declared.16 Lunching with Hitler on May 29 Goebbels persuaded him to instruct
Speer, now munitions minister, to have Jewish munitions workers replaced by foreigners.
That would remove the exemption from deportation on hundreds of Jewish
families. Implying that he was well aware of the ultimate fate of the evacuees Goebbels
dictated that he saw a major danger in having forty thousand Jews ‘with nothing
more to lose’ running loose in the Reich capital. He incidentally also advised Hitler
to liquidate Berlin’s prison population while he could. ‘We have lost so many idealists
in this war,’ echoed Goebbels, thinking of Tonak, ‘that we have to exact a like
measure from the negative criminal fraternity.’17
Hitler told him he saw the hand of the Jews behind many plots fronted by ordinary
Germans. ‘That is why,’ urged Goebbels, ‘the Jewish danger has to be liquidated
whatever the cost.’ He described how the westernized Jews, once back in their eastern
ghetto-habitat, became typical ghetto-Jews again, brutal and vindictive. Hitler
agreed that it would be a mistake to evacuate Jews to Siberia: ‘Living the hard life
there would without doubt turn them into a virulent breed again. That’s why he
would prefer them to be settled in Central Africa: there they’ll be living in a climate
which definitely won’t make them tough and resilient.’ ‘At any rate,’ concluded
Goebbels, ‘it’s the Führer’s aim to rid western Europe of the Jews entirely.’18
Too many Jews were already hearing rumours from the B.B.C. and other sources
about the fate awaiting the Jews. Goebbels learned in January 1942 that their radiomonitoring
agencies, and particularly the foreign ministry’s Seehaus service (a ‘mammoth
atrocity-propaganda concern’ run from a former restaurant on the Wannsee)
were distributing defeatist digests throughout official Berlin; 180 copies were going
Ribbentrop’s ministry alone.19 Hitler gave him immediate powers to prune the lists
708 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
of recipients. Soon afterwards he was granted high-level access to the top-secret
signals-intelligence and intercept digests prepared by Göring’s Forschungsamt.20
Goebbels expressed an interest only in those ‘brown pages’ bearing upon foreign
policy; although the Reichsmarschall usually limited distribution of these intercepts
on a strictly need-to-know basis, he humoured this curiosity and Goebbels’ liaison
officer Dr Severitt brought, in his locked dispatch box, sheaves of reports such as on
Molotov’s secret deals with the British government in May.
sTALIN was losing; he needed the Allies. The pendulum was swinging back in Hitler’s
favour. The Germans were fighting a gigantic tank battle of Kharkov. The Kerch peninsula
was back in their hands. They sank a million tons of Allied shipping during
May 1942, and in the following month, Hitler told Goebbels on May 22, they would
commission one and a half times as many new submarines as were currently at sea.
Rommel took Tobruk. When Hitler came to Berlin on May 28 to speak at the Sport
Palace, he told Goebbels that he now intended to cut off the Caucasus, thus crushing
the Soviet Adam’s apple.21
Over Germany, an unnatural calm prevailed at night. Where were Churchill’s bombers?
Goebbels suggested to his department heads that the British were bluffing to
forestall Stalin’s demands for a second front.22 Hitler attributed the lull to Britain’s
dismay at his reprisal raids; he intended to hit back every time and twice as hard. ‘No
need for us to say we’re doing it,’ he advised Goebbels. ‘We’ll just go ahead and do
it.’ He did however suggest they put all their art treasures in safe keeping. Then their
talk drifted on to gloomy reflections about their own mortality. At a certain age,
reflected Hitler, ones learning outgrew ones energy. The propaganda ministry should
take this into account: they must provide enough money for Germany’s true geniuses
to live tox a comfortable old age.23
The lull ended late on Saturday May 30, 1942. The British bombers returned in
unprecedented force, attacking Cologne. Goebbels was at first blissfully unaware
and Hitler’s adjutant failed to track him down—or any other minister; Hitler reached
Gutterer through the ministry switchboard and told him to start relief operations.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 709
Suspecting that Goebbels was illicitly engaged, Gutterer phoned Hermann-Göring
Strasse and left a discreet message for him to call him urgently ‘whenever he got
back.’ After directing Hermann Schäfer, their electrical wizard, to take the Reich
Motor Convoy (Reichsautozug) from Munich to Cologne with its powerful mobile
generators, kitchens, bakeries, and mobile hospital, Gutterer summoned a ten A.M.
conference with the other ministries in Goebbels’ appropriately named Pompeii
Room.24
A disaster had hit Cologne. The gauleiter was calling it the heaviest raid ever. Churchill
was talking of a ‘thousand bomber’ raid, the German air staff of seventy bombers
(of which they claimed to have shot down forty); while Goebbels assumed that Churchill
was exaggerating a bit, he felt that seventy was far too low. Massive retaliation was
out of the question, as the Luftwaffe had its main weight on the eastern front. Hitler
struck at Canterbury, but had only seventy bombers for the purpose. An unseemly
propaganda war developed. The American press spoke of an earthquake hitting Cologne,
and inflated the casualties—they claimed sixty thousand dead (the real figure
was 474).25 Significantly changing his tactics, Goebbels authorised live radio interviews
with survivors like those broadcast by the B.B.C. at the height of the Nazi
blitz.26
His shortwave broadcasts to North American linked these ‘terror raids’ to the Jewish
problem, accusing Roosevelt’s ‘propaganda kikes’ of ‘yiddling’ while Cologne
burned.27 He did not underestimate the Americans’ propaganda; he particularly feared
their seductive theme that the Allies were fighting the Nazis, and not the German
people. If the British had struck this chord, he admitted to his staff, it could have
been fatal.28 His best hope was to drive a wedge between London and Washington, as
once he had done between London and Paris.29 In broadcasts to American audiences
he portrayed the British as bunglers who existed only at Stalin’s caprice; then he told
the British to beware the rapacious, empire-stealing Americans. He depicted the
United States as disaster-prone and ‘too weak’ to be of real assistance.30 These unsophisticated
messages worked. ‘One only has to read the [American] newspapers,’
Roosevelt was informed, ‘or ride in a bus or visit his [sic] club, bar, or coffee shop.’31
710 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
In Germany meanwhile Goebbels put it about that their ethnic cousins in the United
States were being forced to wear yellow armbands: and thus the vicious circle was
completed.32 ‘America talks,’ his shortwave propagandists mocked, ‘but has neither
the means nor the intention to be a really effective help.’ He began harping on Germany’s
‘superior leadership’ to rationalise why all the Allies’ superiority in men and<
br />
machines would not avail them.33 He coined the phrase Roosevelt’s War, and began
putting it about that the president was mentally ill like Woodrow Wilson before
him.34
He now controlled a Radio Free America ostensibly run by ‘independent Americans’
in Europe. Early in July 1942 Goebbels closed down four of the other ten
‘black’ transmitters; among those remaining on the air were the New British Broadcasting
Station (starring William Joyce), a Voice of Free Arabs, and the Russianlanguage
station directed by ex-communist Albrecht. Goebbels had also set up a
Voice of Free India as a vehicle for the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, a
former mayor of Calcutta whom he interviewed in July.35 The bamboo rod, he ordered,
must become a symbol of British rule in India ‘like the police truncheon in
the System era [i.e., the Weimar republic] in Germany.’36
As Churchill travelled to Washington Goebbels asked his editors to comment on
the prime minister’s habit of fleeing abroad each time things went wrong. ‘Tobruk,’
he wrote, as Rommel captured the strategic North African port, ‘is our revenge for
Cologne.’ While Britain’s drunken dilettante was squandering his bombers on civilian
targets, she was losing vital battles elsewhere through lack of air power. ‘Churchill
is victorious in Parliament,’ he mocked after the British prime minister survived
another vote of confidence in July 1942: ‘But Germany wins the wars.’37
This did not include however the guerilla war. When Heydrich died of his injuries,
the Nazis liquidated the Czech village which had harboured his assassins.38 The Czechs
as a whole had condemned the murder, and when Schirach talked loosely of ridding
Vienna of its Czech minority Bormann reminded all the gauleiters that Hitler had
forbidden any such measures.39 There were other gaffes. In France S.S. Brigadeführer
Carl Oberg announced plans to execute all the male kinsfolk of assassins: their women
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 711
would be sent to hard labour, and their children to orphanages. Goebbels said that
Oberg’s proposals violated every propaganda principle. The inclusion of women and
children was a gift to the enemy, he said; and hostages should always be taken from
the same political spectrum as the culprits.40
He attributed the ominous growth of partisan warfare in Russia to the absence of
any coherent Ostpolitik.41 Earlier in 1942 he had issued guidelines on how to win
over all the occupied populations.42 Russian prisoners were unanimous under Nazi
interrogation that they ‘preferred to die on their feet than to live on their knees.’43 To
Hitler he hinted that they should set up puppet governments in the Ukraine and
Baltic states.44 ‘You can’t rule Russia from Berlin,’ he said, criticizing Rosenberg.45
He felt the latter was impractical, naïve, and hopeless at organisation.46 He drafted a
decree guaranteeing religious freedom to the Russians, and determined to secure
Hitler’s approval the next time they met.47 He felt sure that Hitler was being kept in
the dark about the partisan war. From all quarters he was urged to take it up with
him.48 He sent Walter Tiessler to point out to Rosenberg once again that their enemy
was bolshevism, not Russia as such. Rosenberg ducked the issue, and the infighting
went on.49
Another problem was that German visitors to Russia, like the archæologists that
Rosenberg had recently sent, were finding things there less primitive than Goebbels
had painted.50 The Germans were learning that the Russians too were capable of
fighting and dying for a cause. Russian commanders outnumbered in the fighting for
Sevastopol had chosen to blow up their entire position rather than surrender. Knowing
the German weakness for heroic idols, Goebbels suppressed all such reports.
‘National Socialism,’ he lectured to his staff, ‘teaches that bolshevism is not an ideology,
but the effluence of subhuman, criminal, and Jewish instincts.’ He could never
forget that in their midst lived five million former communist voters: the disease was
only in remission; it had not been extinguished. The sewer rat, he said, reverting to
customary Nazi imagery, would always prove more hardy than the domestic pet.
Thus their reporting must distinguish between the heroism of the German soldier
and the animal survival-instinct of the Russians.51 He wrote an essay on this problem
712 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
for Das Reich and circulated it throughout the party. ‘The superior race will triumph
over the inferior one,’ he asserted, ‘no matter what infernal means the latter may use
to escape its personal fate.’52
BRITAIN’S fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. Rommel’s exhausted Axis armies
reached El-Alamein and dug in, Goebbels’ propaganda blared promises of independence
to the Egyptians. On the high seas Hitler’s submarines had sunk seven hundred
thousand tons of shipping during June. In the first days of July his submarines and
bombers in the Arctic mauled the Russia-bound Anglo-American convoy PQ.17 so
badly that the next convoy-run was abandoned.
Stalin, speculated Goebbels, must be furious with Churchill’s failure. Perhaps he
would one day be willing to come to terms. Germany would certainly not reject any
overtures.53 From his close study of Soviet newsreels he concluded that Stalin was a
quiet, dogged type; head and shoulders above the pigmies of the western democracies.
‘That man has style,’ he said.54 Moscow’s clamour for a Second Front—a British
invasion of the continent—grew throughout July.55 On the twenty-third Goebbels
warned his staff that given Churchill’s ‘unstable’ character an invasion in the west
was quite probable.56 German propaganda had, he pointed out, no interest in provoking
such an event; on the contrary, they must do all they could to help Mr Churchill
represent his air raids as a viable substitute for a Second Front.57 He dealt with such
an invasion in a Reich article on August 2, entitled ‘Don’t even try it.’ Its sardonic
tone almost violated his own guidelines: ‘We extend to the British a hearty invitation
to come over,’ he taunted. ‘We hope they’ll bring a few Americans along too…’58
Churchill hurried to Moscow. Goebbels ordered the Nazi media to dwell on every
detail of the prime minister’s humiliation—for example, that Stalin did not even
bother to meet him at the airport.59
Hitler had meanwhile shifted his summer HQ to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. In mid
August he asked Goebbels to fly down to discuss the domestic situation ‘and foreign
policy,’ as the minister noted. ‘He also intends to give me special powers to take over
civil defence.’60 He had spent several days touring the blitzed cities.61 As his plane
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 713
landed at Vinnitsa on August 19 events in France were taking a dramatic turn. Two
brigades of Canadian troops were storming the beaches on either side of Dieppe. By
midday the landing force had been all but wiped out.62 Hitler told Goebbels the next
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 116
