The American bombers were also becoming more active at long range, but bloody
losses at Schweinfurt and elsewhere still kept them at a respectful distance from
Berlin. From the interrogations of captured American aircrews, Goebbels deduced
that many were homesick and few had wanted to fight Germany.18
The British were still the greater danger, and not every city was as well prepared as
Berlin. Using German émigrés—the very people whom Goebbels had hounded out
of Germany—to broadcast confusing orders to the defences, the British concentrated
444 heavy bombers on Kassel on October 22: 380 dropped their bombs within
three miles of the aiming point, a colossal concentration which unleashed Germa-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 797
ny’s second firestorm. Sixty-five percent of the city was destroyed.19 Goebbels arrived
there on November 5 to investigate the disaster. The local gauleiter Karl Weinrich
turned up late at the freightyard where the minister’s train was forced to halt, then
drove off downtown in a heated, armoured limousine; Goebbels followed in an opentopped
Volkswagen with the local police chief at his side.20 Much had been done to
prepare Kassel for air raids, but not enough: in other cities the gauleiters had ordered
basement connecting-walls torn down to provide tunnels of escape in the
event of firestorms. Weinrich, the worst type of good-time gauleiter, had done nothing
even to evacuate the children.21 Goebbels harangued the Party dignitaries in the
still undamaged city hall. ‘I expect that you realize, Mister Weinrich,’ he concluded
sarcastically, ‘that the British can be blamed for only a fraction of the five thousand
dead in Kassel—including a thousand children.’ (The death toll from the firestorm
rose to eight thousand, nearly six thousand of them killed by carbon monoxide
fumes.)22 Goebbels had Weinrich dismissed immediately from the party and from all
his offices.23
Hartmann Lauterbacher, the young gauleiter of Hanover who drove them up the
autobahn to his city, was all that Weinrich was not. He had prepared his city well,
with shelters big enough for thousands, underground command posts, water tanks,
and mobile kitchens. In the thick of one raid he had led police and soldiers through
the blazing streets to rescue four thousand civilians entombed in a bunker and in
danger of asphyxiation.24
These latest raids taught Goebbels and his men a lot for Berlin. He issued instructions
that bunkers had to have wider exits and be built in open spaces (he withheld
from the public the gruesome details of what had happened inside Hamburg’s superheated
bunkers).25 On the same date he forbade military honours for the burial of
bomber crews, deeming funeral music, graveside salvos, and official wreaths inappropriate
accompaniments for the burial of ‘mass-murderers’.26
THE Russian advance gathered momentum. The Dniepr line was breached. The Red
Army retook Katyn. Goebbels resigned himself to Soviet claims that the Nazis had
798 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
themselves carried out the Katyn massacres. ‘In fact,’ he conceded, perhaps referring
obliquely to the fate of the Jews whom he had expelled, ‘that’s one problem that’s
going to cause us a lot of difficulty in future. The Soviets will indubitably take pains to
find as many such mass graves as possible to pin onto us.’27 Putting Nazi officers on
trial in Kharkov the Russians alleged that they had used ‘gas vans’ for exterminations.
Tackled by Fritzsche about these allegations, Goebbels promised vaguely to ask Hitler
and Himmler about them.28
He certainly asked Hitler more often now about striking another deal with Stalin.
He shared Himmler’s nervousness about Ribbentrop’s ‘lack of flexibility’ in foreign
policy. He clutched at every straw. When Moscow informed Washington that they
were insisting on the Polish-Soviet border that Hitler had agreed to in 1939, Goebbels
hoped that this was an overture to Berlin.29
AIR raids had killed ten thousand more Germans during the month of October 1943.30
Over Berlin however the night skies were still silent. After three weeks of quiet,
Goebbels mused, one tended to forget all about air raids.31 November brought blankets
of low cloud, fog, and drizzle across the city—these probably closed down the
enemy bomber airfields too. If the bombers stood down until February or March
1944 their secret weapons should be ready. Ley told Goebbels that the boffins at
Peenemünde expected to have them operational by late January; young professor
Wernher von Braun had boasted that his rocket missiles would turn the tide of the
war against Britain.32
As the nights drew in, Goebbels wondered every evening whether the bombers
were coming back. He began to haunt his new two-storey command bunker under
Wilhelms Platz. From here, thirty feet below ground, he could follow the invading
bomber streams and watch as Schach and the men of the S.A. brigade ‘Feldherrnhalle’,
their uniforms distinguished by red tabs and piping, plotted the damage reports on a
perspex wall map of Berlin.33 Every household now had fire-buckets, syringes, sand
boxes, fire-beaters, shovels, sledgehammers and axes at the ready. Count von Helldorff
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 799
would be in charge of the fire-fighting. The air raid wardens had been drilled. Every
man in Berlin knew what to do if the firestorms came.
Goebbels had to leave Berlin for three days for the twentieth anniversary of the
Munich putsch. He listened with half an ear to General Jodl’s lecture to the gauleiters,
and with no interest at all to Göring’s.34 For Goebbels, the highlight was a dinner
alone with Himmler. They talked about security operations in Berlin.35 The People’s
Court and military tribunals in Berlin had crushed some unrest in Berlin caused by
the last air raids. Lieutenant-General Paul von Hase, the city’s Prussian, monocled
commandant, told Goebbels on the fifteenth that he had condemned a dozen officers
to death; Goebbels persuaded him to commute some of the sentences.36
Still the bombers had not come. Altogether Goebbels’ evacuation measures had
reduced the city’s population by some two million, to 3,300,204.37
FROM late November 1943 the British bomber commander Sir Arthur Harris—‘the
mass murderer,’ as Goebbels called him—now really did attempt to repeat in Berlin
what he had achieved in Hamburg. The city’s outline on the radar screens was unmistakeable,
with its hundreds of lakes, canals, and rivers. In sixteen air raids until the
spring Harris would commit over nine thousand heavy-bomber sorties against this
883 square-mile city, with the stated aim of killing as many of its inhabitants as possible,
using the most refined tactics that human ingenuity could devise.38
Flanked by special squadrons carrying electronic jamming equipment, approaching
stealthily behind showers of aluminium foil while decoy squadrons dropped marker
flares and feinted away to the north and south, the leading squadrons of Harris’ main
bomber force arrived over Berlin late on November 18. Seen from the ground it was
a frightening, Kafkaesque spectacle as the first waves of Pathfinder Lancasters arrived
above the clouds, their engines’ roar filling the horizons, and suddenly lit up
the night sky with flares, followed by deadly displays of aerial pyrotechnics coloured
in red, green, or yellow to indicate the different aiming points for each wave. The
searchlight beams probed and flickered, and silent flashes high above the clouds showed
800 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
that the ‘eighty-eights’ and the 105-millimetre heavy gun batteries defending
Goebbels’ city were engaging their first targets.
That first night only fifty or sixty of Harris’ bombers ventured all the way into
Berlin’s airspace. Damage was negligible. The city’s morale, astonishingly, soared. It
was like wearing a new white suit, said Goebbels, who ought to know: you were
terrified of the first mud-splash until it happened—after that you took the rest in
your stride.39
Four days later, on Sunday November 22, Harris tried again. With Berlin seemingly
safely shrouded in low, rainsoaked clouds Goebbels was speaking in a high school
in suburban Steglitz when a slip of paper was handed to him. His face perceptibly
paler, he continued but lost his thread. He had uttered only a few more sentences
when the sirens started. A phone call to the Wilhelms Platz bunker told him that the
bombers were already overhead. With bombs bursting all over the city he raced back
to the bunker, his car twice just missing fresh craters. The bunker was filled with the
clatter of teleprinters, hobnail boots, and unattended telephones. Chain-smoking,
he watched as S.A.men grease-chalked the first reports onto the perspex damagemap.
The Opera and the Schiller theatre were blazing; the Scala burlesque, and the
famous Ufa and Gloria Palace movie theatres—where Lida Baarova had been heckled
in 1938—were already gone. The government district was devastated. About
twelve hundred Berliners died and two hundred thousand more were left homeless
including both his mother and his mother-in-law—their home in Flensburger Strasse
flattened by a two ton blockbuster bomb.
For the first time in years Goebbels had no time to dictate a diary. The next evening
the sirens sounded again. He rode out the attack in the command bunker. Incendiaries
hit the State theatre and the Reichstag building but both blazes were extinguished.
The Kaiserhof hotel—another historic station in his via dolorosa—caught fire and
collapsed onto the bunker’s entrance. Gutterer, on duty at the propaganda ministry,
saved that building almost single-handed too. Goebbels called in fire brigades from
as far away as Hamburg. He appealed to Potsdam for troops to fight the fires. The
army had an emergency plan called Valkyrie; Major-General Hans-Günther von Rost,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 801
chief of staff of Third Army district, gave it a dry run and sent in not only infantry but
tanks as well, at two A.M. Goebbels angrily phoned Rost’s superior, General
Kortzfleisch, to order the tanks off the streets before foreign journalists saw them.40
He asked what the devil was going on: in July 1944 he would find out.
It was four A.M. before he got back to No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse. The house
was a sorry sight, its windows smashed but otherwise intact. He went down to the
sleeping cabin in his family bunker—its light-panelled walls embellished incongruously
with priceless paintings including Rembrandts, Spitzwegs, Rubens, and Giottos
also sheltered from the inferno outside.
Magda was already there. ‘One of the wildest nights of my life,’ he dictated the
next morning, referring to the raids. ‘But I think we came out on top.’ He woke to a
searing headache and the smell of burning. There was no power, heating, or water; he
could neither wash nor shave. He groped his way out of the bunker by candlelight.
Fifty thousand troops, conjured up seemingly from nowhere by the army, were already
clearing the streets and railroad tracks. He dictated a proclamation to the
Berliners, and since there were no newspapers he had a million copies handed out at
communal feeding centres.41 His ministry was stone-cold and windowless. Momentarily
disheartened and needing fresh faith, he did what Churchill did—he had his
chauffeur Alfred Rach drive him into the worst hit areas and let the crowds throng
round and slap him on the back. He spied one old crone making the Sign of the Cross
over him and chanting a blessing, and he did not even take that amiss. He heard one
shout of ‘plutocrat!’ as his limousine bumped past, from somebody who may not
have recognized him.42
Seventy-five percent of the city’s labour force turned up for work that day. That
was not bad. As dusk fell the sky still glowed red. Beppo Schmid’s monitoring posts
heard the bombers preparing to take off but bad weather intervened. Goebbels drove
out to the totally undamaged Schwanenwerder peninsula: their house was warm,
the phones here and the radio worked, and there was hot water in the bath. This third
attack had taken eight hundred lives, and there were now four hundred thousand
802 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
homeless, but morale was still high.43 The B.B.C claimed that up to forty thousand
had died in the two latest raids. Goebbels allowed them their belief.
Lunching with him in the badly damaged Chancellery, Lammers told him that
Hitler had ordered all the ministries to stay put. Dr Goebbels was to set up an Air
War Inspectorate to prepare every city in Germany for a similar ordeal.44 The early
symptoms of another raid again fizzled out that night.
As munitions minister, Albert Speer was more visibly shaken by the raids when he
lunched with Goebbels on Thursday the twenty-sixth. It was not just that his ministry
had been totally burned out; Berlin housed one-third of the Reich’s electrical
engineering plants, mainly in the Siemensstadt suburb. He warned Goebbels that
their V-weapons would not now be operational until March. ‘They keep dropping
back,’ noted Goebbels.45
At first that night the British seemed bent on Frankfurt, but that was a feint and
their bomber formations suddenly turned north to Berlin. The Alkett plant and two
more of Berlin’s finest opera houses were hit. Alkett’s, the only assembly plant for
the assault gun, produced one-quarter of all tanks other than the Panther and the
Tiger, and nearly half of all field artillery. Without hesitation Goebbels ordered Count
von Helldorff to save Alkett’s. ‘Tanks are more vital than operas right now,’ he told
Schach, and pushed the button on his console to tell Hitler of his decision.46 Three
more times he phoned Hitler that night. Speer, joining him in the bunker afterwards,
talked of dispersing Alkett’s wrecked production lines to safety elsewhere. Beppo
Schmid reported that they had shot down a hundred of the attacking bombers, and
this raid had killed only eight Berliners. Through secret propaganda channels, Goebbels
however spread the whisper around the world that Berlin was finished.47
He felt like a hero. The next day he addressed the entire Reich Cabinet. After he
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 131
