the outrage that ‘certain abuses’ at home were causing among the troops.23 Goebbels
thereupon put his ideas for ‘radicalizing and totalizing’ the war to Walther Hewel,
Julius Schaub, Alwin-Broder Albrecht, and other long-standing members of Hitler’s
personal entourage.24 If it had worked for Stalin, he argued, then how much better
were the prospects in Germany where there was so much more slack waiting to be
taken up. But while he himself lived a most ascetic existence, those around him did
not. Hans Fritzsche for instance was among the elite who liked to indulge in oysters,
real coffee, and fine wines at Otto Horcher’s gourmet restaurant in Berlin.25
Britain had introduced compulsory labour service for women in March. Goebbels
had long believed that at least women without families aged up to fifty should work,
regardless of their social standing.26 In December 1942 he stated this to Hitler and
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 737
added that school-age boys and girls could help man the anti-aircraft guns.27 But
Hitler had complex biological arguments against it, and others close to him like
Göring and the manpower commissioner Fritz Sauckel assured him that such crisis
measures were not called for.
Goebbels worked hard to promote his belief in total war. In each offensive, he
argued, they had lacked the ten percent that mattered. He discussed it separately
with Speer, Funk, and Krosigk, but petty jealousies still smouldered between them
as well as between Göring, Lammers, and Bormann; each of them had spent years
establishing their own power base, and none would willingly cede territory.28 Speer
agreed on the malady. ‘In every offensive,’ he said to the central planners, ‘we lack
just ten percent.’ He warned of a coming war of attrition if they could not manage
that extra effort. ‘I spoke with Goebbels recently,’ he continued. ‘He holds the view
that the public is actually waiting to be called upon to make this last supreme effort.’
29 In 1944 however Speer would become one of the most trenchant opponents
of Goebbels’ total war.
Pride as much as prejudice constrained Hitler from agreeing to Total War. Not
until the Sixth Army’s position in Stalingrad seemed desperate as it was now did he
send Bormann to Goebbels’ mansion at Lanke on December 28 to explore with him,
as Bormann jotted in his pocket notebook, ‘a total effort by the German people to
increase its war potential.’30 Bormann flattered Goebbels cleverly, calling him, the
‘harbinger’ of total war and speaking of their Führer’s faith in him.31 The proposals
which Goebbels outlined for releasing manpower to war industry and the forces did
not however commend themselves to Bormann: they were rooted in his fiery socialist
adolescence; he wanted punitive sacrifices by the ‘upper ten thousand’ who still
acted as though there were no war. ‘I am glad,’ the minister remarked afterwards at
dinner, ‘that I have always lived in frugal wartime style.’32 Despite Bormann’s misgivings,
Goebbels set to at once, drawing up a plan for all-out war. ‘I see my main task in
the weeks ahead,’ he dictated at Lanke three days after Bormann’s visit, ‘as being to
radicalize our internal management of the war so that there can be no more talk of
738 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
sparing the home front and spoiling the war.’33 He closed the next day’s entry, the
first of 1943, with this philosophy: ‘The radical and most total war is the shortest.’34
For several days after submitting his proposals he heard nothing. He pressed the
Wolf’s Lair daily for a decision. Bormann urged Goebbels to be patient, pleading
that it was not so simple to draft new regulations. The minister’s staff drafted a more
detailed outline plan: it included the introduction of labour service for women, cutbacks
in the manufacture of consumer goods, the closure of department stores, and
the release of two-thirds of all streetcar and railroad conductors. Dr Lammers, the
bone-domed top civil servant, placated Goebbels that while he was the ‘harbinger’
he would not be able to dispense with Lammers’ services or those of Bormann and
Field Marshal Keitel as advisers.35 Impatient for action, Goebbels dictated a vigorous
article on total war for Das Reich, attacking their country’s parasites and sluggards.36
On January 4 Lammers agreed to call a Cabinet-level conference on the seventh. ‘I
am today firmly convinced,’ Goebbels recorded, ‘that if we give it all we’ve got we’ll
smash the Soviet Union this coming summer.’37 As he understood it, the idea was
that, after Lammers had put their finished plan to Hitler, a triumvirate would implement
it with dictatorial powers delegated to them by their over-burdened Führer.38
The three he had in mind were himself, Lammers, and Bormann. Göring, as president
of the defence committee and chief of the Four Year Plan, had far too much on
his plate already. Not that Goebbels gainsayed Göring’s authority—in fact he would
draft a fulsome letter to him on his fiftieth birthday a few days hence.39
There is no doubt that Goebbels, perhaps over-simplifying, saw Total War as the
ultimate answer to his embattled country’s difficulties.40 ‘Total War,’ he felt, ‘should
have been brought in eighteen months ago.’41 They had the manpower, if only they
could drain it off the home front.
Lammers held the promised conference on January 8—delayed one day by Speer’s
tardiness. Sauckel at once threw a spanner into the works, declaring himself quite
capable of raising the manpower without ‘total war’. Funk and Bormann gave only
limited backing to Goebbels’ plan.42 Frustrated, Goebbels re-ran Russian newsreels
of the seige of Leningrad which showed what people were willing to do if pressed.43
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 739
More conservative than the Goebbels plan, the document which Lammers drafted
and Hitler eventually signed spoke of releasing up to 700,000 men to the armed
forces; however it provided for a three-man committee to run total war acting only
‘in close touch’ with Goebbels.44 He tried for several days to become at least an
equal wheel on this unwieldy wagon. Lammers tried in vain to appease him.45 Goebbels
felt slighted; he was sure that ‘certain circles’ were trying to freeze him out.46 When
he phoned the Wolf’s Lair, Lammers rebuked him that this was what the Führer
himself had decided.47 The whole episode probably recalled to Goebbels his galling
omission from Hitler’s first cabinet in 1933.48
When Hans Lammers presided over the first meeting on January 20, Goebbels
rather pathetically called it the Committee of Four in his diary; but he was very
much a junior partner.49 He harangued them all for an hour and dictated mechanically
afterwards, ‘I am still seen and recognized as the driving force.’ This however
was not true. Within his own four walls he muttered to personal staff that Lammers
had ‘wet blanketed’ his ideas.50 For the next month he grappled with the bureaucratic
red tape with which Lammers deftly packaged each measure that his three-man committee
hesitantly approved.
THUS Goebbels began dreaming about a spectacular mass mee
ting at which he would
appeal over their heads to the people, and ask them what they desired. Vox populi—
the voice of the street: ugly enough, but the next best thing to a dictatorship of the
proletariat.
During these first three weeks of January 1943, meanwhile, the Sixth Army was
dying in Stalingrad. The airlift of food and ammunition failed as the airfields were
lost, aircraft engines froze, and aircrew morale slumped. Although Hitler continued
a news blackout policy, hoping for better times, millions of Germans now suspected
that something was going badly wrong. Goebbels promised to persuade Hitler to
release the awful news.51 Colonel Martin reported to Berlin that Hitler seemed to be
out of touch with reality.52 He was acting as though this were Moscow, and the month
were December 1941. The same tactics would not work twice. Attending one min-
740 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
istry meeting, the army’s radio commentator General Dittmar was horrified at the
superficiality on display. ‘Even that clever-dick Hans Fritzsche asked me how close
we are to relieving Stalingrad,’ he noted.53 Five more days would pass before the
High Command vaguely admitted that the Sixth Army was encircled, and had been
for two months.54 Goebbels was furious at these tactics. On January 21 he dictated
that it was high time to make a clean breast to the people. ‘It should have been done
long ago,’ he wrote, adding in almost treasonably critical language: ‘But the Führer
was against it until now.’ Perhaps Stalingrad might yet become a symbol, as the Alcazár
of Toledo had been for the nationalists in the Spanish civil war. He announced to his
ministerial conference that he was going to see Hitler the next day to demand that
they adhere in future to the unvarnished truth—and to total war.55
It was misty, grey, and damp as he arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on January 22. Hitler’s
jug-eared chief adjutant General Rudolf Schmundt had just returned from the
Stalingrad front. He besought Goebbels to force through his total war plans. When
Goebbels protested to Hitler about being frozen out of the Lammers committee,
Hitler expressed surprise: ‘You yourself had Bormann inform me that you were happy
with the role of “harbinger,” he said, ‘and preferred to leave the implementation to
the experts.’ (So Goebbels later recalled.56) Strolling around the compound with
Goebbels and his Alsatian bitch Blondi, Hitler blamed the coming catastrophe in
Stalingrad on Göring and their allies. The Hungarian troops had abandoned their
tanks and stormed the empty hospital trains waiting to carry casualties away.57 There
was however one good thing about their allies’ failure, he remarked. If at the end of
the war Germany stood alone the spoils of victory would be hers alone too. He had
resigned himself, he said, to the loss of all twenty-two divisions in Stalingrad. The
phone rang incessantly as they talked, bringing fresh messages of woe.58
Goebbels then told him of his plans for total war. He promised to raise 1·5 to two
million soldiers by the coming summer. Hitler winced at the mention of female
labour service, but otherwise endorsed everything.59 ‘He would prefer,’ dictated
Goebbels with probably less than utter candour, ‘that I do not join the three man
committee myself—so as not to become bogged down with the minutiæ of this vast
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 741
programme.’ Hitler had however authorised him to attend all its meetings and to
ensure that all its proposals were ‘radical’ enough. The minister further told his diary
that Hitler had ordered an internal dictatorship set up with Goebbels as the ‘psychological
dictator and motive force’. This was somewhat premature, indeed downright
untrue. As Himmler was informed a few days later, Goebbels had tried to persuade
Hitler to appoint him alone as ‘Führer of the Home Front.’ ‘But he has not succeeded.’
60
AFTER this meeting Hitler had to see Goebbels in a new light. None of his army
generals had ever stood up to him like this. For that matter, none could inspire him
the way Goebbels did either.61 When he now asked Goebbels to return as often as
possible, it was perhaps no longer a casual pleasantry. As he hoisted himself aboard
the Berlin-bound train at Rastenburg, Goebbels caught sight of young men of the
Führer’s escort battalion on another platform, mustering for the eastern front. He
wondered how many would survive the next twelve months.62
The Sixth Army would probably not survive another week. As Goebbels began
drafting the inevitable communiqué—choosing his language with the utmost care,
because in ages to come Germans would always recall how they had heard of the
death of their army in Stalingrad—the mood in official Berlin was already catastrophic:
‘For the first time,’ noted General Dittmar, ‘there is everywhere personal bitterness
at the Führer who led us to Stalingrad… A searing sense of shame fills us all.’63
Dittmar heard from Colonel Martin how easily Goebbels had persuaded Hitler to
change the tenor of the High Command communiqué to allow greater gravity and
more truth after the generals themselves had not dared to ask Hitler themselves. The
question was, Martin had said, how to restore Hitler’s bruised prestige among the
troops.
It was a sombre time. Goebbels decreed that January the Thirtieth, tenth anniversary
of the Nazi seizure of power, would not be a public holiday: no flags, no parades.
At eleven A.M. Göring would broadcast to the armed forces from the air ministry. At
five P.M. Goebbels would speak from the Sport Palace and read out a proclamation on
742 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Hitler’s behalf.64 Briefed by the British embassy in Stockholm, London shortly announced
all this—Goebbels was furious that the enemy had somehow learned of his
secret plans.65
British Intelligence seemed to be better in every way than Hitler’s. When Churchill
and Roosevelt met in Casablanca, and announced their demand for unconditional
surrender, Goebbels at first missed it and then ignored it; his rage was directed at the
Abwehr which had confidently translated Casablanca as ‘The White House’ and declared
that the Allied meeting was in Washington.66 On January 27 Goebbels briefed
journalists that unconditional surrender was probably Roosevelt’s reference to the
capitulation of the French generals in Algiers, and even when Churchill announced
the demand in the House of Commons Goebbels ignored it, his only comments
being on the prime minister’s statements about the submarine war and General Eisenhower’s
appointment as supreme Allied commander.67 Reviewing thirty different
Nazi newspapers, Allied Intelligence officers found their ‘unconditional surrender’
slogan ignored except for one reference in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.68
Returning to his struggle for total war, Goebbels dictated a blazing article for Das
Reich.69 When the Reich Gazette published the first ordinances closing down bars,
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 121
