On the following day Hitler outlined to Goebbels his thoughts on the future of the two occupied countries. He did not want a “protectorate, more an alliance. Uniform foreign, economic, and customs policies. We shall acquire the most important military bases as our own property, take over their protection, and the two states will cease having any armed forces. The aim: a north-Germanic confederation.”31
On the same day—it was the third day of the invasion—in view of the losses Goebbels felt obliged to instruct German propaganda to be less defensive about the question of Norway: Success was what counted; losses would have to be accepted.32 “Propaganda: with Denmark tact, discretion, no pushiness, emphasis on the particular character of the Danes and its legitimacy; no talk of a protectorate etc. Whereas with Norway: senselessness of resistance. Example of Poland. We want peace. Nothing can alter the facts. This will get us through for the time being.”33
It soon became apparent, however, that the invasion of Norway was not going as smoothly as Hitler and his propaganda minister had anticipated.34 On April 13 a unit of the Royal Navy succeeded in penetrating the Narvik fjord and sinking eight German destroyers or forcing them to scuttle.35 The Germans were forced to the defensive both militarily and in terms of their propaganda.36
On April 16, when Goebbels made his midday visit to Hitler, he found him looking “very serious.”37 He was very hesitant in mentioning the news of the loss of the destroyers: “We praise the heroism of our navy that will go down in German history.” He admitted, however, that “people were getting a bit worried about our secrecy.”38
On April 20 the Reich Chancellery celebrated Hitler’s birthday. After the congratulations and a big meal, Goebbels took part in a discussion in a small group in which Hitler outlined his next goals: “Italy seems to want to intervene. It can’t avoid it.” England, on the other hand, appeared not “to have any idea of the seriousness of its situation. The Führer intends to give it a knock-out blow. And nevertheless he would make peace this very day. Condition: England must leave Europe and return our colonies, but rounded up. […] He doesn’t want to crush England at all or destroy its empire.”39
In addition to the lack of clarity about the military situation in the north of the country, Goebbels was also concerned about political developments in Oslo. On April 24 his old comrade Josef Terboven, the longtime Gauleiter of Essen, had been appointed Reich commissioner in Norway. Terboven’s main problem turned out to be the appointment of a new government in Norway. Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the small Norwegian Nazi party who had peremptorily appointed himself prime minister on April 9 but then resigned a few days later, considered himself the right candidate for the job, a view supported by Alfred Rosenberg.40
Whereas Terboven was working for a political solution without Quisling, Goebbels wanted at least to hold him in reserve; on the occasion of a short visit to Berlin on April 25 Terboven agreed to this.41 Goebbels also spoke to Rosenberg in favor of Quisling: He was “a greater German patriot,”42 they should not drop him completely. During the coming months Goebbels’s view of Quisling would fluctuate.43
Toward the end of the month, the military situation appeared to be gradually improving from the German point of view. German troops succeeded in advancing from the Oslo area toward Trondheim, where in the meantime a German expeditionary force had been cornered by British and French troops; these were now forced to re-embark.44 The situation in Narvik in the north of Norway, where British and French troops had landed at the end of April and were soon to be reinforced, was still giving cause for concern.45 Gobbels was already assuming that the three thousand men based there would inevitably be interned in Sweden.46 Thus the official propaganda line was: “Narvik should never be mentioned and on no account be turned into a matter of prestige.”47
WAR IN THE WEST
A few days before the start of the war in the west, Hitler once again explained his policy to Goebbels: “England must be given a major blow but not destroyed. For we can’t and don’t want to take over its empire. So much wealth wouldn’t even make one happy.”48
Goebbels spent May 9 largely in the company of his Italian colleague, Alessandro Pavolini, who had come to Berlin in order to coordinate Italian and German propaganda. The day was taken up with meetings and sightseeing, followed by a visit to the State Theater for a performance of Mussolini’s play Cavour; afterward there was a reception at the Haus der Flieger (Pilots’ House). Goebbels spent the following night in the ministry, since nothing much new was happening: “The Führer is determined to launch the attack in the west. It is taking place in great secrecy.”49 During the night he and Dietrich decided on “how our publications will handle it.”50
The following morning Goebbels read out on the radio the text of the memoranda the Reich government had sent to the governments in Brussels and The Hague a few hours earlier. They accused the Netherlands and Luxembourg of breaching neutrality and demanded that all three governments offer no resistance to the German troops.51 Meanwhile, his high-ranking Italian visitor had to cool his heels: “I ditch the whole program with Pavolini. He’ll have to look after himself for a bit. I entrust him to Esser.”
The war began on May 10 with a series of spectacular and generally successful German commando raids against Belgian and Dutch bridges and fortresses; other paratroop operations, such as the attempt to capture the Dutch government quarters in The Hague, proved unsuccessful.52
On the first day of the war the city of Freiburg had already suffered an air raid that killed twenty-four people. After initial hesitation, Hitler decided to use the raid for a big propaganda campaign, threatening the western powers with massive retaliation. Goebbels, who made occasional references in his diary to the “terrible consequences” of the raid, wanted to go on “exploiting” the incident, but the Luftwaffe was wary of doing so because it wanted to secure air superiority before making any threats of retaliation. Although Goebbels was certainly aware of it, he did not make any mention in his diary of the fact that the bombs had been dropped by German planes by mistake. As far as he was concerned, the official lie that was being put out was inviolable fact.53
Right at the start Goebbels used a ministerial briefing to lay down certain basic ground rules for the way propaganda should deal with the campaign. Thus, on May 10 he instructed that “during the conflict in the west the press [should] neither go in for exaggerated optimism nor indulge in panic mongering.”54 On the following day he ordered that all usable material should be put together for foreign news outlets; in the current situation “news [is] more important than polemics.” Moreover, “any enemy reports that are not accurate or can be at all dangerous for us” should be immediately and decisively denied; there was no need to check “whether or not the details of the report [are] true.”55 He was pleased at Churchill’s appointment as British prime minister: “Clear battle lines: That’s what we like.”56 During the following weeks he devoted considerable attention to studying Churchill’s personality, read some of his speeches, and concluded that the man was “a strange mixture of heroism and triviality. If he had come to power in 1933 we wouldn’t be where we are today. Moreover, I believe that he will be a hard nut to crack.”57 The rest of the war would give him little reason to alter this assessment.58
Meanwhile the German invasion had been making progress. While on May 15 the 18th Army forced the Dutch armed forces to capitulate, on May 13 and 14 the tanks of the 4th and 12th Armies had crossed the Meuse and now were making major advances toward the west in a sickle cut formation. On May 20 they reached the mouth of the Somme and thereby prevented the British and French forces in Belgium from retreating back into France.59
Goebbels followed the announcements of these victories with great enthusiasm; he informed himself of the current situation through daily telephone conversations with Dietrich at the Führer’s headquarters. The basic propaganda line during the war was “quite clear: At home celebrate victory […] abroad create panic and confusion.”60 The “secret st
ations” broadcasting from German radio stations played a special role: They claimed to represent opposition groups in the enemy countries and were intended to create confusion and cause demoralization. During the first days of the campaign they broadcast “subversive propaganda to the Netherlands and Belgium”;61 a few days later the emphasis was on “panic propaganda” aimed at Britain and, in particular, France.62 Goebbels noted that he wrote “most of the commentaries” for the radio propaganda himself, and “I very carefully supervise the others.”63
At the end of May, after Belgium’s capitulation and with Hitler’s encouragement, he increased the output of the secret stations targeted at France and unleashed a wave of anti-French propaganda within Germany.64 At the beginning of June Dunkirk fell after more than three hundred thousand British and French troops had managed to escape over the Channel to Britain. After this came the second phase of the war in the west. Goebbels noted: “The aim is for France’s total defeat.”65
Goebbels now concentrated on the secret radio station “Humanité,” which claimed to be staffed by French communists. He hoped that it would produce revolutionary unrest, particularly in Paris, which was now within striking distance of the Wehrmacht. Goebbels had compelled several communists, including the former head of the KPD Reichstag parliamentary group, Ernst Torgler, who had already been given a few jobs by the regime,66 to write scripts for the station.67 His decision to do this was evidently influenced by a sense of triumph over his former opponents. On June 8 he noted: “I have a funny feeling about instructing our former dangerous opponents in how to write our propaganda.”
Paris fell on June 14.68 Hitler ordered “3 days of putting out the flags and bell ringing.”69 On June 17 Marshal Philippe Pétain took over the French government and on the same day Hitler informed Goebbels on the telephone of France’s capitulation.70 Goebbels’s interpretation of the French request for an armistice on June 17 as a “capitulation” was naturally not a misunderstanding but the official line. On June 18 he instructed the media “to nip in the bud” all attempts by the French “to turn what had been a capitulation into some kind of amiable surrender arrangement.”71 Two days earlier he had ordered that France must “once and for all [be excluded] from Europe as a power that has to be taken seriously. […] For this reason we must deal a lethal blow to France’s national honor and pride.”72 For the time being, however, the military operations in France were continuing, so Goebbels geared his propaganda to deal with that.73
Finally, Hitler ordered that negotiations should take place at Compiègne in Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s historic railway coach in which, on November 11, 1918, a German delegation had signed the armistice. Goebbels issued the following instructions for the ceremony: “No demonstrative humiliation, but the disgrace of November 1918 must be erased.”74 The negotiations in Compiègne began on June 21; to begin with, Hitler attended in person but left Keitel to lead the discussions. The negotiations continued until the following evening, with the propaganda minister nervously following the proceedings.75 The treaty that finally emerged established the German occupation of the majority of French territory and the substantial demobilization and disarming of the French armed forces, with the exception of the navy.76 On June 22 Goebbels ordered an announcement that the war had ended to be broadcast on all radio stations: “With a prayer of thanksgiving. Very grand and solemn. Then the final report from Compiègne. So much historical greatness comes as quite a shock.”77
AFTER THE VICTORY OVER FRANCE
At the end of June Goebbels went on a trip through the conquered territories in the west. To begin with he flew—“over fat Dutch soil”—to The Hague, “a clean, attractive, and cozy city,” and was briefed about the situation in the country by his staff who had been deployed to the occupied Netherlands.78 He then traveled on to Brussels via Antwerp and Louvain. Belgium, he noted, was “not quite as clean as Holland,” but here too, as in the Netherlands, he claimed to find a “positive” mood on the part of the population.
On the early morning of the following day he visited various First World War battlefields (“sites of heroic struggles”), including Ypres, Langemarck, and Arras. He looked around Dunkirk and visited Compiègne, “a site of disgrace and of national resurrection.” In the evening he arrived in Paris. His first impression: “A marvelous city. What a lot we’ve still got to do to Berlin!”79 On the following day he took time out for an extensive sightseeing tour of the city: “It’s like a dream. Place de la Concorde, the Étoile. Very generously laid out. The Invalides. Napoleon’s tomb. Very moved. In spite of everything a great man. Notre Dame. Rather absurd architecture for a church, like the Madeleine.” He was rather disappointed by Sacré-Cœur, but he very much liked the view from Montmartre: “I’d like to live here for a few weeks.” He set aside the afternoon for a visit to Versailles, which for him was above all a place “where Germany [had been] condemned to death.”
During his visit he received a telegram summoning him to Hitler’s headquarters near Freudenstadt in the Black Forest. When he arrived there the next day, the dictator outlined to him his plan to address the Reichstag and “to give England a last chance.” Britain, according to Hitler, could be “defeated in 4 weeks,” but it was not his intention to destroy the empire, for “what it will lose in the process is likely to end up not in our hands but in those of foreign great powers.” Hitler assumed that by making a peace offer he would be putting “England in a difficult psychological situation, but it [might] also bring about peace.” There was “much to be said for and against both.”80
The first thing to do was to provide Hitler with a terrific reception in Berlin. The greeting of the “victorious Führer” in the Reich capital was one of the most spectacular mass demonstrations that Goebbels had ever orchestrated. Nothing was left to chance in order to convey to the German people and the world at large the impression that the people of Berlin were standing behind the regime as one man and were full of confidence in victory and genuine enthusiasm for the war. The impression made by this demonstration was so strong that even skeptical and critical observers in Germany could not escape its attraction; even decades later historians interpreted it as proof that there had been “genuine enthusiasm” for the war in the country: Hitler had allegedly appeared to the Germans as a “super figure.”81
In fact, however, the mass enthusiasm was perfectly choreographed, for which the Propaganda Ministry had worked out an elaborate “working plan.”82 In an announcement that appeared in the press on July 6, was distributed by the Party organization, and then reinforced by appeals through “house propaganda,”83 Goebbels called on the population to greet Hitler “in our million strong city” with “unparalleled enthusiasm.” “In a few hours the city will be a sea of flags. […] At 12 o’clock midday factories and shops will close. […] The workers of Berlin will march in closed ranks to the road along which the Führer will drive from the Anhalt Railway Station […] to the Reich Chancellery. No one will want to stay at home, everybody will want to be swept along by the terrific enthusiasm that this afternoon will fill our beloved Reich capital.”84
The Völkischer Beobachter’s report on this spectacle reveals further details of how it was organized: During the night, eight thousand people worked to decorate the streets that Hitler was going to drive down the following day. The walls of the houses were garlanded, flag poles erected, and additional poles fixed to the roofs. In the early morning the Party units that were being deployed to control the crowds marched into the city center and were followed at 10 o’clock by the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM), who were assigned to fill the front rows of the spectators.
The fact that factories and shops closed at 12 o’clock did not mean that employees had a free afternoon; on the contrary, they were shepherded en masse to particular points: The Völkischer Beobachter described how in the early afternoon the workers marched out of their work places in long processions. But it was not only the workers who were being drag
ooned: The Propaganda Ministry’s instructions stated that “the population will assemble along the road designated for the celebration in accordance with a special plan; the celebratory stretch is to be divided into assembly sections and sub-sections, which will invariably be filled via a side street.”85 Anyone who thought they could escape the celebration was informed by the press that on that day the transportation company had canceled schedules to local vacation destinations and the swimming pools would be closed until the evening.
Photos of the event show flower-bedecked streets, indeed a carpet of flowers on which Hitler’s Mercedes drove to the Reich Chancellery. But this sea of flowers was not a product of the spontaneous enthusiasm of the “national comrades” but rather was the result of good organization. The flowers had been ordered from the Berlin Allotments’ Association.86 The Völkischer Beobachter reported on their distribution as follows: “Large trucks arrive at every street corner full to the brim with the most magnificent flowers. Crowds of BDM girls and Hitler Youth stand ready to spread these flowers over the road minutes before the Führer’s arrival providing him with a unique kilometer-long carpet of flowers.”87
Hitler was expected around 3 o’clock in the afternoon at the Anhalt Station. Goebbels described the scene in his diary, absolutely carried away by the spectacle organized by his department: “Within an hour of my announcement Berlin is on the move. When I arrive at the Wilhelmstrasse in the morning it is already full of people. So they are going to wait six hours for the Führer. […] Then the Führer arrives. A storm of applause fills the station. The Führer is very moved. He has tears in his eyes. Our Führer! Ride through the streets to the Chancellery. It is impossible to describe the huge enthusiasm of a happy people. The Führer rides over nothing but flowers. Our people, our wonderful people!”88
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