Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

by Roger Manvell; Heinrich Fraenkel

  men of his own ministry with women.13

  Hitler’s riflemen had paid winter’s cruel price. By late January 1942 they had suffered

  1,856 amputations.14 Goebbels addressed them all in his first Das Reich article

  of the new year. ‘It behoves us to remain tough and composed,’ he wrote.15 Hitler, a

  stickler for style, disliked that word ‘composed’, and decided on the strength of it

  that Goebbels should not deliver the party’s anniversary speech on January 30. ‘I

  know how to preserve the golden mean between reason and rhetoric,’ he explained

  over supper in the minister’s absence. ‘I’d not have expressed myself like that. In a

  situation like this, the soldier is not composed but resolute. When you’ve been through

  it yourself you get a feel for these things.’16

  Characteristically when Goebbels came for lunch the next day Hitler bit his tongue

  and said nothing of this. They talked of Britain’s eclipse in the Far East. In three

  weeks he expected the Japanese to overrun Singapore. ‘Perhaps,’ he mused to Dr

  Goebbels, ‘there is a chance here to bring Britain, if not to her senses, at least to

  consider her position.’ He had succeeded in stabilising their own eastern front. For

  three weeks he had worked round the clock, reviving the spirits of his demoralised

  generals in endless conferences and telephone arguments—he described these commanders

  unflatteringly as like inflatable dummies with slow punctures. He reserved

  his most biting remarks for Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, which Goebbels eagerly

  seconded. ‘He infected his staff with a chronically tractable disposition,’ complained

  Hitler, as though this were not precisely the quality for which Hitler had chosen him

  to succeed Fritsch in 1938.

  Goebbels told Hitler that according to Colonel Martin many officers in the High

  Command had openly predicted that the Soviet armies would be on East Prussia’s

  690 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH

  frontiers that spring. Hitler angrily told him to get their names.17 Back in Berlin

  Goebbels directed the unfortunate colonel that it was now his duty to draw up this

  black list. ‘There is only one sin,’ he said, quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘and that is

  cowardice.’18 It was perhaps significant that he was now automatically extending his

  remit far beyond the portals of his own ministry. A day or two later Schirmeister’s

  wife Emmi, invited by Magda to dinner, innocently told of an officer cousin who had

  plied her in East Prussia with dark rumours that the Russians were coming. Goebbels

  told her to name that officer too, saying, ‘I guarantee he will be shot within twentyfour

  hours.’19

  BEFORE leaving the Wolf’s Lair on January 19 Dr Goebbels had also touched briefly on

  the Jewish Problem. ‘On this,’ he noted, unable to hang any meat on the now threadbare

  phrases, ‘the Führer holds without qualification to the existing and proper hardline

  view.’20

  Behind closed doors the Final Solution, in all its heathen criminality, was already

  undergoing a deadly shift of emphasis. As he arrived back in Berlin on January 20

  Heydrich was holding his first inter-ministerial conference on the topic.21 The ambitious,

  amoral S.S. Obergruppenführer had issued the original invitations back in

  November, including one to Goebbels’ Staatssekretär Gutterer, but he had never

  received his and the propaganda ministry was one of several not represented at this

  conference.22 This conference was largely window-dressing anyway. Chaos was spreading

  in the eastern territories as more trainloads of Jewish evacuees arrived there.

  Hans Frank’s Government-General (former Poland) was flatly refusing to accept any

  more—Frank had exclaimed irritably at one of his Cabinet meetings in Kraków that

  Berlin was telling them they’d got no use for the Jews either. ‘Liquidate them yourselves!’

  was his retort.23 Two more batches, of 1,037 and 1,006 Jews, had left Berlin

  for Riga on January 13, and 19; but the train which left Berlin, also for Riga, on

  January 25, loaded with 1,051 Jews, was the last batch for two months.24

  Goebbels heard his Führer recall, in his speech of January 30, the sinister prophecy

  which he had made exactly three years before that this war would bring the ‘destruc-

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 691

  tion of Jewry.’25 His own evil deportation project temporarily thwarted by the winter

  transportation crisis, Goebbels devised a string of regulations calculated to hound

  and harass the Jews as he had in 1938.26 He ordered one Jew punished for using

  coffee rations given him by a non-Jew.27 He forbade Jews to use public transport at

  all, apart from those still working in the munitions factories.28 He prohibited Jews

  from ordering newspapers by mail, from buying them at kiosks, and from having

  them delivered.29

  In February his legal experts preparing the trial of Vom Rath’s assassin Grynszpan

  in Paris reported that the former foreign minister Georges Bonnet was willing to

  testify that the Jews had pressured France into declaring war in 1939.30 After lunching

  with Hitler a few days later Goebbels dictated that it was their historic duty to

  eradicate this ‘Jewish terrorism’, like the Soviet secret police atrocities, from Europe.

  ‘The Führer once again expresses his ruthless resolve to make a clean sweep of

  the Jews out of Europe. One can’t go getting all sentimental about it. The Jews have

  richly deserved the catastrophe they are suffering today… We have to accelerate this

  process with a studied ruthlessness and we are thereby doing an invaluable services

  to a long-suffering mankind tormented for millenia by the Jews.’ Hitler, he claimed,

  had ordered him to convert those who were still in two minds about this. ‘The major

  prospects opened up by war are recognized by the Führer in all their significance.’

  Fuelling the raging fires of his own prejudices, Goebbels spent an evening watching

  ‘The Dybbuk,’ a Polish Yiddish film. ‘Its effect is so antisemitic that one can only

  marvel how little the Jews … realize what non-Jews find repellent. Watching this

  film,’ he continued, ‘one perceives once more that the Jewish race is the most dangerous

  on earth, and that one must display neither mercy nor softness toward it.’31

  IT is important, reading entries like this, to recall that Goebbels’ diary is not above

  criticism as a source. Firstly, it was now dictated each morning to a private secretary,

  and typed out in triplicate by clerks. Secondly, analysis of earlier entries, like those

  concerning the 1931 ‘bomb attempt’ on Goebbels, the references to Magda and

  Lida, and those written at the time of the Night of Broken Glass, show that the

  692 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH

  diaries are acceptable only as evidence against Goebbels, but not necessarily against

  third parties. A strict distinction must be drawn therefore between what he admits

  putting to his Führer, and what he alleges the Führer put to him.

  Hitler was even now less radical on the Jewish Problem than Goebbels, Himmler,

  Heydrich, and Speer. He was prevaricating and, according to Eichmann, saw in the

  Jewish colonisation of Magadascar the real Final Solution.32 But Goebbels was powered

  by
the unflickering light of a an unwavering, ineradicable antisemitism. It delighted

  his evil heart when there was an outcry in London against Jewish spivs and

  black marketeers. ‘The Jews are the same all the world over,’ he gloated. ‘You either

  have to slap a Yellow Star on them, or throw them into a concentration camp, or

  shoot them.’33 On March 5 he received a report from Heydrich about guerilla warfare

  in the occupied east, and blamed this on the Jews too. ‘It is therefore understandable,’

  he dictated to Otte, ‘that many of them must pay with their lives for this.

  Anyway, in my view the more Jews who are liquidated the more consolidated the

  situation in Europe will be after the war. Let there be no phony sentimentalism

  about it. The Jews are Europe’s misfortune. They must somehow be eliminated otherwise

  we are in danger of being eliminated by them.’34

  On the following day he took note of an extensive report by Heydrich’s office,

  probably on the Wannsee conference.35 There were still eleven million Jews in Europe,

  he dictated, summarizing the document. ‘For the time being they are to be

  concentrated in the east [until] later; possibly an island like Madagascar can be assigned

  to them after the war.’ It all raised a host of ‘delicate questions,’ like what to

  do with half-Jews and people like the late Gottschalk, Aryans married to Jews. ‘Undoubtedly

  there will be a multitude of personal tragedies,’ he wrote airily, ‘But this is

  unavoidable. The situation now is ripe for a final settlement of the Jewish question.’36

  The covering letter from Heydrich invited Goebbels to a second conference, at his

  headquarters in Kurfürsten Strasse on March 6. Goebbels sent two of his senior staff,

  Oberregierungsrat Pay Carstensen of the propaganda division, and Dr Schmidt-Burgk,

  of its eastern territories sub-section.37 The conference was raw with untutored remarks.

  Eichmann talked crudely of ‘forwarding’ the Jews, like so many head of cat-

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 693

  tle; and when one civil servant objected that they could hardly proceed against lawabiding

  Jewish citizens, Eichmann’s rough-tongued adjutant S.S. Sturmbannführer

  Günther remarked cynically, ‘That’s up to our judgement as policemen.’38 The ministry

  of justice handled the report like a hot potato.39 The Reich Chancellery referred

  it all to Hitler.40 Hitler told Hans Lammers categorically that he wanted the solution

  of the Jewish problem postponed until after the war was over—a ruling that remarkably

  few historians now seem disposed to quote.41

  As the Soviet partisans intensified their deadly war that spring the security service

  (S.D.) reported that the culprits were the political commissars and the Jews. ‘It has

  therefore proved necessary once again,’ dictated Goebbels, ‘to shoot more Jews…

  Any sentimentalism,’ he continued, referring to a quality that did not abound in his

  heart, ‘is out of place.’42

  By now the two-month railroad log-jam was over and another train was being

  loaded with Jews marked for deportation. What might be their fate? On March 27,

  the day before this trainload left Berlin, Goebbels dictated an extraordinary, deadpan

  but spine-chilling entry into his diary which confirmed that he at least was now in

  little doubt.

  Beginning with Lublin the Jews are now being deported eastward from the

  Government-General [former Poland]. The procedure is pretty barbaric, and one

  that beggars description, and there’s not much left of the Jews. Broadly speaking

  one can probably say that sixty percent of them will have to be liquidated, while

  only forty percent can be put to work.

  ‘The former gauleiter of Vienna,’ he continued, referring to S.S. Brigadeführer

  Odilo Globocnik, S.S. and police chief of the Lublin District, ‘who is carrying out

  this operation, is doing so pretty discreetly and also using a procedure that is not too

  blatant.’43 Goebbels added that the Jews had had it coming to them for a long time;

  he cited yet again Hitler’s prophecy of 1939, and the need to eschew all mawkish

  694 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH

  sentimentality. ‘It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish

  bacillus,’ he concluded, unconsciously adopting Hitler’s favourite analogy. ‘Here too,’

  he dictated to his poker-faced stenographer, ‘the Führer is the staunch champion and

  promoter of a radical solution.’44

  Nowhere do the diary’s seventy thousand pages refer to an explicit order by Hitler

  for the murder of the Jews. (Perhaps this is not surprising, but for the sake of completeness

  it needs saying.) Goebbels instinctively couched every phrase of those diaries

  with both cunning and ambiguity. The documents clearly show Hitler as the

  uncompromising architect of the plan to shunt all Europe’s Jews out, failing Madagascar,

  to the east. The Polish ghettos emptied by this process would be replenished

  with Jews deported from the Reich. ‘The Jews,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘have nothing to

  laugh about.’45 They were having to pay dearly for the misdeeds of their brethren in

  Britain and America: such was his rationale. On March 28 he stipulated that they

  were no longer to be listed in telephone directories.46 Why should they be? They

  were disappearing from the face of occupied Europe.

  HE can deceive his diary, dictating touching entries calculated to portray their author

  to posterity as a caring family man; but he cannot deceive his own mother. Sometimes

  she is seen haunting the opulent halls and galleries at No.20 Hermann-Göring

  Strasse laughing softly to herself as though she cannot believe that the frenetic demon

  controlling this evil empire is little Jupp, her youngest son, the waiflike cripple

  the she nursed through infancy. She barely speaks to others, and when she does her

  thick Rhineland dialect comes as a shock to them.47

  Once again, pleading problems with her heart, Magda leaves him for a month-long

  cure in Dresden beginning on January 21.48 Sometimes he goes over to see his favourite

  sister Maria, or to talk things over with his mother. They tell him home

  truths about public attitudes.49 He takes his two oldest daughters and sleepy little

  Helmut out to Lanke. It is his first visit there in three months, and the lovely Ursula

  Quandt stands in for Magda.50 He lets the children play truant on the pretext that

  their younger sisters at Schwanenwerder have whooping cough. They spend happy

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 695

  hours sledding in the snow—the same snow which is shrouding Europe and wreaking

  havoc on his Jewish evacuation timetable.51 On the last day of April he moves out

  to Lanke in a vain attempt to cure a bout of eczema, a chronic health problem.52

  One evening he is visited here by a ghost from the past, Anka Stalherm, now fortysix,

  editor of Dame and without even a trace of grey defiling her blonde hair. Her

  second husband Rudolf Oswald, fifteen years her junior, has just been killed on the

  eastern front. She mentions that there are still some (Jewish) Ullstein hold-outs left