Goebbels42: No Room for Two of UsGOEBBEL’S diaries, now all retrieved from hiding, chronicle Hitler’s Russiancampaign almost to the last day. Of particular interest is how this crusade,embarked upon in such a froth of misplaced optimism, impinged upon him as minister:how he argued for the adoption of more realistic policies toward the ‘liberated’Russians, and how, when all seemed lost, Hitler finally granted to him the powers hecraved to mobilize the entire nation. But he was a realist too. He prohibited thepublication of maps of the entire Soviet Union, in case readers felt that this timetheir Führer had bitten off more than he could chew.1He justified Barbarossa effortlessly. Mr Churchill came to his aid with a radio broadcastthat same Sunday evening, June 22, 1941, pledging unlimited British aid toMoscow. Goebbels argued that they had been conspiring together all along.2 In anarticle published four days later he argued that the Soviet Union had been banking ontaking over a stricken and war-ravaged Europe. ‘In one hand they clutched the treatywith us… but in the other they sharpened the blade to plunge into our back.’3 Twoweeks later Das Reich published his pièce justificative, ‘The Veil Falls,’ in which hedescribed Barbarossa as a war (though not a ‘crusade’—he had forbidden the usageof that overworked noun) by civilised people ‘against spiritual putrefaction, againstthe decay of public morality, against the bloody terrorization of mind and body, againstcriminal policies whose perpetrators sit astride mounds of corpses casting about forwhom to select as their next victim.’4652 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHFor six days Hitler ordered a news blackout. On the seventh he ordered twelvespecial communiqués broadcast.5 At hourly intervals from eleven A.M. the same trumpetssounded. Goebbels was livid at this amateurish day-long deluge of fanfares.6 Itallowed the common man to glimpse the workings of high propaganda; preciselybecause it destroyed the illusion, he had forbidden newspapers to publish behindthe-scenes photographs at film studios and reprimanded a weekly magazine for portrayingthe hallowed phonograph disc from which the victory fanfares were playedduring the battle of France.7 ‘I shall see to it,’ he wrote, wrongly blamed for thisstunt, ‘that this never happens again.’8For Goebbels, image was everything. War newsreels never showed air-raid victims,and he persuaded Hitler to suppress lingering shots of battle-casualties in a film onthe heroism of the medical corps during the battle of Crete.9 He wanted the publicto believe in an antiseptic, almost bloodless war.He injected his propaganda into the Soviet Union initially by means of three ‘black’transmitters disguised as Trotskyite, separatist, and nationalist.10 Eventually, despitethe lack of receivers in the Soviet Union, he would have twenty-two official transmittersas well, broadcasting thirty-four daily bulletins in eighteen different languages.11 He had persuaded the communists Torgler, Kasper, and Albrecht, at a secretmeeting in his ministry during May, to broadcast appeals to the enemy in authenticcommunist double-speak to overthrow the ‘traitor’ Stalin and set up workers’ andsoldiers’ councils; Goebbels stopped them from calling for street demonstrations, incase nobody showed up.12 Hoping to use Ernst Thälmann too, Goebbels sent himreports on conditions in the Soviet Union; still in a concentration camp, ‘Teddy’Thälmann disdained to collaborate (and was eventually shot.)13After a few days in shock, Stalin came back fighting with a famous radio broadcaston July 3, 1941, proclaiming a patriotic war.14 Hitler now authorised Goebbels tounleash his main anti-Soviet propaganda campaign.15 There was no lack of material.Hearing of atrocities in Lvov, where the retreating Red Army had murdered six hundredUkrainians, Goebbels rushed twenty journalists there to get eye-witness accounts.16 There was no need for him to invent horror stories. Hitler’s secret policeGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 653had stormed the Soviet diplomatic buildings in Paris and Berlin, and found somedecidedly undiplomatic equipment including sound-proof execution chambers hiddenbehind electrically operated steel doors, a laboratory for the production of exoticpoisons, and electric crematoria for disposing of human remains.17 ‘If a criminalgang comes to power,’ dictated Goebbels reading the reports submitted by Heydrichand Abwehr chief Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Canaris on these gruesome finds, ‘then itwill conduct its politics with criminal methods too.’ ‘There would have been noroom for the two of us in Europe in the long run.’18Goebbels called briefly at No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse to check progress onthe air raid shelter that Speer was excavating in its gardens. Architect Hugo Bartelsput the cost at a third of a million marks, with enough cement to build three hundredworking-class homes.19 Seven feet thick, its roof and walls would be strong enoughto withstand the heaviest British bombs so far.20Worried that one thoughtless bomb might destroy his diaries, Goebbels moved alltwenty volumes to safety in the Reichsbank vaults.21 He finally abandoned writingthe diaries in his barely decipherable script, and began dictating them instead eachmorning
