belligerent Roosevelt personally might be.3 When the lend-lease act was passed
Goebbels scoffed that this was purely a means for the Americans to inherit Britain’s
assets when the time came.4
In February 1941 however Hitler eased the restrictions, although he would still
not allow Dr Goebbels to take the gloves off yet in his propaganda, even when
Roosevelt ordered German merchant ships seized and their crews interned.5 Goebbels
slowly stepped up his short-wave propaganda transmissions across the Atlantic.6
Writing under a pseudonym he published a leader-article in the VB depicting Roosevelt
as the helpless puppet of Jewish advisers.7 He issued a rare photograph showing the
president in full masonic regalia too.8 Visiting Berlin, however his Transocean expert
in the United States warned him not to bank on the ethnic Germans there—they
were either rotten through and through, or simpletons. He advised Goebbels to
make the propaganda to America crude and unsophisticated.9 He prepared a fifteen
minute film, ‘A Stroll through America,’ showing Roosevelt with his ‘Jewish hench-
672 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
men,’ the strikes and hunger marches, the Negro jazz and jitterbug, and the prevalence
of kidnapping—though not mentioning Charles Lindbergh, whose baby’s alleged
kidnapper was a German. The film pirated And apartments—supposedly for
bombed-out Berliners, but the cream of these vacant buildings went to their closest
cronies.
Hitler was neithr consulted nor informed. Ten days after the forced exodus began,
he referred, soliloquizing over supper to Himmler and Heydrich, to the way the
Jews had started this war. ‘Let nobody tell me,’ Hitler added, ‘that despite that we can’t
park them in the marshier parts of Russia!’ ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘it’s not a bad
thing that public rumour attributes to us a plan to time wished another.’ ‘God keep
you—but immediately,’ pleaded yet a third.10
AS he received the winning ‘Goebbelsgram’ from New York, the minister began composing
his own most venomous leader article ever for Das Reich, entitled ‘The Jews
are to Blame!’
His mass expulsion of the Jews from Berlin was beginning. On October 14, 1941
S.S. General Kurt Daluege signed the formal order as national chief of police and the
deportations began the next day.11 Five hundred or a thousand at a time, family by
family, the Berlin Jews were rounded up, coralled in the ruined synagogue in Levetzow
Strasse and then loaded aboard passenger trains at Grünwald station for freighting to
the east.12 The first train with 1,103 Jews was dispatched on October 18; three more
followed on October 24 (1,024 Jews) and 27 (1,009 Jews), and November 1 (1,033).13
All four were bound for the ghetto at Lodz. Between October 18 and November 2,
confirmed Speer’s diary, some 4,500 Jews were ‘evacuated’, releasing to him and
Gauleiter Goebbels one thousand apartments—supposedly for bombed-out Berliners,
but the cream of these vacant buildings went to their closest cronies.14
Hitler was neither consulted nor informed. Ten days after the forced exodus began,
he referred, soliloquizing over supper to Himmler and Heydrich, to the way the
Jews had started this war. ‘Let nobody tell me,’ Hitler added, ‘that despite that we
can’t park them in the marshier parts of Russia!’ ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘it’s not a bad
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 673
thing that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews.’ He pointed
out however that he had no intention of starting anything at present. ‘There’s no
point in adding to one’s difficulties as a time like this!’15
What did the ‘east’ hold for Berlin’s Jews? In the Baltic states they were loved least
of all.16 Nor were the other eastern territories healthier destinations.17 Berlin’s fifth
trainload, of 1,030 Jews, set out for Minsk on November 14. Of Minsk’s 238,000
citizens in 1939 one hundred thousand had been Jews, many of them skilled workers.
18 By December 1941 only eighteen thousand of the original Jews had not fled or
been shot. These and the newcomers from Berlin survived if they were fit for work;
the rest died or were put to death a few months later. Some 3,500 unemployable
Jews of the seven thousand sent there from Berlin, Bremen, Vienna, and Brno ‘on the
Führer’s orders’ during November 1941 were liquidated in the last four days of July
1942.19
So much for Minsk. The trainload of Berlin’s Jews sent to Kaunas in Lithuania on
November 17 probably fared no better.20 Goebbels had visited the country two weeks
before. As in the other Baltic states, the Soviet secret police had deported forty
thousand Lithuanians to Siberia in 1940.21 ‘The Jews,’ Goebbels learned during his
visit, ‘were mainly active as G.P.U. [secret police] agents and informants, and the
deaths of countless Lithuanian nationalists and intellectuals are attributable to them.’
When the tide turned in June 1941 and the Russians were driven out, the Lithuanians
took revenge on the sixty thousand remaining Jews, liquidating 3,800 in Kaunas
alone.22 Hundreds of the rest, Goebbels learned, were being shot.23 Touring the ghetto
in Vilnius he shuddered at the sight of Jews huddled together, ‘frightful shapes you
can’t even look at let alone touch.’ ‘The Jews are like the lice of civilized mankind,’
he dictated the next day. ‘They’ve got to be exterminated somehow… Spare them
now and you’ll fall victim to them later on.’ Hobbling awkwardly around this cheerless,
snow-covered second city of Lithuania he reached one firm conclusion: ‘Here I
would not want to be buried.’24
On November 27, 1941 Speer reported to Goebbels on his efforts to make good
the air-raid damage in Berlin. Their third Aktion against the Jews was just begin-
674 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ning.25 That day a thousand more, the seventh trainload, departed from Berlin, bound
this time for Riga, capital of Latvia. All would die three mornings later.
Like Lithuania, Latvia had begun killing its Jews soon after Barbarossa began, in
revenge for the 33,038 Latvians kidnapped or murdered by the Soviet secret police
since June 1940. In July 1941 there had been seventy thousand Jews in Latvia—the
rest, some thirty thousand, had fled with their Russian benefactors. German
Sonderkommandos manned by Latvian auxiliary police, usually relatives of the Russians’
victims, had murdered about thirty thousand Jews by October 1941.26 In October
Hitler ordered a big concentration camp built just outside Riga to house the
Jews expelled from the Reich and the occupied Czech territories. A site was eventually
chosen at Salaspils to house twenty-five thousand Jews from Germany.27 But
construction was delayed, and when they were told to expect these twenty-five thousand
to begin arriving on November 10, with another twenty-five thousand bound
for Minsk, Rosenberg’s officials appealed for a postponement.28 The army also protested
at this needless burden on already scarce railroad capacity.29
For this and other reasons, by November 21 only seven thousand of Berlin’s 77,000
Jews had been expelled by Nove
mber 21.30 Ten times that number remained. At the
end of November, Speer’s diary records, he booted three thousand more out of their
apartments.31
Goebbels uttered not the slightest sympathy for these innocent victims of his obsession,
although he was well aware that public resistance was growing. He realised
that if they ordered all Jews to give up their seats, for instance, they would soon have
sixteen year old Nazis harassing half-blind seventy-year-old Jewesses, and there would
be a public mutiny. They must go for an indirect approach, for instance subway posters
proclaiming ‘The Jews are our misfortune,’ with texts explaining precisely why.32
Cruel mishaps began to occur. Goebbels had denied to film actor Joachim Gottschalk
the role of Leitwein in the new colour film ‘The Golden City’ unless he divorce his
Jewish wife or at least force her to emigrate to Switzerland.33 When the star’s colleagues
interceded for him, Goebbels screamed at them about the ‘sexual serfdom’
of simple ex-matelots like Gottschalk who were, he said, an easy prey for the sexual
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 675
knavery of Jewesses. Refused the role, Gottschalk killed himself, his wife Meta, and
his eight-year old son Michael that November. Goebbels dictated in his diary: ‘We
are living in very harsh times and fate is sometimes pitiless toward the individual.’34
He then gave the screw another heartless twist. Already deprived of their own telephones,
he forbade Jews to use public payphones either. In a cynical and not unrelated
ruling, he prohibited the use of the word liquidation in connection with their
‘summary executions in the east.’ That word, he said, was to be reserved for the
crimes perpetrated by the Soviets.35
IT was during these same weeks that he dictated his tract entitled ‘The Jews are to
Blame.’36 He ordered it given the widest circulation on the eastern front.37
It appeared in Das Reich on November 16, 1941. A few excerpts suffice to illustrate
its pernicious thrust. ‘The Jews wanted this war,’ he argued, ‘and now they have it.’
They were getting their just desserts. An eye for an eye. All Jews alike, whether
languishing in an eastern ghetto or trumpeting for war from New York, were conspiring
against Germany. The Yellow Star, he argued, was akin to a ‘hygienic prophylactic,’
because the most dangerous were those otherwise not recognizable as Jews.
To those who might bleat that the Jews were humans too he pointed out that the
same could be said of muggers, rapists, and pimps. ‘Suddenly one has the impression
that all of Berlin’s Jews are either darling little babies who wouldn’t hurt a fly, or
fragile old ladies.’ ‘Were we to lose this war,’ he continued, ‘these oh-so harmless
Jewish worthies would suddenly turn into rapacious wolves… That’s what happened
in Bessarabia and the Baltic states after the bolsheviks marched in, and neither the
people nor the governments there had had the slightest sympathy for them. For us,
in our fight against the Jews, there is no going back.’
The article displayed a far more uncompromising face that Hitler’s towards the
Jews. When Hitler came to Berlin for Ernst Udet’s funeral he again instructed
Goebbels to pursue a policy against the Jews ‘that does not cause us endless difficulties,’
and told him to go easy of mixed-marriages in future.38
676 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann’s closest associates, would describe this Goebbels
article as a watershed in the final Solution of the Jewish Problem.39 The S.S. took it as
a sign from above. On the last day of November, on the orders of the local S.S.
commander Friedrich Jeckeln, four thousand of Riga’s unwanted Jews were trucked
five miles down the Dvinsk highway to Skiatowa, plundered, and machine-gunned
into two or three pits.40 According to one army colonel who witnessed it a trainload
of Jews from Berlin—those expelled three days before—arrived in the midst of this
Aktion; its passengers were taken straight out to the pits and shot.41 This happened
even as Hitler, hundreds of miles away in the Wolf’s Lair, was instructing Himmler
that these Berlin Jews were not to be liquidated.42
ON the eastern front bitter frost suddenly replaced the autumn quagmires. Long
freezing nights gripped Central Europe. With them came the British bombers.The
bunker at No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse was hung with costly paintings; there
were armchairs, a bath, and air conditioning. On November 13 he told his adjutant
to see to it that a piano was installed.43 The Goebbels children were now back, living
out in Schwanenwerder with Magda.44 But the matrimonial strains were also returning.
Later in November the diary hears of Goebbels badgering an ‘understanding’
Hitler about ‘a series of personal problems.’45
It would be wrong to infer that he had no concern for his non-Jewish fellow Germans.
He pestered Speer to provide more shelters.46 He was the first to question
whether the army had made proper provision for the coming winter.47 The words
‘met. report’ began to figure on his daily agenda. He had asked the army months
before, in August, if he should announce a ski collection; General Jodl had scrawled
in red the flippant retort that their troops would have no time for ‘winter sports.’48 In
October Goebbels suggested a public appeal for woollen garments—just in case.
The High Command again scornfully turned him down.49 ‘In the winter,’ Jodl now
said, ‘we shall be warmly billeted in Leningrad and Moscow. Leave the worrying to
us.’ ‘If we had put this in hand at the proper time,’ Goebbels would write to Hitler
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 677
three years later, justifying his views, ‘it would have taken care of one of the worst
problems we faced in the winter of 1941–42.’50
The army’s quartermaster-general, the formidable General Eduard Wagner, had
neglected the problem until mid October 1941.51 Over lunch with Hitler he complacently
claimed that one-third to one-half of the winter equipment had already
reached the eastern front.52 He staged at his field HQ a totally bogus exhibition of
this winter equipment, including wooden cabins, trench-heaters, ear muffs, and furlined
coats and boots, and boldly invited Dr Goebbels to see it for himself. Still
suspicious, Dr Goebbels asked him how much was already available. ‘Enough to equip
every soldier two and three times over,’ lied Wagner.’53
‘That’s overwhelming,’ Goebbels dictated the next day as Hitler and Jodl themselves
visited the exhibition. ‘They’ve thought of everything.’54 Both he and Hitler
were thoroughly taken in.55 Hitler instructed him to send the exhibition on tour
round Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. ‘We had already set up the exhibition on Unter
den Linden in conjunction with the Christmas Fair,’ he would recall later, ‘when
suddenly the catastrophe overtook us.’56 Several times after that he reminded Hitler
and Göring of how General Wagner had duped them, but three years passed before
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 110
