Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

composer Gustav Mahler and the producer Max Reinhardt(Max Goldmann), and concede that in their performances the Jews were often ‘notbad.’46The public attitude was the lesser of these two problems. Goebbels got to work onthat with the only three antisemitic films that his studios ever produced, ‘TheRothschilds’ (premiered on July 17, 1940), ‘Jud Süss’ (September 24), and ‘TheEternal Jew’; this third film contained such distressing scenes of Jewish ritual slaughterthat Goebbels ordered an expurgated version made for the more squeamish membersof the public.47His own visceral hatred of the Jews had become more radical since 1940. Physicallyliquidating them now seemed an increasingly viable solution. If it was possibleto liquidate the insane, if Göring’s air force was killing the relatively innocent Englishby the thousand, why should the ‘guilt-laden’ Jews be spared? Goebbels hadagain discussed the euthanasia project (‘the covert liquidation of the mentally ill,’ heGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 657called it) with Bouhler on January 30, 1941. Bouhler had informed him that they hadquietly disposed of eighty thousand so far, with sixty thousand more still to go. ‘Hardwork, but necessary too,’ applauded Goebbels.48 To counter public disquiet he commissionedfrom leading film director Wolfgang Liebeneiner, the Steven Spielberg ofthe day, a harrowing film on the human freaks whom a compassionate Third Reichwas pleased to put out of their misery.49To him the Jews were fair game. Thus when Jewish ringleaders triggered strikes inNazi-occupied Holland in February 1941 he demanded that ‘this Jewish rabble’ behanged.50 Visiting Posen soon after, he heard from the gauleiter Arthur Greiser ofhow he was cleansing the surrounding Warthegau: ‘There has been all manner ofliquidating going on here,’ he penned in his diary, ‘particularly of the Jewish garbage.’‘That’s got to be,’ he added.51 He saw every justification: had the Jews not declaredwar on the Reich? He took particular note when the South African prime ministerJan Smuts said, in a message to the national Zionist congress, that people wouldnever forget the role played by the Jews on the side of Germany’s enemy.52 Goebbelsfor one would not.He was wont to say that the advantage of being branded world-wide as antisemiteswas that they could now do with the Jews as they saw fit.53 Primarily he wanted toexpel all Berlin’s Jews. They formed the dangerous nucleus of an enemy intelligentsia.Hans Hinkel had reported in September 1940 that there were still some seventytwothousand in the city. The intermediate aim was to deport five hundred a monthto the south-east; as soon as the war ended the rest would be sent back to the east.54Later that month he informed Goebbels that about four million Jews still lived inHitler’s present dominions. ‘The Madagascar Plan, which has now been given the goahead,provides for about three and a half million of these to be shipped to Madagascarover approximately eighteen months after the war.’55Goebbels felt that the Jews in the Kurfürstendamm and Uhland-Strasse tenementswere a particularly active grapevine for anti-Nazi rumours which they spread amongtheir American and other foreign lodgers.56 ‘Dr Goebbels,’ Tiessler told the party,‘regards every Jew as a counter-propagandist. Henceforth Jews should only rent out658 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHaccommodation to other Jews.’57 Albert Speer agreed with him fervently, though forother reasons. According to his figures there were over twenty-three thousand Jewishhomes in the city. His official diary* shows that at the beginning of 1941 he hadinitiated a cold-blooded slum-clearance plan which involved evicting Jewish tenantsand cramming them into other already overcrowded Jewish homes.58 However manyordinances Goebbels issued however, the Jews found ways to circumvent them; andalthough he repeated to Dr Gutterer in April 1941 a suggestion that the Jews shouldbe forced to wear some kind of badge, this idea too made slow progress.59THE direct expulsion of the Jews from Berlin was not yet practicable. Vienna hadpriority, and the eastern railroad system was overburdened with war transports.60Besides, some thirty thousand of Berlin’s Jews were working in munitions factories.61 Goebbels still felt, as he told Hitler on March 17, 1941, that it was totallywrong for his city to be housing seventy thousand Jews. He told Gutterer afterwardshowever that the Führer had still not decided that Berlin should be ‘freed of its Jews’.62Gutterer at once called an inter-ministerial meeting attended representatives of bothSpeer and Heydrich. The latter’s man, S.S. Sturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, wentover the recent history: Hitler, he explained, had put Heydrich in charge of evacuatingthe Jews, and Heydrich had recently developed a plan to lodge them all in Poland.Hans Frank was reluctant to absorb any more, but Hitler had ordered him (‘inwriting’) to accept sixty thousand from Vienna. Since they could only lay hands onforty-five thousand in Vienna, continued Eichmann, they could in theory absorb fifteenthousand from Berlin but, he reminded the ministry, Germany’s manufacturing industryneeded every available Jew.63 Speer’s man (probably Dietrich Clahes, chief ofhis infamous Rehousing Office) explained that Speer wanted the twenty thousand* I.e., the original diary, not the sanitized and retyped version which Speer artfullydeposited in the German federal archives after his release from Spandau prison, andfrom which is excised all reference to his infamous Hauptabteilung Umsiedlung (MainRehousing Office) which conducted the evictions.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 659Jewish homes in Berlin emptied as a reserve for air-raid housing losses.64 Gutterertold Goebbels that he had put Eichmann in charge of planning the eventual evacuationoperation.Goebbels discussed this briefly with Hitler on June 19. Hans Frank was visiting tooand made no secret of his eagerness to displace his unwanted Jews still further eastonce Russia was defeated. ‘A fitting punishment,’ philosophized Goebbels, ‘given theway that they have pitted country against country and plotted the war.’ ‘The Führer,’he routinely added, ‘also prophesied all this to the Jews.’ Hitler reassured Frank thatPoland was envisaged only as a transit camp for Europe’s Jews; in due course theywould all be deported further east.65Thwarted in his immediate intention, Goebbels pressed on which the plan forJews to be forced to wear a distinguishing badge in public, explaining that they weregetting more uppity with each day that passed. Polish women in Berlin already had towear a ‘P’ badge, and Jewish street workers a yellow armband.66 He