Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

for deportation. What might be their fate? On March 27,the day before this trainload left Berlin, Goebbels dictated an extraordinary, deadpanbut spine-chilling entry into his diary which confirmed that he at least was now inlittle doubt.Beginning with Lublin the Jews are now being deported eastward from theGovernment-General [former Poland]. The procedure is pretty barbaric, and onethat beggars description, and there’s not much left of the Jews. Broadly speakingone can probably say that sixty percent of them will have to be liquidated, whileonly forty percent can be put to work.‘The former gauleiter of Vienna,’ he continued, referring to S.S. BrigadeführerOdilo Globocnik, S.S. and police chief of the Lublin District, ‘who is carrying outthis operation, is doing so pretty discreetly and also using a procedure that is not tooblatant.’43 Goebbels added that the Jews had had it coming to them for a long time;he cited yet again Hitler’s prophecy of 1939, and the need to eschew all mawkish694 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHsentimentality. ‘It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewishbacillus,’ he concluded, unconsciously adopting Hitler’s favourite analogy. ‘Here too,’he dictated to his poker-faced stenographer, ‘the Führer is the staunch champion andpromoter of a radical solution.’44Nowhere do the diary’s seventy thousand pages refer to an explicit order by Hitlerfor the murder of the Jews. (Perhaps this is not surprising, but for the sake of completenessit needs saying.) Goebbels instinctively couched every phrase of those diarieswith both cunning and ambiguity. The documents clearly show Hitler as theuncompromising architect of the plan to shunt all Europe’s Jews out, failing Madagascar,to the east. The Polish ghettos emptied by this process would be replenishedwith Jews deported from the Reich. ‘The Jews,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘have nothing tolaugh about.’45 They were having to pay dearly for the misdeeds of their brethren inBritain and America: such was his rationale. On March 28 he stipulated that theywere no longer to be listed in telephone directories.46 Why should they be? Theywere disappearing from the face of occupied Europe.HE can deceive his diary, dictating touching entries calculated to portray their authorto posterity as a caring family man; but he cannot deceive his own mother. Sometimesshe is seen haunting the opulent halls and galleries at No.20 Hermann-GöringStrasse laughing softly to herself as though she cannot believe that the frenetic demoncontrolling this evil empire is little Jupp, her youngest son, the waiflike cripplethe she nursed through infancy. She barely speaks to others, and when she does herthick Rhineland dialect comes as a shock to them.47Once again, pleading problems with her heart, Magda leaves him for a month-longcure in Dresden beginning on January 21.48 Sometimes he goes over to see his favouritesister Maria, or to talk things over with his mother. They tell him hometruths about public attitudes.49 He takes his two oldest daughters and sleepy littleHelmut out to Lanke. It is his first visit there in three months, and the lovely UrsulaQuandt stands in for Magda.50 He lets the children play truant on the pretext thattheir younger sisters at Schwanenwerder have whooping cough. They spend happyGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 695hours sledding in the snow—the same snow which is shrouding Europe and wreakinghavoc on his Jewish evacuation timetable.51 On the last day of April he moves outto Lanke in a vain attempt to cure a bout of eczema, a chronic health problem.52One evening he is visited here by a ghost from the past, Anka Stalherm, now fortysix,editor of Dame and without even a trace of grey defiling her blonde hair. Hersecond husband Rudolf Oswald, fifteen years her junior, has just been killed on theeastern front. She mentions that there are still some (Jewish) Ullstein hold-outs leftat her magazine’s publisher, Deutscher Verlag. Goebbels promises to clear them out,but all the quivering, painful tendresse of their earlier relationship has faded andgone away.53HE believed that the winter’s crisis had now passed its lowest point.54 Morale hadbeen depressed all winter by the epidemics of frostbite and typhus ravaging the armiesin the east.55 In North Africa Rommel recaptured Benghazi and lunged on towardTobruk. Goebbels promoted him to a national hero, although the High Commandwas not keen. He found that unlike the navy and air force the army discouragedall hero-worship of its commanders.56Churchill had no such inhibitions. Goebbels had long realised that he had met hismatch. ‘A clever speech,’ he wrote after one Churchill offering a year earlier.57 Afterlistening to one speech by the prime minister in Birmingham he had enviously written,‘He plays on the tear glands, the old crook.’ In Das Reich however he decried theway that his readers fawned on the British enemy. ‘Churchill,’ he scornfully told hisstaff, ‘is one of those hippopotamus types who, when they contemplate the devastationin England, return to London not only reassured but actually reinvigorated.’ Hescoffed at Churchill’s use of language. ‘Thus we sent to Greece a large part of ourArmy of the Nile,’ he mimicked him, ‘to meet our obligations. It transpired by chancethat the formations to hand all came from New Zealand and Australia…’ ‘It’s always“chance” that finds the British bringing up the rear,’ he mocked, spelling out propagandalines to his staff. ‘Chance that they are always on the retreat. By chance they haveno share in the bloody casualties. By chance it is the French, the Belgians, and the696 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHDutch who had to bear the brunt of our western offensive. By chance the Norwegianshave to cover the British as they flee Norway. And by chance it is the troops of theEmpire who, since there are no others left, have to do the job now.’58 Having said allthat, however, he warned against denigrating the British soldier; the British might letothers bear the brunt of the fighting, but when cornered they fought like wildcats.59He became obsessed with Churchill. In Das Reich he referred to him as ‘that oldwhisky soak’ but admitted, ‘A chronic whisky drinker is more welcome as Britain’sprime minister than a teetotaller.’60 He and Hitler devoured the fond if scurrilousbook in which Churchill’s private secretary described his drinking habits and hiscustom