men of his own ministry with women.13
Hitler’s riflemen had paid winter’s cruel price. By late January 1942 they had suffered
1,856 amputations.14 Goebbels addressed them all in his first Das Reich article
of the new year. ‘It behoves us to remain tough and composed,’ he wrote.15 Hitler, a
stickler for style, disliked that word ‘composed’, and decided on the strength of it
that Goebbels should not deliver the party’s anniversary speech on January 30. ‘I
know how to preserve the golden mean between reason and rhetoric,’ he explained
over supper in the minister’s absence. ‘I’d not have expressed myself like that. In a
situation like this, the soldier is not composed but resolute. When you’ve been through
it yourself you get a feel for these things.’16
Characteristically when Goebbels came for lunch the next day Hitler bit his tongue
and said nothing of this. They talked of Britain’s eclipse in the Far East. In three
weeks he expected the Japanese to overrun Singapore. ‘Perhaps,’ he mused to Dr
Goebbels, ‘there is a chance here to bring Britain, if not to her senses, at least to
consider her position.’ He had succeeded in stabilising their own eastern front. For
three weeks he had worked round the clock, reviving the spirits of his demoralised
generals in endless conferences and telephone arguments—he described these commanders
unflatteringly as like inflatable dummies with slow punctures. He reserved
his most biting remarks for Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, which Goebbels eagerly
seconded. ‘He infected his staff with a chronically tractable disposition,’ complained
Hitler, as though this were not precisely the quality for which Hitler had chosen him
to succeed Fritsch in 1938.
Goebbels told Hitler that according to Colonel Martin many officers in the High
Command had openly predicted that the Soviet armies would be on East Prussia’s
690 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
frontiers that spring. Hitler angrily told him to get their names.17 Back in Berlin
Goebbels directed the unfortunate colonel that it was now his duty to draw up this
black list. ‘There is only one sin,’ he said, quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘and that is
cowardice.’18 It was perhaps significant that he was now automatically extending his
remit far beyond the portals of his own ministry. A day or two later Schirmeister’s
wife Emmi, invited by Magda to dinner, innocently told of an officer cousin who had
plied her in East Prussia with dark rumours that the Russians were coming. Goebbels
told her to name that officer too, saying, ‘I guarantee he will be shot within twentyfour
hours.’19
BEFORE leaving the Wolf’s Lair on January 19 Dr Goebbels had also touched briefly on
the Jewish Problem. ‘On this,’ he noted, unable to hang any meat on the now threadbare
phrases, ‘the Führer holds without qualification to the existing and proper hardline
view.’20
Behind closed doors the Final Solution, in all its heathen criminality, was already
undergoing a deadly shift of emphasis. As he arrived back in Berlin on January 20
Heydrich was holding his first inter-ministerial conference on the topic.21 The ambitious,
amoral S.S. Obergruppenführer had issued the original invitations back in
November, including one to Goebbels’ Staatssekretär Gutterer, but he had never
received his and the propaganda ministry was one of several not represented at this
conference.22 This conference was largely window-dressing anyway. Chaos was spreading
in the eastern territories as more trainloads of Jewish evacuees arrived there.
Hans Frank’s Government-General (former Poland) was flatly refusing to accept any
more—Frank had exclaimed irritably at one of his Cabinet meetings in Kraków that
Berlin was telling them they’d got no use for the Jews either. ‘Liquidate them yourselves!’
was his retort.23 Two more batches, of 1,037 and 1,006 Jews, had left Berlin
for Riga on January 13, and 19; but the train which left Berlin, also for Riga, on
January 25, loaded with 1,051 Jews, was the last batch for two months.24
Goebbels heard his Führer recall, in his speech of January 30, the sinister prophecy
which he had made exactly three years before that this war would bring the ‘destruc-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 691
tion of Jewry.’25 His own evil deportation project temporarily thwarted by the winter
transportation crisis, Goebbels devised a string of regulations calculated to hound
and harass the Jews as he had in 1938.26 He ordered one Jew punished for using
coffee rations given him by a non-Jew.27 He forbade Jews to use public transport at
all, apart from those still working in the munitions factories.28 He prohibited Jews
from ordering newspapers by mail, from buying them at kiosks, and from having
them delivered.29
In February his legal experts preparing the trial of Vom Rath’s assassin Grynszpan
in Paris reported that the former foreign minister Georges Bonnet was willing to
testify that the Jews had pressured France into declaring war in 1939.30 After lunching
with Hitler a few days later Goebbels dictated that it was their historic duty to
eradicate this ‘Jewish terrorism’, like the Soviet secret police atrocities, from Europe.
‘The Führer once again expresses his ruthless resolve to make a clean sweep of
the Jews out of Europe. One can’t go getting all sentimental about it. The Jews have
richly deserved the catastrophe they are suffering today… We have to accelerate this
process with a studied ruthlessness and we are thereby doing an invaluable services
to a long-suffering mankind tormented for millenia by the Jews.’ Hitler, he claimed,
had ordered him to convert those who were still in two minds about this. ‘The major
prospects opened up by war are recognized by the Führer in all their significance.’
Fuelling the raging fires of his own prejudices, Goebbels spent an evening watching
‘The Dybbuk,’ a Polish Yiddish film. ‘Its effect is so antisemitic that one can only
marvel how little the Jews … realize what non-Jews find repellent. Watching this
film,’ he continued, ‘one perceives once more that the Jewish race is the most dangerous
on earth, and that one must display neither mercy nor softness toward it.’31
IT is important, reading entries like this, to recall that Goebbels’ diary is not above
criticism as a source. Firstly, it was now dictated each morning to a private secretary,
and typed out in triplicate by clerks. Secondly, analysis of earlier entries, like those
concerning the 1931 ‘bomb attempt’ on Goebbels, the references to Magda and
Lida, and those written at the time of the Night of Broken Glass, show that the
692 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
diaries are acceptable only as evidence against Goebbels, but not necessarily against
third parties. A strict distinction must be drawn therefore between what he admits
putting to his Führer, and what he alleges the Führer put to him.
Hitler was even now less radical on the Jewish Problem than Goebbels, Himmler,
Heydrich, and Speer. He was prevaricating and, according to Eichmann, saw in the
Jewish colonisation of Magadascar the real Final Solution.32 But Goebbels was powered
by
the unflickering light of a an unwavering, ineradicable antisemitism. It delighted
his evil heart when there was an outcry in London against Jewish spivs and
black marketeers. ‘The Jews are the same all the world over,’ he gloated. ‘You either
have to slap a Yellow Star on them, or throw them into a concentration camp, or
shoot them.’33 On March 5 he received a report from Heydrich about guerilla warfare
in the occupied east, and blamed this on the Jews too. ‘It is therefore understandable,’
he dictated to Otte, ‘that many of them must pay with their lives for this.
Anyway, in my view the more Jews who are liquidated the more consolidated the
situation in Europe will be after the war. Let there be no phony sentimentalism
about it. The Jews are Europe’s misfortune. They must somehow be eliminated otherwise
we are in danger of being eliminated by them.’34
On the following day he took note of an extensive report by Heydrich’s office,
probably on the Wannsee conference.35 There were still eleven million Jews in Europe,
he dictated, summarizing the document. ‘For the time being they are to be
concentrated in the east [until] later; possibly an island like Madagascar can be assigned
to them after the war.’ It all raised a host of ‘delicate questions,’ like what to
do with half-Jews and people like the late Gottschalk, Aryans married to Jews. ‘Undoubtedly
there will be a multitude of personal tragedies,’ he wrote airily, ‘But this is
unavoidable. The situation now is ripe for a final settlement of the Jewish question.’36
The covering letter from Heydrich invited Goebbels to a second conference, at his
headquarters in Kurfürsten Strasse on March 6. Goebbels sent two of his senior staff,
Oberregierungsrat Pay Carstensen of the propaganda division, and Dr Schmidt-Burgk,
of its eastern territories sub-section.37 The conference was raw with untutored remarks.
Eichmann talked crudely of ‘forwarding’ the Jews, like so many head of cat-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 693
tle; and when one civil servant objected that they could hardly proceed against lawabiding
Jewish citizens, Eichmann’s rough-tongued adjutant S.S. Sturmbannführer
Günther remarked cynically, ‘That’s up to our judgement as policemen.’38 The ministry
of justice handled the report like a hot potato.39 The Reich Chancellery referred
it all to Hitler.40 Hitler told Hans Lammers categorically that he wanted the solution
of the Jewish problem postponed until after the war was over—a ruling that remarkably
few historians now seem disposed to quote.41
As the Soviet partisans intensified their deadly war that spring the security service
(S.D.) reported that the culprits were the political commissars and the Jews. ‘It has
therefore proved necessary once again,’ dictated Goebbels, ‘to shoot more Jews…
Any sentimentalism,’ he continued, referring to a quality that did not abound in his
heart, ‘is out of place.’42
By now the two-month railroad log-jam was over and another train was being
loaded with Jews marked for deportation. What might be their fate? On March 27,
the day before this trainload left Berlin, Goebbels dictated an extraordinary, deadpan
but spine-chilling entry into his diary which confirmed that he at least was now in
little doubt.
Beginning with Lublin the Jews are now being deported eastward from the
Government-General [former Poland]. The procedure is pretty barbaric, and one
that beggars description, and there’s not much left of the Jews. Broadly speaking
one can probably say that sixty percent of them will have to be liquidated, while
only forty percent can be put to work.
‘The former gauleiter of Vienna,’ he continued, referring to S.S. Brigadeführer
Odilo Globocnik, S.S. and police chief of the Lublin District, ‘who is carrying out
this operation, is doing so pretty discreetly and also using a procedure that is not too
blatant.’43 Goebbels added that the Jews had had it coming to them for a long time;
he cited yet again Hitler’s prophecy of 1939, and the need to eschew all mawkish
694 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
sentimentality. ‘It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish
bacillus,’ he concluded, unconsciously adopting Hitler’s favourite analogy. ‘Here too,’
he dictated to his poker-faced stenographer, ‘the Führer is the staunch champion and
promoter of a radical solution.’44
Nowhere do the diary’s seventy thousand pages refer to an explicit order by Hitler
for the murder of the Jews. (Perhaps this is not surprising, but for the sake of completeness
it needs saying.) Goebbels instinctively couched every phrase of those diaries
with both cunning and ambiguity. The documents clearly show Hitler as the
uncompromising architect of the plan to shunt all Europe’s Jews out, failing Madagascar,
to the east. The Polish ghettos emptied by this process would be replenished
with Jews deported from the Reich. ‘The Jews,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘have nothing to
laugh about.’45 They were having to pay dearly for the misdeeds of their brethren in
Britain and America: such was his rationale. On March 28 he stipulated that they
were no longer to be listed in telephone directories.46 Why should they be? They
were disappearing from the face of occupied Europe.
HE can deceive his diary, dictating touching entries calculated to portray their author
to posterity as a caring family man; but he cannot deceive his own mother. Sometimes
she is seen haunting the opulent halls and galleries at No.20 Hermann-Göring
Strasse laughing softly to herself as though she cannot believe that the frenetic demon
controlling this evil empire is little Jupp, her youngest son, the waiflike cripple
the she nursed through infancy. She barely speaks to others, and when she does her
thick Rhineland dialect comes as a shock to them.47
Once again, pleading problems with her heart, Magda leaves him for a month-long
cure in Dresden beginning on January 21.48 Sometimes he goes over to see his favourite
sister Maria, or to talk things over with his mother. They tell him home
truths about public attitudes.49 He takes his two oldest daughters and sleepy little
Helmut out to Lanke. It is his first visit there in three months, and the lovely Ursula
Quandt stands in for Magda.50 He lets the children play truant on the pretext that
their younger sisters at Schwanenwerder have whooping cough. They spend happy
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 695
hours sledding in the snow—the same snow which is shrouding Europe and wreaking
havoc on his Jewish evacuation timetable.51 On the last day of April he moves out
to Lanke in a vain attempt to cure a bout of eczema, a chronic health problem.52
One evening he is visited here by a ghost from the past, Anka Stalherm, now fortysix,
editor of Dame and without even a trace of grey defiling her blonde hair. Her
second husband Rudolf Oswald, fifteen years her junior, has just been killed on the
eastern front. She mentions that there are still some (Jewish) Ullstein hold-outs left
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 113
