A few days later there was an elaborate state memorial ceremony for Heydrich in Berlin.13 Hitler, who used the occasion for a lengthy conversation with Goebbels, appeared rather depressed: “The Führer is seriously concerned about the large number of deaths being suffered by the Party. The Party and state leadership now hardly ever get together except for state memorial ceremonies.”14
The occupying authorities in the protectorate continued to take “revenge” for the Heydrich assassination. On June 10 the security police murdered all the men of the village of Lidice near Kladno, 199 people in all, deported the women to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and the children, after the most “racially valuable” ones had been removed, to the Chelmno extermination camp.15 On June 11 the Germans announced the Lidice act of retaliation on the radio: Its population had been supporting the enemy parachutist agents, and so they had to make an example of them.16
Goebbels was unimpressed by the fact that enemy propaganda attacked the mass murder as a barbaric act: “We must do what we consider necessary and what the vital interests of the German Reich and the German people require.”17 The press, however, was instructed not to report anything about the “punishment measures” in the protectorate.18
One of these “retaliation measures” was directed against the Prague Jews. On June 10, 1942, a thousand of them were deported to Majdanek and locked up there as well as in surrounding camps.19 Under the impression of the assassination attempt on Heydrich and his subsequent death, however, the Nazi leadership decided to accelerate the preparations, in which Heydrich had played a leading role and which were already under way, for extending the mass murder of the Jews to the whole of Europe. Thus, with his proposal of May 29 to deport the Berlin Jews Goebbels was fully in line with the radicalization of the regime’s Jewish policy. In July the trains began to arrive at the Auschwitz extermination camp from all over Europe.20
During 1942, leading representatives of the regime, including Hitler, made repeated public statements about the extermination and annihilation of the Jews, thereby sending clear signals about the fate of the people who were being deported to the extermination camps. Goebbels participated in this intentional breach of the secrecy surrounding Jewish policy when, for example, in June 1942, in connection with the air war, he wrote of the impending “extermination” of the Jews and kept forcing the press to take up anti-Semitic topics. In general, however, during 1942 propaganda responded to the “final solution” with silence, a silence that, in view of the bits of information and rumors about the mass murder that were going around, was eloquent and uncanny. The fact that in this way many people acquired a rough idea that the regime was perpetrating a crime on the Jews of unimaginable dimensions was one of the factors that facilitated Goebbels’s “direction of morale,” by underlining the seriousness of the situation in the third year of the war; they had burned their bridges behind them.21
THE AIR WAR: THE FIRST THOUSAND-BOMBER RAID
A few days before Heydrich’s death, on the morning of May 31, Goebbels received the first news reports “of a massive air raid by the English on Cologne.”22 In fact, the night before, the RAF had attacked Cologne in unprecedented numbers. It was the first thousand-bomber raid in military history, an exceptional effort by RAF Bomber Command, which anticipated that the raid would completely destroy one of the most important German cities, a devastation that was intended to have a strong demoralizing effect on the whole of Germany’s civilian population. As a result, British propaganda made much of the fact that one thousand bombers were involved and announced there would be more devastating raids.
Goebbels considered that such a large number of enemy planes was “quite out of the question” and assumed that three hundred bombers at most had participated in the raid. The press was therefore instructed not to discuss the number of enemy planes.23 Apart from that he agreed with Hitler that German propaganda should not gloss over the damage, not least in order to have arguments with which to justify “retaliation.”24 During the night of May 31 the Luftwaffe responded with a “retaliatory attack” on Canterbury, with Goebbels ordering it to be given prominent propaganda coverage.25
Despite the enormous number of planes that appeared over Cologne, however, the city was not destroyed, and the demoralizing effect that the British had anticipated did not occur. Almost five hundred people were killed during the bombing of Cologne, more than in any other raid up to that point, and over 250,000 dwellings were destroyed; the cathedral city with its 750,000 inhabitants had been badly hit but by no means completely destroyed.26
After the raid on Cologne Goebbels published an article in Das Reich in which he wrote that the air war was above all a “war of nerves.” He gave the number of victims of the raid on Cologne as 305 and estimated the number of all air raid victims at 7,430.27 Following the raid on Cologne at the end of May, there were over fifty further major raids by the RAF on German cities during the next seven months of 1942, with more than one hundred bombers involved on each occasion.28
GERMAN OFFENSIVES IN AFRICA AND IN THE EAST
In June 1942 Goebbels judged the nation’s mood as being somewhere between “not particularly positive” and “relatively depressed.”29 He blamed this state of affairs on the continuing air raids and worries over how long the war would last but also on the precarious food situation,30 with which he was obliged to get involved throughout the summer.31 The military situation in the east, however, in other words the impending summer offensive, and surprisingly positive news from the North African theater promised to bring about an improvement in the nation’s mood.
While Field Marshal Rommel’s offensive had come to a halt relatively quickly—in the so-called First Battle of El Alamein, which lasted throughout July, Rommel had not succeeded in breaking through the British defenses32—at the end of June it appeared as if there was going to be a triumphant military success on the Eastern Front. On June 28 the Wehrmacht began its real summer offensive in the southern sector of the front, by the end of July achieving its operational goal of reaching the River Don on a broad front.33 In a second phase of the offensive Army Group B marched toward Stalingrad, reaching it in August; Army Group A advanced toward the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea until the offensive came to a halt at the beginning of September.34 In view of the not particularly positive news from North Africa, at the beginning of July Goebbels’s propaganda began to focus on the successes in the east.35
In this situation Goebbels took umbrage at a radio talk by Colonel Dietrich von Choltitz, who as a regimental commander had played an important role in the taking of Sebastapol at the beginning of July. Choltitz reported his experience of battle in a way that contradicted Goebbels’s line: “It’s intolerable the way he praises the Bolsheviks’ fighting spirit.”36
Goebbels gave his opinion of the talk at his ministerial briefing. On May 7 he stated, “The German people [have been] freed from the bacillus of communism and Bolshevism only after a long cure. But they’re still susceptible to Bolshevism.” Two days later he used his briefing to give his staff what amounted to a speech on this issue, the minutes of which ran to ten pages. Objecting to a “Dostoyevsky philosophy of war” and “salon Bolshevism” tendencies, he warned his staff that he would “ruthlessly crush any further example of the tendencies that I have outlined here.”37 Moreover, in an editorial in Das Reich with the title “The So-Called Russian Soul” Goebbels inveighed against the danger of creating myths. The Russians had “a kind of primitive tenacity” that did not “deserve the honor of being called courage.”38
Assessing the impact of his article, he reckoned that the majority of his arguments had had an effect, but there was “still a remnant of suspicion that Bolshevism had done more for the Russian people than we were now prepared to accept.”39 He gained a similar impression from a conversation with Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the SS Leibstandarte division deployed in the east, who was visiting him. It was clear that “in the end lengthy stays in the Soviet Union have a fascina
ting effect on National Socialists as well.”40 These were the fears of a man who in the mid-1920s had admired Lenin, had read Dostoyevsky with enthusiasm, had called himself a “German communist,” and had seen Russia as a natural ally. His continuing attempts to eliminate any remnant of the German people’s admiration and respect for Russia and Soviet communism can also be seen as an obsessive attempt to kill off the last germ of this dangerous sickness in himself.
FURTHER SETBACKS IN THE AIR WAR
Successes in the east were counterbalanced by further setbacks in the air war. Goebbels normally noted the increase in British raids, which were mainly on west German targets, in the military section of his diary entries,41 rarely commenting on them, however. He was only too well aware that there was a direct link between the eastern offensive and Germany’s relative inability to fend off the air raids. At the beginning of August he took part in a meeting of Gauleiters hosted by Göring at which the Reich marshal told him that during the next few months they were expecting an increase in Allied air raids and that, because of its heavy involvement in the east, the Luftwaffe had few resources with which to confront them. Various practical questions affecting civilian air raid defense were also discussed.42 In particular, however, it was necessary to come to grips with the possibility of growing disquiet, and this was the main reason that after the meeting Goebbels embarked on a tour of inspection of the western areas that had been particularly affected.
On the morning of August 7 he arrived in Cologne accompanied by the Gauleiters Josef Grohé (Cologne) and Friedrich Karl Florian (Düsseldorf). Goebbels was pleasantly surprised by the “healthy optimism” that he found among the city’s population.43 He made detailed inquiries of the various agencies involved in the provision of aid and then toured the heavily damaged city.
In the afternoon he gave a speech in the Cologne-Deutz engine factory. He emphasized that “we must accept the wounds that the British air force is now inflicting on us in the west in the interests of pressing ahead with our victorious offensive in the east.” Goebbels made sure that not only this speech but also his whole trip was prominently reported in the press. He was quoted in Das Reich, for example, saying that “children have become heroes here.”44
That evening he traveled to his beloved home city of Rheydt, which he found “completely undamaged.” He naturally found being accommodated in Schloss Rheydt, a Renaissance palace, which had hitherto been used as a museum and had recently been extensively renovated, particularly “pleasing.” It had been placed at his disposal by the city authorities.45
On the following day he visited the cities of Neuss and Düsseldorf, which had been damaged in air raids.46 The Gau capital, Düsseldorf, was still suffering from a kind of “shock effect,” for it had suffered its first major raid only a few weeks earlier. He spent that night and the next day once more in Rheydt. At midday he met his schoolfriends Beines and Grünewald, who gave him the latest “city gossip,” and in the evening he spoke at another rally in the city.47
A few days later he discussed the situation with Hitler, whom he had provided with a fifty-page report of his tour48 and whom he was now visiting at his headquarters in Vinnytsia in the Ukraine. As far as the propaganda treatment of air raids was concerned, the dictator agreed with him that he did not want any “sensational treatment of the damage that had been caused” but a “vivid depiction of the steadfast bearing of the population under the air raids.”49 On this occasion Hitler told him “in confidence” that “the English raids on certain cities, however cruel they may have been, have a positive side.” Looking at the city plan of Cologne he had come to the conclusion that “to a large extent streets that had been flattened would have needed to be flattened in order to open up the city, but flattening them would have imposed a serious psychological burden on the population. So the enemy has done the work for us.”
PROPAGANDA STRUGGLES
In the summer and autumn of 1942 Goebbels once again found himself involved in struggles with his main rivals for control over the conduct of propaganda. As in previous years, in these conflicts Goebbels was less concerned with pushing through a particular propaganda line than with asserting or enforcing his claim to direct propaganda. All these conflicts were inextricably linked with personal feuds with his opponents within the leadership of the regime.
Various entries in his diaries show that the appointment of Propaganda Ministry press officers in German foreign missions that had been planned in the agreement with the Foreign Ministry of October 1941 was not going at all smoothly.50 Moreover, a further argument with the Foreign Ministry occurred in summer 1942. Goebbels wanted to introduce censorship for foreign correspondents51 after Scandinavian correspondents in Berlin had reported peace overtures from the German government.52 In view of the doubts expressed by the Foreign Ministry,53 a series of measures imposing substantial restrictions on the work of correspondents was finally agreed upon without, however, introducing a general censorship.54
In July Goebbels also tried to gain ground in his permanent conflict with Dietrich. At the beginning of July he gave instructions to his staff that in the future they should “coolly reject” requests from Führer’s headquarters to issue special announcements over the radio on short notice. This was a measure clearly aimed at Dietrich, whom Goebbels still blamed for the premature announcement of victory in the east the previous autumn. Goebbels told his staff that generally “in such cases the Führer headquarters was not identical with the Führer.”55
Goebbels was, however, completely surprised by Dietrich’s announcement that Helmut Sündermann, his “chief of staff” in his Party role as Reich press chief, would in the future also act as his deputy in his state role as Reich press chief.56 Goebbels, who suspected that Dietrich wanted to establish an independent press ministry, protested to Hitler about this high-handed decision,57 whereupon the Führer issued a “Basic Instruction for Securing Cooperation between the Reich propaganda minister and the Reich press chief.”58 Goebbels then entered negotiations with Dietrich, which produced a formal “Working Agreement” containing thirteen points and defining responsibilities in detail.59
At the same time that he was fixing the boundaries of his turf with respect to Dietrich, Goebbels brought back the former head of the ministry’s press department, Hans Fritzsche, who, no doubt worn out by the continuing disagreements between his two bosses, had applied to join the army in the spring of 1942.60 Goebbels wanted to remove Fritzsche from the “endless personal arguments in the press department” and assign him a new task: overseeing radio news. In reality, however, this only opened up a new front in the war with Dietrich, as the latter was claiming responsibility for the radio’s news agency, the Wireless Service.61
At the ministry briefing of September 27, prompted by a conversation with Fritzsche the previous day, Goebbels complained that the day-to-day propaganda often used trite jargon and a clichéd style, which “was getting on the nerves” of the German public, while in the neutral countries it was considered “boring and stupid.”62 Goebbels resolved “fundamentally to change the whole tone of our public announcements” during the coming weeks.63 Fritzsche was to be mainly responsible for pushing through this change. At the beginning of October, Goebbels decided to transfer not only the radio news service to him but also the whole of the radio department, whose responsibilities he had substantially increased in February 1942 at the expense of the Reich Radio Corporation,64 thereby facilitating effective control over programming. This increase in Fritzsche’s responsibilities found expression in his appointment as “the official responsible for the Political and Propaganda Direction of Radio.”65
After the winter crisis of 1941–42 Goebbels had become convinced that it was necessary to “reorient our policies and propaganda” with respect to the occupied territories in the east. In agreement with numerous experts, he had identified the following points as important: an announcement that kolkhoz (collective farm) land would be distributed to farmers; religious tolerance; el
evation in the “cultural level”; improvement in social conditions (at least “here and there”), as well as—and here he had strong reservations—the appointment of “pseudo-governments” composed of indigenous personnel.66 He had naturally concluded that the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was the most important opponent of such a pragmatic policy.67 In May, however, he saw Rosenberg adopt a “new course.”68 For during that month Hitler and Rosenberg decided to grant religious toleration in the occupied eastern territories,69 and in the same month Hitler ordered that in future, if Soviet commissars switched sides, they were no longer to be executed.70 Although Goebbels saw “signs of a general change of course as regards the Russian mentality,”71 in neither case was Hitler prepared to make much of the change of direction in propaganda terms, as he was afraid of the threat posed to the authority of German rule in the east.72 Thus Goebbels had every reason to go on complaining in July about the propaganda situation in the occupied eastern territories and to accuse the Ministry for the East of failure.73 A lengthy study trip to the east by a delegation of propaganda experts from his ministry gave him additional material with which to make his point.74 Goebbels concluded from this assessment that he needed to establish his own propaganda apparatus in the east independent of the Ministry for the East (Goebbels referred to it as the “ministry of chaos”)75 and against the will of Rosenberg.76 At the end of October 1942 negotiations began between the two ministries concerning this issue, without them coming to an agreement.77 To put Rosenberg under pressure, Goebbels demanded—along the same lines as ideas being proposed within the general staff—that Hitler issue a “Proclamation to the East” containing promises of a better future for the indigenous population.78 In January 1943 Hitler did indeed order Goebbels to prepare a draft of such a proclamation.79 However, in view of the relaxation in the war situation in spring 1943, Hitler considered that the timing was no longer suitable for such a declaration. Goebbels naturally blamed Rosenberg for the proclamation’s never being issued.80
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