1940 Magda finds that he has invited Ursula out to Lanke too, with his young
adjutant Herbert Heiduschke, a paratrooper, for the sake of appearances.41 At the
New Year he pulls the same stunt. The threesome are inseparable for the rest of
January, even travelling together to Vienna.42
Even in the handwritten diaries the clues about his relationships with women are
so urbane as to be almost invisible. He records the curious fact that their nanny has
‘quite unexpectedly’ given birth to a child. ‘Nobody,’ he informs his diary, ‘had the
slightest idea. I arrange for the scared creature to be taken care of. She has suffered
fear and pain enough.’43 ‘I discussed with Mrs —
her future work,’ he writes a few
weeks later. ‘She’s expecting a child now.’44 For a married woman this would not
normally excite comment. Seven weeks later, just before Barbarossa, he records this
episode: ‘A baby in a flower-covered perambulator is put into the ministry’s entrance
hall for me. With an anonymous letter asking me to show an interest in the baby. I
shall concern myself with it. I shall first try to find the mother.’45*
* The diary does not mention any of these episodes again. Visiting Buenos Aires in
October 1991 I was informed that an illegitimate son of Goebbels was living there.
628 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
If Magda has indeed sought comfort with Hanke, it does not last long.46 Goebbels
prevails on Hitler to banish him from Berlin. Hitler splits Silesia’s administration in
two: Hanke becomes gauleiter and Oberpräsident of his native Lower Silesia.47 Arriving
for supper with Hitler on the day after this arrangement is announced, Goebbels
finds Hanke there as well. ‘I cut him dead,’ he records—four words that say it all.48
Even now strange events cast a shadow over his family, which the diary cannot
entirely conceal. Magda leaves for a five-week cure in Dresden.49 All six children
leave at the same time. Life in Berlin’s air-raid shelters and the indifferent diet are
blighting their growth, writes Goebbels, and Göring has offered them sanctuary in
his villa on the Obersalzberg.50 Midst much weeping Goebbels sees his entire family,
with baby Heide in her little basket, leave at ten A.M. on February 12, 1941. True,
nearly one thousand trainloads of other children have been evacuated from Berlin,
but as Churchill’s raids have momentarily declined other parents are clamouring for
their return; besides, Lanke, so expensively built, is hardly at greater risk than the
Obersalzberg, and the comely young divorcée Ursula Quandt has no qualms about
staying out there at Goebbels’ forest estate.51
He is no stranger to what he calls the sexual problems of men and women forced
to live apart.52 He feigns dismay at being ‘all alone’ in the big house at No.20 Hermann-
Göring Strasse, but all that empty it is not. ‘Chatted Ursula up a teeny bit,’ he records,
‘then off to bed exhausted.’53
From her sanatorium Magda writes him a long letter about her visit to Hitler when
she left the children at the Göring villa.54 Goebbels tells his staff that Hitler has led
her aside, followed by an inquisitive Bormann, asked, ‘Has the Doctor to come to his
senses?’ and then silently squeezed her hand.55 Goebbels motors out to Lanke for a
week to read, to ride through the forest in his splendid new carriage with the ‘nice,
naïve’ and ‘unproblematical’ Ursula, and to listen to classical music.56 At the end of
that week another letter comes from Magda, who has had another mild heart attack.
‘Now,’ he triumphs, ‘she is nice and affectionate to me.’57
She pleads for him to visit, and he does spend one evening in Dresden (with Ursula)
listening to her wifely prattle—‘It is all very nice and harmonious,’ he records, an-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 629
other of those give-away phrases like the ‘Ursula looks gorgeous’ that he writes after
a stroll around the gardens at No.20.58 When Ursula is away for two weeks visiting
the children Goebbels entertains the occasional actress like Margit Syms, a Hungarian
beauty; ‘helped her career a bit,’ he notes afterwards.59
Magda returns to Berlin on March 22. She has arranged for their children to be
billeted at Bischofswiesen in Salzburg’s countryside.60 At the end of the month both
she and Ursula have competition with the arrival or Marina Shalyapin, a good looking
Russian emigrée with fascinating tales of the 1917 bolshevik revolution to tell.
The little doctor spends three weeks flirting with her, especially when Magda goes
down to Dessau to say goodbye to Harald who is off to the Balkan wars.61 All three
women come to Lanke for Easter—‘A turbulent Easter,’ records Goebbels.62 On the
last day of April Magda leaves, taking Ursula with her, to transfer the six children to
a large summer house on a lake near Bad Aussee, on the Upper Danube. ‘They are to
stay there,’ explained Goebbels, ‘until the war is over.’63
HE forbade all prophesies about when that might be. ‘As for Messrs Sperrle and
Stumpff,’ he said, expressing his fury at two of the Luftwaffe’s most indolent commanders,
‘they are in for a surprise. The war game isn’t child’s play after all.’64
The present lull in the war, he had privately explained on January 9 to the foreign
journalists, opening their new press club on Leipziger Platz, was just a ‘creative pause.’65
In fact the 1941 hunting season for Hitler’s bombers and submarines had not yet
begun.66 By February 6 he knew of Hitler’s plans to evict the British expeditionary
force currently embarking in Greece.67 ‘It is high time,’ he wrote in Das Reich, ‘for
London to begin listening to harsh facts.’68 He again began to hint at a coming invasion
of England.69 ‘Hitherto,’ he teased foreign journalists on March 7, ‘we have never
set dates… Now for the first time in his political career the Führer has mentioned
one, namely: “The decision will come this year.”’70 In the privacy of his diary however
he admitted it was fraud. ‘For England’s benefit we’re putting on a bit of an act on the
subject of invasion,’ he explained, ‘to get them all worked up and permanently in a
state of fright.’71
630 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
WHEN Hitler returned to Berlin on March 15, 1941 something still kept the two men
apart. ‘I am far too rushed to see him,’ was Dr Goebbels’ lame excuse to his diary.72
He saw him at a distance the next day, speaking at the Memorial Day ceremony.
Goebbels was impressed by the confidence he voiced in victory, but it perplexed him
that Hitler was still careful not to state that the would would end in 1941. ‘That is
psychologically better,’ he wrote, seemingly applauding Hitler’s prudent language.
‘You never can tell how things may work out, and specifying firm dates is never a
good idea.’73
He was of course still unaware of Barbarossa; he still believed, after an exchange
5of views with General Eugen von Schobert, that the general’s Eleventh Army, stationed
on the eastern frontier, was covering Germany’s rear.74
Hitler finally invited him round to the chancellery on the seventeenth. ‘We are
slowly strangling Britain,’ he told Goebbels, describing their now resumed submarine
and air attacks. ‘One day she’ll lie croaking on the ground.’75 Not above a bit of
crude influence-buying, Goebbels on his next visit to Hitler offered him twenty million
marks for his social and cultural funds, from the winter relief and film industry
purses which he controlled.76
At some stage now Hitler did finally brief him on Barbarossa. Perhaps it was on
March 20, because the next morning Goebbels ordered all Russian journalists kept
under close surveillance.77 Moreover, hearing of the friendly reception accorded by
Moscow to Japan’s foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka on his way to Berlin the minister
commented, ‘I don’t trust the bolsheviks.’78 After attending Hitler’s banquet for
the Japanese minister on March 28 Goebbels hand-wrote this explicit diary entry:
[AFTER Yugoslavia] the biggest operation will then follow: against R. It is being
meticulously concealed, only a very few are in the know. It will be initiated with
massive west-bound troop movements. We divert attention every which way,
except to the east. A feint invasion operation is to be prepared against England,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 631
then like lightning everything goes back [east] and up and at ’em. The Ukraine is
one vast granary.
Psychologically, he admitted, there were obvious drawbacks—for example the
fate of Napoleon’s Grand Army. Propaganda would get around that by playing the
anti-bolshevik melody. What a challenge! ‘We’re going to pull off our masterpiece,’
he bragged in the diary. ‘Great victories lie in store. It all calls for steady nerves and
a clear head… It’s great to be in on it,’ he added, a hint that it still irked him that
Hitler had kept him out of the inner circle for so long.79
ON the day that Berlin welcomed Matsuoka, the Yugoslav government which had just
joined the Axis was overthrown in a coup funded by the British secret service.80 To
Goebbels, seeing him at the banquet in Matsuoka’s honour, Hitler had seemed under
a lot of strain. Hitler told him afterwards that he had decided to deal with Yugoslavia
at once. For several days anti-German demonstrations rocked Belgrade. Goebbels
allowed his newspapers to publish reports on them without any comment other
than, as he put it, a few choice drops of poison. On April 4 his black transmitters
went into action, broadcasting in all the regional dialects, promising everybody autonomy
if Yugoslavia were destroyed.81 Goebbels was already choosing the Balkan
victory fanfare.82
Looking at the clock over dinner on April 5 he disclosed to his closest staff that
their bomber squadrons were already being fuelled for the attack on Belgrade.83 At
one A.M. Hitler sent for him; he wanted company. Three hundred bombers, said
Hitler, would smash Belgrade at daybreak, followed by three hundred more the next
night. ‘We’re going to smoke out this nest of Serbian plotters,’ noted Goebbels,
aping Hitler’s language. Hitler said he would prosecute this war without pity. They
sat sitting tea until precisely five-twenty, the hour appointed for the attack, then
Hitler retired to bed.84 ‘The Führer himself,’ Goebbels told his senior staff at eleven
o’clock that morning, ‘estimates the duration of this whole operation at two months,
632 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
I myself think it may well be shorter.’ Their propaganda was to attack the Serbian
generals, particularly the coup’s ringleader Dusan Simovic. ‘I am convinced,’ he said,
‘that they have been bribed by the British. They did just the same in the Boer war.’ As
for Russia’s likely response, Goebbels calmed his staff’s fears. ‘Russia will think twice
before poking her fingers into this blaze. She’ll stand there clenching her fists with
rage, and watch what happens next. You know the Führer’s methods. Today and tonight
a judgment is being inflicted on Belgrade on such a scale that for a thousand
kilometres around people will say, “Hands off! Don’t get involved!” And that’s the
object of the exercise.’85
Seventeen thousand were killed in the air raids on Belgrade.86 There was worldwide
outrage; when Churchill bombed Berlin on April 10, damaging the university,
state library, and state opera house, Goebbels was perversely pleased as he could use
this raid to offset the bombing of Belgrade. The British claimed to have killed three
thousand Berliners; the real total was fifteen.87
FOR Hitler’s concurrent campaign in Greece Goebbels planned a two-tier propaganda
policy. For domestic consumption, the British expeditionary force in Greece
was to be described as powerful; but abroad, it was to be mocked as puny and ineffective.
88 Moreover, since it was in Germany’s strategic interest to detain and destroy
the British there, Goebbels publicly accused Churchill of planning to do a bunk.89
‘We have to pillory Churchill as a typical gambler,’ he said on April 15, explaining his
tactics to his morning conference, ‘more at home in the gambling salons of Monte
Carlo … cynical, ruthless, and brutal, spilling the blood of others so as to spare the
blood of the British.’ If the B.B.C. now announced that Churchill was pouring reinforcements
into Greece, he said, their response must be: ‘Lies, all lies! It’s not true,
it’s just a cowardly fraud perpetrated by Mr Churchill. Our own precise observations
clearly prove that the British are taking to their heels.’ And if London’s Reuters
agency now referred to the British as ‘taking up new positions,’ then German propaganda
must taunt: ‘These new positions consist of the troop transports in which the
British are planning their getaway.’90 Richard Otte, his verbatim stenographer, took
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 633
down his words at conferences such as these, and within minutes they were being
telexed to every newspaper in the Reich. Soon the world’s press was resounding
with the insults which he had dictated. Even the New York Times predicted that Britain
was preparing to get out of Greece.
His orthodox propaganda capabilities within Greece were strictly limited. There
were only 37,000 radio sets in the entire country.91 Besides, the Greeks were never
Hitler’s enemy. He was infatuated with the Athens of antiquity and, he told Goebbels,
he had forbidden, any bombing of the city.92 Had the British not sent in their troops,
he twice told his propaganda minister, he would have happily left the Italians to stew
in their juice.93 Now, as the Germans fought the British forces once more toward the
coast, Mr Churchill lapsed into a brooding silence. Goebbels heard that he was seeking
solace in whisky and cigars. ‘Just the kind of opponent we need,’ Goebbels observed.
94 By the last day of April the British had all left, aboard troop transports
bound for Crete and elsewhere.
‘First,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘a short breather, and then the grand slam.’95
Until now he had kept his knowledge of Barbarossa strictly to himself. On April
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 103