Goebbels: A Biography

by Peter Longerich

  When Chamberlain rejected Hitler’s proposals in a speech on October 12, Hitler, despite his supposed hopes for peace, expressed his satisfation to Goebbels that “we can now make a start against England.”53 Hitler didn’t even take the time to examine the details of Chamberlain’s reply, so set was he on going ahead with the imminent offensive in the West he had decided on a few days earlier.54 It seemed the moment had finally arrived for even Goebbels to adjust to the idea of a lengthy war.

  WAR PROPAGANDA AGAINST THE WEST

  During the following months, the phase of phony war on the Western Front, Goebbels basically continued his previous propaganda line: The main attack should be directed at Great Britain; Paris must be spared.55 For domestic consumption his watchword was to warn against illusions as much as against pessimism.56 in German propaganda there was to be no more mention of neutral or enemy voices in favor of peace. In general, Goebbels was concerned to make the propaganda attack on France and England somewhat more realistic: “After all, war is not child’s play.”57

  In the meantime there was little to report from the Western Front. In the conflict with Britain it was mainly maritime themes that preoccupied German war propaganda in these early weeks of the war. The sinking of the British passenger liner Athenia on September 3, 1939, by a German U-boat, in which more than one hundred passengers were drowned, was denied by the German side and written off as a British propaganda lie. From the point of view of the Nazi regime this affair was seen as particularly critical, as the victims had included American passengers, and the sinking had caused a corresponding furor in the United States.58

  Goebbels had gone on the offensive right from the beginning and had accused the British First Sea Lord Winston Churchill of having ordered the sinking of the ship after the German submarine fleet had pulled off an important coup by sinking the British battleship Royal Oak within what had been assumed to be the absolutely secure naval base of Scapa Flow in Scotland on October 14. Goebbels now took up the Athenia case again in a widespread press and radio campaign. No doubt he had agreed with Hitler that every effort should now be made to topple the supposedly weakened Churchill.59

  On October 21, under the pseudonym Sagax, Goebbels himself contributed an editorial to the Völkischer Beobachter and followed it up the next day with a radio address. The latter was given great prominence in the press: “A biting reckoning with an arch-liar,” as Churchill was called, who was placed in the role of “the accused.”60

  POLAND

  Occupied Poland played a completely secondary role in German propaganda at this stage. After extensive territories had been annexed, the remainder of the country was now combined into a General Government under Hans Frank. The thinking behind this arrangement was heavily influenced on the one hand by the deep contempt Hitler felt for the Poles, expressed to his propaganda minister as “more animals than human beings,” and on the other hand by the fact that the violent application of the race laws61 in the occupied territories was associated, even in this first phase of occupation policy, with the murder of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews, which made it seem inadvisable to draw attention to this territory. In addition, there was a certain lack of clarity about a solution to the self-created “Polish problem” and the “Jewish question.” Hence, the German press was instructed, in connection with the imminent setting up of the General Government, that not much was to be said about this area, as much for domestic as for external reasons.62

  On October 31, Goebbels embarked on a journey to Łodz, where he met Governor General Hans Frank and his deputy, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and realized that Frank was installing his own propaganda office and that his own powers in this case were limited to giving professional advice.63 It was made clear once again to Goebbels that he was by no means the omnipotent master of the propaganda machine. Goebbels also took a tour of the Jewish quarter: “These are no longer people, they are animals. So our task is not a humanitarian one but a surgical one. Incisions will have to be made, and quite radical ones at that. Otherwise Europe will be destroyed by the Jewish sickness.” On the same day he traveled on by car to Warsaw, where he arrived after an endless journey “across battlefields and past completely shattered villages and towns.” “Warsaw is hell. A demolished city. Our bombs and shells have done their work well. Not a single house is left intact. The population is stunned and shadowy. People creep through the streets like insects. It is repulsive and almost indescribable.” Standing on the destroyed fortress, Goebbels, who a few years earlier had prided himself on having contributed much to the improvement of German-Polish relations, was convinced that “Polish nationalism must be totally eradicated, otherwise it will arise again one day.”64

  On the very next day, Goebbels had a chance to give Hitler an oral account of his journey. “Above all, he was in complete agreement with my presentation of the Jewish problem. The Jews are a waste by-product. More a hygiene than a social matter.”65

  THE MUNICH ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

  On November 8, Goebbels joined in the annual Party ceremonies in Munich, sitting in the Bürgerbräukeller with “old campaigners” that night, listening to Hitler’s incisive verbal reckoning with Britain. Immediately afterward, he took the night train back to Berlin with the dictator.

  Passing Nuremberg, they were sitting chatting in the saloon of Hitler’s special coach, when dire news was brought to them. Goebbels had to tell Hitler that “shortly after their departure from the beer cellar there had been an explosion, leaving 8 dead and 60 wounded.” For Goebbels, the background was immediately obvious: “an assassination attempt, doubtless conceived in London and probably committed by Bavarian monarchists.” Both immediately realized that Hitler would have fallen victim if he had not left the event earlier than originally planned. Goebbels was convinced: “The Almighty is guarding him. He will not die until his mission is complete.”66

  Goebbels’s diaries document that in the next few days the Party leadership remained completely in the dark about the background of the attack.67 However, this did not inhibit German propaganda from linking the attack to the British Secret Service.68 After a few days the would-be assassin, a political loner, was arrested trying to cross the border into Switzerland, and it was established beyond doubt that he was the culprit. Hitler and Goebbels perceived him as a tool of Otto Strasser, who had emigrated to Switzerland and was then regarded as an instrument of the British Secret Service.69 This impression was to be communicated to the public.70 However, just a few days later, the propaganda effort reverted to its chief focus, the war that had begun but had now come to a standstill.

  CHAPTER 20

  “There Is Only One Sin: Cowardice!”

  The Expansion of the War

  Credit 20.1

  Reception of troops in Berlin on July 18, 1940, following the French campaign (Goebbels with arm raised). During the war Goebbels was sometimes obliged to take part in public events that he was unable to organize according to his own ideas.

  The last months of 1939 and the first months of 1940 passed without any spectacular political or major military events occurring. Following their declarations of war, the western powers had been unable to decide to mount an attack on the Reich, so there was hardly any movement or fighting on the Western Front. Goebbels used his proximity to Hitler to gather assiduously any information that might illuminate his views of the international situation and his future political and military plans. The remarkable diplomatic arrangements in which Germany found itself currently involved—the alliance with Stalin, who until recently had been regarded as the arch-enemy, and with Mussolini, who did not want to join in the war—posed additional problems for German propaganda.

  Goebbels noted that while attending a small soirée in January—Magda was also among the guests—Hitler had indicated that he was “determined on a major war with England”: “England must be swept out of Europe and France must be deposed as a great power. Then Germany will be dominant and Europe will have peace. That is our great, our e
ternal goal.” After that, Hitler continued, he wanted “to stay in office for a few more years, carry out social reforms and his building projects and then withdraw.”1 A few days later Hitler talked about the “old Holy Empire,” whose imperial traditions he intended to continue: “Given our organizational talents and our exceptional qualities it will be automatic that we eventually acquire world domination.”2

  But as yet this was a long way off. Hitler and Goebbels were particularly concerned about their awkward Italian ally.3 At his meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass on March 18, 1940—the first meeting of the two dictators since Munich—Hitler pursued the goal of trying to persuade Mussolini to enter the war without initiating him into his plans for an attack in the West in any concrete way.

  On his return Hitler told Goebbels he had been “deeply impressed” by the “strong personality” of Il Duce: “Mussolini will be with us right to the end.” However, Hitler appears to have concealed from Goebbels that, while the Italian dictator had responded positively in principle, he had not made any definite promise to enter the war.4 Moreover, Goebbels was concerned not to make too much of the meeting in German propaganda reports in order not to feed rumors that Mussolini might be acting as a peace envoy.5

  The alliance with the Soviet communists was an increasing pain for Hitler and his propaganda minister. The basic principle adopted for propaganda was “be cautious”; ideological topics should not be addressed either in a positive or in a negative sense.6 In January Goebbels commented on a report he had received: “Terrible report from Lemberg [Lviv] about what the Soviet Russians are getting up to. They have no compassion. What’s more, the Jews are still on top. The troops are untrained and poorly equipped. It’s unadulterated Bolshevism.”7

  The same issue came up at midday on the same day when Hitler told him that the evident backwardness of the Soviet Union under Stalin had significant advantages: “It’s good for us. It’s better to have a weak partner as one’s neighbor than an alliance, however good it may be.” In any case, as Hitler pointed out around two weeks later, the Russians were behaving in an “increasingly loyal way. And they have good reasons for doing so.”8 Two months later the Führer opined that it was good that “the Russians no longer have any Germanic leaders, so they can never be a threat to us. And if Stalin shoots his generals, then we won’t have to do it ourselves. Is Stalin gradually also liquidating the Jews? Perhaps he’s just bandying the word around in order to deceive the world. Trotskyists. Who knows?”9

  Shortly afterward Goebbels read a book by the Soviet satirist Michail Sostschenko with the title, Sleep Faster, Comrade! He considered the stories to be above all “a terrible portrait of the Bolshevist lack of culture, social misery, and organizational incompetence.” Disgusted, he continued: “We’ve really picked the best possible ally. If only we hadn’t been up to our neck in it.” On the other hand: “We are only having to fight on one front. And, when it comes to it, what have the social and cultural standards of Moscow Bolshevism got to do with us.”10

  In March, shortly after reading the book, he banned all “Russian books, positive and negative ones,” because “at the moment they [can] only cause trouble.”11 Hitler adopted the same position when, in April, he objected to all attempts by the Foreign Ministry to start a German-Russian cultural exchange; Goebbels noted that that kind of thing must not go “beyond its political usefulness.”12

  At that time, the Propaganda Ministry’s foreign propaganda operation was very much engaged in a rivalry with the Foreign Ministry. During the first months of 1940 the Propaganda Ministry objected strongly to the sending of liaison officers by the Foreign Ministry that had been agreed to in September 1939.13 On the other hand, it was building up their own organization, “massively” according to Goebbels, in particular the Foreign Propaganda department and the radio broadcasts designed for foreign listeners.14 Although this rivalry was intense, in fact the two ministries hardly differed from one another in terms of their ideas on what the propaganda should contain. This was because on all politically important matters they tried as much as possible to keep a low profile. They were not allowed to give concrete information about German war aims and postwar plans, so what remained were stereotypical phrases and accusations.15

  In winter 1939–40 Britain was the main target of German propaganda, although France was no longer being “protected.”16 Comments by Hitler such as that he was determined to completely destroy the “Peace of Westphalia” and that he wanted to “beat England whatever it cost” confirmed Goebbels in his strongly anti-British attitude.17

  Shortly before Christmas—the festival was on no account to be allowed to encourage a sentimental mood to develop18—Goebbels ordered the anti-British propaganda to be more geared to the slogan “Fight Against Plutocracy,”19 and in fact, during the following months this topic very much came to the fore.20 The fight against the “moneybags democracies” was to be augmented with anti-Semitic undertones, although despite all the anti-Semitic attacks, particularly in the Party press, this topic had not yet become a leitmotif in the German press.21

  Goebbels was only informed about the preparations for the Western offensive, if at all, after some delay. At the end of January he learned from the Düsseldorf Gauleiter, Friedrich Karl Florian, that in fact the western offensive should have begun already but had been postponed because the relevant German plans had fallen into the hands of the Belgian authorities.22

  There is an entry in the diary for March 13 that shows that Goebbels had been initiated into the preparations for the western offensive. The Army High Command’s campaign plan had already been finalized more than two weeks earlier, and the attack was scheduled to begin in the middle of April. Goebbels noted: “It will be a tremendous blow. A fortnight until M[arne]. Then we’ll have a breather. And then a second blow.”23 But the attack was postponed several times, as the German war plans were focusing on northern Europe.

  WAR IN SCANDINAVIA

  On April 7 there is the first mention in Goebbels’s diary of an imminent “extension of the war” by Britain. It refers to the British plan— the Norwegian government had been put in the picture by London—to lay mines in Norwegian waters in order to disrupt German shipping.24 The British action appeared to play into the hands of German policymakers, as Goebbels pointed out: “That’s the excuse we were looking for.” In fact, however, at this point he was not yet aware of how far German plans for extending the war to Scandinavia had already proceeded.25

  In fact, from the end of 1939 onward, the Germans had been pursuing a plan to invade Norway and Denmark and thereby secure control over the iron ore transportations that went via the Norwegian port of Narvik and use the Norwegian coast as a strategic base for continuing the war against Britain.26 It was only on April 8, the day before the invasion of Norway and Denmark, that Hitler considered it fit to inform his propaganda minister about the impending operation. When the German invasion troops had already left their harbors he summoned Goebbels in order to explain his plans to him during a walk. Impressed, the latter noted: “Everything has been prepared down to the last detail. The action will involve around 250,000 men. Most of the guns and ammunition have already been transported concealed in ships.” Hitler appeared to be confident of victory. Resistance “was inconceivable.” But would the operation not have repercussions in terms of America’s attitude? According to Goebbels he was “not interested in that at the moment. Its material aid would only have an impact in around 8 months and, as far as people were concerned”—a revealing utterance, that—“in around 1½ years.” But, Hitler explained to his propaganda minister, “we must achieve victory this year. Otherwise the other side’s superiority in terms of matériel would become too great. Also a long war would be difficult to cope with psychologically.”

  Goebbels improvised—he had to. “Secretly and unnoticed got the radio mobilized. Prepared quarters in the ministry. It’s very difficult to do because I can’t talk to anyone. The main thing now is to keep it secret
, then afterward we can do things properly.” The following day he had his staff get “out of their beds” and explained the operation to them, issuing guidelines as to how it was to be treated.27

  The invasion of the two Scandinavian countries began in the early morning. While the German troops succeeded in getting control of Denmark on the same day, the operations in Norway came up against much greater difficulties. The plan for a rapid takeover of Oslo by a combined air and sea operation failed, giving the Norwegian government time to organize military resistance and escape from the Wehrmacht. The landings in the other Norwegian ports were largely successful, but this success came at the cost of heavy losses by the German navy. All in all, the surprise attack had failed: The expeditionary force found itself caught up in fighting that was to last until June; it probably ended in victory only because of the successful campaign in western Europe. In addition, looked at over the medium and longer term, because of the significant weakening of the navy as a result of the operation, the bases could not be strategically exploited and the extensive Norwegian merchant fleet had gone over to the enemy camp.28

  On the morning of April 9 Goebbels had the task of reading out the German memoranda communicated to the Danish and Norwegian governments: “Our well-known position: protection for Copenhagen and Oslo. Oslo is still resisting.”29 On the same day Goebbels issued detailed guidelines for the “protective custody of Scandinavia”; that these contained, to put it mildly, certain flaws in their arguments is clear from the directive that he issued to his staff at the same time, namely that “this line about protective custody should not be questioned by you, let alone be ridiculed.”30