Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

by Roger Manvell; Heinrich Fraenkel

  that every ill-considered sentence was liable to be reported abroad by the

  Jews. ‘This conduct of the Jews is understandable enough,’ he added, according to

  the transcript. ‘In Berlin there are still forty-eight thousand of them.12 They know

  with deadly certainty that in the course of this war they will be deported to the east

  and left to their murderous fate. They can already sense the inexorable tread of physical

  annihilation and therefore, so long as they live, they inflict damage on the Reich

  whenever they can.’13

  Small wonder that the world’s Jews mobilized against Nazi Germany. In London,

  rabbis rallied to the slogan, ‘England awake!’ Goebbels derided this as a plagiarism of

  the Nazis’ own rallying-call.14 In Jerusalem, Jews at the Wailing Wall placed an ancient

  curse on him. ‘I have yet to observe any untoward effects,’ he noted.15

  His humour was ill-chosen. The deportations from Berlin had resumed. To silence

  public disquiet Goebbels ordered the bourgeois press to feature reports on hostile

  Jewish activities abroad.16 Trainloads of elderly Jews had begun leaving Berlin in June

  for Theresienstadt, the model camp for ‘old folks’. On July 11 the first trainload

  bound for Auschwitz left Berlin with 210 Jews aboard.17 In mid August Berlin packed

  off 1,004 more Jews to Riga, followed by 790 on September 5; on the twenty-sixth

  811 would be shipped to Reval. That day he noted that all Jews were to be excluded

  from fats and meat rations, except those still working in the munitions industry who

  would receive only the heavy-labour supplements.18 (The actual regulations were

  720 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH

  even more pitiless than his diary suggested: meat and bread rations were cancelled

  for all Jews other than those married to non-Jews or wounded in the first world war;

  further, no Jews were to receive milk except infants, an interesting detail; any food

  packets received from abroad were to be deducted from Jews’ ration cards; gifts of

  tea and coffee were to be confiscated and distributed to field hospitals.19)

  Seventeen thousand Jews working in industry were still exempt from deportation.

  According to Goebbels’ diary, Hitler agreed with his venomous comments on how

  their intellectuals and economists were everywhere discovering ‘indispensable’ Jewish

  skilled workers who just had to be spared.20 In Goebbels’ view, since they now

  had 240,000 foreign workers in Berlin it should not be too hard to replace the exempt

  Jews too.21 Two more trainloads of Jews left Berlin in October carrying 963

  Jews to Riga and 791 more vaguely—and sinisterly—simply to ‘the east.’

  He was still dissatisfied, as the level hardly seemed to decline. He learned that

  many of Berlin’s judges were half-Jews transferred there by other cities in the belief

  that they would be less of an eyesore there. ‘Berlin is not a garbage tip,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I fought to make Berlin a model national socialist city.’22 In a letter to the new minister

  of justice Otto Thierack he proposed simply declaring all Jews ‘unconditionally

  disposable’—the word he used, ausrottbar, has uglier connotations—and commended

  to him ‘the concept of annihilation through work.’23 Thierack however was unexpectedly

  unsympathetic. Some, he pointed out, were half-Jews whose sons had already

  died in this war. ‘So long as the Führer won’t allow us to address the broader

  issue of those with Jewish blood or in-laws,’ Thierack said, ‘we can’t carry out an

  Aktion confined to the legal system.’24 At a meeting chaired by Eichmann that month

  the civil servants became bogged down in bureaucratic minutiæ.25 Frustrated,

  Goebbels said that he was sure their Jews were a vital link to the enemy, helping the

  British bomber crews to select and find their targets. He set himself a new target: he

  would rid Berlin of its remaining Jews by March 1943.26

  Ugly rumours were already circulating abroad, fuelled by British propaganda. The

  Daily Telegraph quoted Polish claims that seven thousand of Warsaw’s Jews were being

  killed each day, often in what it called ‘gas chambers’; one of Goebbels’ worried civil

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 721

  servants telexed a request for information to Hans Frank’s press office in Kraków

  and to the propaganda field office in Warsaw. The reassuring reply spoke of the Jews

  being used to construct defences and roads. Be that as it may, in Goebbels’ files the

  original press report, which had just summarised the British newspaper item, was

  rubber-stamped Geheime Reichssache, top state secret.27

  How much did Goebbels know? In his surviving files there is plenty that implies a

  broad general knowledge of the atrocities. Reporting back to him on November 11,

  his legal expert Dr Hans Schmidt-Leonhardt, whom he had sent to inspect conditions

  in Hans Frank’s Polish dominions, noted that the Warsaw police had deemed it

  too dangerous to visit the ghetto there; in the Kraków ghetto he had found all the

  Jews put to work; in Lublin the ghetto had already been cleared away, and there were

  now bloody disturbances. ‘As a Geheime Reichssache,’ dictated the lawyer, ‘Frank related

  to us the following characteristic recent instance:—’ But whatever it was we

  cannot know, as Goebbels’ shocked staff cut off the rest of the page that is filed in his

  ministry’s records.28

  In February 1943 Dr Fritz Prause, a senior staff member, briefed Goebbels on the

  continued terrorist incidents resulting from their occupation policies—the Germans

  had begun rounding up Poles in cinemas and churches for slave labour. A poster

  appealing to ‘Poles of German origin’ had generated speculation about the likely fate

  of the rest. ‘The rumour is spreading,’ Prause reported, ‘that the same fate now

  awaits the Poles as has been meted out to the Jews, and there is not a Pole in the

  Government-General who does not know precisely what has been done to them.’

  ‘One thing is certain,’ recommended Dr Prause: ‘That the current derogatory slogan

  “Pole equals Jew” is no longer viable for the Government-General, particularly

  since the above-mentioned rumours dwell heavily on what is known to have become

  of the Jews.’29

  The wave of terrorist attacks continued. In the first quarter of 1943 forty-four

  Germans were assassinated in Warsaw. In April 1943 a local propaganda official reported

  to Goebbels that the ‘resettlement’ operations in Lublin—Nazi officialese for

  something clearly far worse—had left non-Jewish Poles with the definite impression

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  that after the Jews their turn would come next. There were only two alternatives

  open to the Germans, this brave if circumspect official informed Goebbels: either to

  assimilate or to liquidate (ausrotten) the Poles. ‘Even if for biological reasons the

  adoption of such radical steps as have for instance been necessary against the Jews

  can be justified before the bar of history, such a solution still seems unworthy of the

  tradition of the German people, given that large parts of the population affected are

  still resident within the Reich’s frontiers. The plan of that American Jew to sterilize

  the male population of the Ge
rman Reich,’ the official reminded Dr Goebbels, referring

  to Theodore Kaufman, ‘was rightly pilloried by the entire German press.’30

  In sum it appears that by 1943 members of Goebbels’ staff both in Berlin and in the

  field appreciated that the likely fate of the deported Jews was one about which they

  should use only the skimpiest Nazi euphemisms.31 The camouflage was universal and

  perfect. Addressing allegations by Dr Stephen F. Wise, president of the American

  Jewish Congress, Himmler wrote to Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller that he was not

  surprised at such rumours, given the high mortality rate in the camps; he ordered all

  the cadavers ‘of these deceased Jews’ cremated or interred.32 In London the newspapers

  published during November and December more Jewish reports. Goebbels’

  own Transozean service secretly forwarded to Himmler a Reuter report of February

  14, 1943 alleging that six thousand Jews were being murdered in Poland ever day.33

  In mid December 1942 the B.B.C. concentrated for a whole week on these atrocities,

  announcing that Poland had become a charnel house, that over one-third of

  Poland’s 3,531,000 Jews had been liquidated, and that the German public was turning

  a blind eye on the killings; and declaring that they and their children’s children

  would be cast out of the community of nations for all time as punishment.34 Goebbels

  noted this with irritation in his diary: the Jews were exploiting every known propaganda

  technique—pathos, impertinence, and solemnity—to rouse the world against

  Germany; but she still had more than enough Jewish pawns in her hands. ‘The British

  are the Jews of the Aryan race,’ he dictated, weightier arguments evidently failing

  him.35 On December 22 his monitors reported that the B.B.C. had announced that

  Hitler was planning to complete liquidating the Jews by December 30: ‘The Jews are

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 723

  first robbed of their civil rights and their property, then given less to eat than the

  rest, and finally thrown into concentration camps or deported to unknown destinations.’

  There were allegations about a camp in Danzig were Jews were executed by

  electric chair or gas; other propaganda broadcasts spoke of gas chambers and cyanide.

  Goebbels delegated to the urbane Hans Fritzsche the task of rebutting the

  stories.36

  GIVEN what Goebbels knew, the rage in his diary entries rings hollow. Stockholm, he

  commented, was expressing pious horror at the atrocities, and he added that he

  wished the Swedes had just a few thousand Jews like Germany’s; when however the

  Swedes agreed to accept Jewish refugees from Poland Goebbels remonstrated with

  the foreign ministry over its lack of instinct: presumably because there were hardly

  any Polish Jews left for such an operation.37 ‘In the long run,’ he wrote, ‘I fear we

  shall not be able to get away with this by hushing it up. We’re going to have to answer

  something if we are not to get gradually pinned down.’ He privately believed that the

  Allies were actually glad that the Nazis were clearing out the ‘Jewish rabble.’ Adopting

  standard tactics, he ordered that no direct response be made to the allegations—

  they should remind the world about Britain’s role in India instead.38

  OF greater weight in everybody’s mind that winter was the unending battle for

  Stalingrad. It provided fresh ammunition for Goebbels’ feud with Otto Dietrich,

  Hitler’s dapper, spineless press chief—two months Goebbels’ senior in age, but his

  equal in Party rank.39 There was open war between them, waged with scarcely less

  ferocity than the Sixth Army’s battle at Stalingrad. While the Machiavellian Goebbels

  based in Berlin mapped out broad propaganda strategy, Dietrich, resident at Hitler’s

  HQ, issued directives (Parolen) to the Press which often had the opposite effect.

  Dietrich found it irksome to be excluded from Hitler’s formal conferences with

  Goebbels, and obnoxious that Goebbels regularly invited newspapermen to his morning

  conferences. The direct telephone lines from Goebbels’ desk to his departmental

  chiefs including the ‘German press’ department in Room 24 were a thorn in Dietrich’s

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  flesh. He posted Helmut Sündermann, an experienced journalist, permanently into

  Goebbels’ ministry as his deputy; to Goebbels, this smelt of the creation of an independent

  ‘Press ministry.’40 During the summer of 1942 Hitler banged their heads

  together; he signed a decree ordering the two men to work in harmony; but he also

  instructed Goebbels to channel all directives to editors through Dietrich in future.41

  This left the way open for another Dietrich blunder. On September 15 he announced,

  ‘The struggle for Stalingrad is nearing its triumphant conclusion’—an announcement,

  he said, was imminent. Some newspapers printed special editions.

  Headlines announced that Stalingrad was in the bag. Goebbels, more cautiously,

  warned his staff to strict secrecy. Even he however began his remarks on the eighteenth

  with the words, ‘Now that the capture of Stalingrad is a certainty…’42 Then

  caution returned and he urged editors to find something other than Stalingrad for

  their headlines—a wise move, because soon the High Command was talking about

  ‘exceptionally stubborn’ fighting for the city.43

  Goebbels was not encouraged to hear that the Daily Mail was calling Stalingrad the

  decisive battle of the war.44 Blaming Goebbels for this new gaffe, London mocked

  that he had been rather faster on the draw than the Wehrmacht.45 He cursed Dietrich

  out loud and announced that he would severely punish any editors who blindly issued

  special editions in future. ‘I am, after all, the one with the name to lose,’ he said,

  ‘and I have no desire to see this name, which has taken me twenty years to earn,

  tarnished by thoughtless stunts like this.’46

  Hitler, like Dietrich, was taken in by his own propaganda. He assured Goebbels

  that they would take Stalingrad shortly. He planned to continue the other prong of

  his eastern campaign, across the Caucasus mountains, all winter, then building a

  gigantic broad-track railroad from Germany to the new eastern territories.

  Together they addressed a huge Sports Palace meeting on the thirtieth. Here

  Goebbels called for the first time for what he described as total war. ‘The more total

  the war the better,’ he said. Developing also his new propaganda line of ‘Strength

  through Fear’ he warned of the consequences of bolshevism but assured this mighty

  audience that the worst was over. He drew the familiar comparisons with the last

  GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 725

  months before 1933. ‘The weaker the position of our enemies becomes,’ he said, ‘the

  more bloodthirsty their dreams of revenge, which they proclaim not only against the

  national socialist regime but against the German people as a whole.’47

  Sitting beside Hitler Goebbels heard him announce: ‘We shall be assaulting

  Stalingrad, and taking it too—you can bank on that.’ And, thundered Hitler into the