Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

to Page One.20 When Kurier Polski declaimed‘Germany must be destroyed,’ the ministry ordered editors to headline this quotationon their front page.21 On the eleventh Hitler ordered the volume of the anti-Polish propaganda turned up to eighty percent.22 That day Goebbels ordered Polishterrorist incidents moved onto Page One. ‘The display is not as yet to exceed twocolumns however… Newspapers must take care,’ he defined, explaining the precisepropaganda dosage, ‘not to exhaust all their arguments and vocabulary prematurely.’23Nobody was to mention territorial claims.24 On the fifteenth they flew back to Berlin,picking up the foreign newspapers in Munich on the way. He observed withsatisfaction that the British and French were in disarray and relieved by rumours ofGerman peace initiatives.25 ‘It’s now time,’ he dictated the next day, ‘for the Germanpress to abandon its previous reserve.’26 News items about Polish terror acts were tobe well displayed but not splashed so sensationally that people ‘might conclude that adecisive event is imminent.’27At six P.M. on August 15 he and his family moved back into his expensively (3·2million marks, or three-quarters of a million dollars) rebuilt official residence. Theold palace had been demolished in June 1938. To the 164 workmen gathered at the548 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHtopping-out ceremony in January 1939 his office chief, the blindly submissive WernerNaumann, had explained that the ‘leading men and ministers from around the world’would be coming to this official residence, hence the luxurious appointments: therewas a marble-galleried banqueting hall at ground level; all the rooms, except for themarbled bathrooms, were panelled in costly walnut, mahogany, rosewood, and cherry.Cost-cutting was confined to the servants’ quarters, where the eighteen householdstaff were allowed three primitive Volksempfänger radio sets and one bath-tub betweenthem.28 It was not yet ready, but it was home. Goebbels grimly prayed that thehouse would bring them both more happiness than over the last year.After supper he inspected the house, and found a lot to curse his architect PaulBaumgarten for. A stickler for detail, he dictated five pages of complaints: a pictureof a church in his study was to be replaced by one of the Führer; and the up-marketinterior decorators United Workshops were to remake his desk, chair, and upholsteryin a red that would match the curtains and carpet.29 He was moreover havingserious problems financing the luxurious new mansion taking shape on the otherside of the lake at Lanke.30 Discussing his personal finances with Dr Karl Ott, hischief of administration, he admitted that they were catastrophic: ‘I’ve got to findsome way out.’31‘The war,’ he wrote on August 17, ‘is now expected with a degree of fatalism. Itwould almost take a miracle to avoid it.’ Hitler was lurking down at the Berghof, buthad evidently not yet notified Goebbels because although he wrote that day ‘The airis full of tension. One spark and the powder keg goes sky-high,’ the next day hebegan drafting his speeches for the Nuremberg party rally still scheduled to be heldin September.32On August 18 the ministry instructed editors to adopt a typical Goebbels device,namely to personalize their attack; in this case they were to blame the Polish governorof eastern upper Silesia personally for the ‘barbaric terror’ wave.33 While newspaperswere encouraged to carry interviews with German refugees even these wereto be ‘deliberately understated’.34 The war of nerves had begun for him quite literally;he spent that night and all next day doubled up in bed with painful stomachGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 549cramps (perhaps of emotional origin?) as he brooded on his own financial crisis andhis country slithering toward war.35 During the day a phone call from the Berghofinstructed him to turn up the propaganda volume to full blast by Tuesday the twentysecond.‘So the balloon can go up then,’ concluded Goebbels, not liking it at all.36The very regimentation of this press coverage produced a ghastly sense of déja vuin foreign diplomats as no doubt Hitler intended. The astute American military attachéobserved on the twenty-first that with German blood now flowing, German refugeesfleeing, and German families being attacked by brutish Polish mobs, Goebbelshad reached the same stage as in the last week of September 1938: only the placenames and the enemy were different.37ALL of Goebbels’ previous problems paled beside the psychological problem of presentingto his public the totally unexpected news that Hitler and Stalin were doing adeal.Previous indicators during July had been so minute that a seismograph would nothave detected them. On July 8 Hitler had told Goebbels that he no longer expectedLondon and Moscow to reach an agreement. ‘That leaves the way open for us,’Goebbels had deduced. ‘Stalin doesn’t want either a won or a lost war. In either casehe’d be history.’38 He asked editors not to express glee at the stalling of the Anglo-French negotiations in Moscow39; not to comment on differences emerging betweenMoscow and Tokyo40; and not to pick up foreign press reports that Poland was makingairfields available to the Soviet airforce.41 Newspapers were told to ignore theGerman–Soviet trade talks.42 Totally unexpectedly the news came on August 20 thatBerlin had signed a new trade agreement with Moscow: ‘How times change,’ wasGoebbels’ only comment, cautious enough; he instructed editors to restrict the newsto one column on Page One, with commentaries only of an economic nature.43At the government press conference on August 21, he proudly noted, he ‘pouredoil on the flames. But still kept some in reserve.’ General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of theHigh Command, told him that militarily everything was ready for the attack on Poland.The Germans had almost 1·5 million men under arms. It would take a miracle550 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHto avoid war, decided Goebbels. Overwhelmed by his own preparations, he had notime to start constructing his speech for Nuremberg. Studying the wiretap intercepts,he concluded that blind panic was spreading in the enemy camp.44 That eveningGoebbels heard the news of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and that his arch rival Ribbentrop,triumphant, would be signing the historic document two days later, August 23, inMoscow. ‘That really is something!’ gasped Goebbels. ‘That creates a whole newsituation. We’re home and dry. Now we can sleep a bit more peacefully again.’45The