Apart from the dispute with Rosenberg, there was the ongoing conflict with Dietrich. In September 1943 Goebbels had attempted to integrate the press offices Dietrich had established in the various occupied territories into his propaganda apparatus. However, although Hitler had agreed to this in principle and he thought he had Dietrich’s approval, Goebbels’s initiative came to nothing.77 When, in February and March 1944, Goebbels tried to transfer the press offices in Kraków and The Hague to his own organization, Dietrich (described by Goebbels as “a little man suffering from an inferiority complex”) dug in his heels and blocked the move.78
In autumn 1943 Goebbels renewed his attempt to get Hitler to agree to transfer Wehrmacht propaganda to his ministry. He had first tried in May 1943 and had been supported by Speer.79 Hitler had promised to do this on several occasions but had never fulfilled the promise.80 In October 1943 Goebbels broached the subject once more with Hitler, who replied that he “still believed” that the transfer “should happen as soon as possible,” but he did not want “to pick up this hot potato while there is a crisis in the east,” a reply that evidently satisfied Goebbels.81
There continued to be violent disputes with the Foreign Ministry. Apart from various other matters,82 the main focus was on propaganda in occupied France. Goebbels intervened after the Wehrmacht High Command had ordered the transfer of a substantial number of responsibilities of the Wehrmacht’s propaganda department in France to the Foreign Ministry in November 1943. He sent the former Reich broadcasting chief, Glasmeier, to Paris as his special representative, who managed for the time being to prevent the transfer from happening.83
After Hitler had told Goebbels that he wanted to transfer propaganda in France to the Foreign Ministry, in November 1943 Goebbels protested vigorously “against the destruction of a proven instrument of propaganda” and naturally also against Ribbentrop’s action in approaching Hitler without previously informing him.84 Goebbels noted in his diary that Hitler had been “absolutely furious” with Ribbentrop and had forbidden similar interventions by his foreign minister in the future.85 According to the evidence, however, the question of which department was responsible for propaganda in occupied France remained unresolved until the Allied landings.
Thus Goebbels failed to secure Hitler’s actual support in any of the disputes in which he was engaged, even though in two of them (with Dietrich and with the Wehrmacht) he had explicitly—so Goebbels in any case believed—promised it. Not being able to rely on Hitler’s promises was, however, by no means a new experience for Goebbels. He had had numerous similar disappointments since he had committed himself to his Führer in the mid-1920s. But his loyalty to his idol still appeared to be unshaken.
In 1944 Goebbels instituted several changes of personnel within the Propaganda Ministry. These were prompted not least by the need to counter his rivals in the field of propaganda. He replaced his state secretary, Gutterer, with whose performance he had been unsatisfied for some time,86 with his old office chief, Naumann, who returned to the ministry from service in the Wehrmacht. He compensated Gutterer by appointing him director general of Ufa with “a huge salary.”87 In September Naumann also became chief of staff of the Party’s Reich propaganda directorate; his predecessor Hadamovsky joined the Wehrmacht.88
In fact for a long time Goebbels had been accusing Hadamovsky of neglecting his work in the Reich propaganda directorate in favor of his literary ambitions.89 In June Draeger took over the foreign department in place of Heinrich Hunke. At his induction to the position Goebbels informed him that the “Foreign Ministry” was at the moment “in rather a weak position” and that he must try to make use of this.90 In June Goebbels also had to dismiss Berndt as head of the propaganda department because he had spoken in public about the defensive preparations in the west.91
At the end of 1943 the question of the political leadership in Berlin, which had been open for so long, required a decision. In December Hitler asked Goebbels to take on the office of city president (which Oberbürgermeister Ludwig Steeg had provisionally taken over in 1940) “at least during the war and preferably in peacetime as well,” which Goebbels agreed to do.92 “In this way I have direct control of the municipal authorities, which I have lacked in terms of my control of the Reich capital.” The new regime meant that the offices of city president and Oberbürgermeister, which since the Berlin law of 1936 had been united in one person, were now separated, and the office of city president was now made dominant. Typically, during the coming months Goebbels resisted transferring the full powers of his office as Oberbürgermeister to Steeg, who had only been appointed acting Oberbürgermeister in 1940.93 When Steeg was “finally” appointed at the beginning of 1945 Goebbels managed to ensure that the appointment was not for a fixed term of twelve years but for an indefinite period, because he considered the position of Oberbürgermeister of Berlin to be “a political office whose incumbent can be replaced as required.”94
Goebbels aimed to reduce the staff of the city president’s office from 250 to 50 and with the help of this small leadership cadre to exercise “real control over Berlin’s municipal affairs.”95 In the medium term he intended to expand the position to that of a Reich governor.96 Part of this arrangement involved the dismissal of Görlitzer, whom he had long wanted to get rid of, as deputy Gauleiter, among other things because he suspected Görlitzer of wanting to replace him as Gauleiter. Görlitzer was replaced by Gerhard Schach, a long-term colleague in the Berlin Gau headquarters.97
Hitler formally appointed Goebbels as city president only at the beginning of April 1944.98 During the first days Goebbels was preoccupied with reorganizing the office;99 he had the ambition of creating “an urban leadership cadre that could be a model for other cities and Gaus.”100 In fact Goebbels interpreted the term leadership to mean a situation in which neither at the municipal nor at the Gau level was there anybody who could form a counterweight to his autocratic exercise of power. The position of city president was thus a de facto extension of the power of the Gauleiter, who during the final phase of the regime found it all the more easy to intervene in the administration of Berlin at will. It does not, however, appear as if during the year that remained Goebbels did in fact use the office of city president in this way. In his diary, in any case, he barely mentions the office. But Goebbels advocated making the combination of the offices of Gauleiter and city president in one person permanent by law.101
THE FURTHER DISINTEGRATION OF THE WARTIME ALLIANCES
During the first months of 1944 the Reich was threatened not just from the air. The Battle of Monte Cassino had begun in the middle of January 1944; the Allied offensive was supported by a landing behind the German front at Anzio. This landing, only twenty-five miles from Rome, came as a complete surprise to the Germans, a fact that Goebbels found difficult to grasp: “We should have known that two to three enemy divisions were embarking in Sicily.”102
But Italy was more of a sideshow. The German leadership was most concerned about the increasingly desperate situation on the Eastern Front. In the meantime it had developed in such a dramatic way that the Germans began to become anxious about the loyalty of their allies.
Since February Goebbels had been carefully watching the attempt by the Finnish government to explore the conditions for a possible ceasefire.103 On March 3 he discussed the matter with Hitler. Following Hitler’s instructions, he drafted a “statement” publicly exposing the Finnish maneuvers and threatening them with what might happen “in the event that they change sides, in frank terms as far as the Bolsheviks are concerned and somewhat obliquely as far as we are concerned.” Hitler looked through the text again and instructed Goebbels to begin by publishing articles in the Völkischer Beobachter and the Berliner Börsenzeitung on the same theme.104 Hitler had told Goebbels in connection with the Finnish activities that he was now “absolutely determined to deal with the Hungarian question.” This was prompted by the fact that Horthy, whom Hitler and Goebbels had long distrusted,105 had announced
the withdrawal of the Hungarian troops remaining on the Eastern Front. According to Hitler, the Hungarians were “continually committing treason,” so he wanted to depose the government, take Horthy into custody, and attempt to install a regime under Béla Imrédy. Once he had disarmed the army, he could also “come to grips with the question of the Hungarian aristocracy and above all with Budapest Jewry.” So long as “the Jews are sitting in Budapest we can’t do anything with this city, nor with the country, in particular with its public opinion.” They could use the Hungarian army’s weapons, as well as Hungary’s oil supplies, “quite apart from the food reserves.”
During another conversation on March 14 Hitler returned to the question of the two unwilling allies. Were the Finns to “break away” from the alliance, he would withdraw German troops from the current front line to north Finland.106 However, this did not yet happen, because in April the Finnish-Soviet negotiations collapsed because the Soviet conditions for ending the war appeared unacceptable to the Finns. Meanwhile, Goebbels was carefully following the individual stages of this intermezzo.107
In the meantime, during the spring of 1944, a catastrophic situation was increasingly developing on the Eastern Front. In March the 1st Panzer Army, encircled around Kamenez-Podolsk, succeeded in escaping destruction only through a daring breakout,108 while in April the besieged garrison of the “fortress” of Tarnopol was almost completely wiped out.109 In addition, Odessa had to be evacuated on April 9.110
Under the impression of these developments Hitler had told Goebbels during their conversation on March 14 that he was bringing forward the action against Hungary (“because the Hungarians had smelled a rat”); it was to begin in a few days’ time. “Hungary has 700,000 Jews; we shall make sure that they don’t slip through our fingers.”111
On March 18 Goebbels heard about the conference, which had taken place on the same day at Schloss Klessheim. Hitler had given Horthy a dressing-down, informing him of the occupation of his country, which had already begun the night before. Horthy finally gave way, promising not to resist. In view of this “amicable” solution Goebbels was obliged to withdraw leaflets that had already been printed and that “had used quite tough language.”112 He anxiously followed the occupation of the country, which in fact went off smoothly, and also the measures that were taken there during the following days: the appointment of Edmund Veesenmayer as the new ambassador and plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Hungary, in other words as German governor, and the establishment of a new Hungarian government under the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin, Döme Sztójay.113
During the next few weeks Goebbels’s diaries reflect the German government’s attempts to get the Hungarian government to introduce tougher measures against the indigenous Jews.114 Goebbels and Hitler saw the new Hungarian government’s treatment of the Jews, namely the degree of its radicalism, as an indicator of its loyalty.115 By the end of April Hitler had achieved his goal. Horthy had not only fulfilled the German demands, but he was now “absolutely furious with the Jews and has no objections whatever to our using them as hostages; he has even proposed it himself.” Through its involvement in Germany’s Jewish policy the Hungarian government had compromised itself to such an extent that it could not escape the alliance. “In any case the Hungarians will not be able to escape from the rhythm of the Jewish question,” went Goebbels’s summary of Hitler’s comments. “Anyone who says A must say B, and now that the Hungarians have begun implementing our Jewish policy they can no longer back out of it. After a certain point the Jewish policy gains its own momentum.”116
In the middle of April the Hungarian Jews had begun to be concentrated in camps in the provinces and on May 3 the SS began deporting them to Auschwitz. Up to the time the deportations were stopped at the beginning of July, a total of 437,000 people were deported to the extermination camps, where the overwhelming majority were murdered immediately after their arrival. But even after this point Goebbels regarded any sign of a concession by the Hungarian government toward the surviving Jews as an indication of possible disloyalty toward the alliance with Germany.117
During 1944, as in Hungary, the Nazi regime tried to involve the governments of its other allies in its radical Jewish policy in order to bind them to the German Reich until the bitter end. While their efforts in Romania proved unavailing, they succeeded in enforcing deportations to the death camps in both northern Italy and Slovakia.
The near-total annihilation of European Jews required, as Goebbels was soon to discover, a reorientation of German propaganda, which had hitherto focused very much on the Jews as enemies. From the summer of 1941 onward, the Third Reich had fought the war above all as a “war against the Jews,” in other words against an imaginary enemy that was allegedly holding the enemy alliance together and at the same time trying to sabotage the attempt to establish a new European regime from within. During the previous years Goebbels had orchestrated German propaganda along those lines. But now that the Third Reich had finally gone on the defensive, Hitler considered it no longer advisable to put the image of the Jews as enemies of the world at the center of propaganda. It was not by chance that Hitler introduced this change in the spring of 1944 for, in view of the impending destruction of the remaining Jewish communities in German-occupied Europe, the image of the Jews as an internal enemy that must be fought by Germany and her allies in order to create the basis for the “New Europe” had inevitably ceased to serve its purpose.
On April 26, 1944, Goebbels learned from Hitler, who had invited him to dinner, that he believed that “Stalin isn’t as popular with international Jewry as everybody thinks. In some respects he’s quite tough with the Jews.” This laconic comment by Goebbels in fact refers to a remarkable line taken by Hitler that was to introduce a fundamental change in the direction of propaganda. While hitherto German propaganda had put forward the thesis that “the Jews,” either as plutocrats or as communists, were the “glue” holding the enemy coalition together (an assertion that Goebbels frequently made both in public and in private), now, in view of the threat of military defeat, it was necessary to emphasize the contradictions within the enemy camp. For this purpose and contrary to the previously predominant image of Jewish communists, the anticommunist theme was distinguished from the anti-Semitic propaganda line, and the notion of a Jewish “world conspiracy” was played down. Anti-Semitism continued to play a major role in German propaganda, but principally in relation to American Jews; this was juxtaposed with the threat of “Bolshevism” with all its horrors.
THE CONTINUATION OF THE AIR WAR AND RETALIATION
At the beginning of March 1944 for the first time the Americans launched a series of daylight air raids on Berlin, primarily aimed at industrial targets but causing limited damage.118 Goebbels’s propaganda tactic was to not refer to the “extremely stupid and contemptible boasts” of the Americans about the alleged success of the raids “because it’s in our interest that the Americans should be satisfied with their raids on Berlin.”119 The last raid on Berlin for the time being occurred on March 24. During the following months the Allied air forces concentrated on preparing for the landing in France.120
In view of the air raids the German authorities began to concentrate more of their efforts on retaliation. In January the Luftwaffe had launched a counteroffensive against London (described by the British as the “Baby Blitz”), of which Goebbels had great expectations.121 But the raids remained largely ineffective; only a few bombers actually managed to reach the British capital. In January there were two, in March six raids with a decreasing number of aircraft.122
Despite this comparatively limited offensive potential, Goebbels claimed that these air raids had had “an enormous impact”; he believed they had caused “substantial damage throughout the London area” and gave credence to absurdly exaggerated reports stating that the raids had caused more casualties than all the Allied raids on Berlin put together.123 On the other hand, his notes also contain doubts about the devastating effect o
f the bombing—for example, when he writes that the raids might have been launched more for “psychological than material reasons.”124 But even as far as this aspect was concerned, he tended to gross exaggeration. He believed that the “hysterical reactions” of the London press showed “how low morale in England has sunk.”125
The last of these raids occurred on April 18. After that the ever smaller fleet concentrated on other targets until the raids were broken off at the end of May.126 Now the regime’s hopes were focused on the new weapons of retaliation, which were expected to produce a powerfully demoralizing effect that would decide the outcome of the war. The deployment of these weapons, however, kept being postponed.127
On April 17 Hitler argued that they should postpone the retaliation for a time even though the weapons were ready for action. If they succeeded in defeating an Allied invasion, that would be the moment to deploy the weapons in order to bring about a catastrophic blow to morale in Great Britain.128 State secretary Walter Schieber informed him at the beginning of May that, although the flying bomb was ready, the A4 (V-2) could not yet be deployed, as improvements were necessary that could take between two and four months. A third weapon, the Millipede, could be ready for deployment in June or July. (This referred to the project for a long-range gun, also called a high pressure pump, that in fact was never used against Great Britain.)129 The news about the A4 in particular came as a “great disappointment” to Goebbels, and he wondered whether Hitler, who had told him something different a few days before, was actually informed about the state of affairs. He evidently did not consider whether Hitler might have given him rather too optimistic a picture.130
In the meantime, in spring 1944 the Allies were continuing their air raids on German territory. In April Goebbels had to deal with the raid on Cologne on April 20131 and the raid on Munich on April 24. He objected to the fact that Gauleiter Paul Giesler was making what he considered exorbitant demands for the provisioning of the Munich population: “Hardly have they experienced a major raid, and they behave as if they were bearing the whole burden of the air war.”132
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