less by striking instantly.17 With the issue still unresolved, he flew back to Berlin on
the twenty-seventh. Gutterer, Martin, and Hadamowsky met him at Tempelhof with
his corpulent chief of staff Gerhard Schach. Radiating false confidence he assured
them (untruthfully) that Hitler had taken all the necessary decisions: ‘Unfortunately
I am not at liberty to tell you what they are.’
Goebbels spoke of his puzzlement at Canaris’ failure to give any warning of Mussolini’s
overthrow.18 ‘I am not having anybody “arresting” me,’ he said. He stowed a
6·35 millimetre pistol in his desk, and set up an in-house machine-gun company for
the protection of the ministry.19 Against whom? The summer air was clammy, he
could hardly breathe, and nobody spoke their true feelings any more.
AS a distraction from the worsening news he had his two oldest girls, Helga and
Hilde, brought into Berlin. That night, July 27–28, over seven hundred British bombers
dropped 2,312 tons of bombs on Hamburg creating a firestorm as the entire centre,
tinder-dry in the summer drought, caught fire. There was no escape from the holocaust.
Twice Goebbels phoned Karl Kaufmann, the Hamburg gauleiter, one of their
best: ‘We’ve got fifteen thousand dead,’ shouted Kaufmann, his voice cracking. (Richard
Otte, taking dictation the next morning, thought that Goebbels might even
have said fifty thousand.) He was talking of evacuating the whole city; Goebbels
agreed, and ordered all non-essential personnel to leave Hamburg at once.
As Goebbels entered his ministerial conference at eleven A.M. Berlin’s sirens
sounded. He waited wordlessly for the nerve-wracking wail to die away. From time
to time slips of paper were laid before him, but the American squadrons turned away
short of Berlin.20
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 785
Speer said the next day, ‘If the raids continue on this scale three months will see us
relieved of many a problem that exercises us today. Things will slide downhill smoothly,
irrevocably, and comparatively fast!’21 The raids did continue. That night the British
dropped 2,277 tons of bombs. Speer told Hitler that if this happened to six more
cities the war would be over.22 ‘Things are blacker than Speer paints them,’ exclaimed
Milch at an air ministry conference. ‘If we get just five or six more attacks like these
on Hamburg, the German people will just pack up, however great their willpower.’23
On the last night in July Goebbels had leaflets issued to every household ordering all
children, old people, and non-essential civilians to leave Berlin.24 When he addressed
a panicky meeting of ministers and state-secretaries, with Hitler’s sanction, in his
ministry on August 2, Milch kept shouting: ‘We have lost the war! Finally lost it!’
Goebbels had to appeal to his honour as a field-marshal before he would quieten
down.25
Subsequently Hitler agreed that Goebbels should brief all the ministers and statesecretaries
—but nobody else—like this more often, provided that he did so at the
Chancellery rather than in his own ministry, and provided he was consulted each
time first.26
It was another important step up the ladder of real power.
RUMOURS ran riot through Berlin’s rapidly emptying streets.27 One had it that 150,000
had died in Hamburg. Goebbels confidentially informed the gauleiters that 18,400
dead had been recovered so far; he asked them to use schoolchildren to spread counter-
rumours through their parents.28 Soon the whisper was that the reprisal bombardment
of London had secretly begun.29 In fact nearly fifty thousand people had
died in Hamburg, literally incinerated inside the bunkers, torn apart by explosives,
tossed into the flames by the fiery tornados.
With Berlin obviously Churchill’s next target for saturation raids, he forced the
pace of evacuation. Fifteen or twenty trains a day carried schoolchildren, infants,
mothers, and the elderly eastwards to safety.30 There was opposition from parents
and the host provinces, but Goebbels appealed to all the eastern gauleiters to display
786 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the proper ‘socialist spirit’ toward these people, who had often lost all they had.31 He
felt himself like the commander of an important battle front. He intended to show
the generals how to win. ‘In seven years,’ he told his staff, ‘I earned one title, as
Conqueror of Berlin. In seven weeks I intend to add another: its Defender.’32 He was
in his element. ‘Grievous though it was,’ he wrote to Hitler afterwards, ‘I never felt
as good as I did during the bombing of Berlin; because all the medal-hunters got cold
feet the moment the going got really tough.’33
He did not want a blood bath in his city. The evacuation was brought under control
as the party and welfare agencies struggled to get the frail and the defenceless out of
the railroad stations before the bomber hordes arrived. White-painted arrows appeared
at every street corner telling those who remained which way to run if
firestorms broke out.34 Slit trenches were dug in the streets and parks, water tanks
were built, and the remaining art treasures were crated up and trucked out to safety.
Removal vans carried Magda’s priceless carpets and porcelain out to Lanke, followed
two days later by an Aladdin’s hoard of antique furniture and silver toilet
articles, clocks, engraved cigarette boxes, desk furniture, candelabras, mirrors, powder
boxes, and inkwells along with gold-rimmed crystal ware, and a ten-foot by
fifteen-foot tapestry.35 Fearing that even the white-walled, horseshoe-shaped mansion
at Lanke was a landmark for bombers, Goebbels ordered it draped with eight
thousand square metres of camouflage netting.36
Deciding that they too were not essential after all, several of the more precious
members of the Berlin theatre community fled. Goebbels hauled the offenders back
and packed them off to the munitions factories. Writing an understated article, ‘A
Word about the Air War,’ in the newspapers after the public had noticed that he
missed a week after Mussolini’s overthrow, Goebbels called for discipline and a steadfast
heart from his Berliners. ‘What the British could take in the autumn of 1940—
for which more than one of us admired them at the time—we must now show we
too can take,’ he declared, and then turned the compliment as deftly as he uttered it:
‘But just as Britain turned a new page in the air war after 1940, so too we shall turn
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 787
a new page now.’ The Battle of Berlin, he announced, would soon be joined. ‘As
Berlin’s gauleiter, I shall not, of course, be leaving the capital.’37
In this defiant spirit he prepared his capital city for its hour of glory. He investigated
whether his own household bunker would withstand the latest enemy bombs.
Architect Hugo Bartels replied candidly that the concrete was thick enough for the
bombs of 1941, but they had got a lot bigger since then.38 Bartels also warned that if
a firestorm broke out any papers in the safe would be incinerated along with the
people in the bunker. ‘During an alert,’ Goebbels dictated on the sixth, ‘all floors of
Hermann-G�
�ring Strasse are to be manned by members of the guard, [Wilhelm]
Rohrssen [house manager] and Lüdecke.’ He added that Emil the butler was to take
not only the minister’s briefcase but also the pistol into the bunker—since Mussolini’s
arrest, Goebbels intended to be prepared for anything.39
Taking his immediate staff, Goebbels flew over to inspect the damage to Hamburg.
As their Junkers 52 droned across the first villa-dotted outskirts there was little to
be seen. ‘You always tend to expect the worst,’ said Goebbels, then caught his breath
as the plane banked and acres of charred and lifeless ruins unfurled like a black flag
from beneath the wing. Gauleiter Kaufmann, a small, spry figure, impressed him
deeply with what he had done. ‘I am convinced,’ said Goebbels as they flew back,
‘that we’d have won the war long ago if it was up to the party rather than the generals.’
40
He had unconsciously begun prefacing his utterances with the phrase ‘if I were
Führer,’ and venturing criticisms of their Führung—i.e., of what their Führer did.41
He could afford to. Thanks to his air-raid relief work his popularity was steeply rising,
while Göring’s was in terminal decline. Nothing, remarked Goebbels, was harder
to recapture than lost prestige. He had still not made up all the ground he had lost in
1938, he admitted.42
WITH the evacuation of two million civilians and almost all children, Berlin was now
ready. The nights were long enough for the British once more.
788 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
On August 23, 1943 they came, 625 heavy bombers carrying 1,765 tons of bombs,
but what followed was a bomber-massacre. Under Major Hajo Herrmann the fighter
defences had developed new tactics using largely visual sightings. The British lost
fifty-six bombers; 765 Berliners died, and only twenty-seven of these were children.
Goebbels took it as a very personal victory. On the last night of the month the enemy
came again. This time Milch had pots of magnesium blazing around the city and
planes laying vapour mists across which the marauding enemy bombers crawled like
clumsy insects on a fluorescent table-cloth. The Luftwaffe brought in every available
fighter squadron, from as far afield as Denmark and central France.43 Of the 512
heavy bombers which reached Berlin, forty-seven were destroyed. Only thirteen
Berliners died, and no children at all. Mr Churchill had difficulty in mounting a third
raid at all. On September 3 he sent 295 bombers, all Lancasters; they lost twenty
after killing only 346 Berliners (one of them a child). Unable to sustain such losses
(126 bombers in three raids, and many more damaged beyond repair) he called off
the attack.44
Coming so soon after the holocaust in Hamburg, this victory gave a palpable boost
to Berlin’s morale.45 There were also fringe benefits as thousands of captured British
airmen, Churchill’s erstwhile elite, passed through the Dulag Luft interrogation centre.
Milch recommended throwing parties for these Englishmen with high-class callgirls
—he understood that Goebbels had ‘girls on hand for such purposes’; Gutterer
agreed, and briefed Milch to ask the prisoners about Lord Haw-Haw, about the bombing
atrocities against women and children, about the massacres at Katyn and Vinnitsa,
and about the Jews.46 In January 1944 Goebbels would ask for a breakdown of captured
aircrews, to prove his theory that Mr Churchill was using primarily Canadians
and New Zealanders for his ‘terror’ raids.47
EARLY on September 8, 1943 the telex machines again began to rattle out disquieting
rumours about Italy. At five-twenty P.M. Lieutenant Oven alerted Goebbels that Eisenhower’s
HQ had announced that Italy had capitulated. At six P.M. the B.B.C.
confirmed it. With difficulty Goebbels got a line to Rome. The embassy there was
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 789
frankly incredulous as the king and Badoglio were still denying the reports. Shortly
the switchboard lamp labelled ‘Der Führer’ blinked: Hitler gruffly instructed Goebbels
to take the night train out to Rastenburg. He had anticipated this treachery, aided by
intercepts of transatlantic phone calls from Churchill to Roosevelt revealing the Italian
plans. He instructed Rommel to invade northern Italy at once. ‘You cannot break
your word twice in one century,’ dictated Dr Goebbels, alluding to Italy’s earlier
defection in 1915, ‘without having your political escutcheon stained for ever more.’48
A summer downpour drenched Berlin as his train pulled out at nine-twenty P.M.
that evening. Since his special saloon coach had been shunted out of Berlin to safety,
four regular sleeping compartments had been emptied of their indignant occupants
to make room for him. Here on the train he found Professor Hofer, who was to
repair the faulty surgery on Magda’s jaw.49 Hofer told him that it was vital to get
Hitler to broadcast to the people.
Hitler had spent the whole of the historic previous day flying down to Zaporozh’ye
to see Manstein, then back to his HQ at the Wolf’s Lair. He had not retired until five
A.M. Despite this and the shocking news about Italy he was poised and optimistic.50
He sent for Goebbels straight after breakfast and bragged that he was going to wipe
the floor with the Italians: he was ready to write off all of Italy south of the Apennines.
In Russia too, he would fall back, building an East Wall along the Dniepr river.
Finding him in such a realistic mood, Goebbels ventilated the possibility of cutting a
deal with Stalin. Hitler however declined—‘And quite right too,’ dictated Goebbels
prudently afterwards to Otte, ‘given the crisis in the east.’ Hitler seemed more inclined
to dealing with the west: surely the British must see reason eventually? Here it
was Goebbels who disagreed, although he did ponder whether taking Sicily might
satisfy Britain’s imperialist appetite. ‘Sooner or later,’ Goebbels reflected, ‘we shall
find ourselves having to lean one way or the other.’51
For hours that day—the Wolf’s Lair diary shows him lunching and dining with
Hitler, and taking tea with him until nearly four A.M.—Goebbels pleaded with Hitler
to broadcast to the nation. At 6:35 P.M. the next day, September 10, he finally had
him before a microphone, speaking a twenty-page script down the ministry’s special
790 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
line to a tape machine in Berlin. Hitler’s broadcast expressed concern about the
‘unique injustice’ done to Mussolini; but privately he was more callous. Ice-cold
pragmatism, he told Goebbels, would dictate his decisions from now on. Now Germany
would retrieve the South Tyrol after all, and all of Austria’s former dominions
as far as Venice. After a special communiqué about Rommel’s success in seizing
Rome—‘It is,’ dictated Goebbels, ‘almost like the great advances of 1939 and 1940
all over’—Hitler’s speech went out over the airwaves at eight P.M. The Russians were
not mentioned. But Hitler did promise Vergeltung, revenge for the air raids.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 129
