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Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

Page 127

by Roger Manvell; Heinrich Fraenkel


  plane as Britain’s expulsion from Europe at Dunkirk. ‘For years,’ he scoffed,

  the Allies have committed their entire armed might—to capture what is in effect

  just barren desert.’ ‘We have suffered a setback at the periphery,’ he conceded, ‘but

  the centre of our war effort remains totally undamaged.’60

  This was an unfortunate turn of phrase, as Mr Churchill was now raining explosives

  and fire bombs on Hitler’s cities night after night. Goebbels pronounced once

  more that it was the British who had started this bombing of civilians. It was casuistry

  —true or false, it hardly mattered. Essen, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, and Duisburg

  were ravaged within days. Sometimes a handful of Mosquito bombers, each armed

  with a one-ton sting, left a trail of sirens across Germany that drove twenty-five

  million Germans into their wet and stinking air raid shelters.61 In one daring lowlevel

  raid the heavy bombers breached several Ruhr dams.62 The deluge drowned

  seven hundred people. Goebbels learned that the British were saying that a Jewish

  emigré had master-minded this raid.63 On the evening of May 21 Speer, Ley, and

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 773

  Funk came to see him. They all agreed that the country was in the grip of a ‘Göring

  crisis’—an implicit criticism of Hitler too for tolerating the indolent Reichsmarschall.

  In Das Reich on May 30 he lectured his readers on ‘The Nature of Crises.’ Was it not

  Schlieffen, he asked, who had remarked that a battle without a crisis was just a skirmish?

  Just as a man who survived an illness felt a new urge to live, a nation too must

  sense ‘the healing power of crisis.’64 And so his silver prose ran on—column after

  column of clever dialectics. But he could not fool everybody all the time. Still resting

  at the Berghof, Hitler checked the speech which Goebbels proposed to deliver on

  June 5. Where the minister had written when victory is ours, Hitler crossed it out and

  inked in instead, ‘When this struggle is over.’65

  THE speech, to Berlin munitions workers, was his first devoted to the enemy raids.

  ‘There is only one thought in the mind of the entire German people,’ he said, ‘and

  that is to repay the enemy in his own coin.’ He spoke of his tour of the Ruhr cities:

  2,450 people had been burned alive in Wuppertal on May 29. ‘One day,’ he promised,

  ‘the hour of retribution will come.’ He then launched into a fresh diatribe against

  the Jews. ‘The complete elimination of the Jew from Europe is a question not of

  morality,’ he shrilled, ‘but of the security of the state.’66

  Compounding his problems, both he and Magda were ill. Magda had spent several

  weeks in hospitals undergoing a painful operation ; her trigeminal nerve was playing

  up.67 The surgeon had botched the operation, and the minister sent her off to the

  White Hart clinic in Dresden to recuperate.

  Infuriatingly, his own eczema had returned. Professor Morell’s assistant Dr Weber

  treated Goebbels with multivitamins, the muscle tonics Tonophosphan and Cortiron,

  and injections of Morell’s proprietary liver extract; the latter gave the minister three

  days of excruciating headaches. ‘The Reich minister now has so many pockmarks

  and scars,’ Weber advised Morell, ‘that injections are virtually impossible.’ In mid-

  July Dr Weber reverted to his own Homoseran injections. Finally cured, Goebbels

  gave him two thousand marks, a radio set, and a signed photograph as a reward.68

  774 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH

  Magda stayed in Dresden until August. Goebbels sent his young and personable

  chief aide Dr Werner Naumann, who had just turned thirty-four, to join her there on

  sick-leave.69 Leaving Hadamowsky or Fritzsche to run the ministerial conferences—

  the participants hung around outside swapping blasphemous jokes about Hitler and

  their minister—Goebbels spent Whitsun out at Lanke alone, recovering from the

  eczema.70 With Magda away, some things had not changed. One evening a sentry

  detected a pretty girl cycling inside the perimeter fence and apprehended her: at

  which an angry figure limped out of the trees ahead. Volubly cursing the soldier,

  Goebbels took charge of his young female guest, an actress whom he had invited

  round for the evening.71

  As Düsseldorf, Bochum, Oberhausen, Cologne, and Krefeld were devastated by

  two-thousand ton raids during June, Goebbels ordered newsreel teams to capture

  the harrowing scenes for the archives. Dr Gutterer thoughtlessly included some of

  the footage in one week’s newsreel. The screen images of mangled, headless infants

  and bulldozers tipping bodies into pits were so terrifying that Magda and the children

  burst into tears at the preview. ‘If these pictures have this effect on my national

  socialist family,’ shrieked Goebbels at his next conference, ‘just imagine the utter

  panic in the public!’ ‘Whoever let that through understands as much about propaganda

  as a cow about the quantum theory!’72 Colonel Martin asked Magda about her

  husband’s callous behaviour toward his staff. ‘If he talks with the children for longer

  than a couple of minutes,’ she replied with a sigh, ‘you can be sure that eventually

  they will all be in tears. They just can’t take his brand of mordent sarcasm.’73

  Guided by increasingly accurate radar, the enemy’s bombers were pulverising the

  Ruhr. Goebbels followed them around, speaking in city after city in an undeclared

  personal campaign for Hitler’s succession. He ordered cities to evacuate all nonessential

  personnel —old people’s homes into ancient castles and monasteries, entire

  schools to provinces remote from the enemy’s airfields.74 Over the next months

  he issued 157 civil defence circulars covering every aspect of the new warfare from

  the procurement of excavators for digging mass graves, the escorting or burial of

  enemy bomber crews, and the use of subway systems for fleeing through firestorms—

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 775

  a new phenomenon in war—to the recovery of the air raid dead.75 He ordered static

  water tanks to be built everywhere. ‘In the big conflagrations,’ Berndt explained to

  the gauleiters, ‘many people have died even after the All Clear was sounded because

  they lacked the water to soak their clothing and face-cloths to enable them them to

  breathe.’76 Speaking that day at the mass funeral of the Wuppertal air raid victims

  Goebbels swore vengeance in their name, and at another rally in the Westphalia Hall

  at Dortmund, as the wind blew the acrid smell of a burned-out city through the

  building’s windowless sockets, he confided to twenty thousand Ruhr workers that

  their scientists were working on that revenge even now.77

  In Stalingrad, he told his staff the next day, wedging his knees nonchalantly against

  his desk, a quarter of a million soldiers had suffered. But in the Ruhr seven or eight

  million ordinary people were facing sudden death each night. ‘Hats off to them all,’

  he said. ‘Magnificent!’ And he snapped a flawless imaginary salute to the unseen

  heroes.78

  JUNE 1943 was nearly over. Hitler was about to return to the Wolf’s Lair in East

  Prussia for Citadel, his tank battle against the Russians at Kursk. Before leaving he
<
br />   called Goebbels down to the Berghof. Comfortably surrounded by his friends and

  his favourite oil paintings he listened sympathetically to Goebbels’ nightmarish descriptions

  of the air raids and assured him that he was going to speak his mind to the

  Reichsmarschall the next day. The damage that mattered, he continued, was that to

  the arms factories; the human casualties were regrettable, but inevitable. He actually

  welcomed the destruction of the cities; after the war Germany would have fifteen

  million motor cars, most of them the new Volkswagens, and the fusty and ill-bricked

  cities of old would never sustain the load.79 He spoke to Goebbels of their coming

  ‘revenge weapons’—mysterious missiles which would soon rain down on London.

  He admitted that their U-boats had been thwarted, but soon they would return to

  their hunting grounds, equipped with noise-making decoys and top-secret torpedoes.

  80

  776 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH

  Turning to the eastern front Hitler told him he was going to make ‘a few necessary

  adjustments’ to the line which might well cost the Russians several armies. Stalin had

  nothing to match the new Panther and Tiger tanks. But, he admitted, he had been

  forced by the winter disasters to abandon his old plans to occupy the Caucasus and

  march into the Middle East. If the Italians deserted the Axis, Germany would fight

  on alone—on Italian soil. ‘He no longer trusts them out of his sight,’ commented

  Goebbels afterwards. It was because of the Italian factor that he was determined not

  to get too embroiled at Kursk. After supper that evening he found Hitler quiet and

  pensive as they chatted around the open fire. Bormann’s teleprinter network reported

  that the British had delivered another raid on Wuppertal—2,750 more people

  had been burned alive.

  ‘When I see the Führer in the middle of the night on the Obersalzberg,’ dictated

  Goebbels to his faithful scribe Otte, ‘bowed down by all his cares, my love and veneration

  of him just grow stronger.’

  1 See unpubl. diary, Apr 3, 1943: ‘Both antisemitism and anti-bolshevism are currently our

  best propaganda weapons.’ (NA film T84, roll 265).

  2 Fritzsche interrogation, Sep 29, 1947 (StA Nuremberg, F86).

  3 Diary, Feb 17, 1943.

  4 Ibid., Mar 1, 3–6, 20, Apr 1, 1943; for further sources see David Irving, Accident. The

  Death of General Sikorski (London, 1967), which draws on the Polish records of the Sikorski

  Institute in London.

  5 Diary, Apr 9, 1943 (from French files, on NA film T84, roll 272).

  6 Tel from Smolensk to RSHA dept III C, Apr 4, 1943; forwarded to Gutterer (BA file

  R.55/115).

  7 Ibid., Apr 16, 1943; the former NKVD officer Petr Soprunenko, who signed the Katyn

  death warrant, lives in Moscow as an old age pensioner (1994).

  8 MinConf., Apr 8, 1943 (B file R.55/115).

  9 Diary, Apr 14; Semer, ‘Apr 12, 1943’. For MinConf’s and further RMVP documents on

  Katyn see BA file R.55/115.

  10 Unpubl. diary, Apr 16, 1943.

  11 Ibid., Apr 17, 1943. On the Soviets’ insistence Katyn was added into the indictment at

  the Nuremberg trials and they executed several German officers after a trial in Leningrad in

  1945.

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 777

  12 Ibid., Apr 17, 28; Dittmar records on Apr 19, 1943 a ‘very good Goebbels speech’ on

  Katyn at a conference in the ministry.

  13 Unpubl. diary, Apr 9, 1943.

  14 Dittmar entered in his Jul 5, 1943 diary: ‘To the propaganda ministry. Big event of the

  day: Polish emigré leader Sikorski killed at Gibraltar—by [British] Secret Service?’ (Author’s

  film DI–60).

  15 SD report No.377, Apr 19, 1943.

  16 JG ordered it kept secret (diary, May 8, 1943).

  17 SD report, Jul 26, 1943 (NA film T175, roll 265, 9996ff.)

  18 Schmidt-Leonhardt report, Nov 11, 1942 (Yivo, Occ E2-107); the draft of an agreement

  between JG and Frank was ready on Jan 25, 1943.—Report to JG, Apr 10, 1943 (NA

  film T81, roll 671, 9447ff).

  19 Diary, May 10; Hans Junge diary and Bormann diary, May 9, and note of May 11 (BA,

  Schumacher collection, 371).

  20 Diary, May 22.—Himmler to Frank, May 26 (NA film T175, roll 128, 4157ff); see

  Himmler note, Jun 19 (NA film T175, roll 94, 0506f), and the final report of the SS and

  police chief (HSSuPf) in Galicia, Jun 30, 1943 (Hoover Libr., MS DS.135 G2G37).

  21 Unpubl. diary, Jun 25, 1943 (Author’s film DI–52; IfZ).

  22 Ibid., Apr 15, 17, 1943.

  23 For the statistics on Jews in the Russian communist party see Korherr to Himmler, Apr

  28, 1943 (NA film T175, roll 54, 6439).

  24 JG, ‘Der Krieg und die Juden,’ in Das Reich, May 9, previewed in Frankfurter Zeitung and

  other journals on May 8, issued by the RPL to all party orators and propagandists on May 4,

  and as a special edition by the AO, the party’s overseas organisation, in Jun 1943 (NA film

  T81, roll 134, 8933a).—See Berndt’s Propaganda Parole on this, Apr 30, 1943 (NA film

  T81, roll 672, 0754ff).

  25 Diary, May 8; Times, May 8, and NYT, May 9, 1943.

  26 Semler, ‘Jan 10, 1944.’

  27 Bormann circular No.33/43, Jul 11, 1943 (BDC file 238/II); it is pertinent to note that

  this was classified only geheim (secret), not gRs (top state secret).

  28 Actually: 31,283. See the table in Kempner, 186.

  29 Heinz Lorenz interrogation, Dec 3, 1947 (IfZ, ZS.266)

  30 Fritzsche interrogation, Nov 1, 1946 (StA Nuremberg, F86).

  31 See unpubl. diary, Sep 27, 1942; and the JG/Rosenberg correspondence, Feb 1943–Feb

  1944 (Yivo, Occ E.19).

  32 Diary, Apr 6, 16, May 19, 20, 1943.

  33 Ibid., Jan 14, 21, Feb 10, 14, 16, Mar 2, 8, 9, and passim, 1943.

  34 Ibid., Feb 10, 1943.

  35 Ibid., Jan 7, Mar 2, Apr 16, 1943.

  36 E.g., ibid.Jan 21, 1943.

  37 Correspondence in Yivo file Occ E.12.

  38 JG submission to Hitler, May 22 ‘1942’ (read: 1943) (Yivo, Occ E.18–19).

  39 Naumann to Bormann, Jun 12, 1943 (Yivo, Occ E.12).

  778 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH

  40 Unpubl. diary, Jun 25; Führer decree of Aug 15 (Yivo, Occ E.19; BA file R.55/799);

  and see Taubert (Leiter Ost), proposal for erection of propaganda apparatus in the eastern

  region on the basis of the Führer’s decision, Auf 21, 1943 (Hoover Libr., Fritzsche papers.)

  41 Taubert report (Yivo, G–PA–14).

  42 Diary, Feb 5, 1944.

  43 Himmler to Stuckart, Jul 16, 1943 (NA film T175, roll 33, 2113).

  44 Führer conf. with Keitel and Zeitzler, Jun 8 (stenogramm on NA film T78, roll 788,

  ND: 1384–PS); and see Heinz Danko-Herre (Foreign Armies East) diary (IfZ, ZS.406), and

  Etzdorf to German foreign ministry, Jun 17, 1943 (Pol.Archiv des AA, Etzdorf papers.)

  45 Himmler to Gunter d’Alquèn, Jul 11, 1943 (BDC file, d’Alquèn).

  46 On this committee see Gutterer’s files in ZStA Potsdam, Rep.50.01, vol.799 and Yivo

  files Occ E FD.1 and 4.

 

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