at her magazine’s publisher, Deutscher Verlag. Goebbels promises to clear them out,
but all the quivering, painful tendresse of their earlier relationship has faded and
gone away.53
HE believed that the winter’s crisis had now passed its lowest point.54 Morale had
been depressed all winter by the epidemics of frostbite and typhus ravaging the armies
in the east.55 In North Africa Rommel recaptured Benghazi and lunged on toward
Tobruk. Goebbels promoted him to a national hero, although the High Command
was not keen. He found that unlike the navy and air force the army discouraged
all hero-worship of its commanders.56
Churchill had no such inhibitions. Goebbels had long realised that he had met his
match. ‘A clever speech,’ he wrote after one Churchill offering a year earlier.57 After
listening to one speech by the prime minister in Birmingham he had enviously written,
‘He plays on the tear glands, the old crook.’ In Das Reich however he decried the
way that his readers fawned on the British enemy. ‘Churchill,’ he scornfully told his
staff, ‘is one of those hippopotamus types who, when they contemplate the devastation
in England, return to London not only reassured but actually reinvigorated.’ He
scoffed at Churchill’s use of language. ‘Thus we sent to Greece a large part of our
Army of the Nile,’ he mimicked him, ‘to meet our obligations. It transpired by chance
that the formations to hand all came from New Zealand and Australia…’ ‘It’s always
“chance” that finds the British bringing up the rear,’ he mocked, spelling out propaganda
lines to his staff. ‘Chance that they are always on the retreat. By chance they have
no share in the bloody casualties. By chance it is the French, the Belgians, and the
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Dutch who had to bear the brunt of our western offensive. By chance the Norwegians
have to cover the British as they flee Norway. And by chance it is the troops of the
Empire who, since there are no others left, have to do the job now.’58 Having said all
that, however, he warned against denigrating the British soldier; the British might let
others bear the brunt of the fighting, but when cornered they fought like wildcats.59
He became obsessed with Churchill. In Das Reich he referred to him as ‘that old
whisky soak’ but admitted, ‘A chronic whisky drinker is more welcome as Britain’s
prime minister than a teetotaller.’60 He and Hitler devoured the fond if scurrilous
book in which Churchill’s private secretary described his drinking habits and his
custom of dictating to her in pink silk underwear or even in his bath.61 With a sure
understanding of the public appetite, Goebbels warned his journalists to go easy on
these stories and to concentrate more on the prime minister’s ramshackle family
circumstances, his dilettante conduct of the war and his monstrous lies.62
One conclusion was inescapable: Churchill might be a ‘conceited ape,’ but they
had no choice but to tackle this ‘lying old swine’; he was ‘a bulldog who may yet give
us a run for our money.’63 ‘He’s going to be a tough nut for us to crack,’ he added a
few days later. ‘Without him, the war would have been over long ago. But with him,
there’s going to be some hard fighting ahead.’64 Studying Churchill’s book of pre-war
speeches, Step by Step, he decided that this implacable foe combined a rare amalgam
of heroism and animal cunning. ‘If he had come to power in 1933,’ he frankly assessed,
‘we wouldn’t be where we are today.’65 Many times he discussed Churchill
with his Führer. ‘He will end by reducing the empire to ruin,’ predicted Hitler, who
was not given to making empty prophecies.66 He said that all his pre-war English
visitors, including Neville Chamberlain, had described Churchill as a fool. ‘The Führer
naturally regrets very much the knocks that the White man is taking in the Far East,’
recorded the propaganda minister. ‘But these are no fault of ours.’67 In a move which
Goebbels followed with keen interest, Churchill reshuffled his Cabinet in February
1942 and brought in his most cerebral critic Sir Stafford Cripps; Goebbels identified
with this left-wing ideologist.68 He wondered if Cripps would succeed in replacing
Churchill. This ‘drawing room bolshevik’ had the insolence to announce that Berlin,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 697
Goebbels’ own city, would be the future capital of bolshevism. ‘There are, it seems,’
said Goebbels, ‘always some idiots who keep tossing the ball to us.’69
Those were dramatic days. As Hitler met him for lunch on February 13 three of the
mightiest Nazi warships were ploughing in broad daylight eastward through the narrow,
wintry straits of Dover under Churchill’s very nose; it was one of the most
impertinent naval operations ever staged. At the same time the Japanese were bearing
down on Singapore. Goebbels mocked that the same British who had been unwilling
to allow Danzig to return to Germany now seemed happy to give up Singapore.
70 He told his editors to feign regret—and to remind the British that it was they
who had wanted this war.71 As Singapore raised the white flag, Goebbels added that
they should remind readers of the caustic rebukes that Mr Churchill had heaped
upon his Belgian, Dutch, and French allies for surrendering in 1940.72
His 1942 birthday address to Hitler displayed a worshipfulness of an almost religious
fervour. It revived the image of the ‘lonely Führer,’ to which he added a soupçon
of the ‘suffering Führer’ and a Christ who suffered only for the Germans.73 Nowhere
did the diary reflect this more clearly than after a visit to Hitler’s HQ in March. ‘The
Führer, thank God,’ he routinely began, ‘appears to be in good health.’ But then,
after more in this gushing vein, he dictated: ‘Actually that is not the case. In our
intimate talk he told me that recently he has not been very well. From time to time
he has had to fight off severe attacks of giddiness.’ And finally that day, forty pages
later, ‘The Führer makes an unnerving impression on me this time. I have never seen
him so grim as now. I tell him that I, too, am not at all in the best of health. We
continued this discussion very intimately, man to man.’74 He said that Hitler had
urged him to visit again soon, but over five weeks would pass before the one maladeimaginaire
set eyes on the other again.
Using guarded language, Dr Goebbels had put in a word for his imprisoned colleague
Karl Bömer. Hitler agreed to Bömer’s release and posting to a punishment
battalion. Haggard from his ten months in jail, Bömer was brought into the ministry
building a few days later; Goebbels gave him money and a food package, and sent
him off on four weeks’ leave in Bavaria before his posting to the front.75 Bömer was
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wounded in action at Kharkov a few weeks later and died in hospital at Kraków.
Goebbels and Dietrich jointly signed a defiantly prominent obituary in the party’s
gazette.76
To his Italian counterpart Pavolini Goebbels expressed only qualified optimism
about the future. He would personally be content if they reached the Caucasus.77
>
Hitler had told him that he was setting himself clear but limited objectives for the
coming offensives—Petersburg, Moscow, and the Caucasus. In October, he promised,
he would call a halt for the winter and perhaps even for good. He did not stint
his praise for the Soviet leadership. ‘Stalin’s brutal hand saved the Russian front,’
Goebbels heard Hitler say. ‘We shall have to adopt similar methods.’78
THE next day, March 20, Gutterer brought to him an extraordinary story. He had just
lunched at the Kaiserhof with Professor Otto Hahn, who had discovered nuclear
fission in 1938; Hahn hinted at the work that he and Professor Werner Heisenberg
were doing on the atomic bomb. ‘If we had such a weapon,’ Hahn said, ‘everybody
else would throw in the towel right away!’ Gutterer brought him straight round to
Goebbels at No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse. Goebbels asked how long it would
take to build such a weapon. Hahn spoke of the autumn of 1945, but added that he
was hampered since Rust, the minister of education, had sacked his best physicist
Lisa Meitner (she was Jewish); Goebbels loathed Rust, and exploded in fury; he
asked if Meitner could be retrieved—he would guarantee that she would be under
Hitler’s personal protection and get a fine estate if they got the bomb. (She was
already in England however.)79 Quoting Otto Hahn, Goebbels told his diary that a
tiny device would yield such immense destructive power that ‘one is forced to view
with dread the shape of this war, and indeed of all future wars, if it drags on much
longer.’ It was vital, he noted, to keep the German lead in this field.80
After a meeting with the atomic scientists in June Speer reported to Hitler, though
in terms of little enthusiasm, and the small German lead was lost.81
CONVENTIONAL bombing already seemed destructive enough. On Saturday March 28
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 699
Churchill’s bombers set mediæval Lübeck on fire. Gauleiter Kaufmann told Goebbels
that it was unlike any raid that had gone before. When Hitler phoned, raging that he
had been unable to raise the ministry of the interior by telephone at all, Goebbels
asked for full powers to arrange emergency food and clothing for the city.82
He discovered that most of his fellow ministers went missing on Friday evenings.
The war department not only shut down every weekend but took off Wednesday
afternoons too, as though it were still peacetime.
He complained to Hitler too about recent politically incorrect decisions by their
lawyers and suggested they create a special category of offences against the National
Socialist code, which would be punishable even by death.83 This would enable the
Nazi lawyers to deal with those elements which had eluded them so far. He also
recommended appointing the Nazi judge Dr Otto Thierack, the tough head of the
People’s Court, to succeed Franz Gutterer as minister of justice. Hitler however had
already decided to go even further: he told Goebbels that he would going to ask the
Reichstag to grant him absolute powers, so that he could prosecute what he called
saboteurs. He made the speech on April 26.84 ‘What was the point of that!’ exclaimed
Goebbels to his staff afterwards, and mimicked: ‘One Nation, One Reich, one Führer!’
‘We hear that all the time,’ he added, ‘and then Mr Hitler stands up and asks for
absolute powers so he can tell a few red-tape merchants to go to hell if he needs to.’
He shuddered at what the foreign press would make of it. ‘That’s another fine mess,’
he snapped to Magda, reading out the press summaries to her—the London Daily
Mail, the Daily Herald, and the B.B.C. had scoffed mercilessly at Hitler’s speech.85
The Jewish exodus had resumed on March 28, 1942 after a two-month hiatus.86 A
train had left Berlin that day for Travniki with 974 Jews. He ordered a comprehensive
film record made.87 ‘About a thousand a week are now being shipped out to the east,’
dictated Goebbels. ‘The suicide rate among these Jewish evacuees is extremely high,’
he added without emotion. ‘It’s no skin off my nose. The Jews have had it coming to
them… They ignored our warnings, and now they’re paying for it.’88 Another train
left on April 2 with 654 Berlin Jews, and a third with sixty-five, also bound for
Travniki, on April 14. There was then another halt. It would not be easy to get rid of
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the rest, some forty thousand, because only complete families could be deported: if
even one member was exempt, so was the whole family.89 Controversy was rife about
what to do with the half-Jews—sterilize them, or deport with all that that implied?
‘There is no doubt,’ Goebbels conceded, ‘that these do pose a serious obstacle to the
radical solution of the Jewish problem.’90
The partisan war was claiming thousands of lives in the east, among them Tonak,
Goebbels’ trusty former chauffeur, gunned down and buried in swamplands west of
R’zhev.91 ‘The Jews get short shrift in all the occupied territories,’ Goebbels dictated
after reading the latest S.D. report on the partisans. ‘Tens of thousands are being
wiped out.’ He never tired of repeating Hitler’s sinister 1939 prophecy, and did so
again.92 From Moscow came reports on a Jewish congress uttering bloodthirsty threats
of retribution once Hitler was overthrown. ‘But that cannot be,’ dictated Goebbels.
‘That must not be, and that shall not be.’93
Fears for his own safety were never far from his mind. He saw every living Jew as
a potential assassin. Nine-tenths of the assassinations in Paris were being committed
by Jews, which was, he accepted, hardly surprising under the circumstances. ‘It would
be best either to deport the remaining yids from Paris, or to liquidate the lot.’94 He
was planning an elaborate public trial of Herschel Grynszpan, who had fallen into
Nazi hands in 1940, but the assassin’s crafty lawyers had now invented the theory
that he and his victim vom Rath had been homosexual lovers. This was propaganda
dynamite for the enemy. The minister of justice included the infamous allegation in
the indictment, and, worse, ruled that the trial should allow public discussion of the
deportation of the Jews—a development which Goebbels found ‘incredibly inept.’95
Thus the Grynszpan affair turned to ashes in his hands. Gutterer reviewed the dossier
and advised him to abandon the prosecution entirely.96 The Grynszpan case was
put on ice; indeed, he survived the war—Gutterer was told he had sat at the back of
a Hamburg court-room in the fifties when he himself was on trial—one of the ultimate
ironies of the Final Solution which his pistol shots in 1938 had helped to unleash.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 701
1 Unpubl. diary, Jan 11, 1942 (NA film T84, roll 267).
2 Ibid., Jan 8, 1942.
3 MinConf., Dec 12, 1941.
4 Ibid., Dec 18, 1941.
5 Ibid., Jan 27 (NA film T84, roll 260); and MinConf., Mar 6, 10, 1942.
6 Unpubl. diary, Jan 9, 1942.
7 MinConf., Dec 7, 11, 1941; for a discussion of JG’s tactics after the German winter setbacks
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 114