In a few brief words Goebbels disbanded the propaganda ministry. He handed out
poison capsules to his staff. He told Oven to get Rach and a second driver for Magda
and the children. ‘We’re moving into the Reich Chancellery. No.20 Hermann-Göring
Strasse will not be defended. It’s to be abandoned. The Volkssturm and S.S. men are
to transfer to the Chancellery gardens. My staff are to join the troops.’ Magda asked
if she should pack her toilet articles, and dismissed her children’s nanny with the
words: ‘We’re driving over to the Reich chancellery. We’ve all got to take poison.’39
Hitler’s mid-day war conference had broken up with him on the verge of a nervous
breakdown after learning that S.S. Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner had not even
begun the counter attack from the north on which everybody was banking. He had
slammed down his bunch of coloured pencils and declared that the war was lost. ‘But
you’re very wrong, gentlemen, if you believe that now I’ll leave Berlin after all. I’d
sooner put a bullet in my brains’—and with that he had pushed through them into
his private quarters saying, ‘Get me a line to Dr Goebbels.’
They stood aside as Goebbels rushed into Hitler’s study. What followed, perhaps
his finest speech, was delivered to an audience of only one frightened dictator bent
on killing himself within the hour. Setting the ultimate seal on his personal loyalty, he
told Hitler that he would move into one of the recently vacated bunker rooms himself
at once and bring Magda and the children with him too.40
Back outside, Bormann begged him to talk the Führer into flying out while he still
could. Goebbels blinked around, his eyes searching out Traudl Junge; he briefed the
young, slim secretary to be so kind as to meet his family when they arrived. Taking
General Jodl aside, he revealed that Hitler had made up his mind to stand and fight in
Berlin. Was there, he asked, no means of preventing the encirclement?
‘There’s only one way,’ replied the general. ‘And that’s to denude the Elbe front
and deploy all our troops in the defence of Berlin. It’s just possible then that the
Americans won’t press their offensive.’41
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 913
Surprisingly, Hitler agreed to this at once and ordered Keitel and Jodl out of the
bunker to take personal command of this historic about-face by Wenck’s Twelfth
Army.
Moving into Morell’s old quarters directly across the gangway from Hitler’s rooms
and the map room—the physician took one of the last planes out that same night—
Goebbels sent out a ‘Führer Order’ for Panzer-Bär to print the next day. ‘Anybody
who encourages or approves any move that weakens our power to resist is a traitor!
He is to be shot out of hand or hanged! This order stands even if his moves are alleged
to have been ordered by the gauleiter Reich minister Dr Goebbels or by the Führer
himself.’42 Berlin’s cable radio announced that Hitler was staying in Berlin.43
That evening he fetched his family. Rach drove him and Magda, the children followed
in a second car. They passed Ribbentrop’s car: he was leaving Berlin for the
north.44 Down in the bunker Magda moved with her children into adjoining rooms,
not caring that her matrimonial separation from her husband—whose room was one
floor below—thus became obvious to everybody. Traudl Junge took the children to
the store-room where Hitler’s birthday presents still lay in a heap while their mother
went to work her magic on the Führer.45 Later she wrote to Harald that Hitler had
told her to flee Berlin. ‘But you know your mother,’ she wrote, ‘we’re of the same
blood. That was out of the question.’46 She sent Rohrssen back to pick up a few things
at Schwanenwerder, then released him from his duties.47
From now on Goebbels directed what was left of the propaganda battle by telephone
from the bunker. His old gau HQ had been converted into an emergency
hospital as had the Adlon and the chancellery’s main Voss Strasse bunker. Here in
semi-darkness surgeons operated on casualties from the increasingly close battle areas.
The stench was overpowering, but through it all came the laughter and chatter of
the six Goebbels children as they collected round their table perched on one of the
landings and waited for the two armies that their father and ‘Uncle Führer’ had promised
were coming to rescue them. Many people offered to take Magda and the children
to safety under a Red Cross flag. Shortly before midnight on the twenty-second
Professor Karl Gebhardt, head of the Red Cross, knocked on Goebbels’ door;
914 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Schwägermann, the adjutant, inched it slightly ajar and Gebhardt called out to ask if
he should take the children out of the city. Goebbels said sleepily, ‘No, we’re staying
here,’ and motioned for Schwägermann to shut the door again.48
AT mid-day on April 23 Keitel and Jodl were back. Those two armies were making
only slow progress. At 12:40 P.M. Berlin’s radio broadcast that Hitler, Goebbels, and
his family were still in Berlin.49 ‘The propaganda ministry has been turned into a
fortress,’ it was announced. ‘The staff has been collected into a Volkssturm battalion
under Staatssekretär Naumann’s commend. Even women staff members have been
trained to use the Panzerfaust bazooka.’50 The following day all German short-wave
propaganda transmissions to the world ceased.51
In the afternoons Hitler went to drink chocolate with the children. His favourite
was still the eldest daughter Helga, now twelve. Her long blond tresses were demurely
plaited—a truly Aryan maiden. She stood 1·58 metres in her socks, and
beamed all over her pretty, oval features. When her little brother Hellmut read out
his latest essay on ‘The Führer’s Birthday,’ she chirped, ‘You pinched that from Pappi!’
‘Or Pappi from me!’ the eight-year old retorted, to everybody’s delight. The children
told Hitler they were all looking forward to the new soldiers who were going
to chase the Russians away.52
‘We’re all waiting for Wenck,’ he grimly advised an officer that day.53
Doing what they could to lighten the descending gloom, Eva Braun was delicately
made up and coiffed and wore a different dress each day, while Magda had carefully
brushed her own long blond hair and the hairpiece which she had elaborately woven
in. Once she had a young S.S. doctor from the Voss Strasse bunker attend to her
teeth; she liked this young man—Helmut Kunz—and found it easy to confide in him
as the final days approached.
Hermann Göring, now in safety on the Obersalzberg, began acting as though Hitler
were already dead. Hitler ordered his arrest.54 Traudl Junge glimpsed Goebbels
afterwards outside the map room, raging about the Reichsmarschall’s treason. ‘That
man never was a true national socialist,’ he exclaimed. ‘He just basked in the Führer’s
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 915
reflected glory. He never lived the life of a national socialist or idealist. It’s thanks to
him that we are down here now, in this bunker, and about to lose the war.’55
Not that either he or Hitler had given up even now. Lor
enz’s shorthand notes of
the remaining bunker conferences show Hitler on April 25 reasoning to Goebbels, ‘I
can only win a real triumph here,’ meaning Berlin. ‘If I do that—even just a moral
victory—then it is at very least a way of saving face or gaining time.’56
Unwilling to let anybody rob him of the glamour of sharing Hitler’s fast-approaching
Götterdämmerung Goebbels used every argument to keep him in the city. ‘In
Berlin,’ he agreed, ‘we can score a world-scale moral victory. Such a victory can be
obtained only at the one point on which all the eyes of the world are riveted. The
world will not take it half as hard that the Soviets are marching into Brandenburg, as
if they get Berlin. But if they are thrashed at Berlin that will teach the whole world a
lesson.’
‘If only!’, responded Hitler. ‘I hear that the talks between Eden and Molotov have
broken down. The Russians are demanding the whole [of Poland]. And that will mean
that Britain has lost the war… I think,’ he added, ‘that the time’s coming when the
rest of them, out of sheer self-preservation, will have to stand up to this insatiable
Moloch, this proletarian-bolshevik monster. If I were to duck out like a coward today
… then national socialism would be done for and the Reich with it. But if I fight
on to victory and hang on to the capital, then maybe hope will spring in British and
American breasts that it’s possible to stand up to this whole peril, side by side with
Nazi Germany, after all. And the only man for the job is me.’
‘Leave this city,’ emphasized Goebbels in this surreal conversation deep beneath
the chancellery, ‘and you lose the rest as well.’
Hitler speculated further. Might not the west now turn to him as the only force
capable of holding back the bolshevik colossus? ‘I would think it one thousand times
more craven to finish myself off down on the Obersalzberg than to make a last stand
and die in battle here.’
Reverting to his own leitmotif, Goebbels reminded him that the Russians too might
yet prefer to strike a bargain with Nazi Germany. ‘Once Stalin sees this trend among
916 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the western powers resulting from a German victory in Berlin, he may well say to
himself, “If I’m not going to get the kind of Europe I had in mind, I’m just throwing
the British and Germans into each other’s arms. So let’s cut a deal with the Germans.”’
He predicted that Stalin would shortly start a propaganda campaign against
the Allies, accusing them of having ravaged Germany’s cities with their air raids. ‘He
is a far better propagandist than the British,’ said Goebbels.
Hitler was still pondering his own image in history. ‘Better,’ he growled, ‘to fight
honorably to the bitter end than to live on a few months or years in disgrace and
dishonour.’
This was very much Goebbels’ philosophy; he enlarged on this sepulchral theme,
as though it were still an entirely abstract prospect. ‘If worse comes to worst,’ he
mused, ‘and the Führer dies an honourable death in Berlin, and Europe goes bolshevik,
then in five years at most the Führer will have come a legendary figure and national
socialism a mythus sanctified by a last grand finale—and all of its mortal errors that
are criticized today will have been expunged at one fell swoop.’
At a war conference later that day he remarked optimistically that the Anglo-American
press had already coined the phrase ‘Third World War’ in uneasy anticipation of
the coming clash with Russia. An impregnable Berlin might just be the last straw for
the enemy coalition.
LATE on the twenty-sixth Luftwaffe general Robert von Greim arrived as Göring’s
successor. The renowned aviatrix Hanna Reitsch who accompanied him helped Magda
with bedtime duties with the children. Once Hitler came in, took off his own golden
party badge and pinned it onto Magda.57 Goebbels often stood by his children’s bedside,
gazing at their sleeping forms. In November 1940, during the first British blitz
on Berlin, he had seen them all sleeping in each others’ arms like this in the cellar at
Schwanenwerder—‘all looking as sweet as little angels,’ he wrote in that day’s diary.
Goebbels
58 Once Traudl Junge heard the children through the door,...
‘I went in,’ she wrote, ‘and found them sitting on their three bunk beds, tightly
holding their ears so that the others did not interfere with their three-part song. And
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 917
there was Hanna Reitsch singing with them and conducting.’59 ‘The children,’ wrote
Magda two or three days before the end, ‘are wonderful. ‘They manage all by themselves
in these more than primitive conditions… There’s never a word of complaint
or the hint of a tear from them. When the bunker trembles under the artillery bombardment
the bigger children shield the smaller. Their presence here is a boon to us
all, as they even coax a smile from the Führer now and again.’60
Philosophizing in their bunker fastness, Hitler and Goebbels waited for those relieving
armies. Lorenz heard Goebbels interrupt the war conference on the twentyseventh,
‘Gau HQ reports that Wenck’s group has linked up with our bridgehead at
Potsdam.’
‘The really crippling thing is,’ said Hitler soon after, ‘that one doesn’t know for
certain what is going on.’ Phone calls dialled at random established which streets
were now in Russian hands.
‘God grant that Wenck gets here,’ murmured Goebbels. ‘Just suppose: Wenck gets
to Potsdam, and the Soviets are right outside here in Potsdamer Platz!’
‘And I’m not in Potsdam,’ chimed in Hitler, ‘but here in Potsdamer Platz.’
Later that day Soviet tanks flying swastikas broke right through to Wilhelm Platz
before being shot down. Hitler, who had once directed army groups of a million
soldiers and more, was listening to reports on the placing of individual howitzers
and self-propelled guns in the streets above.61 For a while Hitler and Goebbels reminisced
about the mistakes they now realized they had made in not liquidating their
enemies in 1933. That was the hidden snag about being elected legally to office. In
Vienna too, in 1938, the sheer peacefulness of the revolution had robbed them of the
chance to liquidate all their enemies. Next time, they both resolved in this grotesque
conversation, if there ever was a next time, they would not act Mr Nice Guy with
their opponents.62
SHORTLY before dinner Magda collared the S.S. dentist Dr Helmut Kunz and asked
him to help when the time came. She led him upstairs to where her children were
preparing for bed, and introduced the Sturmbannführer to them, without saying
918 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
why. Goebbels looked in briefly and said goodnight to the children too. The dentist
chatted easily with them all for a while, before returning to his bunker surgery.63
On the twenty-eighth, as the bombardment increased, Greim left the bunker. Both
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 150