Bad Aussee. His children are
staying nearby with Magda, Ursula Quandt, and his mother. He gives all three ladies
presents for Mother’s Day.17 At Aussee he gathers the villagers around and talks until
late about their Führer (‘He is an idol to us all’). He touches fleetingly upon the Hess
affair, but realizes that it means no more to these simple peasants than a nick while
shaving.18 His methods have worked.
Back at Lanke, Ello Quandt visits him. She is our source for an episode which in
bald outline has Magda suffering a nervous breakdown after witnessing a female
secretary clambering from the gardens into her husband’s study one night. She hysterically
tells Ello that she’s going to sue for divorce.19 The only secretary to whom
the diary lays clues is the sweetly-named Helga Hoenig, and the date is May 27,
1941. Magda is already in a state of nerves because Göring’s costly airborne assault
on Crete has just begun, casualties among the paratroops are heavy, and she is worried
about Harald.20 Goebbels meticulously informs his diary that he has been sitting
up late working on a new book.21 ‘Fräulein Hoenig helps me with this very assiduously.’
22 It is fair to observe that his female staff very rarely rate such a mention in his
dispatches; and to speculate that he, the master of all alibis, is creating yet another.
Ello phones Goebbels to advise him to head off Magda. The diary shows that he
indeed drives over to Schwanenwerder. ‘Magda’s heart is playing up. She’s got into a
state again, what with the worry about Harald.’23 They have a ‘little chat’. He hopes
that she will soon get better. He drives back to Lanke alone. Neither has touched
upon the window-climbing secretary. ‘The crafty fox ran rings round me again,’ Magda
tells Ello as her husband drives away. Ello asks why she puts up with it all.
‘Look at me, Ello,’ is the reply. ‘I’m growing old. These girls are twenty years
younger—and they haven’t had seven children.’24
ON distant battlefields the gods of war still thundered. From Rommel’s HQ in North
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 643
Africa Alfred-Ingemar Berndt, his new aide, sent Goebbels dramatic reports about
Tobruk.25 In Munich the sinister Martin Bormann took over Hess’s vacant role as
head of the Party Chancellery. Goebbels neither liked nor trusted him, and he would
deal with him only at arm’s length through Walter Tiessler. When Bormann began a
vicious campaign against the churches, it was Goebbels who told him—through
Tiessler—to lay off.26
In Crete the desperate fighting came to an end. Herbert Heiduschke was already
dead and buried at Khania; his death affected Goebbels deeply, if his diary is to be
believed.27 Churchill alleged that Hitler’s paratroops had worn New Zealand uniforms.
Why not as postmen, Goebbels scoffed to his department heads. ‘They’ve
already had us in priests’, nuns’, and Dutchmen’s uniforms.’28 Göring himself telephoned
that Harald was alive—there was a pleasing humanity about the
Reichsmarschall, Goebbels observed, which people like Bormann lacked. He promised
to Harald later that he would see he was provided for even if he was no longer
around to do so in person. ‘He always treated me like his own son,’ Harald said
later.29
Endless troop transports had begun heading east. Rumours were rife, most of them
deliberately planted by Goebbels.30 ‘People abroad no longer know which canard to
believe,’ he congratulated himself.31 There was talk that Stalin and Hitler were ab
out
to meet: that Stalin was to lease the Ukraine to Germany for ninety-nine years: that
a state visit to Berlin was imminent: and that millions of red flags were already being
stitched.32 Goebbels lifted his wartime ban on dancing as a hint that the Nazi appetite
was momentarily gorged. All Germany knew of immense troops movements heading
west for the invasion of England—some people had actually seen the troop trains
being loaded at Grunewald station. He briefed Dr Glasmeier to select new England
fanfares, he activated English-speaking propaganda companies, and he held a topsecret
conference of department heads on the last day of May to confide to them that
Germany was about to invade England.33
About the real truth—Barbarossa—he briefed only a tiny handful including
Hadamowsky and Major Titel. He must also have initiated the ministry’s popular
644 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Professor Karl Bömer, head of his foreign press department. Bömer had an alcohol
problem however and on May 22 Otto Dietrich phoned Goebbels with word that at
a Bulgarian legation reception a week earlier the professor had blurted out these
words: ‘We’ll thrash the Russians in four weeks. Rosenberg is to become Governorgeneral
of Russia. I am to become his under-Staatssekretär.’34 The Bulgarian envoy
had cabled urgently to Sofia asking to be recalled for consultations. Tipped off by his
press chief Dr Paul Schmidt and by the Forschungsamt codebreakers, Ribbentrop
had greedily seized on this chance of scoring off Goebbels.35 Hitler announced that
he was going to have the head of ‘whichever minister’ had betrayed the Barbarossa
secret to Bömer. He ordered a full-blooded Gestapo inquiry and the luckless professor
was thrown into jail.36 ‘That’s what comes from boozing,’ wrote Goebbels.37
He had to save Bömer if only to save his own skin. Witnesses named by Bömer
swore that he had been misquoted; the professor claimed not to have known the
secret anyway. His minister did what he could, while cautiously telling his diary that
Bömer had only himself to blame.38 ‘Ribbentrop,’ he also wrote, ‘does not play fair.
He confuses politics with selling champagne, where the only thing that matters is
doing your opponent down.’39 On Hitler’s personal insistence Bömer was eventually
stood before the People’s Court on October 18. In an unusual alliance, forged of a
mutual enmity to Ribbentrop, both Dietrich and Goebbels testified on Bömer’s behalf
—the minister declaiming theatrically, “If you find Bömer guilty, then you must
find me guilty too!”40 Convicted of carelessness rather than treason, Bömer was sentenced
to two years in prison.41 It was further proof how low Goebbels’ stock had
unaccountably sunk at Hitler’s HQ.
He could hardly wait for the new war to begin. On June 4 he shared the deadly
secret with Leopold Gutterer, his Staatssekretär and trusty amanuensis (‘upon whom,’
he had written, ‘I can impose at will.’)42 Since the last week in May he had been
feeding ‘invasion’ rumours to the British, but there was disappointingly little evidence
that they were rising to the bait.43 He wondered if he was being perhaps too
subtle, and decided on blunter tactics.44 With Hitler’s approval he drafted for the
Berlin Völkischer Beobachter’s June 13 edition an article, ‘E.g., Crete,’ which implied
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 645
that the airborne assault on that island had been the final dress-rehearsal for the
invasion of Britain; he then arranged for the Gestapo to seize the entire edition as
soon as the embassies and foreign press corps had received their copies. As soon as
the wiretappers heard one American correspondent file his story on this sensation to
New York, all phone lines out of Germany were cut.45
It was one of his most devious stunts. To the uninitiated his ‘gaffe’ looked like the
terminal blow to his prestige. News of it spread throughout the government grapevine.
He hammed it up all day: he did not attend his morning press conference (instead,
backstage, he was trying out new fanfares for Barbarossa.) Dyed-in-the-wool
Nazis like Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink thought it prudent to cancel
long-standing appointments with him. ‘That’s human nature for you,’ reflected
Goebbels, and he chuckled at these faiblesses while outside his door Helga Hoenig
and his other secretaries wept real tears over his apparent disgrace. Only the muchmaligned
Robert Ley showed strength of character, telephoning him to ask if there
was anything he could do—an act of true compassion of which Goebbels often spoke
later on.46*
Hitler returned to Berlin that day, Friday June 13, 1941. Keeping up pretences,
Goebbels did not walk over to the chancellery for his usual lunch either that day or
the next. On Sunday however he was driven in pouring rain to the back entrance in
a borrowed car and hidden behind a copy of the Börsenzeitung. Schaub saw him and
Hitler laughing uproariously over the fake VB edition.47
Hitler told him that Barbarossa would begin on Sunday June 22 with the mightiest
artillery bombardment in history. ‘The example of Napoleon will not be repeated.’
Fortunately Stalin was massing his armies on the frontiers, so Hitler estimated that it
would all be over in four months. Goebbels, who set little store by the Russians’
* The effectiveness of this costly stunt was arguable. The New York Times and others
reported the suppression of the VB edition carrying his article, but the truth about
Barbarossa had long been known to Mr Churchill at least, from code-breaking.
646 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
fighting strength, estimated even less. ‘If ever an operation was a walkover then this
is.’ They had so much in reserve, said Hitler, that failure was impossible. Hitler had
drawn no limits on the map—the fight would continue until Stalin’s forces were
destroyed. As for the pre-attack period, their tactics this time would be different as
Goebbels pointed out in his diary: there would be no protracted crescendo in the
press, but total silence until the day of the sudden onslaught itself.
Goebbels was pleased that Hitler was going ahead with Barbarossa. He had abhorred
the period of uneasy collaboration with Stalin as a blot on the Nazi escutcheon.
He even spoke kindly of Alfred Rosenberg, saying that the coming campaign
justified all that he had stood for. ‘Right or wrong,’ he quoted Hitler as saying, ‘we’ve
got to win. It’s the only way… Once we’ve pulled it off who’s to question us about
how we did it?’ Goebbels added, ‘We’ve got so much to answer for that we’ve just got
to win.’
He had begun drafting the leaflets, brochures, and posters (‘Adolf Hitler the Liberator’)
for this new crusade weeks before. In top secrecy Taubert’s staff had recorded
discs, films, and radio broadcasts in the Ukrainian, Byelo-Russian, Lithuanian,
Latvian, and Estonian tongues as well as in Russian, and in the dialects of countless
Caucasian and other tribes.48 He (wrongly) assumed that Hitler was planning to