Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

on his efforts to make goodthe air-raid damage in Berlin. Their third Aktion against the Jews was just begin-674 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHning.25 That day a thousand more, the seventh trainload, departed from Berlin, boundthis time for Riga, capital of Latvia. All would die three mornings later.Like Lithuania, Latvia had begun killing its Jews soon after Barbarossa began, inrevenge for the 33,038 Latvians kidnapped or murdered by the Soviet secret policesince June 1940. In July 1941 there had been seventy thousand Jews in Latvia—therest, some thirty thousand, had fled with their Russian benefactors. GermanSonderkommandos manned by Latvian auxiliary police, usually relatives of the Russians’victims, had murdered about thirty thousand Jews by October 1941.26 In OctoberHitler ordered a big concentration camp built just outside Riga to house theJews expelled from the Reich and the occupied Czech territories. A site was eventuallychosen at Salaspils to house twenty-five thousand Jews from Germany.27 Butconstruction was delayed, and when they were told to expect these twenty-five thousandto begin arriving on November 10, with another twenty-five thousand boundfor Minsk, Rosenberg’s officials appealed for a postponement.28 The army also protestedat this needless burden on already scarce railroad capacity.29For this and other reasons, by November 21 only seven thousand of Berlin’s 77,000Jews had been expelled by November 21.30 Ten times that number remained. At theend of November, Speer’s diary records, he booted three thousand more out of theirapartments.31Goebbels uttered not the slightest sympathy for these innocent victims of his obsession,although he was well aware that public resistance was growing. He realisedthat if they ordered all Jews to give up their seats, for instance, they would soon havesixteen year old Nazis harassing half-blind seventy-year-old Jewesses, and there wouldbe a public mutiny. They must go for an indirect approach, for instance subway postersproclaiming ‘The Jews are our misfortune,’ with texts explaining precisely why.32Cruel mishaps began to occur. Goebbels had denied to film actor Joachim Gottschalkthe role of Leitwein in the new colour film ‘The Golden City’ unless he divorce hisJewish wife or at least force her to emigrate to Switzerland.33 When the star’s colleaguesinterceded for him, Goebbels screamed at them about the ‘sexual serfdom’of simple ex-matelots like Gottschalk who were, he said, an easy prey for the sexualGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 675knavery of Jewesses. Refused the role, Gottschalk killed himself, his wife Meta, andhis eight-year old son Michael that November. Goebbels dictated in his diary: ‘Weare living in very harsh times and fate is sometimes pitiless toward the individual.’34He then gave the screw another heartless twist. Already deprived of their own telephones,he forbade Jews to use public payphones either. In a cynical and not unrelatedruling, he prohibited the use of the word liquidation in connection with their‘summary executions in the east.’ That word, he said, was to be reserved for thecrimes perpetrated by the Soviets.35IT was during these same weeks that he dictated his tract entitled ‘The Jews are toBlame.’36 He ordered it given the widest circulation on the eastern front.37It appeared in Das Reich on November 16, 1941. A few excerpts suffice to illustrateits pernicious thrust. ‘The Jews wanted this war,’ he argued, ‘and now they have it.’They were getting their just desserts. An eye for an eye. All Jews alike, whetherlanguishing in an eastern ghetto or trumpeting for war from New York, were conspiringagainst Germany. The Yellow Star, he argued, was akin to a ‘hygienic prophylactic,’because the most dangerous were those otherwise not recognizable as Jews.To those who might bleat that the Jews were humans too he pointed out that thesame could be said of muggers, rapists, and pimps. ‘Suddenly one has the impressionthat all of Berlin’s Jews are either darling little babies who wouldn’t hurt a fly, orfragile old ladies.’ ‘Were we to lose this war,’ he continued, ‘these oh-so harmlessJewish worthies would suddenly turn into rapacious wolves… That’s what happenedin Bessarabia and the Baltic states after the bolsheviks marched in, and neither thepeople nor the governments there had had the slightest sympathy for them. For us,in our fight against the Jews, there is no going back.’The article displayed a far more uncompromising face that Hitler’s towards theJews. When Hitler came to Berlin for Ernst Udet’s funeral he again instructedGoebbels to pursue a policy against the Jews ‘that does not cause us endless difficulties,’and told him to go easy of mixed-marriages in future.38676 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHDieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann’s closest associates, would describe this Goebbelsarticle as a watershed in the final Solution of the Jewish Problem.39 The S.S. took it asa sign from above. On the last day of November, on the orders of the local S.S.commander Friedrich Jeckeln, four thousand of Riga’s unwanted Jews were truckedfive miles down the Dvinsk highway to Skiatowa, plundered, and machine-gunnedinto two or three pits.40 According to one army colonel who witnessed it a trainloadof Jews from Berlin—those expelled three days before—arrived in the midst of thisAktion; its passengers were taken straight out to the pits and shot.41 This happenedeven as Hitler, hundreds of miles away in the Wolf’s Lair, was instructing Himmlerthat these Berlin Jews were not to be liquidated.42ON the eastern front bitter frost suddenly replaced the autumn quagmires. Longfreezing nights gripped Central Europe. With them came the British bombers.Thebunker at No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse was hung with costly paintings; therewere armchairs, a bath, and air conditioning. On November 13 he told his adjutantto see to it that a piano was installed.43 The Goebbels children were now back, livingout in Schwanenwerder with Magda.44 But the matrimonial strains were also returning.Later in November the diary hears of Goebbels badgering an ‘understanding’Hitler about ‘a series of personal problems.’45It would be wrong to infer that he had no concern for his non-Jewish fellow Germans.He pestered Speer to provide more shelters.46 He was the first to questionwhether the army had made proper provision for the coming winter.47 The words‘met. report’ began to figure on his daily agenda. He had asked the army monthsbefore, in August, if he should announce a ski collection; General Jodl had scrawledin