hypocrisy,’ he felt. ‘I just can’t believe it all,’ he wrote on March 1. ‘The [Gestapo]
methods in the fight against Fritsch are not very honourable.’ The case exposed
Himmler in all his treachery. The general had demanded a court-martial to clear his
name. The pre-trial investigation threw a most unsavoury light on Gestapo methods.
‘They can prove hardly anything against him,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘They should never
have dragged in the Führer.’75 Hitler expressed to him serious concern about the
investigation. Goebbels learned that it was not going at all smoothly.76 Von der Goltz,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 437
now acting for the general, had established beyond doubt that the Gestapo had cynically
framed him using the dossier of an army captain von Frisch.
This really was a horror story, and it all came out when the court martial, which
had been convened on March 10 and immediately adjourned (as we shall see), was
resumed on the seventeenth. Goebbels wrote: ‘The entire thing seems to be based
on mistaken identity. Very nasty,’ he wrote, adding with unconcealed satisfaction,
‘above all for Himmler… The Führer’s quite annoyed.’77 Fritsch was acquitted. Hitler
sent him a handwritten apology and handsomely exonerated him in a speech to
his generals.78 Goebbel was delighted, both for Fritsch’s sake and because it was ‘a
terrible put-down for Himmler.’79
THE Fritsch trial had been held over from March 10, 1938 by dramatic new developments.
In the last few days Hitler and Goebbels had paid remarkably little attention to
Austria; their private conversations had gyrated around Czechoslovakia instead. ‘The
Führer is pleased to see Prague being so intransigent,’ Goebbels had recorded. ‘All
the more surely will she be torn to pieces one day.’80 When Schuschnigg on March 9
broadcast his plan to hold a referendum on the Berghof agreement, Goebbels, diverted
by a farewell party at the ministry for Funk, rated it merely a ‘rotten trick.’81
Hitler however had seen his golden opportunity. He called Goebbels out of a meeting
with editors later that evening: over at the chancellery the minister found Göring
called in too. By staging his ‘stupid and crass plebiscite,’ Hitler snorted, Schuschnigg
was trying to outsmart them. Goebbels was fired by Hitler’s enthusiasm for action.
He suggested they send a thousand planes over Austria to drop leaflets, then ‘actively
intervene’.82
His newly found 1938 diary makes clear how closely he consulted with Hitler over
the next hours and days. In deliberations that would last until five A.M. on Thursday
the tenth Hitler mapped out his ‘very drastic’ plans to Goebbels and the Austrian
general Edmund von Glaise-Horstenau. The latter, a Nazi, had been foisted on
Schuschnigg’s Cabinet by the Berghof agreement. He paled at the possible conse-
438 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
quences of a German invasion, but not Hitler. ‘He believes the hour has come,’ wrote
Goebbels. ‘Just wants to sleep on it. Says that Italy and Britain won’t do anything…
That the risk isn’t as great as it was when we occupied the Rhineland.’ Only France’s
reaction was unpredictable. After dozing for two hours, however, Goebbels awoke to
the news that France’s prime minister had resigned over unrelated domestic issues.
That clinched it. ‘Tally-ho,’ he whooped. ‘The imponderables are melting away.’ Called
over to the chancellery again that Thursday (the tenth) he found a hunched Führer,
now brooding over maps.
They had two days before Schuschnigg’s proposed referendum. Goebbels suggested
this scenario: they two tame Austrian Nazis, Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau,
should stipulate that the referendum be based on the 1935 Saar referendum statute.
Schuschnigg would of course refuse. The two Nazis would resign on Friday. On Saturday
the Luftwaffe would send six to eight hundred planes to drop leaflets calling
on the Austrian people to arise. ‘The people do so. And on Sunday we march in.’ S.A.
Obergruppenführer Hermann Reschny, who had four thousand embittered Austrian
‘legionnaires’ (exiled Nazis) standing by, predicted that Schuschnigg’s troops would
open fire. But now there was no stopping Hitler. ‘There has always been something
about March,’ mused Goebbels, setting his printing presses rolling. ‘It has been the
Führer’s lucky month so far.’
At midnight Hitler sent for him again. He was speeding things up. The Wehrmacht
would invade Austria on Saturday, not Sunday, and push straight through to Vienna.
He himself would follow. ‘In eight days,’—this was Goebbels’ sober estimate, with
all that it implied—‘Austria will be ours.’
The few remaining hours saw him at his best. At his desk until four A.M., he dictated
leaflets, placards, and circulars and arranged with Heydrich for a police guard
on the printing works—nobody was to be allowed out until the tanks began to move.83
Once, Magda came briefly with the children to see their absentee father. At eight
A.M. on Friday Hitler reviewed the leaflets. As the hours ticked away, Hitler, Göring,
and Goebbels put their heads together, hatching plans on how to effect the actual
Anschluss, political union with Austria. ‘The Führer must be popularly elected as
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 439
[Austria’s] federal president as well,’ was Goebbels’ idea, ‘and thereafter bring about
the Anschluss little by little.’ To legalize the invasion Seyss-Inquart would have to
send a telegram from Vienna appealing for Wehrmacht troops. Hitler, Goebbels, and
Göring dictated a suitable text. ‘It arrives here soon after,’ wrote Goebbels, somewhat
prematurely, ‘and thus we have the legitimation we need.’84
The German troops rolled into Austria on Saturday March 12. Leaving Göring and
Goebbels in Berlin, Hitler left to follow them. Not a shot was fired.
The Austrians’ overwhelming reception of the ‘invaders’ stunned even Goebbels.
Tears streaming down his cheeks he sat up until three A.M. listening to the radio
broadcasts of the emotional scenes. Again and again Horst Wessel’s hymn blared forth.
Hitler and the rump Austrian cabinet decided on Anschluss forthwith, which settled
that problem. After that things moved at breakneck speed. The Jewish-controlled
newspapers in Vienna were banned—the Jews themselves were already in full rout,
stampeding toward those few frontiers that still opened for them (‘Where to?’ commented
Goebbels maliciously. ‘As Wandering Jews into Nothingness.’)85 Together with
Lida Baarova and her bosom friend Hilde Körber, Goebbels sat glued to the radio in
Veit Harlan’s house on the afternoon of March 14 listening to the excited commentary
as Hitler entered Vienna.86 The forlorn British and French protests tailed away,
swamped in the totally unexpected sounds of jubilation from Austria.
To consolidate his master-stroke, Hitler called a joint Austrian-German referendum
for April 10. Goebbels established a Reich Propaganda Amt (agency) in Vienna,
shipped fifty thousand Volks radios there to facilitate the referendum campaign, and
prepared an epic reception for Hitler’s return to Berlin. This was not ea
sy as, at
Berndt’s request—who had deputized for Goebbels in Austria—he had just sacrificed
Berlin’s entire stock of flags and banners for Hitler’s entry to Vienna.87 But when
Hitler landed back in Berlin at five P.M. on the sixteenth Goebbels outdid himself. He
and Göring sat proudly in the Führer’s open car as it slowly drove through the cheering
millions to the chancellery.88
The speed of events was now almost frightening. Unrolling maps, Hitler discussed
with Goebbels and chief engineer Fritz Todt the new autobahns for Austria, and the
440 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
rebuilding of his native Linz.89 ‘Astounding, the fresh plans he is already hatching,’
wrote Goebbels—and it is clear that it was not just bricks and concrete that both
men had in mind.90
FOR a few days, after Warsaw issued a short-fused ultimatum to Lithuania over disputed
territories, Hitler stood by to claw back Memel—now Klaipeda—a little strip
of once-German territory annexed years before by Lithuania.91 Nothing came of it,
and the next major victim was to be Czechoslovakia.
Goebbels had long known that this was so.92 After the chief of the Czech general
staff had boasted of how their fortifications would allow time for their allies to act,
Goebbels pityingly commented: ‘Poor fool!’93 Several times he delivered to Prague’s
envoy in Berlin, Dr Vojtech MastnO(y,´), lofty homilies on the follies of allowing
German emigrés to slander Hitler from the false sanctuary of Prague.94 He knew all
Hitler’s plans. On March 19 Hitler invited him upstairs to his little study in the
Reich chancellery, unrolled a map of central Europe, and plotted their next moves.
Each man spurred the other on. Germany would tackle Czechoslovakia next, Hitler
confirmed. ‘We’ll share that with the Poles and Hungarians,’ recorded Goebbels
afterwards: ‘And without ado. At the next best opportunity.’ (‘We are a boa constrictor,
still digesting,’ he added, as though apologising to the diary for the delay since
entering Austria.) Then, the two men agreed, Germany would strike north-east into
the Baltic countries, and west into Alsace and Lorraine. ‘Just let France wallow deeper
and deeper into her crisis,’ he wrote. ‘Let there be no false sentimentality.’ How he
admired Hitler. ‘How stirring it is when he says his one desire is to live to see with his
own eyes this great German, Teutonic Reich.’95
Hearing that Göring, now a field marshal, had incautiously reassured MastnO(y,´)
about the Czech frontier, Goebbels was distraught. ‘Guaranteeing their frontiers!
That’s right out of line.’96 A few days later, on March 24, Hitler repeated his innermost
intentions to Goebbels and his new foreign minister Ribbentrop. ‘The Führer
declares,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘that he wants to adjust our frontier with France one
day, but not that with Italy. He particularly does not want to reach the Adriatic. Our
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 441
ocean lies to the north and east. A country cannot throw its weight in two directions
at once. If it does, it will split in two.’97
His diary reveals the cynical instructions which Hitler now issued to the Sudeten
German leader Konrad Henlein: ‘Keep demanding more than Prague can deliver.
That will set the ball rolling.’98
Thus the time-bomb began to tick beneath the Czechs. ‘They haven’t the foggiest
notion of whom the bell is tolling for,’ Goebbels chortled. And he repeated: ‘Poor
fools!’99
FIRST his well-practised election machinery began to whir. He had printed seven
trainloads of propaganda material to persuade the voters. Only the actual ballot form
proposed by Frick upset him. ‘People can vote either Yes or No at will,’ he observed.
‘We didn’t have that the last time’—in March 1936.100 Hitler promised to look into
it, but the final ballot still had space for a No vote.
Late in March 1938 the two men opened their separate campaigns, speaking in
dozens of cities until their throats were sore and their vocal chords ached, and phoning
each other each night to bandy details of their rhetorical triumphs. Goebbels
spoke in Hanover, Dresden, and Vienna. ‘To those,’ he roared in the
Nordwestbahnhalle, decorated with huge swastika banners, ‘who ask, “Why another
plebiscite?” we reply that we must put the world face to face with such an overwhelming
vote as to close its mouth.’101 At Breslau, to ensure a capacity audience, his
ministry announced that his speech would not be broadcast (but it was.)102 While
Hitler’s referendum speeches still bore the stamp of sincerity, Goebbels’ at Nuremberg,
according to Henderson, described the steps of the Nazis’ ascent to power
with brutal frankness, and revelled in the way that they had taken advantage of the
difficulties of the western powers.103
Soon the first results began to come in—Germans overseas casting their votes
aboard German passenger liners in harbour gave Hitler ninety-nine per cent backing.
104 The main vote was to be on April 10, 1938. On the morning before that—
proclaimed by Goebbels as ‘The Day of the Grossdeutsches Reich’—he took Hitler
442 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
to Vienna’s city hall for another brilliantly stage-managed pageant. As twenty thousand
carrier pigeons fluttered up into the bitingly cold skies, as sirens wailed, and as
the Luftwaffe’s squadrons thundered over the rooftops, Hitler stepped out onto the
balcony.105 Vienna went wild. After supper, the crowds began to chant—no doubt
wholly spontaneously—‘Dearest Führer, please won’t you /bring our Doctor out
there too!’ Not doubting the outcome of the vote, Hitler told Goebbels he was planning
to put Schuschnigg on trial. He would of course commute any death sentence
that resulted. (‘Pity,’ observed Goebbels. ‘What has to be, has to be!’)106 The next
morning, as their train back to Berlin passed through Leipzig, Hitler mused out loud
about the Jewish Problem. He planned, he said, to ship them all off to, say, Madagascar.
That island was French, but an hour later he reiterated that he was going to take
on France too one day. ‘His life’s burning ambition,’ realized Goebbels.107
They arrived back in Berlin at one-thirty P.M. It was now voting day. Magda was
waiting. The cameras whirred as their children handed over posies of flowers to Hitler
and they cast their own votes at a booth on the station concourse.
The voting results revealed a unanimity of almost embarrassing proportions for
the new Grossdeutsches Reich. In Austria 99·75 percent of all voters had cast their
ballots for Hitler; in Germany, 99·08 percent (Saxony had let them down). From
Paris, London, and Prague a shocked silence greeted this extraordinary display of
democracy running amok.108
‘Germany,’ commented Goebbels, ‘has conquered an entire nation with the ballot
paper.’109
1 ‘The diaries contained a lot of personal material which was not suited for publication
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 72