Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 107
and Abwehr chief Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Canaris on these gruesome finds, ‘then it
will conduct its politics with criminal methods too.’ ‘There would have been no
room for the two of us in Europe in the long run.’18
Goebbels called briefly at No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse to check progress on
the air raid shelter that Speer was excavating in its gardens. Architect Hugo Bartels
put the cost at a third of a million marks, with enough cement to build three hundred
working-class homes.19 Seven feet thick, its roof and walls would be strong enough
to withstand the heaviest British bombs so far.20
Worried that one thoughtless bomb might destroy his diaries, Goebbels moved all
twenty volumes to safety in the Reichsbank vaults.21 He finally abandoned writing
the diaries in his barely decipherable script, and began dictating them instead each
morning to Otte, his high-speed stenographer, from notes compiled during the previous
day. Aged thirty-four, Otte performed this task until the end, sometimes having
to sleep on a couch next door until the next torrent of dictation was ready to
sweep over him.22 One single day’s entry might run to 144 pages.23 Relays of secretaries
typed each page on fine bond paper in triplicate, triple-spaced and in an outsize
typeface; until the primitive glass microfiches containing all 75,000 pages surfaced
in Moscow in 1992, where this author was the first historian privileged to use
them, only a fragment was believed to have survived.
OTTE’S first transcript was dated July 9, 1941. His minister had just paid a flying visit
to the ‘Wolf’s Lair,’ Hitler’s new HQ built in a swampy, mosquito-infested forest in
East Prussia.
Hitler boasted that they had already damaged or destroyed two-thirds of Stalin’s
forces and written off five-sixths of his tanks and planes. ‘Our strategy is to take on
654 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
our enemies one at a time,’ Hitler explained. ‘Preventive wars are still the best.’
Stalin had probably been banking on seizing Romania that autumn. Bad weather would
have stalled Hitler’s counter-moves, and he would have lost his only significant petroleum
supplies. Goebbels was impressed: ‘The Führer rescued the Reich from its
fate,’ he dictated. Hitler said that after ‘rubbing out’ Moscow and Petersburg he
would advance on the river Volga and the Ural mountains. A repetition of Napoleon’s
disaster was impossible. The Nazi forces had motor transport and panzer divisions,
which Napoleon had not. Goebbels told his diary that Hitler had asked him to visit
the Wolf’s Lair more often, ever week or so; but five weeks passed before another
invitation came.24
A week after Barbarossa began Goebbels ran into unexpected problems with
Rosenberg. On the day before his visit to HQ, Hitler had ruled that Rosenberg’s Ostministry,
and not Goebbels, should control all propaganda in the east.25 Goebbels
vainly referred to the decree of September 1939 which entrusted to his ministry all
‘practical execution’ of propaganda.26 His old rival was trying to become the next
Tsar, he decided.27 As the years passed Rosenberg proved woefully incapable of organizing
on an imperial scale, and Goebbels contemptuously referred to his apparatus
as the ‘Cha-ost’ ministry.28 ‘If only we had proceeded more shrewdly in the east,’
he would reflect in 1944, ‘and if only we had made clear to the peoples there that we
were coming not as conquerors but as liberators from bolshevism, the decisive blow
against the Soviet Union might have met with success.’29
At first as the Wehrmacht advanced the jubilant natives had greeted Hitler’s troops
with garlands of flowers.30 They made no attempt to adopt the scorched-earth policies
demanded by Stalin. Goebbels stressed in his propaganda that their common
enemy was their ‘Jewish-bolshevik’ oppressors.31 Rosenberg however pursued very
different policies.32 He pronounced all Soviet citizens equally culpable for having
tolerated bolshevism, and acted accordingly. Although there were virtually no printing
presses or paper, and although ‘every nail and pane of glass’ had to be imported
from Germany, it was Goebbels’ task to cover the eastern territories with
(Rosenberg’s) propaganda. His ministry blocked Rosenberg’s plans where it could,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 655
but that was not often.33 ‘We managed to prevent the total eradication of the Ukrainian
intelligentsia,’ reported Dr Taubert early in 1945. But it was an unequal fight.
Rosenberg unhelpfully declared all Soviet citizens ‘sub-humans’ and wondered why
they flocked to the ranks of the partisans. It would take Goebbels a year to get an
odious S.S. brochure called Sub-Humans withdrawn.34 He would fight equally hard to
have the Ost-badge issued to Russian slave labourers replaced by something smacking
less obviously of the badge worn by Jews.35 Gunter d’Alquèn told Goebbels that the
Ukrainians, who had joyfully dug up ancient icons which they had concealed for
decades as the Germans marched in, now lived in mortal terror of these new Nazi
oppressors.
During July Hitler’s advance slowed. The United States, which had originally given
the Soviet Union only ten days to survive, now expressed the first doubts as to Hitler’s
chances of victory.36 Visiting the Wolf’s Lair, Goebbels’ director of broadcasting
Eugen Hadamowsky heard Hitler admit that he had been misinformed about Stalin’s
strength.37 The enemy had unsuspected reserves of tanks, aircraft, and men of unquestionable
bravery.
AS Goebbels flew down to Salzburg for the Mozart festival and to see his children he
dipped into a one-hundred page book by an American, entitled ‘Germany must Perish!’
38 The author, Theodore N. Kaufman, proposed the ‘summary sterilization’ of all
Germans. ‘Germany must perish forever!’ wrote Kaufman. ‘In fact—not in fancy.’
The dust cover carried endorsements from Time magazine, the Washington Post and the
New York Times.39
It was an extraordinary book. ‘Well,’ dictated Goebbels gleefully to Otte. ‘This
Jew has done a disservice to the enemy. If he had composed this book at my behest he
couldn’t have done a better job.’40 He decided to issue one million copies to German
soldiers; after initially shelving this on legal grounds, fearing American reprisals against
German copyrights, he issued the book with a photograph showing President
Roosevelt apparently dictating the contents.41 The ‘castrationist’ book, with all its
Freudian overtones, preyed on his mind throughout his brief visit to the children.
656 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
In August 1940 he had discussed with Hitler the Soviet liquidation of the intelligentsia
in the Baltic states they had then just occupied—the ‘commissars’ and K.G.B.
officers were the murderers. Goebbels had closed his heart to the victims. Without
their intelligentsia, he had pointed out, the Baltic states were emasculated.42 Later
that month he and Hitler found they agreed that Europe’s Jews should all be shipped
off to Madagascar.43 When Goebbels visited Kattowitz in September 1940 the gauleiter
Fritz Bracht had confirmed that all th
e Jews there had been deported. But driving on
through the Jewish villages around Kraków, Goebbels was nonetheless daunted by
the magnitude of the task.44
FOR Goebbels there were two problems. Neither the broad German public nor their
Führer shared his satanic antisemitism. He studied Hitler’s attitudes carefully during
a dinner with Hans Frank upon whose Polish domain fell the thankless task of absorbing
the Reich’s detritus of unwanted Jews.45 The same Hitler who had issued
ruthless orders for the execution of the Soviet commissars was by no means as hostile
as Goebbels toward western Europe’s more cultivated Jews. He heard Hitler
speak warmly of both the composer Gustav Mahler and the producer Max Reinhardt
(Max Goldmann), and concede that in their performances the Jews were often ‘not
bad.’46
The public attitude was the lesser of these two problems. Goebbels got to work on
that with the only three antisemitic films that his studios ever produced, ‘The
Rothschilds’ (premiered on July 17, 1940), ‘Jud Süss’ (September 24), and ‘The
Eternal Jew’; this third film contained such distressing scenes of Jewish ritual slaughter
that Goebbels ordered an expurgated version made for the more squeamish members
of the public.47
His own visceral hatred of the Jews had become more radical since 1940. Physically
liquidating them now seemed an increasingly viable solution. If it was possible
to liquidate the insane, if Göring’s air force was killing the relatively innocent English
by the thousand, why should the ‘guilt-laden’ Jews be spared? Goebbels had
again discussed the euthanasia project (‘the covert liquidation of the mentally ill,’ he
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 657
called it) with Bouhler on January 30, 1941. Bouhler had informed him that they had
quietly disposed of eighty thousand so far, with sixty thousand more still to go. ‘Hard
work, but necessary too,’ applauded Goebbels.48 To counter public disquiet he commissioned
from leading film director Wolfgang Liebeneiner, the Steven Spielberg of
the day, a harrowing film on the human freaks whom a compassionate Third Reich
was pleased to put out of their misery.49
To him the Jews were fair game. Thus when Jewish ringleaders triggered strikes in
Nazi-occupied Holland in February 1941 he demanded that ‘this Jewish rabble’ be
hanged.50 Visiting Posen soon after, he heard from the gauleiter Arthur Greiser of
how he was cleansing the surrounding Warthegau: ‘There has been all manner of
liquidating going on here,’ he penned in his diary, ‘particularly of the Jewish garbage.’
‘That’s got to be,’ he added.51 He saw every justification: had the Jews not declared
war on the Reich? He took particular note when the South African prime minister
Jan Smuts said, in a message to the national Zionist congress, that people would
never forget the role played by the Jews on the side of Germany’s enemy.52 Goebbels
for one would not.
He was wont to say that the advantage of being branded world-wide as antisemites
was that they could now do with the Jews as they saw fit.53 Primarily he wanted to
expel all Berlin’s Jews. They formed the dangerous nucleus of an enemy intelligentsia.
Hans Hinkel had reported in September 1940 that there were still some seventytwo
thousand in the city. The intermediate aim was to deport five hundred a month
to the south-east; as soon as the war ended the rest would be sent back to the east.54
Later that month he informed Goebbels that about four million Jews still lived in
Hitler’s present dominions. ‘The Madagascar Plan, which has now been given the goahead,
provides for about three and a half million of these to be shipped to Madagascar
over approximately eighteen months after the war.’55
Goebbels felt that the Jews in the Kurfürstendamm and Uhland-Strasse tenements
were a particularly active grapevine for anti-Nazi rumours which they spread among
their American and other foreign lodgers.56 ‘Dr Goebbels,’ Tiessler told the party,
‘regards every Jew as a counter-propagandist. Henceforth Jews should only rent out
658 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
accommodation to other Jews.’57 Albert Speer agreed with him fervently, though for
other reasons. According to his figures there were over twenty-three thousand Jewish
homes in the city. His official diary* shows that at the beginning of 1941 he had
initiated a cold-blooded slum-clearance plan which involved evicting Jewish tenants
and cramming them into other already overcrowded Jewish homes.58 However many
ordinances Goebbels issued however, the Jews found ways to circumvent them; and
although he repeated to Dr Gutterer in April 1941 a suggestion that the Jews should
be forced to wear some kind of badge, this idea too made slow progress.59
THE direct expulsion of the Jews from Berlin was not yet practicable. Vienna had
priority, and the eastern railroad system was overburdened with war transports.60
Besides, some thirty thousand of Berlin’s Jews were working in munitions factories.
61 Goebbels still felt, as he told Hitler on March 17, 1941, that it was totally
wrong for his city to be housing seventy thousand Jews. He told Gutterer afterwards
however that the Führer had still not decided that Berlin should be ‘freed of its Jews’.62
Gutterer at once called an inter-ministerial meeting attended representatives of both
Speer and Heydrich. The latter’s man, S.S. Sturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, went
over the recent history: Hitler, he explained, had put Heydrich in charge of evacuating
the Jews, and Heydrich had recently developed a plan to lodge them all in Poland.
Hans Frank was reluctant to absorb any more, but Hitler had ordered him (‘in
writing’) to accept sixty thousand from Vienna. Since they could only lay hands on
forty-five thousand in Vienna, continued Eichmann, they could in theory absorb fifteen
thousand from Berlin but, he reminded the ministry, Germany’s manufacturing industry
needed every available Jew.63 Speer’s man (probably Dietrich Clahes, chief of
his infamous Rehousing Office) explained that Speer wanted the twenty thousand
* I.e., the original diary, not the sanitized and retyped version which Speer artfully
deposited in the German federal archives after his release from Spandau prison, and
from which is excised all reference to his infamous Hauptabteilung Umsiedlung (Main
Rehousing Office) which conducted the evictions.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 659
Jewish homes in Berlin emptied as a reserve for air-raid housing losses.64 Gutterer
told Goebbels that he had put Eichmann in charge of planning the eventual evacuation
operation.
Goebbels discussed this briefly with Hitler on June 19. Hans Frank was visiting too
and made no secret of his eagerness to displace his unwanted Jews still further east
once Russia was defeated. ‘A fitting punishment,’ philosophized Goebbels, ‘given the
way that they have pitted country against country and plotted the war.’ ‘The Führer,’