ended, Goebbels’ flunkies served lunch. The family came out of the bunker,
and while Magda clucked disapprovingly he described to his spellbound youngsters
everything he had seen. He told them proudly that their city was now the most
heavily bombed city in the world.35
The next American raid, by six hundred bombers on the eighth, killed only fortynine
Germans and twelve foreigners, and left a mere 1,500 homeless.36 Altogether
however the enemy air raids had now killed 116,000 Germans, Goebbels confidentially
recorded.37 He was impatient for the Vergeltung to begin. Hitler had ordered Speer to
have the V-weapons ready by April 15 but Speer, it seemed, was recovering from
depression in a clinic. Goebbels sent Naumann to visit him. Speer pleaded for a
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 815
further postponement. ‘Fourteen days won’t bake the cakes any better,’ snorted
Goebbels; he suspected that Speer was getting cold feet about reprisals.38
WHEN Goebbels arrived back at the Berghof at nine P.M. on March 13, Hitler flattered
him by meeting him at the door. Over dinner they debated why the British were still
refusing to heed the bolshevik peril. This had been the subject of Goebbels’ most
recent leader article in Das Reich..39 ‘Without doubt,’ observed Goebbels afterwards,
‘history will see Churchill … as the gravedigger of the British empire. With his
shortsighted, vindictive policies he has manœuvered Britain into a blind alley, with
no way out.’
It snowed heavily all day. Up in Eva Braun’s quarters the two men watched the
Kodachrome home movies that she had made in 1939 and 1942. The minister noted
silently how much Hitler had changed since then. He was stooped and aging, but his
confidence in Field Marshal Rommel was still unalloyed. After lunch the next day he
told Goebbels that he longed for the invasion to come so that he could make a clean
sweep in the west and then settle Stalin’s hash as well. He was even toying with the
idea of weakening the west deliberately in order to lure the Allies in. Goebbels did
not like that at all.40 Hearing rumours two weeks later that Hitler was indeed pulling
two S.S. divisions out of France, he sent Colonel Martin down to the Berghof to find
out, determined not to allow it to happen.41
March 1944 brought a decisive downturn in the German public’s morale. The
failure of the submarine war, the lack of reprisals, and the shrinking Reich frontiers
all gave the lie to Goebbels’ public assurances.42 Colonel Martin returned from
Berchtesgaden quoting General Jodl as stating that if the Allied invasion succeeded
they had lost the war.43 Tempers in the ministry frayed. After one row, Gutterer
snappily advised the minister to recommend a political end to the war before the
Reich itself was destroyed. That afternoon Gutterer reappeared with Dr Hermann
Muhs, the former Staatssekretär in the ministry of church affairs, and repeated the
treasonable advice. The worst of it was, Goebbels knew they were right. ‘Your proposals
are out of line,’ he retorted, and told them to clear out—‘I don’t want to see
816 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
you again.’44 Lying, he told Hitler that Gutterer was unwell, and started rumours
that he was involved in a newsprint-purchasing scandal.45 In a little ceremony on
Gutterer’s birthday he formally replaced him as Staatssekretär by Werner Naumann,
a truly meteoric rise for his young bureau chief who was at that time still only thirtyfour.
46
Premonitions of death occurred to Goebbels. ‘I want to be buried in some open
space in Berlin,’ he decided.47 The clock was already ticking. He had ordered the
cable radio network to provide a running commentary to city dwellers during air
raids. Insidious as a Chinese torture, the hollow tick of a radio clock now separated
the air raid bulletins.48 It got on the strongest nerves and Goebbels replaced it with a
melodious four-note jingle which he composed himself.
On April 1, 1944 Hitler appointed him City President of Greater Berlin.49 He
moved the office to the corner of Lietzenburger and Emser Strasse, and—in line
with total war—reduced its payroll immediately from six hundred to fifty.50 Vested
already with sweeping powers over life and death as Defence Commissioner, he authorized
other gauleiters to execute looters after air raids and to publicize those
executions immediately.51
On the eve of Hitler’s birthday he wrote him a fawning letter (‘How often has your
struggle been fraught with the same hazards as today’) and broadcast a eulogy contrasting
him with the ‘parliamentary mayflies’ among their enemies.52 ‘From the first
day of this war to this very hour there has not been, despite all the enemy’s vile
calumnies, one single case where a soldier has broken the oath sworn to his Führer
by laying down his arms; nor one workman who has betrayed his trust to the Führer
by stopping work. We know that our enemies abroad cannot understand this fact and
attribute it to brute force.’53 He closed by predicting, ‘He, and not his adversaries,
will be the man of the century.’ His call to the Berghof at two minutes past midnight
was, said Hitler, the first to reach him. He wished him ‘at least thirty’ happy returns.
As he drove out to Lanke, leaning back into the upholstery of his Mercedes, they
passed a church with a scorched and tattered swastika newly draped from its ruins.
‘It’s the Furtwängler spirit,’ he said: ‘When the going gets tough…!’54
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 817
The threat of invasion hung over all the Nazi leaders. Hitler admitted that he slept
only three hours a day. His limbs literally trembled when he speculated on the where
and when of the invasion.55 Goebbels too was edgy, though for another reason: he
had to compose a leader article for Das Reich which events might well overtake before
it appeared two weeks later.56 That Easter weekend the tides were again just
right. But no invasion came. Hitler reassured Goebbels that Rommel had an old
score to settle with the British and Americans. ‘So let them come!’ dictated the minister
in his diary. ‘I am very pleased with the sovereign calm with which the Führer
faces events.’57 But that very phrase—Hitler’s ‘sovereign calm’—belied his own deeper
misgivings. The public too was on tenterhooks. ‘The letters I am getting,’ he recorded
on May 13, ‘talk almost solely about the invasion. People are not only expecting
but looking forward to it. They’re only afraid that the enemy may not try.’58 As
April became May, and no invasion came, the S.D. reported that a sense of disappointment
was setting in.59
Twice in April and again on May 7 and 8 the American bomber squadrons struck at
industrial targets in Berlin.60 A thousand pound bomb scarred the Chancellery, but
life otherwise soon returned to normal. Goebbels remarked privately that General
Douhet, the much vaunted theorist of air power, had a lot to answer for. ‘First it was
our airforce generals who thought they could bomb Britain to a pulp, ripe for invasion.
Now the strategic-bombing wizards are on the other side.’61 As he addressed a
hundred officers i
n the Throne Room the sirens heralded yet another American visitation,
and he had to finish his speech (about the inevitability of a German victory) to
a skeptical audience wedged into the new bunker beneath Wilhelms Platz. In Das
Reich he again hinted at the coming V-weapons. ‘Terror,’ he wrote, ‘only works when
it is one-way.’
Mounds of rubble now choked the centre of his city, a breeding grounds for rats
which scavenged the flooded cellars for the remains of food or flesh. Typhus cases
reached epidemic proportions. Goebbels imposed quarantines and compulsory vaccination
programmes. He found himself suffering outbreaks of perspiration and headaches,
and one morning in May a red sore appeared on his face. ‘Do you think it
818 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
might be typhus,’ he asked his one-eyed adjutant Günter Schwägermann. A long
distance call was placed to Professor Morell in Bavaria. Morell sent round a specialist,
who diagnosed a simple cold-sore.62
Recovering out at Lanke with the children, Goebbels watched the frontiers of
Hitler’s Reich still steadily shrinking. The Crimea was lost, and in Italy the Allies
broke through at Monte Cassino. Harald Quandt’s commanding officer wrote that
the young lieutenant was doing well, and the minister sent cigars and cognac down
to his stepson’s unit.63 Magda had serious complications with her neck glands. She
saw Morell later in May when she went to spend an evening with Hitler; the doctor
insisted she must have an operation.64
THE American airforce had now begun ground-strafing attacks in Germany.65 On Sunday
May 21, 1944 their fighter planes, flying only a hundred feet up, machine-gunned
several people in fields and streets.66 (Nazi pilots had enjoyed doing the same in their
heyday). On the twenty-third Goebbels secured Hitler’s approval for an article encouraging
the public to lynch such airmen if they fell into their hands.67 At midday on
May 24 the Americans again bombed Berlin. Coming across a downed American
bomber pilot, Second-Lieutenant James G. Dennis, that day Goebbels’ propaganda
director Alfred-Ingemar Berndt drew his revolver and shot him in cold blood.68 As
Berlin burned, Goebbels began drafting the controversial article.
It is not provided for in any Article of war [he wrote] that any soldier who
commits a heinous crime is exempted from punishment by reason of superior
orders, particularly when such orders flagrantly violate every human ethic and
every international usage of war.
He angrily quoted from J.M. Spaight’s book on air power ‘Bombing Vindicated’
(‘It is not possible to draw a dividing line between the civilian population and the
combatants’), and from the News Chronicle. ‘We are in favour,’ the liberal London
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 819
daily newspaper had written, ‘of wiping out every living creature in Germany—
man, woman, child, bird, and insect.’ The left-wing British novelist H.G. Wells had
echoed these words, and even the Archbishop of York had officially described the
bombing of civilians as ‘the lesser evil.’ Goebbels claimed sanctimoniously to have
abstained from citing these words before lest his public take matters into its own
hands and ‘do until the pilots … as they have been doing to others.’ Such compunctions
no longer applied, he now suggested: ‘It is asking too much,’ he wrote, ‘to expect us
to use German troops to protect these child-murderers… Enough is enough.’
After checking again with Hitler he published the article in the Völkischer Beobachter.69
It provoked outrage—but also apprehension—in London.70 Ribbentrop had his press
chief telephone an angry protest to Goebbels. ‘This article,’ the propaganda minister
retorted, ‘was written at the Führer’s behest.’71
GOEBBELS had lost his awe of the officer caste ever since reading of how the Spartans
had born their diminutive and crippled king Agæsilaos joyously into battle on a shield.
That gave him a hero with whom he could identify. After writing the ‘lynching’ article
he travelled down to Sonthofen castle—a Nazi indoctrination centre—to speak
to front-line generals and admirals.72 Himmler had already addressed them, once
more mentioning his work in killing off the Jews.73 Wearing a dark blue suit, he
joined Goebbels, wearing the Party’s brown uniform, and the officers for dinner
afterwards.74 The text of Goebbels’ own pep talk is not preserved. He did not like
having to make one to officers. ‘I’m just not in the mood,’ he told Lieutenant Oven.
‘I’ve tried telling the Führer we’re wasting our time with these people.’ But he found
himself placed next to the exquisitely named Major-General Hyacinth Count
Strachwitz, and this officer, wearing the highest medals for valour, partly restored his
faith in the officer-aristocracy.75
He returned to Berlin via Augsburg—delivering here another pep-talk, though it
was hardly needed. Precisely three months after the British bombers had violated
this city, it was already back to normal.
820 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
THE evacuation of the Jews from Berlin had dwindled to a trickle, and the Jewish
problem had all but vanished from his diary. He had put Berndt in charge of an anti-
Jewish propaganda unit analogous to the old anti-Comintern.76 Other top Nazis still
wanted to proselytize, taking the anti-Jewish campaign worldwide. Rosenberg suggested
reinforcing their antisemitic propaganda among prisoners of war and foreign
labourers.77 Ribbentrop proposed setting up a phony ‘Jewish’ radio station to discredit
all Jews everywhere; but Goebbels feared it would rebound upon the credibility
of his own propaganda. Besides, he complained to Hitler, the proposal violated
the first law of all propaganda, simplicity.78
Hitler’s occupation of Hungary had brought over seven hundred thousand more
Jews into the Nazi fold. Goebbels had noted a few days before, ‘We’ll take care they
don’t abscond.’79 Eichmann extracted three hundred thousand for the Nazi war factories,
and deported most of the rest to Himmler’s camps.80 Goebbels noted, based
on his own experience in Berlin, that once the Hungarian government embarked on
anti-Jewish policies they would find themselves unable to stop.81 There was no going
back. He advised them to take care to justify their policies in the press.82
He did not conceal his cynicism about what he meant by ‘justification.’ Speaking to
two hundred hand-picked German government and business officials in his ministry’s
Throne Room in June, wearing a sober grey suit and an air of confidentiality, he
reiterated his propaganda canons: simplicity, constant repetition, and a language capable
of holding the intellectuals while not losing the common man.83 Nazi propaganda,
he told this select audience, had only two themes, the dual struggle against
bolshevism and the Jews. One day, when the great powers met around the conference
table, the question would arise how all this had come about. With one voice,
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