situation. The Soviets had mastered a similar crisis in 1941, and the British in
1940. ‘The misfortunes that have beset us are very painful but they are in no way
888 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
synonymous with the forfeiting of our victory and the consequent dissolution of the
Reich and the biological extinction of the German people.’ They had again stabilised
an eastern front, he said, and the territories they had lost would be regained. The
indescribable bolshevik atrocities in the east were however ‘no products of their
fantasy.’ ‘We would rather die,’ he said, echoing Stalin’s famous phrase, ‘than capitulate.’
What was the consequence of the Allies’ aerial terrorism, he asked: just that the
Germans hated them even more. He reiterated that they had to believe in victory,
‘unless the Goddess of History be just a whore of the enemy.’ Now however he
added that if victory be denied them then he would consider life no longer worth
living, ‘neither for myself, nor for my children, nor for all whom I love and together
with whom I have fought for so many years for a better and more noble existence.’
He knew, said Goebbels, that people would ask him how victory could still be
theirs. He drew on a familiar analogy. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘we’re like the marathon runner
who has thirty-five of the forty-two kilometres behind him.’23
This, his penultimate broadcast, was a brilliant effort. For the most part the reception
was enthusiastic. ‘When Goebbels speaks,’ said S.S. Oberführer Kurt Meyer
that evening in British captivity,, ‘it really grips you.’ ‘At any rate,’ said an army
general, ‘he has achieved … a people which willingly cooperates with the government.’
24 Others felt differently. Major-General Bruhn, also in British captivity, called
the speech ‘the most two-faced, hypocritical exhibition there has ever been,’ and
Major-General von Felbert agreed: ‘What a scoundrel he is. If only I could lay hands
on that dirty beast, that swine … this lump of filth, this muck-worm!’25
‘You can’t give the people confidence with speeches like that,’ remarked Dr Ley to
his mistress, criticizing that Hitler and Goebbels never saw the front line. ‘These
people have no idea how grave the situation on the fronts actually is. If only one of
them would leave his comfortable four walls and visit the fronts!’26
Hitler did in fact visit the Oder front on the first Saturday in March, but when
Goebbels visited him on the fourth he refused even to allow the press to report it.
Goebbels found him more depressed than ever, and he was horrified at the uncontrollable
tremor in Hitler’s left hand. His sixth sense was however intact. Hitler
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 889
bitterly pointed out that while his general staff and Himmler, now commanding the
army group on the Oder, had expected the Russians to go for Berlin, he had anticipated
that they would first move on Pomerania, to the north-east. He had as usual
proved right. Goebbels wondered why Hitler could not get his own way with his
own general staff. When Hitler stressed the need to hold the Rhine, Goebbels could
only agree: if the British and Americans once got through into central Germany,
there would be no need for them to negotiate with Hitler at all. They talked about
the Dresden catastrophe—Hitler’s own half sister Angela had written him an eyewitness
account of the horrors. Goebbels proudly revealed that Magda and the children
would stay with him in Berlin. While Hitler’s spirits were still high, the HQ
generals with whom Goebbels spoke were very downcast. ‘The atmosphere in the
Reich chancellery,’ he noted, ‘is pretty grim. I’d prefer not to go there again because
you can’t help being infected by the mood.’27
Himmler, like Speer before him, was now skulking in bed with nameless disorders
in the clinic at Hohenlychen outside Berlin. On March 7 Goebbels visited him and
they warily explored each other’s views for two hours and exchanged venomous
remarks about Göring and Ribbentrop. Goebbels said that he had warned Hitler that
by hanging on to Göring he was asking for trouble—he hinted at a top level mutiny;
but still Hitler refused to draw the consequences. Himmler showed that he believed
their only chance lay in doing a deal with the west; Goebbels disagreed—Stalin was
far more realistic than the hooligans in London and Washington.28
He had evidently given up all a deal with the west. General Dittmar noted on
February 27, ‘Everybody I speak with in the propaganda ministry is in favour of the
western solution. But that too is a leap in the dark.’29
GENERAL Schörner’s troops counter-attacked in Lower Silesia and recaptured Lauban
from the Russians. On March 8 Goebbels visited the little market town. Schörner
was a popular commander, because he was tough. He told the minister he was hanging
deserters in public with a placard round their neck: ‘I’m a deserter and refuse to
defend German women and children.’ This was a general after Goebbels’ heart. At
890 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
any rate, as he told Hitler afterwards, Schörner’s troops knew two things: that they
might die in the front line; and that they would die in the rear.30
While badly damaged by the fighting, Lauban was not as bad as any town that had
been bombed, reflected Goebbels. Among the paratroops parading to hear him deliver
a fiery and wholly improvised speech on its market square he discovered his
former department head Willi Haegert—and a sixteen year old, Willy Hübner, who
had just earned the Iron Cross for bravery.31 Goebbels saw to it that the picture went
round the world. He shuddered as he drove past the burnt out hulks of Soviet tanks,
these steely robots with which Stalin was hoping to subjugate Europe. Back in Görlitz
that evening he spoke in the town hall to thousands of soldiers and Volkssturm men.
He told them of the children murdered and the women violated by the Russians, and
proclaimed à la Ilya Ehrenburg ‘Slay the Bolsheviks wherever you find them!’ ‘This
enemy,’ he said, ‘can be beaten because you’ve beaten them before! Make them pay
dearly in blood for every inch of German soil. We shall fight them in the fields and
forests, and in the cities, and in every street and in every building until they have lost
so much blood that they’re no longer able to fight on.’ ‘History,’ he declared, ‘will
grant to us the victory, because we alone deserve it.’32 Writing in Das Reich he said:
‘The only thing that matters is for a people to have the nerve to wait for its great
hour and then to use it.’ The best thing a warring nation could do, he argued, was to
think only of war, and then to devote itself to it body and soul: ‘The most total war is
always the most merciful.’33 These were slogans that all sounded very familiar: they
had lost their captivating power.
He saw Hitler again on Sunday evening March 11 and told him about Lauban.
Hitler told him Göring had recently visited him to discuss the need to ‘clear the air
politically’ toward the enemy. Hitler had retorted that he’d do better to clear the air,
period. Clutching at straws, Hitler was convinced the
enemy coalition was disintegrating.
But they could not deal with the British. Churchill, said Hitler, was running
amok—he had got it into his head to destroy Germany, regardless of whether he
ruined his empire in the process. In a reversal of his earlier stance Hitler now believed
that if he could inflict a bloody enough reverse on the Russians, the Kremlin
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 891
might open up toward him: in the resulting separate peace with Russia, he hoped he
might still achieve a beneficial partition of Poland, with Hungary and Croatia within
the German ægis and freedom to continue operations in the west. Whether he could
no longer bear to listen to such fateful illusions, or whether he too was wearying of
the war: Goebbels decided that one such talk a week with Hitler, on a Sunday evening,
was worth any number of regular daily visits.34
IT was twelve years to the day since he had set foot in the propaganda ministry on
Wilhelm Strasse for the first time as minister. Schinkel’s ornate palace had survived
five years of continuous air raids, including some of the heaviest in history. Between
eight and nine P.M. on March 13 it was hit by a single 4,000 pound blockbuster bomb
dropped by a twin-engined Mosquito plane. Goebbels drove straight over, and found
his beloved theatre, the Throne Room, the Blue Gallery and all the other fine architectural
features on whose restoration he had lavished so many years of effort, levelled
to the ground. For a while the fires which had broken out threatened to touch
off five hundred bazookas he had stockpiled in the building. The front wing had collapsed,
and the blast wave had wrought havoc in Hitler’s old chancellery too.35 ‘The
worst imaginable augury for the next twelve years,’ reflected Goebbels, and added
some nasty remarks at Göring’s expense.
Hitler told him that night that in their latest talks Göring had been ‘totally shattered’
—‘But what use is that!’ exclaimed Goebbels impotently in his diary. Still
chewing over past grievances Hitler also showed him the shorthand record of the
conferences in which he, unheeded by his generals, had correctly predicted that the
Russians were going for Pomerania next. Together they walked over to watch the
firefighters quenching the smouldering ruins of the propaganda ministry.36
On March 16 Goebbels invited the press round to his residence and lectured them
for an hour on the barbarity of the allies in the west.37 He now knew that Ribbentrop’s
peace feelers to Britain had been rebuffed. Goebbels’ emotions were mixed, between
Schadenfreude and apprehension about his own future. He commented on
rumours that Himmler had offered the enemy Hitler’s head, ‘They’re demanding
892 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
more heads than just Hitler’s,’ he remarked in his diary.38 Hitler still hoped that the
new Me262 jet fighters would prove Germany’s salvation. But they had too few, and
this was all coming too late. The Americans saturated Berlin’s poorer districts with
bombs on March 18, killing about five hundred people. With flames still devouring
his capital Hitler phoned Goebbels to ask about morale. He mentioned that he had
been in conference with his generals until six A.M. That day Kolberg was evacuated;
Goebbels saw to it that it was not mentioned in the High Command communiqué.39
One after another all their fortress-cities were captured, except one. On March
20 Gauleiter Karl Hanke sent a dramatic report from Breslau. The city was in ruins,
but he and his men were making the Russians pay in blood for every inch. ‘Gentlemen,
nobody is too good to die for Grossdeutschland,’ he had proclaimed, quoting
the words of Rommel, his commanding officer in France in 1940: ‘Attack!’ The experience
he had gained in the battle for Berlin before 1933 had served him well, he
wrote to Goebbels, who reflected once more that this was the type of national socialist
who put their army generals to shame.40 Hanke managed to put through one
phone call on March 29 to Goebbels and Magda, and even to send her a gift; she
thanked him in terms of touching warmth, praising his courage and telling him that
Hitler had recently called him ‘the Nettelbeck of this war’. ‘Our fondest wishes
always go with him,’ wrote Magda to Hanke’s trustiest friend, ‘and I sincerely believe
that he will one day get out.’41 Forbidding the fortress military commander to surrender,
Hanke’s men fought on until they had only two hundred guns, seven tanks, and
eight assault guns left; the city held out until May 6—by which time Hitler had
appointed him Himmler’s successor; Hanke escaped, and was murdered by Czechs
partisans a few days later.
The army generals meanwhile distinguished themselves by apathy and negligence.
The Americans found a bridge across the Rhine intact at Remagen and hurled their
forces across it. On March 21 Goebbels found Hitler tired and dejected, aged by this
fresh and unexpected catastrophe, and kept going only by ‘iron will-power.’ Morale
everywhere in the west was collapsing. Food was running out. Deprived of sleep by
the Allied bombers, the population was irritable and hysterical. When Goebbels
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 893
mechanically mentioned Frederick the Great Hitler snapped that the Seven Years
War was very different from this one. ‘I can’t get anywhere with him,’ noted Goebbels,
alarmed, ‘even with my analogies from history.’ Göring, said Hitler, revealing one
cause of his aggravation, had just set off for Bavaria with two trainloads of entourage
to visit his wife. Yet he again refused Goebbels’ suggestion that the man must go.
Goebbels dictated in impotent fury: ‘What can I do? All I can do is unremittingly
badger the Führer and put my criticisms to him.’ Back home he found No.20 Hermann-
Göring Strasse in darkness: a power cable had been hit in the afternoon’s Mosquito
raid. Magda had left for Dresden to visit her women friends. He felt low and depressed.
‘What should I do,’ he pondered, ‘to implement what I consider to be right?’
He felt responsible to the nation, as one of the few people left with Hitler’s ear.42
In Dresden Magda visited Ello Quandt at the White Hart sanitarium. ‘The new
weapons will be our salvation,’ she encouraged her sister-in-law, then guiltily checked
herself: ‘No, I’m talking nonsense. There’s nothing else. Germany’s defeat is only a
matter of weeks.’ Ello asked what she intended to do. ‘We’re all going to die, Ello,’
she replied. ‘But by our own hand, not the enemy’s.’ They had been the leaders of the
Reich, she explained; they could not duck the responsibility now. ‘We have failed.’43
AT the back of her husband’s mind were the Russian newsreels of their heroic defence
of Leningrad—of civilians collecting the bodies of their soldiers, tossing them into
pits, and fighting on.44 Berlin could and must be defended to the last man. He asked
Hitler’s permission to convert Berlin’s main east-west highway to a landing strip—it
would mean dismantling the ceremonial lamp standards and tree-felling in the
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 146