Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
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Tiergarten on either side. Hitler grudgingly said, ‘That’s okay by me,’ but disallowed
the tree-felling later.45 Berliners would need trees, when all this was over. Goebbels
called on the western city of Mönchen-Gladbach to put up a special fight, but that
town fell and the neighbouring Rheydt, his home town, surrendered without a shot
being fired to the Americans in mid March.
894 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
1 E.g., Heinz Linge, Hitler’s appointments register, Jan 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 1945 (NA
film T84, roll 387).
2 Diary, Jan 29; Linge, appointments register, Jan 28, 1945 (NA film T84, roll 387).
3 JG, circular propaganda directive, Feb 5, 1945. DE.53/DIS.202 (Hoover Libr., Lerner
papers.)
4 Diary, Jan 1945 (BA file NL.118/124).
5 By Zdenko von Kraft, Alexanderzug; JG to Hitler, Jan 10, 1945 (NL.118/107). The
passage begins: ‘Death, said Philippos [the king’s doctor], had already been quite close for
the king…’
6 Diary, Jan 14, 1930.
7 Diary, Feb 28, Mar 5, 22, 24, 1945. Published as Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher 1945. Die
letzten Aufzeichnungen 1945 (Hamburg 1977).
8 Ministerialrat Dr Fries (of Hippler’s office) to JG, Dec 12, 1944; with note, ‘The Minister
has refused.’ DE.492/DIS.202 (Hoover Libr., Lerner papers.)
9 RMVP air war notice No.178, Jan 18, 1945 (NA film T84, roll 322, 1469ff).
10 JG (as RPL) circular to all gau propaganda officials, Jan 15, 1945 DE.331/DIS.202
(Hoover Libr., Lerner papers).
11 Roger Freeman, The Mighty Eighth (New York) 1970), 208.
12 Heinz Linge, Hitler’s appointments register, Feb 2, 5, 7, 11, 12, 14, 1945 (NA film T84,
roll 387).
13 Freybe to Salon Berthe, Feb 1, 1945 (ZStA Potsdam, Rep.90 Go 2, vol.2).
14 Magda to Harald Quandt, Feb 10, 1945: facsimile in Behrend, op. cit., No.8., Feb 23,
1952.
15 Hanke to his wife, Feb 13, 1945 (Hanke papers; by kind permission of the late Freda
Rössler).
16 JG to Streicher, Feb 12, 1945 (ZStA Potsdam, Rep.90 Go 1, vol.3).
17 Sündermann, ‘Feb 17,’ 273; Interrogation of Steengracht, CCPWE No.32, DI–19, Jul
2; and by US State dept., Sep 4, 1945.
18 A news item in Basler Zeitung, Feb 19, 1949. This adds that JG abandoned the plan
because the BBC revealed details on Feb 22; at the MinConf he threatened to strangle with
his bare hands the culprit (who had deliberately revealed it to a Swedish journalist).
19 Steengracht’s remarks of Jul 2, 1945 in CCPWE No.32 report X–P.21 (PRO file
WO.208/3438).
20 Diary, Mar 30, 1945.—On this subject see Ribbentrop, Von London bis Moskau, 266f; Jodl
to Hitler, Feb 21, 1945 (ND: 606–D) and notes, Jan 15, 1946 (Jodl papers); William Scheidt’s
notes in Echo der Woche, Oct 28, 1949; and the testimonies of Helmut Sündermann, Baron
Steengracht, and Hitler’s stenographer Ludwig Krieger (IfZ, Irving collection). Kaltenbrunner
also claimed credit for thwarting JG, in conversation with Dr Hermann Neubacher. USFET
MISC CI–RIR/4, Feb 1, 1946 (NA file RG.407, entry 427, box 1954b).
21 NYT, Jun 29, 1946.
22 Diary, Feb 28; Heinz Linge, Hitler’s appointments register, Feb 27, 1945 (NA film T84,
roll 387).
23 JG speech, Feb 28, in DAZ, Berlin, and NYT, Mar 1; the Daily Herald, London, Mar 1,
1945 headlined its report GOEBBELS PLEDGED TO DIE.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 895
24 Ibid.
25 Remarks overheard on Feb 28, 1945. CSDIC(UK) report GRGG.265. Major-General
Bruhn was heard telling Lieutenant-General von Schlieben, ‘According to what Goebbels
said … pure murder is going on in the east of Germany, on a large scale. That’s the first I’ve
heard of it. … One must assume that that’s another lie.’ ‘I suspect him of possessing so devilish
a nature that he upholds all those things which appeal to the soul of the people without
acknowledging their application to himself.’ Bruhn then described what Lieutenant General
Kittel had told him about mass shootings which the Nazis had carried out in the east (PRO
file WO.208/4177).
26 ‘Robert Ley as described by his mistress,’ SAIC.40, Jun 4, 1945 (NA file RG.165, entry
79, box 756).
27 Diary, Mar 5, 1945.
28 Diary, Mar 8, 1945.
29 Dittmar diary, Feb 27; JG at first accepted Dittmar’s script, with its hidden appeal to the
western powers in general (Mar 22) and the Americans as the strongest partner in particular
(Apr 7), on Apr 10, 1945 however he banned it (author’s film DJ-60).
30 Diary, Mar 12, 1945.
31 Sündermann, ‘Mar 10, 1945,’ 303.
32 Diary, Mar 9. JG’s speech in Hamburger Zeitung, Mar 10, VB and NYT, Mar 11.—The
European Political Report, Mar 16, 1945, vol.ii, No.11, commented: ‘German propaganda
this week devoted an extraordinary amount of newspaper and radio output to lurid tales of
Allied atrocities’ (USAMHI, Donovan papers, box 37b).
33 JG, ‘Der Zeitpunkt, der die Wende bringt,’ in Das Reich, Mar 11, 1945.
34 Diary, M ar 13, 1945.
35 Albrecht to his wife, Mar 14; there were no casualties (IfZ, Irving collection);
Sündermann, ‘Mar 14, 1945,’ 309.
36 Diary, Mar 14, 1945.
37 Sündermann, ‘Mar 16, 1945,’ 310f.
38 Diary, Mar 17; cf. Sündermann, ‘Mar 18, 1945,’ 311f.
39 Diary, Mar 19, 1945.
40 Diary, Mar 21, 1945.
41 Ibid., Mar 30.—Magda Goebbels to Zeller (for Hanke) Apr 9, 1945 (ZStA Potsdam,
Rep.90 Go 2, vol.2)
42 Diary, Mar 22, 1945.
43 Ebermayer & Meissner, Revue, No.26, Jun 28, 1952.
44 Naumann testimony, May 18, 1950 (IfZ, ZS.1134).
45 Hitler’s war conference, Mar 23 (Heiber, op. cit.); JG diary, Mar 27; Sündermann, ‘Mar
24, 1945,’ 322.
896 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
58: Death of Another Empress
SO Dr Goebbels remained in Berlin, a prisoner of his own pride and his own
routine from the moment he strapped on his leg-calipers each morning. In the
west General Eisenhower’s armies had swept across the Rhine and a pincer operation
was about to shut off the Ruhr, the Nazis’ last arsenal. The Rhinelanders had
seemed almost to welcome the Allies: the civilians saw relief from the air raids, and
from the threat of pestilence and starvation. The wording had become circumspect.
‘In fact,’ he dictated as April began, ‘events in the west seem likely to give the enemy
some hope of overwhelming us militarily quite soon.’1 Lieutenant Colonel Rudi Balzer
brought back from the western front shocking reports of the collapse of morale
which confirmed what Field Marshal Kesselring had said a few days earlier.2 The city
of Mannheim had telephoned the approaching Americans offering to surrender.3 Cologne
surrendered in an hour. In Frankfurt German women were embracing the
American troops. Townsfolk were openly hanging out the white flag and jeering at
their own soldiers. Goebbels sent in thirty of his finest orators—he had no choice,
because the printed media had virtually disappeared. In the south Hitler’s last oilproducing
fields in Hungary were about to be overrun. Dictating the diary each
morning gave him little cheer. If only he could
get Hitler to broadcast, as Churchill
had in 1940 and Stalin in 1941, it would be like a battle won.
The scale of the air war was now such that when nine-hundred American heavy
bombers attacked Hanover and Berlin he dismissed it as a ‘medium scale’ operation.
His field office in Hamburg reported that people were commenting scornfully on
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 897
the swift execution of the German officers who had allowed the Rhine bridge at
Remagen to fall into American hands and suggesting quite openly—in letters to
which they did not hesitate to append their full names and addresses—that the
Reichsmarschall should face a firing squad as well.4
THE British and Americans had now crossed the Rhine in strength and had flooded
into central Germany as far as Würzburg. Hitler suspected treason in the west, and
sent for Goebbels at noon on March 27, 1945. For an hour they strolled through the
chancellery garden beneath his study window, talking. Goebbels noticed how stooped
the man had now become; and that the gardens had been torn up, as reinforcing
work on Hitler’s subterranean bunker proceeded. Hitler had decided to stay in Berlin,
and the mood of the generals around him was already one of despair. Goebbels
remarked that they should have quit the Geneva Convention when he said: he blamed
Speer and Bormann for talking Hitler out of it. They were still half-bourgeois, these
men—‘They think, but don’t act, as revolutionaries.’ Goebbels warned of the collapsing
morale in the west, and urged Hitler to broadcast to the nation like Churchill
and Stalin in their moment of crisis. Fifteen minutes would do the trick, he said.
GOEBBELS saw Hitler again on March 30. A day or two before, he had asked Himmler’s
security service, the S.D., to scour its files for the old, forbidden horoscopes that had
been cast for the birth date of the republic, November 9, 1918, and the birth date of
Hitler’s Reich, January 30, 1933.5 The tracts were on his desk at the ministry on the
twenty-ninth. ‘Both are in startling agreement,’ he furtively informed his diary. ‘I can
well understand,’ he hastened to add, ‘that the Führer has prohibited any trafficking
in such unverifiable things. Even so it is not without interest to see that both the
Republic’s horoscope and that of the Führer are prophesying that our military affairs
will look up in the latter part of April. In May, Jun, and July things will go downhill
again but hostilities will cease, it seems, in mid August. God grant,’ he dictated cynically,
‘that this be so.’ fearful lest these pages fall into the wrong hands he added: ‘For
myself such astrological prophecies are of no account. But I intend to exploit them
898 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
… because in times of crisis people will clutch at the slightest straws.’6 Among these
people he counted his Führer; but Hitler had slept for only two hours and was in no
mood for horoscopes. Just six days ago, said Goebbels, produced his tattered copy of
Carlyle, he had found himself reading the description of the most harrowing days of
the Seven Years War. The great monarch had seen no way out of the imminent defeat;
Frederick had set himself a final deadline, and wrote to the Count d’Argenson that if
things did not look up by then he would swallow that phial of poison. Three days
before that date, continued Goebbels, reading from the book, the Empress Elisabeth
of Russia had suddenly died. Her half-witted successor Peter the Third had offered
peace to Frederick, and the House of Brandenburg was saved. Why should they not
hope for precisely the same kind of miracle now? Looking up, Goebbels saw tears
flooding into Hitler’s eyes.7
For some days Goebbels had pleaded with Hitler to broadcast a flaming oration to
the Reich. But Hitler displayed what was to Goebbels an incomprehensible aversion
to facing the microphone now.8 The S.D. had informed him after his New Year’s
speech that people felt that it had not said anything new, explained Hitler; now he
wanted to wait for good news from the western front before broadcasting again.
That might take some time. The news from there was devastating. The Me262 jets
were scoring notable successes but the mass desertions of his troops could not be
ignored. There were, Goebbels suggested, a consequence of Hitler’s having rejected
his drastic suggestion after the Dresden massacre that they repudiate the Geneva
Convention and start executing Allied prisoners. Hitler agreed. Goebbels also criticized
their efforts at starting guerrilla warfare. Admittedly, the collapse in the west
had come with breathtaking speed, but their operation ‘Werewolf’ movement—an
attempt to create an underground army of partisans—was a flop.9 So far only one
man, the enemy-appointed mayor of Aachen, had been assassinated. Goebbels planned
to take over ‘Werewolf’ himself, giving it a newspaper and a radio station, using all
the tactics that he had developed in Angriff in the early Thirties. He even had a new
‘Isidor’ in his sights—he was planning the assassination of the newly installed ‘Jewish
police chief’ of American occupied Cologne as well as Heinrich Vogelsang, a ‘former
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 899
Nazi nincompoop’ whom the Americans had appointed the mayor of Rheydt, his
home town.10 The Americans immediately founded ‘the first free newspaper’ in
Rheydt, just to spite Goebbels.11 Worse, an American army lieutenant held a Passover
ceremony for three hundred Jewish soldiers in his parental home in Dahlener
Strasse—a Corporal Sidney Talmud of Brooklyn set up a camp stove on the family
porch and made pancakes for three hours.12 This really stuck in Goebbels’ craw.
Even now, he complained, the war was still not being fought radically enough. The
‘weakling’ Otto Dietrich was wet-blanketing his every move. When Goebbels announced
that the mayor of Aachen had been ‘sentenced by a national tribunal’ Dietrich
killed the announcement pointing out that it was untrue.
Hitler needed a Goebbels now, as defender of Berlin, more than a Dietrich. He
told Goebbels that Dietrich was sacked.13 He had just dismissed General Guderian
too—the mystery man of the Twentieth of July. Guderian, he said, had lost his nerve
again, just as in the Battle for Moscow.14 (This was a signal for Hitler to launch into
well-worn reminiscences on how he, single-handed, had saved the entire army that
winter of 1941–42 after his generals had thrown their armies into retreat.) Hitler
brooded on the fiasco that Sepp Dietrich had just suffered with his Sixth S.S. Panzer
Army in Hungary. He told Goebbels privately that he had come to accept that Himmler
had no strategic talents after all. ‘Punctilious, but no warlord,’ was his assessment.
The army’s Ferdinand Schörner, whose army group was fighting magnificently in
Czechoslovakia, was the only general that Hitler spoke well of—‘one hell of a guy,