1944 it was plain that he had contracted jaundice. Apathetic and weary, he lay
in bed for days and his war conferences were canceled. General Schmundt died of his
injuries, but Hitler barely stirred. Goebbels blamed the illness on Professor Morell’s
neglect, suspecting that the physician had injected so many questionable nostrums
that Hitler’s own organs had finally rebelled in this way.1 From Berlin, Goebbels
pressed him relentlessly about the foreign-policy document, but only when the Russian
assault on East Prussia resumed did Hitler lever himself out of bed and agree to
receive him, on Saturday October14.2
Killing time until then Goebbels toured the Rhineland, conferred with the gauleiters
and visited Kluge’s successor as C.-in-C. West, Field Marshal Model.3 The tour increased
his disillusionment with Speer. ‘You keep falling for his miracle figures,’ he
told his staff back in Berlin, ‘because your heart leaps when you hear of the thousands
of tanks and fighter planes we’re turning out. But Model says if they get three Tiger
tanks it’s a red-letter day for them.’4
Broadcasting on October 4 Goebbels warned the Allies not to under-estimate the
powers of a people to resist occupation. He spoke of the ‘Morgenthau Plan’ devised
by President Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary to destroy Germany’s post-war economy;
under it, six million Germans would probably die of starvation, and tens of thousands
would be shot without trial including Hitler, Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels.
Roosevelt and Morgenthau had just initialled this plan in Quebec. Even undistorted,
870 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
it was a gift for Nazi propaganda. Even other Jews were horrified by it. In Goebbels’
papers is an intercepted letter from a German Jew, a lawyer, in Switzerland, who
wrote to Morgenthau that his plan was just ‘designed to pitch the vanquished into the
swamp of slavery.’ ‘Where hatred speaks,’ warned this émigré, ‘revenge answers.’5
Goebbels exploited the Morgenthau Plan as cynically in 1944 as he had Kaufman’s
book three years before, telling his propagandists to emphasize constantly the American
Jew’s premise of ‘forty million Germans too many in the world.’6 Both the Allies
and the Soviets had the same intent, Goebbels could now suggest in Das Reich:, ‘Namely
to truncate the German people by thirty or forty million.’7
From Canada, Churchill travelled onward to Moscow. Reading this hopefully as a
sign of increasing frictions within the enemy coalition, Goebbels ordered newspapers
to abstain from comment. ‘I have the utmost respect,’ he said in private, ‘for this
septuagenarian who flies half way around the world to glue together a crumbling
coalition on which his entire war strategy depends.’8
HE would be the first visitor whom Hitler received after his illness; but the great
foreign policy debate did not take place. Goebbels spent a frustrating Sunday and
Monday hanging around the Wolf’s Lair, not even invited to share mealtimes with
Hitler. Hitler was in bed recovering, but still sickly and feeble.9 He had neither time
nor inclination for a long talk—he granted ten minutes here, an hour there—and he
had notÊ even read the Goebbels memorandum. Bormann had given him the gist of it,
he said; he flatly refused to replace Ribbentrop, ‘a second Bismarck,’ in his eyes, and
that was that.10
Returning by train to Berlin, Goebbels sat in silence with his head in his hands. To
Oven, he seemed suddenly to have aged.11 The spectre of the hangman loomed dimly
ahead.
HITLER had however confided two decisions to him. The first was to mount a surprise
counter-offensive in the west to catch the Allies off balance at their weakest moment
—the moment which Clausewitz had prophesied.12 He briefed his western front
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 871
commanders a few days later. Goebbels himself was not overly impressed. ‘It is strongly
to be hoped,’ he wrote skeptically, ‘that it will succeed.’13
Hitler’s second major decision was to create a Volkssturm, a people’s army of every
remaining male between the ages of sixteen and sixty.14 That was a task that Goebbels
could throw himself into. Recruiting posters went up on Thursday, October 19.
Seventy thousand Berliners volunteered at once, with twenty thousand more on Saturday
and thirty-five thousand the next day. In Silesia, Karl Hanke mustered over one
hundred thousand men on the castle square in Breslau. Broadcasting nationwide on
October 27 Goebbels recalled the words that Clausewitz had used writing of the
Prussian ‘Landssturm’ raised to fight Napoleon at Leipzig: ‘It shall spread like a bushfire
and shall finally smite the territory on which the invader has set foot.’ ‘We cannot,’
said Goebbels, ‘be swayed from our resolute and immutable decision … to fight
until a peace can be attained which will guarantee to our people their right to life,
their national independence and, in a broader sense, the basis of their existence, thus
justifying the sacrifices.’ This sounded very much like a willingness to discuss terms.
‘The Führer,’ he continued, ‘with whom I spent several days at his headquarters,
stands like a rock amid the surging tide.’15 One of Hitler’s adjutants wrote privately
that evening, ‘Dr Goebbels just spoke … It’s a treat to hear him every time.’16
Not everybody agreed. ‘The German people can do without any propaganda stunts,’
wrote one army corporal to Ribbentrop’s wife after listening to the broadcast. ‘We
can see things just as they are.’ ‘Did you think,’ he challenged Mrs von Ribbentrop,
‘that we ordinary squaddies don’t know about the bestial murders committed particularly
by our S.S. in Russia? Where for instance are the 114,000 Jews of Lvóv? We
were there when they were trucked out of Lvóv in 1943 and 1943 and shot not far
away.’17
The spectre looming larger with each news bulletin, Goebbels drove out to Lanke
to celebrate his birthday.
At midnight Hitler telephoned his greetings, his voice still husky and run down.
‘My last weeks have been almost entirely taken up with plotting our revenge,’ he
said, and Goebbels knew he was alluding to the coming great offensive in the west.
872 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Hitler still would not hear of getting rid of Ribbentrop. Disappointed, Goebbels
handed the phone to Magda. They spent the evening together, husband and wife,
vainly trying not to talk about the war. ‘It will never let us out of its clutches,’ he
dictated the next morning, ‘until it’s all over.’18 It was to be his last birthday. Fortyseven
and a half years would separate the humble cradle in Rheydt and the unmarked
grave in Berlin.
Poisoning the already strained atmosphere, the trials of the traitors in the People’s
Court continued all autumn. Dr Dietrich had strongly opposed allowing any newspaper
coverage of them. Goebbels had overruled him.19 Hadamowsky observed the
first day, when Witzleben, Hoepner, and Stieff were tried and sentenced; he praised
Judge Freisler as magisterial, national socialist, and superior.20 Goebbels had commissioned
a film of the trial and han
gings.21 Hitler however forbade its release fearing
a backlash, an ‘undesirable debate’ about the trial.22 He ordered the execution footage
particularly kept under lock and key. Despite this newspapers reported that the
British legation in Switzerland had shown a print to Swiss officers there. Investigations
showed that it was a fake furnished by a Mr Saunders, a British secret service
agent; it was evidently the origin of several post-war legends about the executions
including rumours that the men were hanged from meathooks and took ten hours to
die.23
The further trials brought many unsavoury facts to light about Ribbentrop’s diplomats.
Goebbels adroitly brought them to Hitler’s attention. ‘The latest People’s Court
trials,’ he pointed out, ‘and reports that foreign service officials are refusing to return
to the Reich, have shown that the foreign ministry is riddled with traitors and
politically unreliable elements.’ Perhaps, he mischievously wondered, the defection
of Germany’s European allies was the result of their sabotage?24 Still Hitler refused
to let Ribbentrop go.
TRUE to Clausewitz’s prophecy, the Allies had run out of steam. On the western front
they had also outrun their supplies. In the east, Hitler counter-attacked. In East Prussia,
towns like Gumbinnen and Nemmendorf were recaptured, revealing the recent atroci-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 873
ties which the Red Army had committed. Göring phoned Goebbels and described
the horrific scenes. Oddly, because the result must inevitably be the same scenes of
refugee chaos that Goebbels had himself striven to produce in France in 1940, he
embodied these atrocity reports in press announcements so lurid that the local population
could have no doubt what awaited them if they stayed.25
It seems clear that he was interested less in victory now than in his place in posterity.
On November 12 the Volkssturm volunteers were sworn in at emotional rallies
all over Germany. Goebbels himself took the salute on Wilhelms Platz that Sunday
morning. Many were old enough to be his father. ‘We were home again by noon,’
wrote one veteran, who would later die defending Hitler’s Chancellery. ‘This Old
Soldier’s heart just laughed out loud. So now I’m a full sworn-in Volkssturm man.
Our motto: “We’re going to give our bloody enemies what-for until they’re ready to
offer us an honourable peace.” He found the minister’s speech just ‘wunderbar.’26
Grizzled but proud, these elderly, bemedalled Berliners marched past the newsreel
cameras like a hundred thousand extras in a film epic: rank upon rank, proudly keeping
step to the thump and blare of the bands, some wearing captured Italian helmets,
many shouldering ancient flintlock rifles, muskets, and carbines, others more modern
weapons that were taken from them as soon as they had marched out of camera
range. Goebbels promised them better weapons when their time came, and warned
them frankly that they might be committed on the main eastern front and not just
here in Berlin.
His ministry now urged newspapers not to use the word durchhalten, ‘hold out,’ as
it struck unhappy chords in those who had lived through World War I.27
History, argued Goebbels in Das Reich, would surely not be so unjust as to let
Germany lose again.28 The Allies were war-weary, he said, speaking on November
25. When Churchill now conceded that London had been under ‘V–2’ attack for five
weeks Goebbels used this tardy admission to illustrate the unreliability of British
propaganda. ‘Millions of people,’ he triumphed in Das Reich, ‘were witnesses of the
use of the new German long-range weapon, which is incomparably more destructive
than the V–1.’29
874 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Hitler left the Wolf’s Lair and returned to Berlin for an operation on his throat. In
total sympathy with his chief, Goebbels too felt poorly, with chest pains. He had his
chest X-rayed but nothing was found.30 He called at the Chancellery on December 1
and stayed with Hitler until five-thirty A.M. (He would call this talk one of the most
interesting he ever had with Hitler). His voice still only a croak, Hitler excitedly
revealed his secret plans for the coming Ardennes offensive. ‘When I consider,’
marveled Goebbels afterwards, ‘how sickly and weak he was when I saw him bedridden
several weeks ago, when he already outlined these same great plans to me
…Ê then I can only say that a miracle has come over him.’
Hitler’s main problem would be to inspire his generals, because they were infected
with defeat. Nothing, he said, matched the western front in importance now. If his
offensive succeeded they could Dunkirk the British all over again, blame the Americans,
and restart their V–1 bombardment of southern England. As for the V–2, Hitler
added meaningfully: ‘Mr Churchill had every reason to keep it secret from his
public.’ With no lack of confidence in the final outcome himself, Hitler mentioned
that after the war he was going to give fine estates to his best political and military
officers.31
IT was unlikely that Reichsmarschall Göring would qualify. Every night the British
destroys yet another city.
Hitler expressed uncomprehending sorrow about Göring. How could he still live
in such repugnant luxury, wearing his pompous pearl-grey silk uniform? He had
advised Göring, he said, to spend less time out at Carinhall surrounded by his assorted
aunts, cousins, and sisters-in-law. Göring had even taken to receiving generals
in a floor-length dressing gown and furry slippers. Hitler was determined to
smash the camarilla of corrupt generals surrounding the Reichsmarschall, and to
help his better qualities come to the fore.
In a fire-raid on Heilbronn on December 4–5 most of the city was ravaged and
7,147 people burned alive. At midday on the sixth Goebbels found Göring at Carinhall
just as Hitler had described—sipping tea surrounded by elderly female relatives,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 875
friends, and sycophants like Philipp Bouhler (the euthanasia mass-murderer) and
Bruno Loerzer, Göring’s crony in the Richthofen squadron and ex-chief of Luftwaffe
personnel. (Hitler had sacked him). For four hours Göring whined and argued, pleading
his innocence for the Luftwaffe’s failures. He blamed everybody but himself.32
Two days later, at 6:45 P.M. on December 3, 1944 a chauffeur-driven car brought
Hitler over to No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse to pay what proved to be his last visit
to the Goebbels household. The children put on long dresses made from old curtains
in ‘Uncle Führer’s’ honour. As he was helped out of his greatcoat, Magda’s mother
found him a shadow of his former self.33 His hands trembled uncontrollably. The
children had not seen him for four years. Whereas Helga and Hilde (at twelve and
ten, the oldest) had earlier captivated him, now his attention turned to six-year old
Hedda. She had eyes only for Günter Schwägermann, however, her father’s one-eyed
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 143