were in for a dreadful awakening, Goebbels commented to his staff afterwards. ‘There’s
no defence. No warning. Bam!—It just smacks into the unsuspecting city.’4
Months would first have to elapse. When Göring launched several conventional
raids on London in January, Goebbels forbade newspapers to use the word Vergeltung
(retribution) or even to adopt tones of triumph or satisfaction.5
Responsibility for the civil defences of all of Germany’s cities gave him the cachet
that he had until now lacked when speaking to high-ranking officers. ‘Some of you,’
he told three hundred officers assembled for Nazi indoctrination courses in Posen on
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 809
January 25, ‘might well say, a fat lot you people back home know! But, if we disregard
for a moment the misery that the enemy’s terror raids have inflicted upon us, I
am happy about them in one respect: that I can now speak to you, not as a deskwarrior
but as the representative of a multi-million inhabitant city that has been
through catastrophes unparalleled by anything that has gone before in history.’6
The British were putting out reports, still not denied by him, that up to a million
had died in their raids on Berlin.7 On January 28 Mr Churchill sent 596 bombers to
unload 1,954 tons of bombs on the western and south-western suburbs. Reuter’s
agency admitted that the British were trying to burn down whole districts.8 Among
the buildings destroyed this time were the Nollendorf and State theatres.9 One hundred
thousand more Berliners lost their homes, and forty-six more bombers were
shot down. The next raid, on January 30, was the heaviest yet: 489 planes dropped
12,961 tons of bombs. Goebbels surfaced from his bunker to find the doors and
windows at Hermann-Göring Strasse blown out. He idly traced a swastika in the
mortar dust that covered his desk—then brushed it irritably aside.10
When he drove around the city a few days later the trams and subways were running
again, and eighty-five percent of the labour force was already back at work. At
Mariannen-Strasse, where a building had pancaked, he watched rescue operations
for a while and spoke with weeping survivors until hope for their families was abandoned.
He began to fear that Berlin’s morale was indeed cracking.11 He ordered
Schach to have shelters for eight hundred thousand more people built by the coming
winter—and to have the city’s 56,000 laid-up automobiles towed to safety.12
Unquestionably, it called for moral fibre—or many feet of concrete—to stay on in
Berlin. Goebbels asked Hitler to award the highest medals for bravery to Berlin’s top
officials Gerhard Schach and police chief Count von Helldorff.13 He pinned the decorations
on them on February 9. ‘I have found my colleagues in Berlin to be worth their
weight in gold,’ he dictated. ‘For the most part they are veterans of the years of
struggle, utterly loyal and willing to go through thick and thin with me.’14
On the fifteenth Beppo Schmid warned that the bombers were again heading for
Berlin. This time Göring also phoned, to say that he had given the flak artillery a free
810 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
hand. Goebbels had time to bath and dine before the sirens sounded; 806 bombers
bore down on his city. The 2,643 tons of bombs they dropped were widely scattered,
but one demolished the Hotel Bristol killing all but eight guests.15
The city’s ordeal was almost over. The British losses were steadily approaching
unacceptable limits. On February 19, a crystal clear night, they lost seventy-eight
out of 730 bombers raiding Leipzig. Eyes smarting from smoke and fumes, and head
aching from ‘bunker sickness’, Goebbels again toured the bomb-ravaged streets of
his capital. Hitler made no attempt to emulate him, either now or later.16
THE Allies might have the bigger bombs, but the Nazis still believed they had the
better cause. Addressing the senior officers’ indoctrination course at Posen on January
25, Goebbels suggested that their ideology compensated for the material supremacy
of their adversaries. ‘In the heavy raids on the Reich capital,’ he told them,
‘six hundred thousand lost their homes in two consecutive nights.’ Just one such raid
in 1918 would have brought the war to an end. ‘If I say that at the end of such an
ideological conflict there will be only the survivors and the dead,’ remarked Goebbels
opaquely, ‘this should not be taken as meaning that the inevitable outcome will be
the utter physical extermination of this or that section of the population.’17
This Goebbels speech is only worth mentioning because the next day Himmler
spoke to the same audience bluntly about the fate of Germany’s Jews.18 When he
announced that they had totally solved the Jewish problem most of the officers sprang
to their feet and applauded.19 ‘We were all there in Posen,’ recalled one of them, a
rear-admiral, ‘when That Man told us how he had killed off the Jews… I can still
recall precisely how he told us, If people ask me, “Why did you have to kill the
children too?”, then I can only say, “I’m not such a coward that I leave for my children
something I can do myself.”’20
Goebbels was not one of Himmler’s audience, but he learned of a strange episode
which happened the next day at Hitler’s HQ. Hitler, unsettled by the pernicious
influence of the Seydlitz traitors’ propaganda, tried to inspire these same officers
with talk of the coming new secret weapons. ‘If the worse comes to the worst,’ he
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 811
then said, ‘and if I am ever deserted as Supreme Commander by my people, then I
shall still expect my entire officer corps to muster around me with daggers drawn…’
At this moment Field Marshal von Manstein, one of Goebbels’ bêtes noires, rose and
called out: ‘And so it will be, mein Führer!’21 It was an interpolation of painful ambiguity.
Hitler initially took it as a compliment; so, when he read the transcript, did
Goebbels.22 But he shortly realized that it was in reality a ‘stupid interruption’ designed
to provoke.23 For weeks, fumed Goebbels, Manstein had been demanding
permission to retreat. Between every line was however the field-marshal’s real message
to Corporal Hitler: this is your war, not mine—let’s see how your vaunted
military genius gets you out of this mess. ‘Our generals want defeats,’ he exclaimed.
‘Not defeat—not even they are as blind as that.’24
Defeat still did not seem inevitable, when viewed from No.20 Hermann-Göring
Strasse. Addressing the gauleiters assembled in Munich on February 23 Goebbels
reported that despite the thirty to forty percent destruction of Berlin, arms output
had actually increased. The flying bomb should begin operations early in April, followed
soon after by the rocket missile.25 ‘The Germans are still pinning their hopes
on Vergeltung,’ dictated Goebbels, worried. ‘People are vesting far greater hopes in it
than they are actually entitled to.’26 He again prohibited any official use of the V-word
but he promised the gauleiters that there would be reprisal raids.
At this meeting Hitler both looked and spoke well; he too referred to their coming
> Vergeltung. Both Bormann and Himmler put out perceptible feelers to Goebbels on
this occasion. On the twenty-eighth Himmler spoke to Goebbels’ field officials on
topics which included internal security and the Jewish problem (no record survives
of what he said.) Goebbels told his staff that he and Himmler had similar views about
the war.27 Over dinner that evening Hitler’s adjutant Schmundt discussed with him
their problem-generals. ‘They’re as thick as thieves,’ he growled: they covered for
each other, but gave the cold shoulder to true zealots like Lieutenant-General Lieb
who had commanded Forty-Two Corps in its successful breakout from the Cherkassy
pocket. Lieb had told Goebbels he had received a six-page handwritten letter from
Seydlitz urging him to defect. Goebbels suggested that as during the Gregor Strasser
812 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
crisis of 1932, when the gauleiters had sworn loyalty to Hitler, all their field marshals
should sign a loyalty declaration now. Goebbels dictated a suitable text, and Schmundt
left at once to tour every battle front, beginning with the HQs of Rommel and
Rundstedt in France, to collect the field marshals’ signatures. Fully aware of his own
unpopularity among the generals, Goebbels advised him not to disclose that he was
the author of the declaration.28
IN an article published in January 1944 entitled ‘In Ninety Days’ Goebbels predicted
that the Allied invasion would come within that space of time. It was a leaf from
Churchill’s propaganda book. If nothing happened, he could claim that the Allies had
failed. The Americans alone would suffer half a million casualties, the article prophesied.
‘On the German side,’ he added, ‘they will find army commanders confronting
them who have already triumphed once in the west, and who tossed the British
back across the Channel in a sorry state… And above them all stands a Führer who
laid France low in six weeks.’ He pointed out that the Allies had failed to destroy the
Luftwaffe. Every Allied airman venturing over Germany was doomed, wrote
Goebbels: if not dead today, then dead tomorrow. ‘We have forgotten nothing,’ he
wrote, hinting again at the coming Vergeltung. ‘The world will have no pity when it’s
the British people’s turn.’29
Visiting Hitler’s Berghof on March 3, Goebbels found that Eva Braun had enlisted
the help of some lady friends to distract Hitler from the possibility that he might be
fighting a losing war. One eye grotesquely bloodshot from a burst blood vessel, Hitler
disclosed that he was soon going to invade Hungary; he asked Goebbels to gear
up his propaganda machine accordingly. After disarming Hungary’s army, he said,
they could tackle her aristocracy and Jewry. As soon as he had smashed the coming
Allied invasion, he added, he was going to switch forty divisions to the eastern front.
Sooner or later the Allies would have to start talking to him. Meanwhile he had
delayed their Vergeltung until the second half of April, rather than shoot his bolt too
early. Beefing up the Little Doctor’s own morale Hitler portrayed the colossal firepower
of the Panzer divisions with their new Panther and Tiger tanks. He promised
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 813
that their fighter planes’ heavier armament and new radar would foil the enemy air
offensive in the coming winter. Göring was a wash-out, he admitted, but it was their
duty to help him. ‘He can’t stand criticism right now,’ Hitler explained. ‘You’ve got
to watch your tongue very carefully when you tell him things.’ He also forbade
Goebbels to attack their Moscow traitors. ‘The Führer holds our generals in utter
contempt,’ noted Goebbels. ‘The generals … want nothing better than to trip him
up.’ He hoped that the field marshals’ declaration of loyalty would restore Hitler’s
trust in them.
Stalin had done well, he reflected, to liquidate his generals early on. ‘Only in the
Jewish Problem have we pursued such a radical policy,’ he dictated, taking pride in
his own historic accomplishment. ‘Rightly so. And today we are the beneficiaries.
The Jews are out of harm’s way. Yet people told us again and again, before we tackled
the Jewish Problem, that there was no solution.30 Even so there were still six thousand
‘privileged’ Jews living in Berlin and he could not get at them.31
With the tail end of ‘Butcher’ Harris’ winter air raids still blistering Berlin not
everybody considered it a privilege to remain. Wilhelm Furtwängler was a shining
exception. He insisted on staying behind to conduct morale-boosting concerts for
the blitz victims and munitions workers. ‘We won’t forget that after the war,’ Hitler
promised Goebbels. He ordered a private shelter built for the great conductor.
Furtwängler graciously declined and asked that a public shelter be built in a working-
class area instead.32
RETURNING by train from the Obersalzberg to Berlin, Dr Goebbels had good reason
to feel that his political come-back from the wilderness was beginning. It was as
though he had drunk deeply of a fiery potion, observed Lieutenant Oven. Goebbels
told his adjutants that Hitler had asked him to return within a week (characteristically,
he told his diary that he would try to.) Standing in the swaying corridor, hands
thrust deep into his pockets, he said: ‘I’m convinced that if I’d lived a generation
earlier I’d have become Reich Chancellor in 1917. In times of danger the cry always
814 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
goes up for a strong man.’ Had not England sent for Mr Churchill in 1940?33 (There
was that comparison again.)
His city’s daytime ordeal now began. At dawn on March 6 the early-warning radars
picked up seven hundred and thirty B–17s and B–24s leaving England escorted by
nearly eight hundred fighter planes. One hundred Luftwaffe fighters engaged them
over Dummer See destroying twenty-three within minutes. Four hundred fighter
planes began tearing at the following American formations. Forewarned by telephone,
Goebbels stood on the terrace of his lakeside mansion at Lanke, sweeping the pale
horizons with binoculars for the attackers. As the silvery shoals of high-flying bombers
passed silently almost directly overhead, keeping tight formation, he broke into
an ungainly gallop across the lawn, crushing dandelions and crocuses underfoot to
get a better view. He had never seen the British—they still began their lethal business
after dusk and left before dawn—but here was the other enemy, crewed by
airmen in leather flying-jackets emblazoned with slogans like ‘Murder Inc.’34 A fighter
squadron scrambled from a nearby airbase and zoomed low overhead. He waved to
the pilots. He could hear distant cannon-fire as the leading formations began their
bombing runs on the Erkner and Bosch factories. Puffs of smoke hung in the air
where the heavy flak shells burst. One or two B–17s lurched out of station and
spiraled earthwards spilling smoke and parachutes. Sixty-nine went down this day,
with over a hundred more crippled beyond repair. As the fearsome aerial tournament
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 133