Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

the room—and his desk stillmeasured ten feet across.39MEANWHILE Goebbels methodically stoked up the propaganda fires over Danzig, releasingthe steam in carefully controlled bursts. Via teleprinter and telephone, editorswere told what stories to print and how—how much leeway was allowed, howbig the headline should be.40 ‘The [Berlin] press,’ an American observer would reportto Washington that summer, drawing on the experience of the previous year, ‘passesGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 533through set stages of invective in preparation for each of the major incidents whichhave so far occurred.’ The first stage, he described, merely set forth in general termsthe German point of view. Secondly, there followed attacks on the foreign governmentin question. Thirdly, the press attack switched to the ‘acts of terror’ allegedlyperpetrated against the German people by these governments. The fourth and finalstage of this cycle, he said, was marked by ‘lurid tales of German blood being spilled.’This officer pointed out that the process had begun anew in May 1939, with asseverationsof Germany’s historic right to Danzig.41This analysis was correct. From May onwards Goebbels had lifted the ban on reportinganti-German incidents in Poland, though restricted for the time being toPage Two.42 To imprint Danzig’s character firmly on the world’s mind as a Germancity, in June Hitler authorized him to deliver a major speech there—‘a trial balloon,’Goebbels confidentially informed his editors, ‘to test the international atmosphereon Danzig.’With the local gauleiter Forster he plotted a ‘spontaneous’—how he loved andabused that word—display in Danzig to demonstrate to the foreign journalists travellingin his party the German character of the city and its people.43 He delivered thespeech ‘spontaneously’ from the balcony of the Danzig state theatre through loudspeakerswhich had no less spontaneously materialized. ‘I am standing here on thesoil of a German town,’ he emphasized, motioning to the architectural icons all around.‘You long to return to the Reich,’ he intoned. The thousands of well drilled youngNazis chanted in response, ‘We want to see Hitler in Danzig!’ Their town, Goebbelsshouted, had become an international problem. Polish agitators had even begun demandingthe river Oder as their new frontier. ‘One wonders why they do not claimthe Elbe,’ he mocked, ‘—or the Rhine!’ There they would come into contact withtheir new allies the English, he added; their frontier, as everybody knew, was also onthe Rhine.44‘My speech,’ Goebbels told his diary with a conspiratorial air, ‘looked quite improvisedbut I had prepared the whole thing in advance.’45 Speaking that evening at theCasino Hotel at Zoppot, near Danzig, to the foreign journalists who had accompa-534 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHnied him, Goebbels lamented that there would have been no problem if the Britishhad not butted in with their ‘absurd’ guarantee to Poland. ‘Morally, the right toDanzig is ours,’ he argued. ‘Just as we had a moral right to everything else we havetaken—with the exception,’ he added as a disarming afterthought, ‘of Bohemia andMoravia. But we had to take those to create a strategic frontier for ourselves.’ ThePoles should learn a lesson from the Czech crisis: each day the Czechs had remainedobdurate, Hitler had upped the ante. Now the British were raising the same song anddance. They were just bluffing, suggested Goebbels. Hitler’s nerves would prove thestronger. ‘We know for sure that the stupid English are too weak and too cowardly toget in our way.’46‘I know,’ he said with a careless wink, according to a second source, ‘that some ofyou are curious as to whether today’s demonstration was truly spontaneous or not.’In fact their Berlin colleagues had received the text in advance and it had alreadybeen typeset for a special Sunday edition of the party’s Danzig newspaper the daybefore.47On June 20 Hitler summoned him to report on Danzig at the Berghof. Hefound Hitler sitting in the teahouse, eager to make prognoses:Poland will offer resistance at first, but upon the first reverse she will pitifullycollapse. The Czechs are more realistic. The Poles are quite hysterical and unpredictable.London will leave Warsaw in the lurch. They’re just bluffing. Got too manyother worries… The Führer says, and he’s right, that Britain now has the mostrotten government imaginable. There’s no question of their helping Warsaw. Theyled Prague up the garden path as well. This is proved by the files we have capturedin the Czech foreign ministry.If it comes to an armed conflict, then the Führer believes the Polish businesswill be over and done with in fourteen days.With a trace of scepticism Goebbels wrote, back at the the lodge known as theBechstein guesthouse, ‘Amen to that!’GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 535His bellicose speech in Danzig had sounded alarm bells around the world. Ambassadorvon Hassell wondered if it was the prelude to a solution of the Polish problemby brute force.48 The British ambassador heard that Hitler had ordered Goebbels tomake the speech ‘as [the] result of reports of castration of Germans in Poland.’49 Buteven Henderson believed that Goebbels was deliberately playing down such incidents.This was true: on June 23 the propaganda ministry ordered reports of Polish atrocitiesplayed down.50 Goebbels forbade any discussion of Danzig as yet.51 Even kite-flying items on Danzig printed by British newspapers were not to be picked up.52 Heordered the press to ignore specific belligerent and anti-German speeches by foreignstatesmen, as well as foreign press items about German troop movements, inductionof reservists, leave cancellations, and British naval manœuvres in the North Sea. Heallowed reports about ‘incidents in Poland [and] expropriations of German property,’but still subjected them to ‘existing layout guidelines.’ Page Two was still prominentenough.53 He did however order all those news items to be emphasized whichserved to diminish Britain’s prestige—her failing encirclement policy, her flounderingnegotiations with Moscow, her fumbling in Palestine, and her citizens’ humiliation atthe hands of Japanese troops in the Far East.54 He made some exceptions: Lord Londonderry,a personal friend of Göring’s, was to be spared, and Britain’s militaryhonour was not to be impugned.55 He drafted a biting attack on Britain’s encirclementefforts himself, but ordered his press to go easier on Britain, while still instructingeditors not to overlook the twentieth anniversary of Versailles on June 28.‘The German people know only too well what