Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

to Otte, his high-speed stenographer, from notes compiled during the previousday. Aged thirty-four, Otte performed this task until the end, sometimes havingto sleep on a couch next door until the next torrent of dictation was ready tosweep over him.22 One single day’s entry might run to 144 pages.23 Relays of secretariestyped each page on fine bond paper in triplicate, triple-spaced and in an outsizetypeface; until the primitive glass microfiches containing all 75,000 pages surfacedin Moscow in 1992, where this author was the first historian privileged to usethem, only a fragment was believed to have survived.OTTE’S first transcript was dated July 9, 1941. His minister had just paid a flying visitto the ‘Wolf’s Lair,’ Hitler’s new HQ built in a swampy, mosquito-infested forest inEast Prussia.Hitler boasted that they had already damaged or destroyed two-thirds of Stalin’sforces and written off five-sixths of his tanks and planes. ‘Our strategy is to take on654 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHour enemies one at a time,’ Hitler explained. ‘Preventive wars are still the best.’Stalin had probably been banking on seizing Romania that autumn. Bad weather wouldhave stalled Hitler’s counter-moves, and he would have lost his only significant petroleumsupplies. Goebbels was impressed: ‘The Führer rescued the Reich from itsfate,’ he dictated. Hitler said that after ‘rubbing out’ Moscow and Petersburg hewould advance on the river Volga and the Ural mountains. A repetition of Napoleon’sdisaster was impossible. The Nazi forces had motor transport and panzer divisions,which Napoleon had not. Goebbels told his diary that Hitler had asked him to visitthe Wolf’s Lair more often, ever week or so; but five weeks passed before anotherinvitation came.24A week after Barbarossa began Goebbels ran into unexpected problems withRosenberg. On the day before his visit to HQ, Hitler had ruled that Rosenberg’s Ostministry,and not Goebbels, should control all propaganda in the east.25 Goebbelsvainly referred to the decree of September 1939 which entrusted to his ministry all‘practical execution’ of propaganda.26 His old rival was trying to become the nextTsar, he decided.27 As the years passed Rosenberg proved woefully incapable of organizingon an imperial scale, and Goebbels contemptuously referred to his apparatusas the ‘Cha-ost’ ministry.28 ‘If only we had proceeded more shrewdly in the east,’he would reflect in 1944, ‘and if only we had made clear to the peoples there that wewere coming not as conquerors but as liberators from bolshevism, the decisive blowagainst the Soviet Union might have met with success.’29At first as the Wehrmacht advanced the jubilant natives had greeted Hitler’s troopswith garlands of flowers.30 They made no attempt to adopt the scorched-earth policiesdemanded by Stalin. Goebbels stressed in his propaganda that their commonenemy was their ‘Jewish-bolshevik’ oppressors.31 Rosenberg however pursued verydifferent policies.32 He pronounced all Soviet citizens equally culpable for havingtolerated bolshevism, and acted accordingly. Although there were virtually no printingpresses or paper, and although ‘every nail and pane of glass’ had to be importedfrom Germany, it was Goebbels’ task to cover the eastern territories with(Rosenberg’s) propaganda. His ministry blocked Rosenberg’s plans where it could,GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 655but that was not often.33 ‘We managed to prevent the total eradication of the Ukrainianintelligentsia,’ reported Dr Taubert early in 1945. But it was an unequal fight.Rosenberg unhelpfully declared all Soviet citizens ‘sub-humans’ and wondered whythey flocked to the ranks of the partisans. It would take Goebbels a year to get anodious S.S. brochure called Sub-Humans withdrawn.34 He would fight equally hard tohave the Ost-badge issued to Russian slave labourers replaced by something smackingless obviously of the badge worn by Jews.35 Gunter d’Alquèn told Goebbels that theUkrainians, who had joyfully dug up ancient icons which they had concealed fordecades as the Germans marched in, now lived in mortal terror of these new Nazioppressors.During July Hitler’s advance slowed. The United States, which had originally giventhe Soviet Union only ten days to survive, now expressed the first doubts as to Hitler’schances of victory.36 Visiting the Wolf’s Lair, Goebbels’ director of broadcastingEugen Hadamowsky heard Hitler admit that he had been misinformed about Stalin’sstrength.37 The enemy had unsuspected reserves of tanks, aircraft, and men of unquestionablebravery.AS Goebbels flew down to Salzburg for the Mozart festival and to see his children hedipped into a one-hundred page book by an American, entitled ‘Germany must Perish!’38 The author, Theodore N. Kaufman, proposed the ‘summary sterilization’ of allGermans. ‘Germany must perish forever!’ wrote Kaufman. ‘In fact—not in fancy.’The dust cover carried endorsements from Time magazine, the Washington Post and theNew York Times.39It was an extraordinary book. ‘Well,’ dictated Goebbels gleefully to Otte. ‘ThisJew has done a disservice to the enemy. If he had composed this book at my behest hecouldn’t have done a better job.’40 He decided to issue one million copies to Germansoldiers; after initially shelving this on legal grounds, fearing American reprisals againstGerman copyrights, he issued the book with a photograph showing PresidentRoosevelt apparently dictating the contents.41 The ‘castrationist’ book, with all itsFreudian overtones, preyed on his mind throughout his brief visit to the children.656 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHIn August 1940 he had discussed with Hitler the Soviet liquidation of the intelligentsiain the Baltic states they had then just occupied—the ‘commissars’ and K.G.B.officers were the murderers. Goebbels had closed his heart to the victims. Withouttheir intelligentsia, he had pointed out, the Baltic states were emasculated.42 Laterthat month he and Hitler found they agreed that Europe’s Jews should all be shippedoff to Madagascar.43 When Goebbels visited Kattowitz in September 1940 the gauleiterFritz Bracht had confirmed that all the Jews there had been deported. But driving onthrough the Jewish villages around Kraków, Goebbels was nonetheless daunted bythe magnitude of the task.44FOR Goebbels there were two problems. Neither the broad German public nor theirFührer shared his satanic antisemitism. He studied Hitler’s attitudes carefully duringa dinner with Hans Frank upon whose Polish domain fell the thankless task of absorbingthe Reich’s detritus of unwanted Jews.45 The same Hitler who had issuedruthless orders for the execution of the Soviet commissars was by no means as hostileas Goebbels toward western Europe’s more cultivated Jews. He heard Hitlerspeak warmly of both the