Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

of Jewish evacuees arrived there.Hans Frank’s Government-General (former Poland) was flatly refusing to accept anymore—Frank had exclaimed irritably at one of his Cabinet meetings in Kraków thatBerlin was telling them they’d got no use for the Jews either. ‘Liquidate them yourselves!’was his retort.23 Two more batches, of 1,037 and 1,006 Jews, had left Berlinfor Riga on January 13, and 19; but the train which left Berlin, also for Riga, onJanuary 25, loaded with 1,051 Jews, was the last batch for two months.24Goebbels heard his Führer recall, in his speech of January 30, the sinister prophecywhich he had made exactly three years before that this war would bring the ‘destruc-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 691tion of Jewry.’25 His own evil deportation project temporarily thwarted by the wintertransportation crisis, Goebbels devised a string of regulations calculated to houndand harass the Jews as he had in 1938.26 He ordered one Jew punished for usingcoffee rations given him by a non-Jew.27 He forbade Jews to use public transport atall, apart from those still working in the munitions factories.28 He prohibited Jewsfrom ordering newspapers by mail, from buying them at kiosks, and from havingthem delivered.29In February his legal experts preparing the trial of Vom Rath’s assassin Grynszpanin Paris reported that the former foreign minister Georges Bonnet was willing totestify that the Jews had pressured France into declaring war in 1939.30 After lunchingwith Hitler a few days later Goebbels dictated that it was their historic duty toeradicate this ‘Jewish terrorism’, like the Soviet secret police atrocities, from Europe.‘The Führer once again expresses his ruthless resolve to make a clean sweep ofthe Jews out of Europe. One can’t go getting all sentimental about it. The Jews haverichly deserved the catastrophe they are suffering today… We have to accelerate thisprocess with a studied ruthlessness and we are thereby doing an invaluable servicesto a long-suffering mankind tormented for millenia by the Jews.’ Hitler, he claimed,had ordered him to convert those who were still in two minds about this. ‘The majorprospects opened up by war are recognized by the Führer in all their significance.’Fuelling the raging fires of his own prejudices, Goebbels spent an evening watching‘The Dybbuk,’ a Polish Yiddish film. ‘Its effect is so antisemitic that one can onlymarvel how little the Jews … realize what non-Jews find repellent. Watching thisfilm,’ he continued, ‘one perceives once more that the Jewish race is the most dangerouson earth, and that one must display neither mercy nor softness toward it.’31IT is important, reading entries like this, to recall that Goebbels’ diary is not abovecriticism as a source. Firstly, it was now dictated each morning to a private secretary,and typed out in triplicate by clerks. Secondly, analysis of earlier entries, like thoseconcerning the 1931 ‘bomb attempt’ on Goebbels, the references to Magda andLida, and those written at the time of the Night of Broken Glass, show that the692 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHdiaries are acceptable only as evidence against Goebbels, but not necessarily againstthird parties. A strict distinction must be drawn therefore between what he admitsputting to his Führer, and what he alleges the Führer put to him.Hitler was even now less radical on the Jewish Problem than Goebbels, Himmler,Heydrich, and Speer. He was prevaricating and, according to Eichmann, saw in theJewish colonisation of Magadascar the real Final Solution.32 But Goebbels was poweredby the unflickering light of a an unwavering, ineradicable antisemitism. It delightedhis evil heart when there was an outcry in London against Jewish spivs andblack marketeers. ‘The Jews are the same all the world over,’ he gloated. ‘You eitherhave to slap a Yellow Star on them, or throw them into a concentration camp, orshoot them.’33 On March 5 he received a report from Heydrich about guerilla warfarein the occupied east, and blamed this on the Jews too. ‘It is therefore understandable,’he dictated to Otte, ‘that many of them must pay with their lives for this.Anyway, in my view the more Jews who are liquidated the more consolidated thesituation in Europe will be after the war. Let there be no phony sentimentalismabout it. The Jews are Europe’s misfortune. They must somehow be eliminated otherwisewe are in danger of being eliminated by them.’34On the following day he took note of an extensive report by Heydrich’s office,probably on the Wannsee conference.35 There were still eleven million Jews in Europe,he dictated, summarizing the document. ‘For the time being they are to beconcentrated in the east [until] later; possibly an island like Madagascar can be assignedto them after the war.’ It all raised a host of ‘delicate questions,’ like what todo with half-Jews and people like the late Gottschalk, Aryans married to Jews. ‘Undoubtedlythere will be a multitude of personal tragedies,’ he wrote airily, ‘But this isunavoidable. The situation now is ripe for a final settlement of the Jewish question.’36The covering letter from Heydrich invited Goebbels to a second conference, at hisheadquarters in Kurfürsten Strasse on March 6. Goebbels sent two of his senior staff,Oberregierungsrat Pay Carstensen of the propaganda division, and Dr Schmidt-Burgk,of its eastern territories sub-section.37 The conference was raw with untutored remarks.Eichmann talked crudely of ‘forwarding’ the Jews, like so many head of cat-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 693tle; and when one civil servant objected that they could hardly proceed against lawabidingJewish citizens, Eichmann’s rough-tongued adjutant S.S. SturmbannführerGünther remarked cynically, ‘That’s up to our judgement as policemen.’38 The ministryof justice handled the report like a hot potato.39 The Reich Chancellery referredit all to Hitler.40 Hitler told Hans Lammers categorically that he wanted the solutionof the Jewish problem postponed until after the war was over—a ruling that remarkablyfew historians now seem disposed to quote.41As the Soviet partisans intensified their deadly war that spring the security service(S.D.) reported that the culprits were the political commissars and the Jews. ‘It hastherefore proved necessary once again,’ dictated Goebbels, ‘to shoot more Jews…Any sentimentalism,’ he continued, referring to a quality that did not abound in hisheart, ‘is out of place.’42By now the two-month railroad log-jam was over and another train was beingloaded with Jews marked