Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 119
microphones, ‘You can take it from me, nobody is ever going to shift us from that
spot.’
Rommel’s position in Egypt also seemed impregnable. The field marshal came to
Berlin and stayed for several days at Schwanenwerder, marking up his maps for the
Führer and regaling Goebbels with stirring tales of the desert and of the armoured
gladiators who were disputing its command. Goebbels treated him to all the newsreels
issued since Tobruk, and to his first ever glimpse of a colour movie, the lavishly
produced ‘Golden City.’48
ALLOWED back into Magda’s home at Schwanenwerder for the Rommel visit, Goebbels
was happy to see the children again after so long.49 His new press expert Rudolf
Semler found himself wondering sometimes however whether the minister really
did love his children.50 He seldom showed them true affection, noticed Semler, and
only rarely saw them now. He refused to lower himself to play trains with little
Helmut; now seven, Helmut’s blue-grey eyes often had a vacant look which did not
endear him to his father. With his precocious oldest daughters Helga and Hilde the
minister either flirted outrageously or tested their intellect to the point of tears. The
others he virtually ignored except for photo calls. ‘Our children have inherited your
good looks and my brains,’ he chaffed Magda once. ‘How awful it would have been
the other way around.’ (He was a connoisseur of Bernard Shaw from whom the
remark originally came.)
His forty-fifth birthday came. Hitler sent him a handwritten letter. Goebbels signed
his reply ‘At your undeviating and loyal service.’51 The German Newsreel Company’s
gift to him was a private half-hour feature showing the Goebbels family—the children
reciting poetry, riding ponies, chasing a squealing piglet, and greeting their
726 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
mother or Rommel as their respective limousines drive up. Helga, ten years old
now, with finely moulded features and braided hair, was more ladylike than ever.52 ‘I
want just two children when I marry,’ she once emphasized. ‘Otherwise I won’t have
a moment to call my own!’53 Their mother, Magda, was now something of a virago.
Most of her earlier femininity had passed to her five daughters—and to Helmut too.
The newsreel camera found him in the classroom of the village school. ‘Twelve
birds sitting in a row, Helmut Goebbels!’ the teacher challenged. ‘A huntsman shoots
one dead. How many are left?’
After much coaxing and flubbing while a forest of young hands waved around him,
Helmut eventually arrived at a plausible answer: ‘Eleven?’
‘Wrong!’ answered the teacher triumphantly. ‘None! The rest all fly away when the
gun goes off!’ Helmut offered a goofy smile through his protruding upper teeth—
the only thing he had inherited from his absentee father, who barely featured in the
film himself.
BY that time, the late autumn of 1942, Hitler’s calculus was also going wrong. His
armies faced a stalemate in the Caucasus and perhaps even defeat in Stalingrad.
Stalingrad became a matter of personal prestige between Germany’s Führer and the
Soviet leader after whom it had been named.54 The morale reports from all Goebbels’
sources brought mounting evidence of public disquiet.55 People were openly wondering
if Stalingrad was to become a second Verdun. In private, speaking to Major
Martin, the minister criticized Hitler’s strategic decisions as increasingly unrealistic.
56 With the sudden and unexpected collapse of Rommel’s front at El Alamein,
Goebbels’ own private nightmare began. To the chronic pessimist Hans Fritzsche,
returning from a tour of duty on the Stalingrad front, Goebbels admitted, ‘You were
right.’57
He betrayed none of this in public. Speaking on October 21 he scoffed, ‘One cannot
prosecute a war without iron, oil, or wheat’ (Stalin had now lost both the Donetz
basin and the Ukraine).58 Challenging the enemy’s insidious theme that Hitler had
lost the race because the Americans would shortly intervene he published in Das
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 727
Reich an article entitled, ‘For whom is time working?’59 He set up a special unit to
start a whispering campaign about ‘miracle weapons’, both real and imaginary.60 He
felt it necessary to warn all his senior staff not to display pessimism about the future.
61 But each passing week augmented the grounds for pessimism. On the night of
November 6 the B.B.C. announced a British victory at El Alamein and the capture of
twenty thousand Axis troops, most of them Italians. Goebbels’ machinery lapsed
into silence.62 At his eleven o’clock conference on the seventh he suggested that they
describe events at Alamein as ‘fighting’ rather than a ‘battle’. With pursed lips he
then announced, ‘Three large British convoys have left Gibraltar. This fact is a military
secret and to be treated as such.’63
The Abwehr, Germany’s military Intelligence service, could offer no clue where
these convoys were headed.64 Goebbels feared they were bound for southern France
or Italy itself.65 But as Goebbels set out for the Munich anniversary of the 1923
putsch he heard that the Allied warships were landing tens of thousands of troops in
French Morocco and Algeria. At the Brown House in Munich Hitler phoned Paris,
Vichy, and Rome; he secretly invited Vichy France to join the war on his side. But as
he began his speech at the beer hall he still had no reply.66
Though still flawed by over-confident predictions about Stalingrad, it was otherwise
a good speech. ‘There was a time,’ Goebbels heard him say, ‘when the Germans
laid down their weapons at a quarter to twelve. I never, ever, stop until five past.’ His
biting witticisms about the ‘perfumed dandy’ Anthony Eden delighted Goebbels as
did his sinister reference to his 1939 prophecy about the Jews. ‘Of those who laughed
then,’ Hitler mocked, ‘countless already laugh no longer today.’ Then he boasted that
Stalingrad was as good as theirs: ‘That was what I wanted to capture, and, do you
know—modest that we are—we’ve got it, too! There are only a few more tiny pockets!’
Back at the Brown House afterwards he told Goebbels that the French were unlikely
to join the German cause. The Allies would certainly not hesitate to do what he
had refrained from in 1940, namely bombing Paris. Sure enough, the Vichy French
admiral in Algeria, Jean-François Darlan, asked the Americans for an armistice. A
728 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
month later the Forschungsamt reported to Goebbels that that was why Darlan had
gone to North Africa.
Goebbels returned to Berlin late on the ninth. At his Berlin conference the next
morning he cajoled his department heads once more to keep a stiff upper lip. It was
like a football match, he suggested, developing a new line of debate: the home team
had been four-nil until half-time, but now suddenly the visitors had scored a goal.67
He hoped for dramatic news from Hitler’s meeting that day with Pierre Laval, the
French prime minister, and directed the press to express ‘warm feelings’ toward
France.68 Nothing came of the meeting however and
Hitler ordered his troops into
the unoccupied half of France. He moved his air force straight into Tunisia, far ahead
of the Allied invasion troops. By occupying this ‘bastion of North Africa’ he expected
to gain another six months and perhaps even give Rommel another chance of victory.
‘German propaganda,’ admitted Goebbels on the twelfth, ‘is in for a tough
time. Its most importance principle must be to put on a resolute and confident face,
to show no signs of weakness, and … to pull everyone together as Churchill did after
Dunkirk.’69
BRITISH air raid dead so far totalled forty-three thousand; the corresponding German
figure was 10,900.70 Preparing to turn that ratio to Germany’s disadvantage, the
British government was loudly proclaiming that it was Hitler who had started the
bombing of civilians.71 In Tokyo the Japanese put captured American bomber crews
on trial; Goebbels decided against encouraging the lynching of British bomber crews
in Germany however, arguing that the result would be total lawlessness, as he rather
grotesquely told his staff.72 Touring the most vulnerable cities in the west he was
encouraged to find people there more phlegmatic than the S.D. reports suggested.73
‘The enemy,’ he announced on November 17, 1942 in Wuppertal, scene of many
early political memories, ‘has thank God left us in no doubt as to the fate he has in
store for us if we ever lose faith in victory.’
With Rommel in retreat Goebbels suggested that the Mediterranean was of less
importance than ‘the war of the lieutenant-commanders,’ as he called the U-boat
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 729
war. A retreat in North Africa was regrettable but not of pivotal importance. They
had sunk a million tons of shipping during September, 750,000 tons in October, and
as much again already during November, or so he claimed. As for the British air raids,
which had now resumed in force, he emphasized: ‘Mr Churchill cannot wash his
hands of the historic guilt for having started this war against innocent civilians.’ He
promised that the hour of retribution would come.74
Two days later the Red Army crashed through the eastern front at Stalingrad, and
the Sixth Army found itself fighting for its life. By November 22, 1942 it was totally
surrounded, and Goebbels was facing the most challenging crisis of his career as a
propagandist.
1 ‘Vom Sinn des Krieges.’—Unpubl. diary, Aug 14–15, 1942 (NA film NL.118/125).
2 Memo Wilson to R Leeper, Aug 21, 1942 (PRO file FO.898/67).
3 Martin, 33f.
4 Propaganda-Parole No.33, Jun 2, 1942 (NA film T81, roll 672, 0810ff).
5 MinConf., Aug 15–18; diary, Aug 10, 1942.
6 MinConf., Aug 21; unpubl. diary, Aug 20, 1942 (Moscow archives.)
7 Diary, Aug 9,1942.
8 MinConf., Aug 17, 22, 23, 24, 1942.
9 JG, ‘Seid nicht allzu gerecht!’ in Das Reich, Sep 6, 1942.
10 Unpubl. diary, Sep 30, 1942, pp.30f (author’s film DI-52; IfZ).
11 JG referred to his secret speech, delivered to Berlin’s editors and foreign press corps, in
ibid., Sep 24; see too VB, Sep 25, 1942. The text I have quoted is a 5pp. copy typed on flimsy
‘Flight Post’ stationery on an English typewriter (no Umlaut), evidently obtained by Polish
intelligence; it was forwarded by Mr F Savery (of the British embassy to the Polish government
in exile) to Frank Roberts of the FO: a ‘Mr Wzelaki’ mailed it to Savery on Feb 25,
1943 (PRO files FO.371/30928, /34454). The 49-year old Jan Wszelaki was deputy Secretary-
General of the Polish ministry of foreign affairs in exile; see his correspondence with
Savery in Polish Institute archives, Kol.39.—As for the text’s authenticity, I am impressed
by JG’s similar references to ‘exaggerated craze for objectivity’ in his speech of Nov 17,
1942, and to the needless ‘love of truth’ and ‘functionalism’ of German media reporting, in
his secret speech of Jul 17 or 18, 1943 (see VfZ, 1971, 83ff).
12 However on Jul 22 he had told the People’s Court in a speech that there were ‘still
40,000 Jews’ in Berlin (Report by Crohne in Schlegelberger’s files, ND: NG.417); he had
quoted the same figure in his diary on May 11, 1942.
730 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
13 This is very similar to JG’s ‘Jews who have nothing to lose’ argument (cf. Diary, May 30,
1942; NA film T84, roll 267).—At his MinConf. on Dec 8 JG agreed that the ‘maltreatment
of the Jews in Poland’ was a tricky issue, and too hot really to handle; he also discussed the
multiplying British and American allegations about ‘atrocities against Jews’ in the east in his
conferences of Dec 12, 14, 16 (‘What must happen is that each side accuses the other of
atrocities; the general hullabaloo will eventually lead to the topic being removed from the
agenda’) and 18, 1942.
14 Diary, Dec 14, 1942.
15 Ibid., Dec 18, 1942.
16 MinConf., Aug 13, 1942.
17 Kempner, 185.
18 Unpubl. diary, Sep 27, 1942 (author’s film DI-52).
19 Propaganda directive to all gauleiters, No.12, Oct 2, 1942 (NA film T81, roll 672,
0663f)
20 When Fritz Sauckel proposed leaving the Jewish skilled workers in the Government-
General (Poland), Hitler agreed but (Sep 20–22) ‘reiterated the importance of pulling the
Jews out of the munitions plants in the Reich’. (Hitler–Speer conferences, IWM file FD.3353/
45). But Himmler noted on Oct 9, 1942 that he was ‘collecting the [Jewish] so-called munitions
workers’ in Poland and replacing them by Poles (NA film T175, roll 22, 7359f).
21 Unpubl. diary, Sep 30, 1942.
22 Tiessler, note, Oct 5, 1942 (NA film T81, roll 676, 5851).
23 Thierack note on discussion with JG, Sep 14, 1942, about ‘destruction of anti-social
lives’ through work, especially Jews, Poles, gypsies, Czechs and miscellaneous Germans
(ND: 682–PS, IMT, vol.v, 496f).
24 Tiessler, note, Oct 31; noted by JG on Nov 5, 1942 (ibid., 5845ff).—Thierack notified
Bormann, ‘the legal system can only be of limited assistance in disposing of the members of
this race.’ (Reitlinger, 176; Reuth, 507).
25 Note on meeting at RSHA on Final Solution of the Jewish Problem, top secret, Oct 27,
1942 (NA film T120, roll 780, 1943ff).
26 MinConf., Nov 3, 1942.
27 Telex from [Regierungsrat Walter] Koerber [chief of Hauptreferat Schnelldienst in domestic
press dept.] to Generalgouvernement press office, and RPA in Warsaw, No.65, Sep 7,
1942 (Yivo, Occ E2–72).
28 Schmidt-Leonhardt’s report of Nov 11 is in Yivo file Occ E2–107. On Nov 15, 1942
Himmler wrote to Lammers about briefing Hitler on ‘the developing situation in the
Generalgouvernment’ (NA film T175, roll 122, 7770); deputy gauleiter Albert Hoffmann
(eastern Upper Silesia) had briefed JG on the disturbances in the Generalgouvernement
earlier (unpubl. diary, Sep 25, 1942).
29 Prause (Gutterer’s pers. Referent) report to JG, Feb 15; identical wording in his report
of Feb 22, 1943 (Yivo, Occ E2–12).,