Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

content himself with mocking Churchill’s‘frightened stutterings’ in his diary: ‘But it is a pity that we can’t get at him yet.’The big question, he added, was how now to proceed against Britain? ‘The Führerdoes not really want to press on. But he may well have to. If Churchill stays on,assuredly.’ Göring set up a plan for a mass air attack on Britain, but Hitler keptpostponing it.55 The British air force kept poking at Germany. ‘Churchill,’ fumedGoebbels at the end of June, ‘is just trying to provoke us. But the Führer doesn’tintend to respond, yet.’56A telegram from Hitler curtailed his tour of the battlefields in France—he was toreport to the interim Führer HQ in the Black Forest the next day, July 2, 1940.It was their first meeting in a month. He found that Hitler was planning to offerBritain one last chance in a speech to the Reichstag. He still believed that he coulddefeat Britain in four weeks. ‘The Führer however does not want to destroy theEmpire,’ Goebbels noted, ‘because everything it loses will accrue to foreign powersand not to us.’57 Goebbels was clearly unhappy with Hitler’s prevarication: he recordedthat it would be a tough decision to sell to the German people, though nodoubt the Führer would bring it off. The tenor of his coming speech, Hitler had said,would be magnanimity.What he did not mention to Goebbels was that he had just begun staff studies on awar with the Soviet Union.58They decided that Hitler should stage a triumphant homecoming to Berlin thatSaturday, July 6, and make his Reichstag speech two days later.59Goebbels hated the idea of offering an easy peace to Britain.Dramatic events came to his rescue. Under the armistice terms Hitler had justallowed the defeated French nation to retain is powerful battle fleet, though disarmedand under German supervision. Concerned that the Nazis might somehowseize the biggest warships, lying at anchor at Oran (Mers el-Kébir), Churchill orderedthem sunk on July 3, the day after Hitler and Goebbels met. Over a thousandGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 597French sailors died in the ruthless naval bombardment. This incident dominated aquarter of Goebbels’ entire domestic propaganda output for the next four days,while the personal abuse levelled at Churchill equalled the colossal intensity firstreached after the Altmark incident.60 Goebbels’ private admiration for Churchill rose,as his diary shows. Moreover, the British were still bombing Germany. Hitler howeverstill restrained his own bomber force.61 ‘The Führer,’ the minister marvelled,‘has the patience of an angel.’ He directed the press to focus their attack on Churchilland his clique alone. This was not easy, as the entire British press was ‘chortling withpleasure’ about Oran.62BERLIN’S reception for Hitler on Saturday July 6, 1940 was the most spectacular thatGoebbels ever staged.63 He had issued a million swastika flags to the crowds liningthe route, and he himself broadcast the excited running commentary as the trainbearing the conquering warlord hauled into the station at three P.M. to an accompanyingcacophony of church bells, factory sirens, and steam whistles. Once inside theChancellery Goebbels asked him what he had decided and learned that the Britishfleet’s attack at Oran had unhinged all of Hitler’s plans. ‘He had his speech almostcomplete,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘when the attack occurred. It has brought about anentirely new situation. Churchill is a raving lunatic who has burned all his boatsbehind him.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ Hitler lectured him, ‘we must be guided not by hatredbut by common sense.’64Hitler postponed the speech. He came out to Lanke that Sunday, and played withthe Goebbels children. Several times during the coming week Goebbels lunched atthe Chancellery with Hitler and his ministers, and heard him daydream about hispostwar plans. He was going to build an autobahn from Carinthia in southern Austriaall the way up to Norway’s northernmost cape, with a gigantic new naval base nearTrondheim like Britain’s Singapore. Darré, another lunch guest, recorded, ‘Theycouldn’t decide whether to call it Atalantis (Himmler’s suggestion), Atlantis (Frank),Northern Light (Ley), or Stella Polaris (Goebbels).’65 But these were castles in theair because, Goebbels noted, Hitler was still unwilling to deliver the final blow. In598 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHfact, said Hitler, he was now going to retire to the Berghof to think things over; heleft for Bavaria that evening.66JUST as Hitler hankered after his peacetime hobby of architecture, so Dr Goebbelsdreamed of retiring to a country estate and firing off magisterial newspaper editorials.67With the birth of Das Reich, his new national weekly magazine for the intelligentsia,part of this dream came true. He contributed a highly-paid, regular leading articlewhich would come to be quoted around the world as a real sensor of Nazi policies.Appearing every Saturday from May 26, 1940, Das Reich became the flagship ofhis journalistic career.68 It was well designed, its prose was literate, its photographssuperb. It was particularly popular with the officer corps.69 Its circulation hoveredaround a million—‘a rare publishing success of which I was not entire innocent,’Goebbels wrote.70The large circulation involved simultaneous printing in several centres, and this inturn meant that his manuscript had to be delivered by the previous Monday. Hebegan drafting it a week ahead, initially with a schoolboy dread, then with growingenthusiasm as it took shape; he devoted inordinate energy to checking dates, facts,and quotations from the Greek and Latin classics, until he was ready to dictate thefinal draft just before the weekend. One copy went off by courier for Hitler’s approval;another went to the radio, because from November 7, 1941 each such leaderarticle would be broadcast in full at 7:45 P.M. on the eve of its publication. Its textwas issued worldwide. Its influence on German morale, as the war progressed, wasunquestionable; it was a weekly shot in the arm—celebrating battles won, explainingsetbacks, justifying persecutions, promising retaliation, predicting victory. Towardthe end, a Goebbels article would present eloquent arguments from antiquityor parables from the party’s struggle for power which briefly lightened the loweringdarkness of defeat. One Luftwaffe general admitted that after reading Das Reich hechided himself, ‘Oh, ye of little faith! Perhaps things really are different from howyou, in your puny mind, make them out to be.’ After reading Goebbels in Das