he routinely added, ‘also prophesied all this to the Jews.’ Hitler reassured Frank that
Poland was envisaged only as a transit camp for Europe’s Jews; in due course they
would all be deported further east.65
Thwarted in his immediate intention, Goebbels pressed on which the plan for
Jews to be forced to wear a distinguishing badge in public, explaining that they were
getting more uppity with each day that passed. Polish women in Berlin already had to
wear a ‘P’ badge, and Jewish street workers a yellow armband.66 He directed Taubert
to discuss this idea with the Gestapo. In fact the Gestapo had first mooted the idea in
1938.67 Late in 1939 the propaganda ministry had independently suggested that Jews
should wear some kind of lapel pin to facilitate the new ordinance that they give up
their seats in public transport; the idea had been put to Himmler but got no further.
68 The Gestapo’s chief, S.S. Brigadeführer Heinrich Müller, told Taubert that
Heydrich had made similar proposals ever since 1940. Tiessler asked Bormann if a
decision from Hitler was likely soon, and there the matter rested until the summer
of 1941.69
As Hitler’s armies invaded the Baltic states in June and July 1941, expelling the
recent Russian conquerors, the natives of those three countries exacted terrible retribution
on the Jews. Shortly before Goebbels saw Hitler that August he learned
from d’Alquèn of this bloody sequel, and pitilessly referred once again to Hitler’s
famous prophesy of January 1939.70 During that month Speer evicted five thousand
more Berlin Jews from their homes.71 Goebbels applauded, and rhetorically asked
his staff what their returning soldiers would think if they found the Jews still living in
eight-room homes waited on hand and foot by Aryan domestic labour, and for ever
660 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
whining in public transport?72 ‘I don’t want to see,’ he added piously, ‘the mob taking
the Jewish problem into its own hands again like 1938.’73 ‘You only have to imagine,’
he dictated to Otte, ‘what the Jews would do with us if they were ever in power.’74
SPEER’S air-raid shelter for Goebbels was scheduled for completion at the end of
August 1941, and high time too since autumn was approaching and Churchill’s bomber
squadrons would soon return. Even the Russians had recently sent bombers over
Berlin.75
Stalin was playing Goebbels at his own game. One evening an enemy voice from
Moscow broke into the brief silence before the evening news bulletin and intoned
blasphemies against the Führer.76 The same voice used subsequent pauses to pass
sarcastic comments on each preceding item. There seemed to be no adequate counter-
measure. Goebbels, who had total control of the radio news, ordered the bulletins
read ever faster, and then had to start rumours to explain away this undignified
verbal gallop.77 The enemy voices continued. In August 1943 Himmler would write
to Goebbels:
Driving back at night from the Wolf’s Lair to my headquarters I like to listen to
music on the Deutschland-Sender. The last few weeks I have noticed that close to
that wavelength there is, always after two A.M., an enemy radio station which is
much more audible here in East Prussia, and broadcasts enemy news in German.
78
THE voice must have seemed like an ill omen from the east.
GOEBBELS reported to Hitler’s HQ on August 18, 1941 for the first time in over five
weeks. Hitler was recovering from an attack of marshland dysentery and, Goebbels
was malevolently pleased to hear, some kind of attack brought on by a stand-up row
with Ribbentrop. In the four hours that they spent strolling through the heavily pa-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 661
trolled woodlands within the compound Hitler admitted that Barbarossa had run
into difficulties. His experts had credited Stalin with five thousand tanks: he had
closer to twenty thousand, and not ten thousand warplanes but twenty.79 However
he put Stalin’s losses at three million dead, and he had already taken 1·4 million
Soviet prisoners.* Perhaps, continued Hitler, Stalin would ask for peace terms. He
would grant them, provided that his forces were totally disarmed. He had no qualms
about letting bolshevism as such survive. He hoped to conclude the campaign by the
onset of winter.
GOEBBELS touched upon the topic of euthanasia.81 In a recent sermon Count von
Galen, bishop of Münster, had threatened to have the ‘murderers’ prosecuted.
Goebbels felt that Galen should be hanged for sedition.82 Hitler however argued that
in general they must avoid all potentially divisive subjects, like the denominational
conflict.83 A time for example when millions of German soldiers found simple pleasure
in nicotine was not the time to start an ‘insulting and demeaning’ campaign
against tobacco smoking.84 Despite this warning, Goebbels raised the Jewish Problem
with Hitler, and showed him Kaufman’s pamphlet ‘Germany must Perish!’ Hitler
was convinced that his sinister prophesy of January 1939 was being fulfilled automatically.
‘In the east,’ Goebbels reported to his diary, speaking in circumlocutions,
‘the Jews are having to foot the bill; they have already paid it in part in Germany.’
Even if they all fled to North America, there too the day of reckoning would come.
For several minutes, dictating this diary passage to Otte, Goebbels spluttered on
about the Jews. Hitler gave him carte-blanche to introduce the badge for the Jews
however, so there would be no further legal problem. Goebbels had Kaufman to
thank for this breakthrough. The badge, he told his diary, would be a yellow cloth star
with the word Jude emblazoned across it.85
* At Potsdam Marshal Stalin confided to Churchill in July 1945 that Soviet losses
during the war had amounted to five million killed and missing.80
662 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
THE campaign in the east was not running as scheduled. In North Africa too the
Germans were now on the defensive. Goebbels feared that the easy victories of the
Wehrmacht during the early weeks of Barbarossa had been devastating for domestic
morale in the long term.86 British propaganda analysts detected a shift in his output
to a more sombre mood.87 With Hitler’s permission he recalled his trusty Berndt,
now an S.S. Oberführer, from North Africa, to take over his central Propaganda
Department.88 Berndt secretly confided to Himmler, whom he saw as his real boss,
that his job would be ‘to get the German public through the coming winter.’ ‘I am
quite clear,’ he added, ‘that our propaganda this summer has blundered badly. We’ve
been in the illusions business, we’ve painted everything too rosy.’ Churchill’s method,
he told Himmler, was to paint the situation to his public in the darkest hue as possible,
but to stress that in the end British arms would be triumphant.89
Goebbels kept his finger on Germany’s pulse at several vital points. His staff closely
analysed all incoming mail, including anonymous letters; a brutally frank weekly
morale report was compiled by Amt III of Himmler’s security service; and his own
network of forty-two gau-level Propaganda Offices (Reichspropagandaämter) rep
orted
each Monday on public morale (Stimmung) and behaviour (Haltung). They in
turned drew their information from cells in individual factories and party branches.
Dr Immanuel Schäffer, who had to collate this data at the ministry, found a broad
measure of agreement between them. Broadly speaking, while behaviour remained
remarkably stable, public morale fluctuated wildly.90
FIVE more weeks passed before Goebbels saw Hitler again. Barbarossa had regained
its lost momentum. At five P.M. on September 20, 1941 German radio announced
the captured of Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. Two million Russian prisoners were now
in German hands. As Goebbels and Hadamowsky flew into the Wolf’s Lair for lunch
on the twenty-third the news was of even greater victories as four Soviet armies,
encircled by army groups Centre and South, faced destruction.91 Hitler told them
that the worst would be over by mid-October. He would follow through with thrusts
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 663
toward Kharkov, Stalingrad, and the river Don, to rob Stalin of his coal and arms
production centres. Petersburg would be starved out, then ploughed literally into
the ground.92 Goebbels learned that Hitler was putting Heydrich in charge of an
increasingly fractious Prague. ‘Such situations,’ the minister dictated approvingly,
‘call for a strong man.’
While at Hitler’s HQ he was able to coordinate with Reinhard Heydrich his measures
against the Jews.93 The new yellow star badge had been gazetted into law two or
three weeks earlier, but there had been unforeseen consequences: there was loud
public criticism, and some Germans were going out of their way to offer Jews seats
in crowded public transport. Goebbels was furious, and ordered that they be reminded
of Kaufman’s slogan that Germany ‘must perish forever from this earth.’94 To
rub it he issued through the party’s Reich Propaganda Directorate (RPL) a leaflet
headed, ‘Whenever you see this badge, remember what the Jew has inflicted upon
our Nation.’95
In Hans Fritzsche’s view it was this unexpected sentimentalism of the Berliner that
finally decided Goebbels on the rapid and ruthless deportation of the Jews.96 Dictating
his diary note on September 23 Goebbels noted that this would still have to await
the end of Barbarossa. ‘They are all to be transported ultimately to (regions?) adjacent
to the bolshevik (rump territory?)’ he dictated.* Hitler had confirmed to him
that peu à peu all Jews were to be expelled from Berlin, Vienna, and Prague.97 This
conformed with what he had told Himmler. The aim was to evacuate them all by the
end of 1941: first to occupied Poland, then, in the spring of 1942, further east into
occupied Russia. The first sixty thousand, were to be expelled from Berlin, Vienna,
and Prague. This conformed with what Hitler had told Himmler: the aim was to
evacuate them all by the end of 1941; first to occupied Poland, then, in the spring of
1942, further east into occupied Russia. The first sixty thousand, Himmler had there-
* The photocopy is only partially decipherable. On orders from the minister of the interior
in Bonn the German federal archives on July 1, 1993 refused to alljow me to inspect the
original image. See Author’s Acknowledgements.
664 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
upon notified Heydrich, would be dumped in the Lodz ghetto.98 To the distinctly
disenchanted Nazi governor of Lodz, Friedrich Uebelhör, Himmler wrote that such
was ‘the Führer’s will.’99 ‘All the Jews are to be removed,’ Hitler repeated during
lunch on October 6. ‘And not just to the Government-General [former Poland] but
right on to the east. It is only our pressing need for war transportation that stops us
doing so right now.’100
AT five-thirty A.M. on October 2, 1941, Hitler’s armies began Typhoon, the attempt
to capture Moscow. Nearly two thousand tanks moved off in blinding clouds of dust.
Again he had kept Goebbels in the dark. At Goebbels’ request however he made a
flying visit to Berlin to speak at the Sports Palace on the third: his train arrived at
1:10 P.M., and he spoke at five. Goebbels had packed the front rows with combatinjured
like in the good old days.101 Speaking ex tempore, Hitler delivered a witty,
boisterous oration and the Berlin audience, which was not the usual stuffed-shirt
party audience, roared approval. He boasted that Russia was ‘already broken’ and
‘would never arise again.’ Gales of laughter gusted around the vast hall as he mocked
Mr Churchill’s self-proclaimed victories; deafening applause followed as he proclaimed
his own. As Goebbels accompanied him back to his special train at seven-thirty, Hitler
prophesied that (‘provided that the weather stays fine’) they would have destroyed
the Soviet armed forces within the next fourteen days.
For a few days, as a news blackout prevailed, it seemed that he was right. As the
first snows drifted idly down on October 7 General Jodl called it the most crucial
day of the campaign.102 On the eighth he went further: ‘We have finally and without
exaggeration won this war.’103 Later that day Hitler sent for Otto Dietrich and his
young deputy Heinz Lorenz and dictated to them a written briefing for the press; he
also directed General Rudolf Schmundt to give to Dietrich an order of the day announcing
that Marshal Timoshenko’s armies were trapped. Dietrich drafted a press
statement. General Jodl approved the text.104 ‘The Russian armies have been annihilated,’
it said in part. And, ‘All that remains in Russia is policing work.’ Arriving in
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 665
Berlin the next day, October 9, Dietrich told a press conference that Russia was
‘done for.’
The first that Goebbels knew was when he read the afternoon headlines: THE GREAT
HOUR HAS STRUCK: THE CAMPAIGN IN THE EAST DECIDED! He limped furiously up and down
his home’s carpeted corridor. He phoned Major Martin, his High Command liaison
officer. ‘Are there any fresh bulletins since this morning?’ he snarled.105 As fanfares
announced the special communiqué, on the eastern front it was now pouring with
rain. Agonies of uncertainty beset Goebbels. On the tenth he telephoned Jodl. The
general feigned ignorance and dismay and warned that the war would continue all
winter.106 Goebbels sent agents out into the beer halls to sample public opinion. The
people had all heard Dietrich say the campaign was ‘decided’ but understood it as
won.
Goebbels switched to damage-control. He put it about that Hitler himself had
ordered the communiqué solely as a ploy to jolt the Japanese into some kind of
action.107 Taking a dramatically independent line, Goebbels tried to defuse the High
Command’s gaffe. In the Völkischer Beobachter he argued that while victory was indeed
certain, nobody could say when; then, in Das Reich, as the first wintry blizzards began
to harass Hitler’s mud-spattered and exhausted riflemen, he published an editorial
entitled, ‘When, or How?’108 This too, despite the question in the title, talked of
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 108