murdering many thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn forest
in 1940 Stalin’s secret police had planted trees to conceal the graves. Locals had
tipped off the Germans in 1942, but it had taken until now for the ground to thaw.
Two months earlier Goebbels had remarked that ‘ghosts were coming to life’ as
other Soviet atrocities in Latvia were revealed.3 In March 1943 Moscow had begun a
serious dispute with the Polish exile government in London over their countries’
future common frontier.4 It was now that the German troops uncovered at Katyn the
mass graves of thousands of Polish prisoners of war, their hands crudely bound with
barbed wire, expertly executed by the Russians by bullets in the nape of the neck.
The first such grave yielded 4,143 victims.5 On April 4 an S.S. Unterscharführer
reported that they had already found the corpses of a Polish general, senior staff
officers, a bishop—and diaries.6 The letters and diaries in the corpses’ pockets had
expired, like their authors, in April 1940 when the Russians controlled the region.
‘Once again,’ dictated Goebbels, ‘one sees how the Jews work hand in hand, and
what Europe may expect if it ever falls into the hands of the eastern or western
denizens of this subversive race.’7
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 767
Goebbels acted swiftly and shrewdly. He briefed his staff at his April 8 morning
conference that he was sending neutral journalists and Polish community leaders
with captured British medical officers to witness the opening of further mass graves.8
Berndt, his finest propagandist, had now returned from Tunisia: Goebbels put him in
charge. By April 13 twelve thousand rotting corpses had been exhumed.9 ‘One dare
not think what would become of Germany and Europe if this Asiatic-Jewish torrent
ever burst upon our country and continent,’ wrote Goebbels after seeing the film
footage.10 He ordered his editors to feature Katyn two or three times each week.
Undeniably embarrassed by the discovery, Moscow alternately called the graves ‘ancient
burial grounds’ and blamed the Nazis.11 Shocked by the revelations, the Polish
exile prime minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski appealed to the International Red
Cross to investigate Katyn; Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with Sikorski.12
Goebbels was dizzy with pride at this unexpected triumph of his propaganda. Katyn
was suddenly a threat to Mr Churchill’s carefully constructed grand coalition. The
British prime minister (that ‘vassal of the Jews’13) did as Goebbels himself would
have done: he thrice denied all evidence of Soviet culpability for the massacres. When
a British plane-crash shortly killed off the inconvenient Polish prime minister
Sikorski—the pilot survived—Goebbels found still further grist for his pernicious
propaganda mills.14
The success of the Katyn revelations in a Germany long saturated with anti-Soviet
atrocity propaganda was only limited. Editors soon tired of carrying the story. The
public profoundly mistrusted the revelations. One reaction cited by the S.D. was
that they had no right to get worked up since the Nazis had liquidated far more Poles
and Jews than had the Russians.15 One minor annoyance was when German ammunition
was found in some of the graves, probably part of the pre-Barbarossa deliveries
to Stalin.16 When still more Soviet mass graves were found at Vinnitsa, the people
commented: ‘We also ruthlessly wiped out all opposition elements in the east.’17
IN Nazi occupied Poland the impact of Katyn was equally disappointing.
768 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
The minister had tried for months to settle his differences with Hans Frank, but
the uproar caused by Himmler’s anti-Jewish measures rendered all coherent propaganda
work impossible.18 Over lunch on May 9 Hitler and Goebbels agreed that
Frank had lost control, but there was nobody fit to replace him.19 As anti-German
incidents multiplied, Frank blamed the S.S.; on May 26 Himmler disclosed to him
that he was going to evacuate the last 250,000 Polish Jews regardless.20 When Goebbels
again suggested Frank’s replacement in June, Hitler exonerated the Governor-General:
‘He has to extract food supplies, prevent the unification of the people, ship out
the Jews and yet at the same time accommodate the influx of the Jews from the
Reich.’21
According to him, Hitler ordered him to link the Jews directly to Katyn.22
At the end of April Goebbels composed another major assault on the Jews for Das
Reich. In this he argued that the Jews had wanted this war. The warmongers in London
and Washington were all Jews, as were the Soviet secret police and commissars.
23 ‘It is therefore a matter of state security,’ he explained, ‘for us to take certain
steps in our own country.’ This was now a race war, in which the Jews aimed at the
destruction of the German people. The Jews had always been criminals, he continued:
‘The Jews have not enjoyed such remarkable rewards because they are cleverer
than non-Jews, but because they operate by a different code of ethics.’ Hitler’s January
1939 prophecy was ineluctably coming true. ‘One day the same punishment will
be meted out to Jews worldwide as they are suffering in Germany today.’ ‘There is no
place for sentimental considerations,’ he emphasized. ‘When they hatched their plot for
the total destruction of the German people they were signing their own death warrant.’
24 Newspapers around the world quoted surprisingly freely from the article,
and he took this as proof many people in every editorial office thought like him.25
Despite the apparent implicit admissions in the article, when his press officer showed
him foreign allegations about ‘Gestapo extermination camps’ in Poland, where Jews
and others were being gassed and cremated, Goebbels dismissed them as ‘sensationalism.’
26 Nevertheless Bormann notified every Reichsleiter and gauleiter including
Goebbels in July that Hitler did not want public discussion of any ‘overall solution’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 769
(Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish problem. ‘It can however be stated,’ Bormann informed
them, ‘that the Jews are under confinement and being given appropriate employment.’
27
Goebbels knew different. In the first six months of 1943 fourteen trains had carried
14,620 of his city’s Jews to Auschwitz. Over thirty-one thousand Jews had now
been expelled from Berlin by the joint efforts of Goebbels, Speer, and the police.28
THROUGHOUT these months the Nazi propaganda policies in the eastern territories
were chaotic. In occupied Poland there was the usual conflict between rival Nazi
agencies. Propaganda was run from Kraków by a capable civil servant,
Oberregierungsrat Wilhelm Ohlenbusch, but he was permanently at loggerheads
with Hans Frank’s press chief Dr Gassner, an Otto Dietrich appointee.29 Gassner had
replaced the independent Polish press with gutter publications which included pornographic
Polish-language magazines whose explicit purpose was to undermine family
life and thus destroy Polish society; conversely Gassner prohibited the importation
of the ‘healthy’ publications produced in Germany under Goe
bbels’ fiat, like Mother
and Child.30
As for the Soviet Union, right up until February 1944 Goebbels bickered with
Rosenberg, Bormann, and the tiresome pedant Lammers over jurisdiction.31
Rosenberg regarded all of the Soviet peoples as sub-humans. Koch continued his
brutal policies in the Ukraine.32 Goebbels pleaded for a far-reaching proclamation
designed to win over the Russian peoples. He was in no doubt that a slogan that the
Germans were fighting the bolsheviks and not the Russian people would significantly
aid the propaganda battle.33 Hitler flatly opposed this: his view was that they could
hardly seize the Russian peasants’ last cattle at the same time as wooing them for
support.34 Knowing that Hitler and Himmler vehemently opposed it the German
army did not back Goebbels.35 Several times he resolved to discuss the issue with
Hitler, only to lose courage when he faced those steely blue-grey eyes.36
So the unproductive bickering with Rosenberg continued.37 Rosenberg demanded
that Goebbels shut down Taubert’s eastern propaganda unit. ‘It’s perfectly obvious,’
770 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels wrote to Hitler, ‘that I as propaganda minister should have responsibility
for all propaganda throughout the Reich.’38 The finance ministry cut off all his funds
for propaganda work in the east.39 When Bormann conveyed his protests to the Wolf’s
Lair, Hitler—after further delay—agreed that all propaganda should be in one hand,
and he signed a decree to this effect in August, allowing Goebbels to attach a propaganda
field office (Reichspropagandaamt) to each Nazi governor in the east.40 But
time was already running out: by the time they were in place (and then only in
Minsk, Riga, Reval, and Kaunas41) it would be February 1944 and the Nazi dominion
was coming to an end. Goebbels blamed Rosenberg. ‘Now we’ve missed the bus,’ he
sourly observed in February 1944.42
Their unsettled policies toward the captive lieutenant-general Andrei Vlasov further
illustrated this rift at the top. This renegade Russian offered to raise an army of
fellow prisoners to overthrow bolshevism in Russia. Goebbels backed him; again
Himmler and Hitler did not.43 When Hitler did grudgingly allow the project to go
ahead, it was purely as a dishonest propaganda ploy.44 Goebbels’ radio stations thereupon
took up Vlasov’s cause. After hearing one such broadcast on his automobile
radio in July, Himmler wrote, ‘I forbid the S.S. once and for all to fall in, in any way
whatsoever, with the entire bolshevik-Vlasov act which the Wehrmacht are staging
and which the Führer has so clearly rejected.’45
On the very next day the Soviet government established near Moscow the mirrorimage
of the Vlasov movement—a Free Germany Committee under the communist
writer Erich Weinert.46 Its members were a ragbag of captured German officers,
Jews, and other emigrés; its first manifesto was signed by Goebbels’ old sparring
partners in the Battle for Berlin, Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck. Two months
later the Russians formed a renegade League of German Officers—primarily those
captured at Stalingrad like General Walter von Seydlitz.47
Stalingrad had deeply afflicted German morale. The relatives of the one hundred
thousand missing German soldiers had been dismayed by Goebbels’ revelations about
the fate of the Polish prisoners in Soviet hands.48 The slew of nightly British raids on
the Ruhr, coinciding as they did with a swingeing cut in the meat ration, further
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 771
eroded morale. Moreover the German submarine campaign was in disarray as the
British introduced new radar devices.49 Germany was passing through a trough in the
waves, said Goebbels; but the waves seemed to be getting ever taller.50 Women shoppers
in Berlin were heard openly cursing this ‘damned war.’51 They inveighed against
Göring, and sometimes even against Hitler. Goebbels wished that he could persuade
these two to speak, or at least to pay their respects in a Ruhr city. Limping down
Wilhelm Strasse with Dr Naumann after dining with Hitler in May he spoke pointedly
of the need to instal a clear political leadership at home.52
Speaking alone with Goebbels in his private quarters in the Chancellery, Hitler
again—allegedly—suggested they whip up more antisemitic propaganda as a
smokescreen. Goebbels pointed out that it already accounted for eighty percent of
their overseas broadcast output. The virus was already implanted throughout Europe.
Antisemitism was steadily rising overseas, and Goebbels was proud to take the
credit.53 Turning to the bombing war, Hitler ruled out copying the Japanese example
of executing captured Allied air crews. The Allies would shortly have a hundred thousand
more German prisoners, taken in Tunisia, and this probably influenced his decision.
He was sick of war, he told Goebbels. He longed to take off his field-grey
uniform and become a human being again. He was sick of his generals too: they were
all liars, disloyal, reactionary, and hostile to national socialism.54 Goebbels will not
have disagreed.
THE imminent final loss of North Africa faced Goebbels with the problem of explaining
how Field Marshal Rommel had been spirited out of Tunisia to safety two months
before.55 Over tea with Goebbels and Berndt, a dispirited and embittered Rommel
said that the Italians really were useless as fighters.
Italy was clearly the Allies’ next invasion target, with Sicily particularly at risk.
Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris however boasted to Goebbels that he had recovered
from a corpse washed ashore in Spain a secret letter to General Sir Harold Alexander
revealing that the Allies would invade Sardinia.56 Goebbels—like Hitler—suspected
a British plant, and they were right.
772 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
He did not know what to make of the pink-faced and flabby fingered Abwehr chief.
At Colonel Martin’s pleading he had first met Canaris a month earlier.57 Flourishing
a sheaf of papers Canaris claimed to have correctly predicted the strength of Soviet
armour before Barbarossa and the site of the Allied invasion of North West Africa in
November 1942. ‘Despite all the assertions,’ dictated Goebbels, unconvinced, ‘our
political and military Intelligence just stinks.’58
IN the middle of May 1943 the last Axis positions in Tunisia were overrun. As with
Stalingrad, Goebbels had prepared an impressive radio ceremony to cushion the news.
Hitler forbade the broadcast. Goebbels made no secret of his irritation.59
To set the loss of North Africa in perspective he wrote a clever leading article
entitled ‘With Sovereign Calm.’ ‘A victory of initially only the barest significance can
turn out to be decisive in a war,’ he argued, ‘while one that has been contested over
immense areas and at the cost of many men and much material may soon pale into
insignificance.’ Let nobody claim that the loss of North Africa was on the same historical
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