Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

enthusiasm, and the small German lead was lost.81CONVENTIONAL bombing already seemed destructive enough. On Saturday March 28GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 699Churchill’s bombers set mediæval Lübeck on fire. Gauleiter Kaufmann told Goebbelsthat it was unlike any raid that had gone before. When Hitler phoned, raging that hehad been unable to raise the ministry of the interior by telephone at all, Goebbelsasked for full powers to arrange emergency food and clothing for the city.82He discovered that most of his fellow ministers went missing on Friday evenings.The war department not only shut down every weekend but took off Wednesdayafternoons too, as though it were still peacetime.He complained to Hitler too about recent politically incorrect decisions by theirlawyers and suggested they create a special category of offences against the NationalSocialist code, which would be punishable even by death.83 This would enable theNazi lawyers to deal with those elements which had eluded them so far. He alsorecommended appointing the Nazi judge Dr Otto Thierack, the tough head of thePeople’s Court, to succeed Franz Gutterer as minister of justice. Hitler however hadalready decided to go even further: he told Goebbels that he would going to ask theReichstag to grant him absolute powers, so that he could prosecute what he calledsaboteurs. He made the speech on April 26.84 ‘What was the point of that!’ exclaimedGoebbels to his staff afterwards, and mimicked: ‘One Nation, One Reich, one Führer!’‘We hear that all the time,’ he added, ‘and then Mr Hitler stands up and asks forabsolute powers so he can tell a few red-tape merchants to go to hell if he needs to.’He shuddered at what the foreign press would make of it. ‘That’s another fine mess,’he snapped to Magda, reading out the press summaries to her—the London DailyMail, the Daily Herald, and the B.B.C. had scoffed mercilessly at Hitler’s speech.85The Jewish exodus had resumed on March 28, 1942 after a two-month hiatus.86 Atrain had left Berlin that day for Travniki with 974 Jews. He ordered a comprehensivefilm record made.87 ‘About a thousand a week are now being shipped out to the east,’dictated Goebbels. ‘The suicide rate among these Jewish evacuees is extremely high,’he added without emotion. ‘It’s no skin off my nose. The Jews have had it coming tothem… They ignored our warnings, and now they’re paying for it.’88 Another trainleft on April 2 with 654 Berlin Jews, and a third with sixty-five, also bound forTravniki, on April 14. There was then another halt. It would not be easy to get rid of700 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHthe rest, some forty thousand, because only complete families could be deported: ifeven one member was exempt, so was the whole family.89 Controversy was rife aboutwhat to do with the half-Jews—sterilize them, or deport with all that that implied?‘There is no doubt,’ Goebbels conceded, ‘that these do pose a serious obstacle to theradical solution of the Jewish problem.’90The partisan war was claiming thousands of lives in the east, among them Tonak,Goebbels’ trusty former chauffeur, gunned down and buried in swamplands west ofR’zhev.91 ‘The Jews get short shrift in all the occupied territories,’ Goebbels dictatedafter reading the latest S.D. report on the partisans. ‘Tens of thousands are beingwiped out.’ He never tired of repeating Hitler’s sinister 1939 prophecy, and did soagain.92 From Moscow came reports on a Jewish congress uttering bloodthirsty threatsof retribution once Hitler was overthrown. ‘But that cannot be,’ dictated Goebbels.‘That must not be, and that shall not be.’93Fears for his own safety were never far from his mind. He saw every living Jew asa potential assassin. Nine-tenths of the assassinations in Paris were being committedby Jews, which was, he accepted, hardly surprising under the circumstances. ‘It wouldbe best either to deport the remaining yids from Paris, or to liquidate the lot.’94 Hewas planning an elaborate public trial of Herschel Grynszpan, who had fallen intoNazi hands in 1940, but the assassin’s crafty lawyers had now invented the theorythat he and his victim vom Rath had been homosexual lovers. This was propagandadynamite for the enemy. The minister of justice included the infamous allegation inthe indictment, and, worse, ruled that the trial should allow public discussion of thedeportation of the Jews—a development which Goebbels found ‘incredibly inept.’95Thus the Grynszpan affair turned to ashes in his hands. Gutterer reviewed the dossierand advised him to abandon the prosecution entirely.96 The Grynszpan case wasput on ice; indeed, he survived the war—Gutterer was told he had sat at the back ofa Hamburg court-room in the fifties when he himself was on trial—one of the ultimateironies of the Final Solution which his pistol shots in 1938 had helped to unleash.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 7011 Unpubl. diary, Jan 11, 1942 (NA film T84, roll 267).2 Ibid., Jan 8, 1942.3 MinConf., Dec 12, 1941.4 Ibid., Dec 18, 1941.5 Ibid., Jan 27 (NA film T84, roll 260); and MinConf., Mar 6, 10, 1942.6 Unpubl. diary, Jan 9, 1942.7 MinConf., Dec 7, 11, 1941; for a discussion of JG’s tactics after the German winter setbackssee NYT, Jan 11, 18 (magazine), 23, and Apr 12, 1942.8 Ursula Backe diary, Dec 29, 1941, recording a phone call from Berndt to Backe.9 Diary, Dec 12, 1941, Jan 21, 1942.10 Ibid., Dec 19, 1941.11 Schirmeister interrogation, May 6, 1946 (NA film M.1270, roll 19); and letter to GMoltmann, 1959, VfZ, 1964, 13ff.12 MinConf., Dec 12, 1941.13 Diary, Jan 23, 1942.—Most of the women vanished into Russian captivity in 1945 andwere not seen again. For the diary of one unnamed 19 year old RMVP secretary from Jan 28,1942 to 1944 see BA file Kl.Erw.716.14 Statistics until Jan 20 in MinConf., Feb 4, 1942.15 JG, ‘Das neue Jahr,’ Das Reich, Jan 4, 1942; cf. Das eherne Herz. Reden und Aufsätze (Munich1943), 168, and NYT, Jan 3, 1942.16 Heinrich Heim, table talk, Jan 18–19, 1941 (Genoud papers).17 Partly unpubl. diary, Jan 20, 1942.18 Unpubl. diary Jan 21, 21, 1942 (NA film T84, roll 260).19 Behrend, op. cit., No.21, May 24, 1952.—Schirmeister returned from the easternfront to RMVP Jan 20; see unpubl. diary, Jan 21,