that every ill-considered sentence was liable to be reported abroad by the
Jews. ‘This conduct of the Jews is understandable enough,’ he added, according to
the transcript. ‘In Berlin there are still forty-eight thousand of them.12 They know
with deadly certainty that in the course of this war they will be deported to the east
and left to their murderous fate. They can already sense the inexorable tread of physical
annihilation and therefore, so long as they live, they inflict damage on the Reich
whenever they can.’13
Small wonder that the world’s Jews mobilized against Nazi Germany. In London,
rabbis rallied to the slogan, ‘England awake!’ Goebbels derided this as a plagiarism of
the Nazis’ own rallying-call.14 In Jerusalem, Jews at the Wailing Wall placed an ancient
curse on him. ‘I have yet to observe any untoward effects,’ he noted.15
His humour was ill-chosen. The deportations from Berlin had resumed. To silence
public disquiet Goebbels ordered the bourgeois press to feature reports on hostile
Jewish activities abroad.16 Trainloads of elderly Jews had begun leaving Berlin in June
for Theresienstadt, the model camp for ‘old folks’. On July 11 the first trainload
bound for Auschwitz left Berlin with 210 Jews aboard.17 In mid August Berlin packed
off 1,004 more Jews to Riga, followed by 790 on September 5; on the twenty-sixth
811 would be shipped to Reval. That day he noted that all Jews were to be excluded
from fats and meat rations, except those still working in the munitions industry who
would receive only the heavy-labour supplements.18 (The actual regulations were
720 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
even more pitiless than his diary suggested: meat and bread rations were cancelled
for all Jews other than those married to non-Jews or wounded in the first world war;
further, no Jews were to receive milk except infants, an interesting detail; any food
packets received from abroad were to be deducted from Jews’ ration cards; gifts of
tea and coffee were to be confiscated and distributed to field hospitals.19)
Seventeen thousand Jews working in industry were still exempt from deportation.
According to Goebbels’ diary, Hitler agreed with his venomous comments on how
their intellectuals and economists were everywhere discovering ‘indispensable’ Jewish
skilled workers who just had to be spared.20 In Goebbels’ view, since they now
had 240,000 foreign workers in Berlin it should not be too hard to replace the exempt
Jews too.21 Two more trainloads of Jews left Berlin in October carrying 963
Jews to Riga and 791 more vaguely—and sinisterly—simply to ‘the east.’
He was still dissatisfied, as the level hardly seemed to decline. He learned that
many of Berlin’s judges were half-Jews transferred there by other cities in the belief
that they would be less of an eyesore there. ‘Berlin is not a garbage tip,’ he exclaimed.
‘I fought to make Berlin a model national socialist city.’22 In a letter to the new minister
of justice Otto Thierack he proposed simply declaring all Jews ‘unconditionally
disposable’—the word he used, ausrottbar, has uglier connotations—and commended
to him ‘the concept of annihilation through work.’23 Thierack however was unexpectedly
unsympathetic. Some, he pointed out, were half-Jews whose sons had already
died in this war. ‘So long as the Führer won’t allow us to address the broader
issue of those with Jewish blood or in-laws,’ Thierack said, ‘we can’t carry out an
Aktion confined to the legal system.’24 At a meeting chaired by Eichmann that month
the civil servants became bogged down in bureaucratic minutiæ.25 Frustrated,
Goebbels said that he was sure their Jews were a vital link to the enemy, helping the
British bomber crews to select and find their targets. He set himself a new target: he
would rid Berlin of its remaining Jews by March 1943.26
Ugly rumours were already circulating abroad, fuelled by British propaganda. The
Daily Telegraph quoted Polish claims that seven thousand of Warsaw’s Jews were being
killed each day, often in what it called ‘gas chambers’; one of Goebbels’ worried civil
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 721
servants telexed a request for information to Hans Frank’s press office in Kraków
and to the propaganda field office in Warsaw. The reassuring reply spoke of the Jews
being used to construct defences and roads. Be that as it may, in Goebbels’ files the
original press report, which had just summarised the British newspaper item, was
rubber-stamped Geheime Reichssache, top state secret.27
How much did Goebbels know? In his surviving files there is plenty that implies a
broad general knowledge of the atrocities. Reporting back to him on November 11,
his legal expert Dr Hans Schmidt-Leonhardt, whom he had sent to inspect conditions
in Hans Frank’s Polish dominions, noted that the Warsaw police had deemed it
too dangerous to visit the ghetto there; in the Kraków ghetto he had found all the
Jews put to work; in Lublin the ghetto had already been cleared away, and there were
now bloody disturbances. ‘As a Geheime Reichssache,’ dictated the lawyer, ‘Frank related
to us the following characteristic recent instance:—’ But whatever it was we
cannot know, as Goebbels’ shocked staff cut off the rest of the page that is filed in his
ministry’s records.28
In February 1943 Dr Fritz Prause, a senior staff member, briefed Goebbels on the
continued terrorist incidents resulting from their occupation policies—the Germans
had begun rounding up Poles in cinemas and churches for slave labour. A poster
appealing to ‘Poles of German origin’ had generated speculation about the likely fate
of the rest. ‘The rumour is spreading,’ Prause reported, ‘that the same fate now
awaits the Poles as has been meted out to the Jews, and there is not a Pole in the
Government-General who does not know precisely what has been done to them.’
‘One thing is certain,’ recommended Dr Prause: ‘That the current derogatory slogan
“Pole equals Jew” is no longer viable for the Government-General, particularly
since the above-mentioned rumours dwell heavily on what is known to have become
of the Jews.’29
The wave of terrorist attacks continued. In the first quarter of 1943 forty-four
Germans were assassinated in Warsaw. In April 1943 a local propaganda official reported
to Goebbels that the ‘resettlement’ operations in Lublin—Nazi officialese for
something clearly far worse—had left non-Jewish Poles with the definite impression
722 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
that after the Jews their turn would come next. There were only two alternatives
open to the Germans, this brave if circumspect official informed Goebbels: either to
assimilate or to liquidate (ausrotten) the Poles. ‘Even if for biological reasons the
adoption of such radical steps as have for instance been necessary against the Jews
can be justified before the bar of history, such a solution still seems unworthy of the
tradition of the German people, given that large parts of the population affected are
still resident within the Reich’s frontiers. The plan of that American Jew to sterilize
the male population of the Ge
rman Reich,’ the official reminded Dr Goebbels, referring
to Theodore Kaufman, ‘was rightly pilloried by the entire German press.’30
In sum it appears that by 1943 members of Goebbels’ staff both in Berlin and in the
field appreciated that the likely fate of the deported Jews was one about which they
should use only the skimpiest Nazi euphemisms.31 The camouflage was universal and
perfect. Addressing allegations by Dr Stephen F. Wise, president of the American
Jewish Congress, Himmler wrote to Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller that he was not
surprised at such rumours, given the high mortality rate in the camps; he ordered all
the cadavers ‘of these deceased Jews’ cremated or interred.32 In London the newspapers
published during November and December more Jewish reports. Goebbels’
own Transozean service secretly forwarded to Himmler a Reuter report of February
14, 1943 alleging that six thousand Jews were being murdered in Poland ever day.33
In mid December 1942 the B.B.C. concentrated for a whole week on these atrocities,
announcing that Poland had become a charnel house, that over one-third of
Poland’s 3,531,000 Jews had been liquidated, and that the German public was turning
a blind eye on the killings; and declaring that they and their children’s children
would be cast out of the community of nations for all time as punishment.34 Goebbels
noted this with irritation in his diary: the Jews were exploiting every known propaganda
technique—pathos, impertinence, and solemnity—to rouse the world against
Germany; but she still had more than enough Jewish pawns in her hands. ‘The British
are the Jews of the Aryan race,’ he dictated, weightier arguments evidently failing
him.35 On December 22 his monitors reported that the B.B.C. had announced that
Hitler was planning to complete liquidating the Jews by December 30: ‘The Jews are
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 723
first robbed of their civil rights and their property, then given less to eat than the
rest, and finally thrown into concentration camps or deported to unknown destinations.’
There were allegations about a camp in Danzig were Jews were executed by
electric chair or gas; other propaganda broadcasts spoke of gas chambers and cyanide.
Goebbels delegated to the urbane Hans Fritzsche the task of rebutting the
stories.36
GIVEN what Goebbels knew, the rage in his diary entries rings hollow. Stockholm, he
commented, was expressing pious horror at the atrocities, and he added that he
wished the Swedes had just a few thousand Jews like Germany’s; when however the
Swedes agreed to accept Jewish refugees from Poland Goebbels remonstrated with
the foreign ministry over its lack of instinct: presumably because there were hardly
any Polish Jews left for such an operation.37 ‘In the long run,’ he wrote, ‘I fear we
shall not be able to get away with this by hushing it up. We’re going to have to answer
something if we are not to get gradually pinned down.’ He privately believed that the
Allies were actually glad that the Nazis were clearing out the ‘Jewish rabble.’ Adopting
standard tactics, he ordered that no direct response be made to the allegations—
they should remind the world about Britain’s role in India instead.38
OF greater weight in everybody’s mind that winter was the unending battle for
Stalingrad. It provided fresh ammunition for Goebbels’ feud with Otto Dietrich,
Hitler’s dapper, spineless press chief—two months Goebbels’ senior in age, but his
equal in Party rank.39 There was open war between them, waged with scarcely less
ferocity than the Sixth Army’s battle at Stalingrad. While the Machiavellian Goebbels
based in Berlin mapped out broad propaganda strategy, Dietrich, resident at Hitler’s
HQ, issued directives (Parolen) to the Press which often had the opposite effect.
Dietrich found it irksome to be excluded from Hitler’s formal conferences with
Goebbels, and obnoxious that Goebbels regularly invited newspapermen to his morning
conferences. The direct telephone lines from Goebbels’ desk to his departmental
chiefs including the ‘German press’ department in Room 24 were a thorn in Dietrich’s
724 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
flesh. He posted Helmut Sündermann, an experienced journalist, permanently into
Goebbels’ ministry as his deputy; to Goebbels, this smelt of the creation of an independent
‘Press ministry.’40 During the summer of 1942 Hitler banged their heads
together; he signed a decree ordering the two men to work in harmony; but he also
instructed Goebbels to channel all directives to editors through Dietrich in future.41
This left the way open for another Dietrich blunder. On September 15 he announced,
‘The struggle for Stalingrad is nearing its triumphant conclusion’—an announcement,
he said, was imminent. Some newspapers printed special editions.
Headlines announced that Stalingrad was in the bag. Goebbels, more cautiously,
warned his staff to strict secrecy. Even he however began his remarks on the eighteenth
with the words, ‘Now that the capture of Stalingrad is a certainty…’42 Then
caution returned and he urged editors to find something other than Stalingrad for
their headlines—a wise move, because soon the High Command was talking about
‘exceptionally stubborn’ fighting for the city.43
Goebbels was not encouraged to hear that the Daily Mail was calling Stalingrad the
decisive battle of the war.44 Blaming Goebbels for this new gaffe, London mocked
that he had been rather faster on the draw than the Wehrmacht.45 He cursed Dietrich
out loud and announced that he would severely punish any editors who blindly issued
special editions in future. ‘I am, after all, the one with the name to lose,’ he said,
‘and I have no desire to see this name, which has taken me twenty years to earn,
tarnished by thoughtless stunts like this.’46
Hitler, like Dietrich, was taken in by his own propaganda. He assured Goebbels
that they would take Stalingrad shortly. He planned to continue the other prong of
his eastern campaign, across the Caucasus mountains, all winter, then building a
gigantic broad-track railroad from Germany to the new eastern territories.
Together they addressed a huge Sports Palace meeting on the thirtieth. Here
Goebbels called for the first time for what he described as total war. ‘The more total
the war the better,’ he said. Developing also his new propaganda line of ‘Strength
through Fear’ he warned of the consequences of bolshevism but assured this mighty
audience that the worst was over. He drew the familiar comparisons with the last
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 725
months before 1933. ‘The weaker the position of our enemies becomes,’ he said, ‘the
more bloodthirsty their dreams of revenge, which they proclaim not only against the
national socialist regime but against the German people as a whole.’47
Sitting beside Hitler Goebbels heard him announce: ‘We shall be assaulting
Stalingrad, and taking it too—you can bank on that.’ And, thundered Hitler into the
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