Hitler nor Göring bothered to hear the broadcast. Hitler was at the front, and
Göring had retired to bed at five P.M.21
Goebbels however listened to its broadcast at eight P.M.; the answers to his Ten
Questions nearly burst the loudspeaker membranes of his radio. For twenty full minutes
after his final defiant phrase, ‘Arise as one nation, and let the storm burst upon
them!’ the radio network continued to broadcast the tumult of acclaim. The field
agencies of the S.D., briefed to stand by twelve hours earlier, had sent agents to
eavesdrop in railroad waiting rooms and cafes; at one A.M. the S.D. regions
(Leitabschnitte) telexed their collated reports to Himmler’s Amt III in Berlin, and
this provided the propaganda ministry with a glowing summary two hours later.22
Goebbels’ field offices reported in equally favourable terms.23 Studying every available
newspaper from around the world, Goebbels basked in glory. The Forschungsamt,
wiretapping the foreign journalists in Berlin, recorded high praise. Only the final
S.D. report was critical.24 Jealous army officers were also less enthusiastic.25
No matter, Goebbels was the man of the moment. ‘It is beautiful,’ he dictated, ‘to
be the gauleiter of Berlin and to gather around one so many prominent men of party
and state.’ He decided to do it more often, ‘since the central leadership is lacking
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 755
now, during the Führer’s absence from Berlin.’26 These words reveal that he was setting
himself very ambitious goals indeed.
THE fine weather which now set in displeased Goebbels. For his purposes he needed
the winter gloom to linger on.27 Toward the end of February the eastern front was
stabilized again; he forbade the media to mention it. Their propaganda would forfeit
all respect if it bleated about crises each winter, and forgot them in the spring. When
the Waffen S.S. shortly retook Kharkov, Goebbels even tried to prevent any special
communiqué being issued.28 ‘We got over the first winter crisis relatively well,’ he
reminded his staff. ‘But we only just survived the second. If there’s ever a third, I
don’t want to be propaganda minister.’29
The Sports Palace speech was soon forgotten. It marked a turning point in Goebbels’
career but not in the war effort. ‘After Stalingrad,’ he reminded Hitler in July 1944,
‘I proclaimed total war… But it remained only superficial.’30 He had worked off
many private complexes in the speech, and settled many old scores; he had referred
to ‘a certain social stratum’ which was interested only in preserving its almost peacetime
lifestyle. National socialism, he had said, heeded neither class nor profession.
‘Rich and poor, high and low, all shall have the same claims made upon them.’ ‘It’s
time to put an end to bourgeois pruderies,’ he had also said, and: ‘It’s time to take off
the kid gloves and clench our fists.’ His speech had also referred to the idle classes
who ‘lolled around in stylish bars’ with no greater concern than the welfare of their
stomachs. Every morning in the Tiergarten, he had scoffed, people could see the
horseback cavalcades—an unconscious echo of his old attack on the hobby-horseman
‘Isidor’ Weiss—while indolent ‘travellers of leisure’ snapped up all the seats in
railroad cars. Not surprisingly after this speech the middle class suspected Goebbels
of planning to eliminate them, and Berndt had to issue a secret denial during May.31
Total war remained a chimera. Goebbels closed down some stores and restaurants,
about half the newspapers, and the Ruhleben racetrack; he banned manicures, pedicures,
and permanent-waves.32 Even so General von Unruh reported that they would
not meet the target of 800,000 men.33 What happened was often a parody of total
756 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
war. Magda, convalescent and dizzy, was put to work in the Telefunken factory, but
none of the other minister’s wives followed suit. Goebbels patriotically laid off his
domestic staff, including his treasured chef; Ribbentrop, his arch-enemy, snapped
them all up for his own expanding household.34 The inertia produced by easy earlier
victories proved impossible to dispel. Goebbels shut down Rothe’s, the exclusive
flower shop where Emmy Göring shopped, but every other luxury flower shop and
eating place seemed to have its protectors. Professor Morell saved the Stadtkrug
restaurant in Vienna by a word in Hitler’s ear.35 Göring pleaded for Horcher’s. When
Goebbels sent in hired thugs to smash its windows Göring posted two policemen
permanently outside; Goebbels phoned Göring at the Obersalzberg and threatened
to use his powers as gauleiter; Göring retorted that his Luftwaffe would in that event
take over Horcher’s as an exclusive officers’ club.36
The Reichsmarschall seemed however to be Goebbels’ only hope of neutralizing
the incompetent Committee of Three (Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann). Speer flew
down to the Obersalzberg on Sunday February 28 to suggest that Göring reactivate
the moribund Reich Defence Committee. He phoned Goebbels later that afternoon
to come down too and at four P.M. on Monday Goebbels was driven up the hairpin
bends to Göring’s villa. The Reichsmarschall received him wearing what the propaganda
minister wearily described as a somewhat baroque costume—‘But that’s how
he is, and you’ve got to take him quirks and all.’37 They needed his name, his authority,
his clout; but no more.
For five hours they wrangled until everybody agreed to let bygones be bygones—
Goebbels dismissed their past differences with a wave of the hand. Göring bellowed
with laughter when he hard of Goebbels’ run-in with Unruh. Cunning as a fox,
Goebbels intimated that it was everybody’s duty to rally round the Führer at this
time of crisis. But he also left Göring with no illusions that like him the Reichsmarschall
was up to his neck in blood. (‘I am in,’ Shakespeare’s King Richard the Third had
moaned, ‘so far in blood, that sin will pluck on sin…’) ‘Göring,’ dictated Goebbels
the next morning, ‘is quite clear about what threatens us all if we go soft in this
war… Above all we have committed ourselves so far in the Jewish Problem that for
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 757
us there is no escape any more, none whatever.’ The same would go for Himmler,
whom Göring promised to win over too.38
With Göring’s backing secured, Goebbels took the sleeper back to Berlin that
night, March 1, 1943. Mr Churchill’s bomber squadrons got there before him and
Göring’s stock temporarily slipped again. Berlin’s deathroll from this one raid topped
six hundred.39 One bomb had fallen two hundred yards from the Goebbels home in
Schwanenwerder; he decided to bring his children to No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse,
where they now had the deep shelter. Many officials, particularly Goebbels’ deputy
gauleiter, had lost their heads; inadequately drilled in civil defence, thousands had
crouched too long in their shelters while buildings which could have been saved
burned to the ground. Several plunderers had been caught: they lost their heads too
(as Reich Defence Commissioner, Goebbels had t
he power of life and death in Berlin.)
40
War had a brutalising effect. Watching rescue operations S.S. Obersturmbannführer
Eichmann found one elderly couple crushed beneath girders, whimpering to be put
out of their agony; he told his corporal to oblige.41 At a wrecked hospital Goebbels
looked on as the bodies of patients and nurses were pulled out of the rubble; he too
swore revenge, enraged at the thought that ‘some Canadian thug’ who probably
couldn’t even find Europe on the globe could do this to his city. After the British next
hit Essen, the S.D. reported that many people were asking about when Germany
would begin hitting back. Speer confided that powerful new weapons were in production,
and Goebbels began hinting at them with increasing frequency in his speeches.
When he arrived at Hitler’s HQ, now at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, on March 8 he
found everybody livid with Göring.42 For hours Hitler let fly about the Luftwaffe’s
useless commander-in-chief and his corrupt entourage of high-living World War I
cronies—they were all currently shopping for looted art works in Italy. As Hitler
went on to discuss Rosenberg’s talents and Goebbels’ propaganda offensive against
bolshevism43, further disastrous news came: the British bombers had struck at ancient
Nuremberg. Goebbels tried hard to salvage the absent Reichsmarschall’s reputation
—he phoned Nuremberg and assured Hitler that the damage was less than
758 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
feared—but in vain. ‘Given the prevailing mood,’ he dictated to his secretary afterwards,
‘I consider it inopportune to raise the question of Göring’s political leadership
with the Führer. Now is not the right time.’
Göring was missing from the next total war conference that Lammers called in the
Chancellery on March 16. Goebbels took Speer, Ley, and Funk to see him for three
hours on the seventeenth, but he seemed totally out of touch with reality. He was
astonished when Goebbels told him that 616 people had died in the latest raid on
Berlin.44 He agreed to ask Hitler’s consent for the revival of the Reich Defence Committee.
45 But Hitler was in no mood to listen . He wanted only to hear that the
Luftwaffe was hitting back at Britain; when he came to Berlin for Memorial Day
Goebbels proposed that they take out London’s wealthier suburbs one by one, rather
than those of the working class.46
Meanwhile Berlin and other cities, particularly in the Ruhr, would just have to
bear the onslaught. Many a hardened soldier on home leave soon wished that he was
back on the battlefield. Even Count von Helldorff pleaded to be posted to an S.S.
unit; Himmler ordered him to stay in Berlin.47
‘COUNT Helldorff,’ Himmler had been notified in January 1943, ‘is very often questioned
by Dr Goebbels about the evacuation of the Jews, and about communism and
other political affairs in Berlin.’48
Talking with Hitler into the small hours of January 22, Goebbels had again badgered
him to let him get on with ridding the city of its Jews. It had become an obsession.
He devoted twenty-six percent of his speech of January 30 to attacking the
Jews.49 His staff instructed field offices to link them closely to the concept of bolshevism.
‘The Jews of the [pre-1933] Berliner Tageblatt portrayed the communists as harmless,’
his ministry said. ‘But we’re not falling for this Jewish trick of playing down the
bolsheviks until they can cut the little man’s throat. Recent events in Latvia, Estonia,
and Lithuania speak for themselves’—a reference to the pogroms and counter-pogroms
in the Baltic states in 1940 and 1941.50
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 759
So far, seventeen thousand of Berlin’s Jews had gone. The trains began heading for
Auschwitz, the most brutal of all Himmler’s slave labour camps and with the highest
mortality rate. Working closely with the S.D., Goebbels planned one final sudden
sweep for the night of February 27 when the remaining Jews would be rounded up
and held, ready for deportation in trainloads of two thousand at a time.51 He set
himself the target of evacuating the very last Jews by the end of March. During his
Total War speech he had called them the incarnation of evil (he had said that neither
foreign protests nor crocodile tears would deter Germany from ‘the exter–’, he
began, then checked himself and continued, ‘the neutralisation of Jewry.’ On the day
after the speech, February 19, one thousand more Berlin Jews were shipped to
Auschwitz. ‘Experience goes to show,’ he dictated cynically a few days later, ‘that a
movement and a party which have burned their boats fight more ruthlessly than
those which still have an avenue of retreat.’52
The police bungled their swoop on Berlin’s Jews. Goebbels had arranged to use the
loyal units of the S.S. Leibstandarte to cordon off factories while police seized their
Jewish labour force for deportation. ‘Misguided’ fellow-Germans, wrote Goebbels,
had however tipped them off and four thousand slipped through his fingers. ‘We’ll
get our hands on them yet,’ he added.53 For several days there was chaos, compounded
by the horrific air raid of March 1, as the manhunt for missing Jews went on. In the
first six days of March five more trains left for Auschwitz (carrying 1,736, 1,758,
1,732, 1,143, and 662 Berlin Jews). ‘War is no time to be sentimental,’ commented
Goebbels.54 But there was widespread public disquiet at the continuing manhunt,
especially after the air raid, and unfortunate scenes outside one Jewish old folks’
home where crowds intervened on their behalf: Goebbels professed distress at the
tactless timing.55 He told the S.D. to go easy for a few weeks. After one more transport,
of 947 Jews to Auschwitz on March 12, the operation was halted for five weeks.
Widespread damage had however been done. General Dittmar remarked that public
concern was growing about Hitler’s military leadership, about the air raids, and
about the Jewish problem.56 It did not surprise Goebbels that most of the hate mail
after the total war speech came from Jews.57 A significant number of letter writers
760 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
protested about his picking on the Jews, and some even saw a poetic justice in the air
raids on Nazi Germany.58
As more than once before he sought absolution from his Führer. After seeing him
on March 8 at Vinnitsa he again noted for the record that Hitler had endorsed his
plans to rid Berlin of its Jews. There was much the same diary entry after Hitler
phoned him on the fourteenth, and on the twentieth he noted how pleased the Führer,
visiting Berlin, had been when he told him that most of the Jews had now gone.59 The
war had, agreed Hitler, enabled them to tackle a number of thorny problems. In mid
April however Goebbels found his city once more ‘overrun’ with Jews claiming exemption
from deportation. He ordered a thorough screening. ‘I am convinced,’ he
dictated, ‘that by ridding Berlin of the Jews I have achieved one of my greatest political
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 124
