of his artillery.’9 The death of his old friend Eugen Hadamowsky, of which Goebbels
learned on March 2, 1945, ‘leading his company into action … a bullet through the
heart,’ also affected him deeply.10 After this, said S.S. Gruppenführer Berger, Goebbels
tapped his breast pocket and said: ‘I and my whole family will commit suicide.’ ‘I
have the right,’ the minister intimated to him, ‘not to die alone if I commit suicide,
but for a whole lot of my followers to die with me.’ The S.S. general contradicted
him—he personally had no intention of dying with Goebbels: ‘You have had nothing
but good out of national socialism. I have had only worry and work, so I don’t feel
the same moral obligation.’ Goebbels just looked at him blankly.11
Magda was at one with him on this matter. She was fatalistic and perhaps even
callous about it all. Looking across the room at her at a Berlin society function back
in 1933 the French ambassador had remarked, ‘I have never in my life come across a
woman with such cruel eyes.’12 Death did not frighten her. After Werner Naumann
lit a cigarette for her in March 1945 with a special-agents’ lighter, she expressed
curiosity about it; Naumann opened it to reveal a poison capsule concealed within,
and at her request—in front of Dr Goebbels—gave it to her.13 Once she had leaned
over tipsily to the family major domo Wilhelm Rohrssen and confided to him how
she imagined her family would die. ‘We shall all be invited to the Führer’s,’ she slurred.
‘And there we shall drink chocolate. This chocolate will taste good, and it will be our
last.’ She raised her glass to Rohrssen. ‘The Führer will not die without my husband,’
she promised.14 ‘We shall all die—even you.’ Shortly she would have Joseph to herself,
and there would be no contenders.
OF course even after Roosevelt’s sudden death the British and Americans did not have
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 907
one bomber less, nor the Russians fewer tanks; but as Goebbels told Krosigk on the
phone that morning, the news would cause a sea-change in morale. ‘We can and
must see in it the dispensation of an all-powerful History and Justice,’ he explained.15
‘Why not just say of God?’ rejoined the finance minister. He wrote to Goebbels an
hour or two later, arguing that Roosevelt’s death was a Divine gift—‘but one that
we’ve got to earn.’ The president’s death removed the last obstacle to dealing with
the United States. In this letter Krosigk also sowed the idea in Goebbels’ mind that
the Americans and the Russians were really making for Prague now, not Berlin.16
GOEBBELS’ diary as recorded on the glass microfiches in Moscow ends with April 12,
1945; the plates also record several hundred pages of shorthand notes, and there is
reason to believe that these contain his final diary dictation, which Otte had no more
time to transcribe.17
Hitler’s desk diary shows only one appointment at this time with Goebbels, at
mid-day on April 15.18 Magda evidently came too—it was a Sunday—because Hitler’s
pilot Hans Baur saw her stepping in through the back gate just as Hitler was
inspecting the outside of the three-storied bunker which Speer had now completed
beneath the garden. Hitler was shocked to see her and offered her Baur’s plane to fly
down to the Obersalzberg. ‘Berlin will be a rat trap!’ he said.19
‘Mein Führer,’ she replied, ‘my husband is gauleiter of Berlin. Life without my
husband would have no purpose for me—nor did I bear my children to have them
put on display in the Soviet Union and America as the children of the propaganda
minister Goebbels.’
A day or two later she ran into a former musician friend of her husband’s in Unter
den Linden; she knew him well enough to have dropped a broad hint in a letter, years
before, that she had only married Goebbels to be near ‘him,’ meaning Hitler. She
added that she had now brought all her family into Berlin; if things got worse, she
said, they would move into Hitler’s bunker. She turned and waved to him as they
parted. The musician thought involuntarily of the last days of Pompeii.20
908 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
FINIS Germaniæ was the spirit of the leading article that Goebbels published that day.
The ‘bloodthirsty and vengeful’ enemy coalition was wasting away; it had ‘to triumph
swiftly or triumph not at all.’ The article displayed a confidence bordering on
complacency: ‘I know for certain that the Führer will find a way out of the dilemma,’
he soothed his readers. The rest was written purely for posterity. ‘We have no cause
to hang our heads before the enemy,’ he wrote. ‘What the German people has achieved
in this war is already history. No filthy hand of foe shall ever fling aside the crown of
laurels that already adorns our nation’s brow.’ Now, he recommended, was a time for
all to fight—‘And what life is too precious to sacrifice pro patria!’ ‘So let each and
every one of us swear a private oath, devoid of any pathos, to choose to die rather
than accept the yoke of servitude.’ They were traversing the final phase of this war, he
wrote. ‘One cannot humanly conceive of how it can last much longer.’21
Indeed it could not. At dawn on the sixteenth Marshal Georgii Konstantinovich
Zhukov and Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Koniev threw eighteen Soviet armies at Berlin
—not Prague. At night the children looked out of their window and asked why
the flashes lighting the horizon produced no rain. Dr Goebbels was in hourly contact
with General Busse. He commandeered a fleet of Berlin omnibuses to rush soldiers
to the battlefield.22 To Hitler’s anger Goebbels sent five of the Volkssturm battalions
although they were supposed only to be used for immediate neighbourhood defence.23
Goebbels suspected however that this was already the last battle. He asked Lieutenant
Oven to help him burn his private papers—including pictures of parents, yellowing
and mounted on thick card, snapshots of the little Joseph in a sailor suit,
school reports, a letter of the Rheydt Cotton Trading Association, academic diplomas,
and hotel bills. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, holding up a studio portrait photograph.
’Now there was a woman of perfect beauty!’ The portrait, of actress Lida
Baarova, joined the others in the flames.24
He dedicated to Hitler, on the eve of his birthday, a last brilliant broadcast honouring
him as the man whom the German nation had in free elections chosen as their
leader. ‘If Germany still lives today,’ he thundered, ‘if Europe and the cultured and
civilized Occident have still not been swept away for ever into the fathomless mael-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 909
strom that yawns black and ominous before us, then they owe it to him alone. He
will be the Man of the Century.’ What, he continued, had the enemy to offer? ‘Nothing
but their superiority in numbers, their brutish mania for destruction, their diabolical
rage that masks the chaos of mankind in dissolution. An entire violated continent
stands testimony against them. In every country of Europe once flourishing
cities and villages have been turned into cratered wastelands.’ Now however the final
act of this mighty tragedy had begun. ‘The chief of the hostile conspiracy has been
crushed by Fate, the same Fate which left the Führer on July 20 standing erect and
uninjured midst the dead and dying and rubble so that he might complete his works.’
‘Pay heed, ye Germans!’ he declared into the microphone. ‘Millions of people, in
every country on Earth, are looking to this man, wonderingly and perplexed: does
he know a way out of this mighty misfortune that has beset the world? He will show
it to the nations.’25
The underlying message was vintage Goebbels: blind, self-sacrificing loyalty to his
Führer. A message went to Magda to have the children brought to No.20 Hermann-
Göring Strasse ready to brighten the Führer’s birthday the next day. At midnight he
went over to the Chancellery bunker. With glazed and red-rimmed eyes Hitler spoke
to them of his hardening resolve to hold northern Germany and Norway if the Reich
should indeed be sliced in two, and to defend the Alps and Bohemia-Moravia. To Dr
Ley he hinted that he would move into this southern ‘fortress’ himself.26 Goebbels
however had already decided to defend Berlin to the last since the army generals had
proven incapable. Ley urged him at least to send his family to safety. Goebbels was
obstinate. ‘I shall die here, if I have to, and Magda has decided to do likewise.’27 Not
for him the humiliating surrender of a Paulus. ‘What does he do, this man who has
ordered and exhorted his men to stand and die?’ he had said in 1943. ‘He trots off
into captivity, not forgetting to pack his little suitcase on the way!’28
At mid-day on April 20 there was a small birthday parade. Goebbels followed Hitler
up the winding staircase into the garden. Hitler turned up the collar of his grey
greatcoat and walked down the line of youngsters handing out medals to the teenagers
who had fought the Russians off with flak guns or bazookas. At four P.M. he went
910 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
back down into the bunker, never to come out alive again, and Goebbels returned to
his residence.
The High Command and war department evacuated Berlin, traveling to Bavaria,
leaving skeleton staffs in Berlin. Dr Friedrich-Wilhelm Kritzinger, Lammers’
Staatssekretär, broke it to Goebbels that every other ministry had now left for the
northern ‘fortress’. Furious at this news Goebbels demanded to know how he was
expected to defend Berlin without them?29 Thus his own ministry staff found that
they, like their minister, were hemmed into the Reich capital. (Most of the women,
around three hundred in all, went into Russian captivity and were not seen again).
When Otto Meissner, Hitler’s pettifogging old Staatsminister, phoned later that day
from the safety of Mecklenburg to explain that ‘the Reich government’ had withdrawn
from the danger zone ‘to preserve its freedom of action’ Goebbels snarled at
him, ‘The Reich government is where the Führer and I are, not where you are! For
twelve years I have had the urge to spit in your eye. For twelve years I have suppressed
that urge—and today I regret it.’30
That night Bormann sent a telex down to the Obersalzberg, reading: ‘Wolf [Hitler]
is staying here as situation can only be restored by him if at all possible.’
The dawn of Saturday April 21 came with Russian artillery lobbing shells at extreme
range into Berlin.31 White-faced Goebbels presided over one last eleven o’clock
conference at No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse, one long tirade against the traitors
who had talked Hitler out of invading Britain in 1940, who had lost their nerve in
Russia, and who had failed again in Normandy in June 1944 and finally shown their
colours on July the Twentieth. When Fritzsche suavely objected the minister snapped,
‘What can I do with men who won’t fight even when their womenfolk are being
raped?’32 Then an evil leer spread over his face, as he paced up and down behind his
big desk. ‘It’s up to the German people,’ he murmured softly. They had literally asked
for national socialism. In November 1933 after Hitler quit the League of Nations
40·5 million Germans had voted for his policies and only 2·1 million against. Hitler
had not forced himself on them; and now, God help them. He folded his arms, and
almost spat out the final words: ‘Well, what were you working with me for, gentle-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 911
men? Now they’re going to slit your pretty little throats.’33 According to Werner
Naumann, he said: ‘Gentleman, we hung together and we’ll be hanged together.’34
He stalked out, pausing only to fling them a Hitler salute.
At noon-fifteen a Russian shell burst only a hundred yards away, shaking the whole
structure. Unshaken, he read out over cable radio the dramatic ‘Emergency Speech’
that he had long prepared, pausing only to shake splinters off the pages as another
shell burst blew in several panes of glass. He had intended to send the metal boxes
containing the glass-plate microfiches of his diaries into the southern ‘fortress’ but
that road was now closed. That same Saturday afternoon he entrusted to Rudi Balzer
his latest diaries and the shorthand notes and told him to carry them out to the
north. Then he told his secretary Otte to bring him all the secret papers from the
two ministry safes to the Reich chancellery. ‘Go to ground,’ he told Otte. ‘When
Berlin is liberated report back to me again.’ Otte rendezvoused at the Adlon with
Balzer and they set out in an army staff car for Hamburg. About halfway, for no good
reason, the two men halted and buried the precious diary notes in a preserving jar
outside Perleberg.35*
Goebbels made his final dispositions. His staff was now reduced to Naumann, Heinz
Lorenz—the unobjectionable former deputy of Sündermann, who had been dismissed
with Otto Dietrich—and perhaps thirty others. He told them that he proposed,
when it was all over, to poison his children.36 In Berlin itself the only newspaper
still being printed was an emergency news-sheet, the Panzer-Bär. His last leader
for Das Reich was a shrill call for Germany’s women and children to fight from the
rear against these insolent invaders who had wasted entire cities with the cruel air
warfare. Some, he wrote, might think nothing of living ‘under the knout of the Anglo-
American banker-Jews’, but the true German would be hurling hand grenades, laying
Teller mines, and sniping from rooftops and cellar windows.37
* Armed with the map drawn by Balzer and aided by a proton magnetometer team from
Oxford university, the author searched for this jar in the heavily wooded area in the then
communist eastern Germany in 1970, without success. Otte, at the time still a serving
German government official, was unable to accompany us.
912 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
AROUND six o’clock the next evening, April 22, he received a shocking telephone call
from Hitler who asked him, voice breaking, to go over straight away. ‘It’s all over,’
was all that he would say.38
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 149
