the type you can blindly rely on,’ said Hitler, and Goebbels saw tears start into his
eyes again.15
THEY parted, each invigorated by the other as so often before. Goebbels did not see
him again for two weeks. ‘One sometimes has the impression,’ he recorded on April
4, 1945, modifying his famous argument of 1943, ‘that the struggling German nation
is breaking out in a sweat at this, the direst moment of its crisis: and for the
layman it is hard to tell whether this is the herald of recovery or the harbinger of
death.’16
900 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
As the last ‘V–2’ rockets were launched at targets in Belgium, the S.S. newspaper
Das Schwarze Korps adopted the infelicitous line that while Germany now had no hope
of avoiding military defeat ‘The Idea’ must live on.17 Dr Goebbels inveighed against
the ‘too clever by half’ intellectuals who had penned such defeatist drivel. He issued
to the editors of surviving newspapers orders to underscore every act of old-fashioned
valour that came to their attention, and print stories about Allied atrocities
too—to prove that the British and Americans were no less barbarian than the
bolsheviks.
Under the code-name Werewolf he had persuaded Hitler to authorize the Luftwaffe’s
first and last major kamikaze operation on April 7, 1945.18 While the fighter-control
radio wavelengths were swamped with female choirs singing the Horst Wessel anthem
and voices urging the charioteers to die for Germany, over 180 Me109 fighter
pilots took off that day pledged to ram the American bombers. Although seventyseven
pilots died in the clash over the Steinhuder Meer west of Hanover, only twentythree
bombers were destroyed. Goebbels expressed disappointment at this meagre
yield of so much individual bravery.19
That next day’s leader article in Das Reich that used radical language; even he found,
reviewing the article, that he had ‘somewhat abandoned’ his previous ‘moderation
and reserve.’ The one slender consolation that he offered was that one way or the
other an end was indeed in sight. ‘The hour that precedes the sunrise,’ he reminded
his readers, ‘is always the darkest of the night. The stars that have cast their gentle
glow have already subsided and the deepest darkness draws in the approaching dawn.
None need fear that it will forget to come. The black veil of night will suddenly sink
and the sun will soar into the blood red firmament.’ As it was in nature, he concluded,
so it was in the lives of men and nations, particularly in war. ‘We are confronted
by bloodthirsty and vengeful foes who will put into effect all of their diabolical
threats if once they get the chance. Let nobody deceive himself on that score. The
one side will decimate the German people by bullets in the nape of the neck and by
mass deportations, the other will ausrotten by terror and starvation.’20
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 901
Hunger already stalked the streets. Learning that two hundred housewives had
stormed two bakeries in the impoverished suburb of Rangsdorf, Goebbels had two
of the ringleaders beheaded that night and ordered the fact announced by wall-poster
and via the muted voice of Berlin’s cable radio. He hoped to hear no more about
mobs storming bakeries after that.21 He asked his driver if the Berliners would fight
to defend their city. Rach answered bluntly, ‘They see no point. For them the war’s
already lost.’22
That weekend Magda came downtown from Schwanenwerder. ‘A rather melancholy
evening,’ Goebbels noted, ‘in which one piece of bad news after another came
crashing in.’ ‘We often find ourselves desperately asking where it is all going to end,’
he added. They talked over their own rapidly approaching end. Ribbentrop and Göring
were both extending feelers to the British via Switzerland, Sweden, and Italy. Unlike
the Russians and even the Americans, the British slapped down every such manœuvre.
‘There is not the slightest opening here,’ Goebbels noted. The Russians were allegedly
demanding East Prussia as the price of armistice and this was an impossible
demand for Hitler.23 A few days later Goebbels told Rach that the other ministers
were leaving—Göring had already sent his wife and child to safety; but, he added,
Magda and he had decided to stay.24
The Red Army was already overrunning Vienna. Goebbels blamed this on the softness
of their gauleiter von Schirach. He resolved that the Russians would not have a
walkover in Berlin. Volkssturm and Hitler Youth battalions were already drilling at
the bridges and streets which they would have to hold. But, Goebbels learned, stocks
of gasoline, food, and coal were already running low. The Americans boasted that
they had captured one hundred tons of Gold, the entire German reserves, in a saltmine
in Thüringia. Goebbels recalled that he had opposed Funk’s decision to evacuate
the Gold from Berlin.25 The railway board now admitted that they had taken steps
to transport the two wagon-loads of Gold back to Berlin—but the Easter weekend
had intervened.26
General Theodore Busse, whose Ninth Army was holding the Oder front, had assured
him that he would hold off the coming Soviet offensive. Goebbels hoped that
902 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
in the west General Walther Wenck’s Twelfth Army would seize the initiative against
the exposed American flank in Thüringia. As for the wider outlook, he took the
optimistic view to Count von Krosigk that all that mattered now was ‘staying on our
feet’ until the enemy coalition fell apart.27 The finance minister argued that it was not
enough to wait, but that the Reich could not expect serious results from sending out
second-class foreign ministry men—a reference to Ribbentrop’s recent abortive peace
initiative in Stockholm.28 ‘Goebbels agreed spiritedly,’ recorded Krosigk in his diary,
‘and confided to me that certain feelers have already been put out.’ Goebbels made
no secret that he still coveted Ribbentrop’s job, and hinted that Krosigk might put a
word in with Hitler. When the count pointed out that he had not seen Hitler for
years, Goebbels offered to set up an audience: Krosigk might start with budgetary
matters, the Führer would talk sooner or later about the broader situation, ‘and
that’s where you jump in.’ Nothing came of it.
ON the twelfth Goebbels paid his regular Thursday visit to the front, the Oder bridgehead
at Küstrin, only a few miles from Berlin, his car loaded with cigarettes and
cognac for the men. Like all populist statesmen it thrilled him to descend from the
Olympian heights to the levels at which the ordinary man fought, lived, and died. He
sat up smoking and drinking with General Busse’s staff until midnight had long passed.
Busse reassured him that his army would withstand the coming Soviet onslaught.
‘We’ll stand fast here until the Engländer kicks us up the arse,’ he roared.29
‘If there is any justice in history,’ Goebbels declaimed to the officers, ‘a turning
point must soon come—one like the miracle of the House of Brandenburg in the
Seven Years War.’
‘Who’s the empress who’s going to snuff it
this time, then?’ asked one of the colonels,
in a tone just short of sarcasm.
The propaganda minister drove back to Berlin. An air raid was under way. From
twenty-five miles away he could see the slow, lurid flashes as the blockbusters exploded,
the glittering showers of marker flares and target indicators cascading out of
the black, starless skies above—‘The darkness before the dawn.’ The streets were
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 903
deserted as he drove up to No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse, but there was a knot of
people waiting for him on the steps.
A babble of voices greeted him. Somebody thrust a Reuter’s bulletin into his hands:
The American president Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs that afternoon.30
Goebbels clutched the slip of paper, his polished, receding forehead illuminated by
the fires started by a shower of incendiaries on the Hotel Adlon—his gau headquarters
now—and the Reich Chancellery further down the street. His eyes glistened,
though with Goebbels true tears only rarely came. ‘Champagne!’ he finally croaked.
Was the Nazi sun not now about to soar into a new, blood-red firmament? ‘Champagne!
Bring out our finest champagne—and put me through to the Führer!’31
‘Mein Führer,’ he shouted down the line. ‘It is written in the stars that for us the
second half of April will bring the turning point. This is Friday the Thirteenth. The
turning point has come.’
1 Diary, Apr 1, 1945.
2 Ibid., Mar 27, 1945.
3 Ibid., Mar 30, 1945.
4 Ibid., Apr 1, 1945.
5 Ibid., Mar 30, 1945. On this episode see too JG’s conversation with Schwerin von Krosigk
on Apr 9: Krosigk diary, Apr 13, 1945. USFET document DE.443/DIS.202 (Hoover Libr.
Lerner papers; and Trevor Roper papers, IfZ, Irving collection.)
6 Diary, Mar 30, 1945.
7 So he told Krosigk; and see JG diary, Mar 24, 1945.
8 Ibid., Mar 31, 1945.
9 See ibid., Mar 27. As it was set up under SS Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann,
JG refused to have anything to do with it. See the interrogation of SS-Obergruppenführer
Ohlendorf, Jul 7, 1945: CSDIC(UK) report, SRGG.1322. The RMVP had set up its own
‘Werwolf’ Referat (section) under Hitler Jugend Bannführer (colonel) Dietrich, 31, a radical
Nazi in Berlin. See US Seventh Army report SAIC/CIR/4, ‘Propaganda Organisation
RMVP and RPL,’ Jul 10, 1945 (NA file RG.332, entry MIS-Y, box 116).
10 Diary, Mar 31; he had begun plotting Vogelsang’s assassination by dependable Berlin
Nazis soon after Rheydt was captured. Ibid., Mar 11, 1945.
904 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
11 Ibid., Mar 11, 1945.
12 NYT, Mar 31. ‘“It is retribution come home,’” said First Lieut. Joseph Shubow of Boston
who presided over the service.’—And see NYT, Mar 2, 18, 1945.
13 Cf. Sündermann, ‘Mar 30, 1945,’ 328ff.
14 On the dismissal of Guderian: Oven, ‘Apr 2, 1945’, and the Guderian papers (IfZ,
Irving collection).
15 Diary, Mar 31, 1945.
16 Ibid., Apr 4, 1945.
17 Ibid., Apr 8, 1945.
18 For the preparations of this Totaleinsatz see the Koller diary (author’s film DI–17); the
war diary of the Luftwaffe high command, entries for Mar 18, Apr 3, 6, 7, 1945 (NA film
T321, roll 10); and ADI(K) reports 294/1945 and 373/1945.
19 Diary, Apr 9, 1945 (the final published entry).
20 JG, ‘Kämpfer für das ewige Reich,’ in Das Reich, Apr 8, 1945.
21 Diary, Apr 8, 1945.
22 SS Hauptsturmführer Alfred Rach, interview publ. in Pinguin (Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg)
May 1949 (in IfZ archives).
23 Diary, Apr 8, 1945.
24 Rach interview.
25 Bormann’s diary, Feb 14, shows Funk discussing with Hitler the evacuation of the precious
metal from Berlin. Funk told Ohlendorf afterwards that Hitler was ‘completely mad’
(it was the day after Dresden). CSDIC(UK) report SRGG.1322, Jul 7, 1945.
26 Diary, Apr 9, 1945.
27 Conversation on Apr 9. See Krosigk diary, Apr 13, 1945. USFET document DE.443/
DIS.202 (Hoover Libr. Lerner papers; and Trevor Roper papers, IfZ, Irving collection.)
28 By Fritz Hesse. Diary, Mar 17, 18; and Oven, ‘Apr 2, 1945.’
29 Oven, ‘Apr 12, 1945’ and the Krosigk diary.
30 DNB quoted at 00:08 A.M. the BBC news item: BBC monitoring report, Apr 13, 1945
(IWM archives).
31 Heinz Lorenz, interview, Mar 22, 1967; Werner Naumann, testimony, May 18, 1950
(IfZ, ZS.274); and see Frau Inge Haberzettel’s statement to Leslie Randall in Evening Standard,
London, Feb 16, 1946 (Trevor Roper papers, IfZ, Irving collection). She was a member
of JG’s office.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 905
59: The Man of the Century
AS HE looked at his family now Goebbels can have seen them only as actors in
a drama, of which he had cast himself in the leading role. Their approaching
end inspired no horror in him. Once he had hoped for a peaceful death, a private
funeral, and burial in some open space in Berlin. ‘I’d prefer to die quite alone somewhere,’
he had remarked in 1941, ‘and be buried only by those who really love me.’1
This now seemed an unlikely circumstance. Lord Vansittart had only recently declared
that the only issue remaining on war criminals was ‘the site of the gallows and
the length of the rope.’2
In January 1940 when a conversation with Hitler had lightly turned to methods of
suicide Goebbels had agreed that the pistol was best.3 Later he inclined toward cyanide
and asked Ley to obtain enough for his entire family.4 By 1943 he had resolved
that suicide in extremis was the only way to lasting glory. Had he not expected General
Paulus to ‘forfeit fifteen or twenty years of his life’ to earn a thousand years of
immortality?5 He told the swashbuckling S.S. Major Otto Skorzeny that he could not
figure out why Mussolini had not killed himself after his arrest that July: ‘He did not
lack the means—we know he had the poison on him… Why didn’t he swallow it the
moment he found himself in captivity and his life’s work in ruins.’6 ‘If all our efforts,
work, and struggle should lead nowhere,’ Goebbels commented a few days later,
‘then I should not find it hard to die. In a world where there was no room for my
ideals there would be no room for me.’7 He added weight to his memorandum to
Hitler in July 1944 by promising something that his rival Speer never could, the mass
906 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
suicide of his entire family if they lost the war. ‘Each time I am out at Lanke with my
six children, then I realize all over again that neither I nor my entire family could, or
should, live on into an era that is not our own.’’8
The more he read the letters of Frederick the Great the more Dr Goebbels took
note that the great monarch was never without his poison capsule during the critical
years of the Seven Years’ War, and that he aspired to be ‘buried beneath the batteries
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 148
