But these maneuvers proved futile. That very evening, September 1, the ambassadors of Britain and France called on Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to assure him that their countries would stand by their pledges to Poland. At the same time the two countries declared general mobilization.4 On September 3, the British ambassador handed over a last, short-term ultimatum from his government, which Hitler rejected. Whereupon Britain declared war. The French government followed suit, albeit after several hours’ delay.5
By that morning, in parallel with his rejection of the British ultimatum, Hitler had already addressed separate appeals to the people, the Party, and members of the armed forces, which Goebbels immediately had broadcast over the radio. That same evening, Hitler left Berlin on his special train, “in order,” as Goebbels dramatically phrased it, “to make his way to the Eastern Front.” In fact, during the following weeks, Hitler was to move around at a relatively safe distance from the fighting.6
Exploiting the propaganda value of the Polish “campaign,” already victorious after only five weeks, was one of the chief tasks falling to Goebbels’s propaganda machine at this time. As before, during the Sudeten crisis, and as in the days before the beginning of hostilities, Goebbels’s office made strenuous efforts to disseminate reports of alleged Polish atrocities, inflicted first and foremost on the German minority population, although in most cases these horror stories were either invented or highly exaggerated.7 In point of fact, during the course of the war, many thousands of “ethnic Germans” lost their lives, some as a result of combat action, others executed by the Polish military, or killed by civilians. The civilian attacks peaked at the beginning of September in Bromberg (in Polish: Bydgoszcz), and while it is true that some hundreds of “ethnic Germans” were killed as alleged “saboteurs,” Nazi propaganda described the “Bromberg Bloody Sunday” in terms of a massacre of thousands.8 After the Polish action, German propaganda was to assert that over fifty thousand “ethnic Germans” had fallen victim to such atrocities at this time. In reality, the total number of people of German origin who had died was multiplied by a factor of ten.9
The Germans used this atrocity propaganda to justify “retribution.” During the Polish campaign and in the following months, German units (including task forces, police, the ethnic German self-defense force newly formed by the SS, and also regular German troops) shot tens of thousands of Polish civilians, members of the intelligentsia, the clergy, and the aristocracy and thousands of Jews.10 German actions were systematically planned from the beginning to carry forward the wishes of the political leadership. By September 7, Heydrich had already given orders at a conference of leading officials that “as much as possible the Polish elites are to be rendered harmless.”11 Action was taken accordingly.
During these weeks, while creating suitable atrocity propaganda around the mass shootings of “ethnic Germans,” Goebbels also directed propaganda efforts at the Western powers. At a meeting with Hitler on September 3, guidelines were set for wartime propaganda. The byword for the coming weeks ran: “Against Chamberlain and his associates. Divide leadership from people. Leave France unmolested for the present.”12
CONFLICTS OVER THE DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITIES
An immediate result of the opening of hostilities was that Goebbels had to fight off increased competition for command of the propaganda effort. In fact, arguments over responsibility for this area were to continue until the end of the war; indeed, it is quite clear that Hitler deliberately left unresolved certain questions of authority so that, if necessary, he would have the opportunity to intervene personally. These conflicts over authority, often fought out in bitter personal arguments between the leading figures, typified the Nazi state.
By August 1939, a new dispute had already flared up between the Foreign Ministry and the Propaganda Ministry, when State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker, once again citing an oral command from the Führer, requested permission from the Wehrmacht High Command for his ministry, instead of that overseen by Goebbels, to be allowed to convey to the press certain directives, which had been drawn up in readiness for mobilization.13 When State Secretary Dietrich proved obstructive, Ribbentrop again brought in Hitler and rapidly demonstrated that his recent diplomatic successes in Moscow had reinforced his position at Hitler’s court. On September 3, Hitler placed all overseas German representatives, whether of State or Party, under the command of the respective Heads of Mission.14
When Goebbels resisted this ruling, Hitler summoned him to his headquarters, where Goebbels arrived on the same day, aboard a bomber. Hitler forced the two opponents to come together and settle their differences in a compartment of his special train, which served as his headquarters at this time. The two emerged and reported to Hitler three hours later, as Dietrich tells us in his memoirs, both of them “red in the face,” to tell him that a compromise could not be found. The next day, Hitler penned a written “Führer decree,” which stated that, “in the sphere of foreign policy propaganda […], the foreign minister will issue guidelines and instructions […]. For the purpose of putting these instructions into effect, the foreign minister will have the entire apparatus of the Propaganda Ministry at his disposal.”15 Hitler, angered by this territorial dispute, insisted that Goebbels and Ribbentrop immediately “agree to carry out his order,” whereupon they agreed on a division of labor. Essentially, what was agreed on was the exchange of liaison personnel.16
On his return to Berlin, Goebbels carried out a substantial reorganization of his ministry. He introduced a daily meeting of his most important staff members, fixed for 11 A.M. His aims were to coordinate the work better and to maintain control of it. This measure was meant to counteract competition not only from the Foreign Ministry but also from Dietrich, whom Goebbels, in any case, saw as a dimwit, lacking in imagination and reasoning power. Goebbels took the view that Dietrich all too frequently acted independently and cherished ambitions to become press minister.17
In the months that followed, Goebbels went on the offensive, particularly against the placement of liaison personnel in his ministry,18 while, at the same time, he was building up his Foreign Department. This took place against a background of constant complaints from him about what he perceived as the incompetence of the Foreign Ministry in matters of propaganda.19
Goebbels was also unhappy about the performance of Armed Forces propagandists who had been removed from his immediate control. He always found the reports and film footage delivered to him by the propaganda companies completely inadequate, obviously the work of soldiers, not propagandists.20 After Hitler, too, had severely criticized the quality of the newsreels, in December Goebbels attempted, in long discussions with his liaison officer in the Armed Forces High Command, Bruno Wentscher,21 to make it clear that the work of the propaganda staff required more than just military discipline and drill.22 He complained to Wilhelm Keitel and discussed the matter with Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant, Rudolf Schmundt.23 In January 1940, Wentscher was replaced by Major Leo Martin.24
WAR WEARS DOWN THE NERVES
Goebbels’s enthusiasm for war was by no means boundless. At the beginning of September he agreed with Göring that a full-scale war was not desirable. After only a few days he was beginning to find the war very strenuous; as he put it in an emotional diary entry on September 24, it “takes a toll on the nerves:25 War consumes everything, even our own egos!” A few days later, in view of the glorious autumn weather, he could not “imagine that a world war was about to begin.”26
In the following weeks, Goebbels strove above all to discover more about Hitler’s further intentions. On a lightning visit to Hitler’s headquarters at the troop training ground of Gross-Born on September 27, Hitler explained to him that first of all he wanted to smash Poland and then make peace in the West. “He doesn’t need a long war,” was Goebbels’s summary of his impressions a few days later. “If it must be war, then short and all-out. We cannot allow London to force us to our knees once more through attrition (time and hunger
).”27
A few days after the war began, the Italian culture minister, Dino Alfieri, had tried to involve Goebbels in the mediation efforts pursued by the Italian government to bring Germany and the Western powers together, even to negotiate. Goebbels put the matter to Hitler and, in accordance with Hitler’s wishes, gave Alfieri an evasive reply.28 In early October he was still hoping that Italian soundings in Paris might bring results in some way.29 What he did not know was that Hitler had just informed Foreign Minister Ciano quite clearly that he did not want the services of the Italians as mediators.30
By means of the reports available to him, which in the early weeks of the war were constantly being compiled by his own propaganda machine, by the Party, and by government agencies, Goebbels carefully observed the “mood” of the population, which seemed to him “calm and composed,” “quiet and confident”: The hope of an early peace must have played an important part in creating this mood.31 It is not surprising that the tendency of all these reports was so uniform. After all, in a speech on September 1 to Reichstag members, Hitler had declared that he didn’t want anyone reporting to him that the mood in his Gau, district, or Party cell might sometimes be bad. “You are the bearers, the responsible bearers of the public mood!”32
Right at the beginning of the war, the propaganda minister took an important step to protect “public opinion” from harmful outside influences. On September 2, the press announced an order issued by the Council of Ministers concerning extraordinary measures governing the radio. It proclaimed that listening to foreign radio stations would be a punishable offense and that the disseminating of news obtained from these stations was even punishable by a death sentence.33
This decree, initiated by Goebbels, had not in fact been a product of the Council of Ministers. Indeed, it had been strongly rejected there. Rudolf Hess later explained that it had nonetheless been published as the result of a misunderstanding. Until the order was set out in an official version in the Reich legal bulletin a few days later, there continued to be hectic negotiations among the various ministries, which led to considerable changes to the order as it appeared in its final form. In particular, what was now missing was the decree permitting the Propaganda Ministry to order that radio sets should be confiscated.34
Even in its revised form, the order turned out to be an effective instrument. Naturally, it could not prevent a significant portion of the public from listening to foreign broadcasts. But for the individual citizen it was practically impossible to refer, in a public conversation, to a foreign radio station as the source of information departing from the official propaganda line. Thus the order represented an important measure in the hands of the Nazis for sealing off the public. The regular press reports about sentences passed for “radio crimes,” of which there were three dozen by the end of 1939 and 830 in 1940, ensured that the desired deterrent effect was achieved.35
What the reports of the public mood actually signified in these first few weeks was that the German population, among whom there was scarcely a trace of enthusiasm for war to be detected (in contrast to the mood of 1914), was complying with the orders of the regime; hardly anyone dared show recalcitrance in public. This compliance was ensured not least by the punitive measures introduced at the beginning of the war: Aside from Goebbels’s radio law there was the war-economy legislation of September 4, with its long catalogue of punishments, as well as the so-called Edict on National Vermin of September 5. In addition, sentences based on these new laws, which frequently included the death sentence, were announced in the press in the same way as the executions carried out, by way of example, by the Gestapo, without any corresponding sentence having been pronounced. The aim in both cases was a particular kind of deterrent effect through terror.36
What did threaten to have a negative effect on the public mood in the early weeks were the rigorous measures taken to bring about mobilization for war: They cut deep into economic and social life. For this purpose Goebbels was regularly summoned, from September 19 onward, to the sessions of the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich, newly created as the war began, as a kind of war cabinet presided over by Göring to carry out the essential measures needed to place the administration and the economy on a war footing.37
Goebbels was among those members of the Nazi leadership elite who felt that the schematic execution of civilian war-related measures in the early weeks of the war had gone too far. Thus in his diary he criticized the laying off of workers, which took place immediately after the war began and rapidly led to considerable unemployment, and he also opposed plans, originating from the Reich economics minister, Funk, to reorganize industrial pay at a lower level.38 Finally in mid-November the Council of Ministers decided, much to Goebbels’s approval, to reverse several social policy steps introduced at the beginning of the war.39
But when the SD (Security Service) reports about the mood of the public continued in November to yield what Goebbels perceived as an unsatisfactory picture, Goebbels stepped in to correct it with other means. He declared the methods used by the SD to be increasingly unreliable and at a ministerial meeting warned those reporting on the mood of the country against “exaggeration.”40
CONTINUATION OF WAR?
Nearly three weeks after his speech in the Reichstag, on September 19 Hitler once again addressed the public. In his speech in the historic Artus Hof in Danzig, which was broadcast by all German stations, he again proclaimed his supposed love of peace but also his determination to continue the war if need be.41
A few days later Goebbels learned from Dietrich, who had just returned from Hitler’s headquarters, that after his victory over Poland, now clearly in sight, Hitler wanted to drive a wedge between France and Britain—that is to say, to make a separate peace with France. But it wasn’t only Goebbels who asked himself, “How can that be done?” He also heard from Dietrich that Ribbentrop lacked the proper connections to enable him to make approaches to Paris.
During the following weeks, Goebbels took every opportunity to find out the dictator’s further plans for the war, avidly noting down every hint that war on a larger scale might still be avoided. These entries demonstrate yet again how cut off Goebbels was from decision-making in central political matters, however hard he might try to maintain the impression that he enjoyed Hitler’s full confidence. At the end of the month, Hitler, who had returned to Berlin for a few days, realized the possibility that there could still be a “Potato War” (a war of attrition) in the West, since there was no threat of a serious and long-lasting military conflict because the Western powers were unwilling to go to war.42 Two days later, Goebbels noted Hitler’s view that if London and Paris accept the peace proposals that he was about to offer them, “then order would soon be restored in Europe. If they don’t, then it is clear where war-guilt will lie, and the battle begins.”43
On the same occasion, Hitler explained his ideas for the future treatment of the occupied Polish territories: Poland should be divided into “three zones”—that is, into a strip to be, once more, completely “germanized”; a “Protectorate” for the “good Polish elements”; and finally, east of the Vistula, a territory for the “bad Polish elements” and the Jews, including Jews from the Reich.44 In fact, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) would start, as early as Autumn 1939, to send thousands of Jews from Reich territory to the planned reservation in eastern Poland. But the plan to “cleanse” the Reich of Jews in this way had to be deferred for the time being.45
They were now acquiring, as Hitler explained to Goebbels in the same conversation, a huge expansion of territory, but at the same time they had to accept that “Moscow’s influence in the Baltic had been strengthened. But he personally was convinced of Russia’s good faith. After all, Stalin had made enormous gains.”46 Hitler’s remarks were informed by the Border and Friendship Agreement signed on September 28 in Moscow by his foreign minister, which laid down the division of spheres of influence in Poland and the Baltic and reinforc
ed the alliance of the two states.47
Talking to Ribbentrop, just back from Moscow, on September 30, Goebbels criticized what he felt to be Ribbentrop’s all-too-positive assessment of the Soviet Union, something he carefully avoided doing with Hitler, “as though Bolshevism was just a kind of National Socialism.”48 On October 3, he met Hitler again: “The Führer still believes he will manage to restore peace. I have very strong doubts right now; the enemy governments are not yet exhausted enough.”49
Hitler, fresh from the victory parade in Warsaw, spoke again in the Reichstag on October 6 to make an offer of peace to the western powers. Hitler’s reasoning was as simple as it was astonishing: War in the west should be avoided, since now that the Polish state had been dissolved the original reason for the French and British declaration of war, the German attack on Poland, was null and void. The final shape of this territory could only be resolved by Germany and the Soviet Union. If the western powers accepted the German-Soviet actions as a fait accompli, the future could be glorious. It would be possible to create a comprehensive European security system and introduce arms limitation. Germany had no interest in any further revision of its borders.50
Goebbels was so impressed by this speech—“a masterpiece of diplomacy”—that he assumed France and England would not be able to resist its powerful emotional appeal.51 By October 12 he was still asking himself, “Are we truly heading for real world war? Even now nobody can tell.” Notes of his lengthy discussion with Hitler the day before reveal how hard he was trying, in this critical situation, to reinforce his own confidence in victory. “With the Führer we will always win; he combines in himself all of the virtues of the great soldiers: courage, smartness, circumspection, and a complete disregard for a life of ease.”52
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