except pharmacies, groceries, and cobblers.25 He even tried to dissolve the Reich
Labour Service.26 Himmler had to secure a special dispensation to protect his own
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 857
vital tasks.27 Goebbels announced the death penalty for anybody caught violating his
Total War regulations.28 By these means he expected to raise three hundred thousand
men for the front by September 1, 450,000 more by October and a quarter million
during November: one million men all told.29
AT the Wolf’s Lair on August 2, Hitler and Goebbels discussed how to deal with the
traitors. The Gestapo investigations were turning up some nasty new details. Even
Kluge and Rommel were implicated.30 One of those arrested, Major Egbert Hayessen,
had incriminated one of Goebbels’ oldest friends, Count von Helldorff, in the plot.31
Goebbels’ fury was indescribable.32 Ignoring Magda’s reproaches he and Hitler had
personally settled the Berlin police chief’s gambling debts and bought him property.
Yet even as Goebbels had been decorating him in February for heroism in the air
raids, the count had been plotting his and Hitler’s downfall. Hitler ordered that
Helldorff was to watch each hanging until his own turn came.33 Broadcasting that
night Goebbels named Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, as another conspirator
and put a million mark ($250,000) bounty on his head. Among Goerdeler’s
effects the Gestapo found a draft list of names of future ministers, including both
Rommel and Speer.34 Stauffenberg, wrote Goebbels after reading Kaltenbrunner’s
investigation reports, had worked for months just setting up the putsch. Squandering
immense amounts of scarce gasoline he had motored around, working on one
traitor after another, until each ultimately fell in with him, as many had since testified
in court. ‘A good thing we got rid of Stauffenberg,’ he noted. ‘A negative personality
with talents like that [is] always extremely dangerous.’35
Stauffenberg, it seemed, had been in touch with the traitors in Moscow. Hitler
showed Goebbels the latest Soviet propaganda leaflets, signed by German generals:
‘Men like Stauffenberg came from our own ranks,’ read one. ‘Soldiers and officers of
the German army and Luftwaffe, surrender as one man to the bolsheviks.’ 36 Hitler
said that the quartermaster-general Wagner (who had shot himself) had sent ten
times more gasoline to sectors without tanks than to those with them.37 While both
men agreed that they could not publicly excoriate the generals in mid-battle Hitler
858 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ordered Goebbels to spare no detail of the other traitors’ infamy—for example that
they had also planned to kill him by planting a bomb in the knapsacks of three soldiers
demonstrating a new infantry uniform to him.38 It was not difficult for Goebbels
now to persuade him to stage a political show trial rather than court-martial the
plotters.
Goebbels and Himmler revealed this decision to the party’s gauleiters assembled
in Posen the next morning, August 3.39 In fourteen days, said Goebbels, twenty-two
generals of army group Centre had deserted to Soviet captivity—and several were
already broadcasting from Moscow.40 Three German armies had been wiped out, he
asserted, because the generals in Berlin had devoted less energy to the eastern front
than to Valkyrie; yet he still insisted that it had been only ‘a tiny clique’ of traitors—
‘I think four or five were shot all told, and I think ten at most are standing trial this
Monday.’ On the morrow, he announced, the traitors were to be expelled from the
army by a court of honour. ‘Those found guilty will be sentenced to death, dressed in
convict garb, and hanged regardless of their rank as field marshal or whatever else.’
You could tear out your hair [he continued] at how these accursed criminals
duped their Führer: how often the Führer pleaded for one more regiment and
was told they didn’t have one. But if you needed troops in the air-raid areas—in
Berlin one day [November 23/24, 1943] they coughed up sixty thousand men!
Then they had them—so you can’t help thinking that they weren’t sending the
troops to the front because they needed them for treachery at home, to put the
party down.
Fearing defeat at Moscow in 1941 all Stalin’s men, he alleged, had begged him to
surrender. Stalin had retorted, ‘I’ve only just begun!’ That kind of spirit would still
save Germany now, just as it had saved England in 1940. ‘Comrades,’ appealed
Goebbels, ‘remember how Stalin put out the slogan, “Better to die on your feet than
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 859
survive on your knees”? … A hundred times the Führer has said, “That is the only
man I regard as my equal.”’
Returning briefly from Posen to HQ to hear Hitler address these gauleiters,
Goebbels’ train made slow progress as all the routes east were now choked with
troop-transports. He allowed himself a contented grin at this visible proof that total
war had begun.
ALMOST every week he reported to Hitler.41 The post office patched together for him
a secure nationwide conference-network to enable him to adress all forty-three
gauleiters each noon by loudspeaker telephone. Few of them willingly missed this
daily briefing. Hans Frank in Kraków and Kurt Daluege in Prague joined the network,
as did Epp in Munich and Kaltenbrunner in Berlin. Only his old enemy Erich
Koch disdained it and when the police HQ in Königsberg was bombed out at the end
of August he did not have the link restored.42
By now the Red Army had overrun nearly all of Hitler’s eastern dominions. The
Normandy beachhead had burst, hæmorrhaging Allied troops into France. Goebbels
warned farmers to prepare for a coming food crisis. After attending a Goebbels
Cabinet on August 28, agriculture secretary Darré recorded that Goebbels had spoken
well: ‘We’re fighting with our backs to the wall.’43
Public sympathy for Dr Goebbels was slipping however. Writing his weekly Reich
article had become a burden.44 His facile suggestion that the Bomb Plot had brought
them ‘one step closer to victory’ attracted derision.45 There was a growing belief that
German could no longer win—that their leaders could not have bargained for such
a rapid collapse in the west. Kaltenbrunner wrote to Goebbels that the implementation
of total war was still taking too long for the public’s liking, and that they looked
to leading personalities ‘and their wives’ to set an example.46 Taking the hint, Goebbels
once more put Magda to work, making war goods at home at Lanke. ‘As I’m switchboard
girl, manageress, and Jack-of-all-Trades out here,’ Magda wrote patiently to a
friend, ‘you’ll always reach me here except for Mondays when I have to turn my
work in at the factory!’47
860 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Speer began to mutiny as he saw his skilled labour siphoned off into army uniform.
He wrote blistering letters, but with Keitel and Bormann backing Goebbels he had
little leverage.48 He complained privately that Goebbels was violating agreements,
not returning calls, and creating faits accomp
lis. He demanded that his name no
longer appear in newspaper reports about arms production, since the gauleiters had
taken charge. He unloaded a sheaf of protest telegrams onto Goebbels’ desk, but the
minister remained unmoved.49 ‘You’ve been asked to give up 150,000 of your fifteen
million men,’ he reminded Speer. That was just one percent. ‘I’d like to see one of my
department heads tell me he can’t produce as much with ninety-nine men as with
one hundred… No, Mr Speer, arguments like this won’t wash with me!’ Speer, he
told his staff, was about to find out whom he was up against. ‘I can’t help wondering
why the traitors put his name on their list.’50
To Speer’s chagrin, on the first of September Goebbels learned that nearly all of
the gauleiters had met their August manpower targets. Three hundred thousand men
had been called up—thirty new divisions. Despite that, arms production had actually
increased. Speer had not a leg to stand on. His vanity punctured beyond repair
he none the less flew to the Wolf’s Lair to protest about Goebbels. From there he
phoned Goebbels, who gave him short shrift, and Speer ‘acted all cut up,’ as he was
pleased to dictate to Otte afterwards.51 He was having his twice-weekly bath that
evening when the phone rang—Hitler’s S.S. adjutant Otto Günsche, instructing him
to take the 8:13 P.M. courier train out to Rastenburg. Speer was calling for a showdown.
Its departure delayed until nine o’clock while the minister completed his
toilette the train arrived at Rastenburg twelve hours later.52 Preempting the debate,
however, Goebbels sent Hitler a telegram reporting the three hundred thousand
new troops. ‘I intend,’ he dictated on the train, ‘to plead with the Führer not to let
Speer pick the currents out of my cake.’53
THE Führer-bunker had been reinforced yet again, but even with twenty-two feet of
solid concrete surrounding them they could all hear the rolling thunder of the approaching
Russian guns. While Speer glowered, Hitler took the propaganda minister
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 861
over to the map table and showed him where he would emplace those three hundred
thousand new men. As the two ministers left the bunker their friendship was behind
them.54
Back in Berlin Goebbels found a minute from Hadamowsky reminding him of
Clausewitz’s dictum that the most dangerous point for an attacker was when victory
seemed in sight: he relaxed his efforts while the defender redoubled his. Clipped to
the memo was a British news despatch: the London Daily Mail was bragging, ‘Militarily,
the war in the west is over.’ This was the same blunder that the Germans had made at
Moscow in 1941.55
The German retreat in France had turned into a rout. Field Marshal von Kluge
launched a counter-attack at Avranches, bungled it, and committed suicide.56 ‘The
Americans,’ noted Goebbels, ‘are now showing off to us the same blitzkrieg tactics
that we demonstrated to the French and British in 1940.’
Once he sat up with Hitler and his advisers until two A.M. discussing what to do;
but Goebbels feared that Hitler was operating in the west with non-existent divisions
and useless generals. ‘If there were brutal party men in charge of the various
sectors things would probably be quite different.’57
The Americans crossed the German frontier at Aachen in mid September. The war
might be over with dramatic swiftness, in weeks or even days.58 The day of reckoning
suddenly seemed nearer. Goebbels knew that Soviet propaganda was claiming that in
three years the Nazis had murdered two million prisoners in Lublin, Poland.59 He
knew too that the Allies considered him a war criminal.60 It was likely that top Nazis
like him would be shot out of hand. ‘It should not be assumed,’ Mr Churchill announced
in London, ‘that the procedure of trial will be necessarily adopted.’61 During
one trial in Rome the mob had lynched a fascist defendant and tossed his corpse
into the Tiber. ‘These,’ Goebbels mused, ‘are alarming omens which no thinking man
can ignore.’62 He did not intend to be taken prisoner. Hearing that General Hermann
Ramcke had surrendered at Brest, Goebbels was baffled at the paratroop general’s
lack of any sense of immortality.63 He had decided on suicide; but evidently he had
no notion yet of killing his children, as he discussed with Max Winkler that autumn
862 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
what would become of them after his death, adding that his son Helmut showed few
of his daughters’ talents and he would like to leave him perhaps a small farm.64
Since the daily drive in from Lanke was robbing him of precious hours, Goebbels
moved back into No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse, while his family stayed out at Lanke.
Enforcing Total War was still an uphill struggle. During September 1944 he ordered
teenagers mobilized, and directed women to take over all hairdressing.65 He
had the propaganda companies slashed from fifteen thousand to three thousand men;
but the railroad and the foreign ministry declined to make manpower cuts, and Speer
stubbornly refused to release the next hundred thousand men from his factories.66
He accused Goebbels of organising a useless people’s army. Goebbels called the allegation
puerile—‘We don’t have any intention of pitting unarmed soldiers against
the enemy,’ he wrote. After hearing Speer pontificating about his responsibility before
history, Goebbels dictated: ‘I think we have let this young man get too big for his
boots.’67
Hitler ruled in his favour every time. When Speer flourished tables of statistics,
Goebbels denounced them as lies.68
The people were still waiting for ‘V–2’. ‘If we didn’t have more such weapons,’
they said, ‘Dr Goebbels would not have been able to speak so definitely about them.’69
S.S. Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler told Goebbels that the ‘V–2’ attack on London
had begun on September 8; the rockets were being launched from secret mobile
sites in Holland.70 Mr Churchill however was admitting nothing, so Goebbels dared
not commence his ‘V–2’ propaganda yet.
With France lost, the Luftwaffe’s ‘V–1’ had all but ceased operations. Hitler again
considered replacing Göring as commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, but again he
abandoned the idea. ‘It is horrendous,’ commented Goebbels, ‘the contortions that
have to be gone through… When the good times rolled, the Führer allowed Göring
to get too grand; and now the bad times are here, he’s like a ball-and-chain.’71 The
public had no time for either Göring or Ribbentrop, Himmler was told at this time:
they thought well only of Hitler, Goebbels (and of course the Reichsführer S.S.)72
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 863
For all his shortcomings however it was Göring who broke it to Goebbels that
Harald was missing in action in Italy. Goebbels and Magda decided to keep it from
Harald’s siblings, who idolized him. He consoled Magda that her son might have
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 141