Goebbels45: At any PriceTOURING Austria’s principal cities in 1942 to celebrate the fourth anniversaryof the Anschluss Goebbels launched a new slogan, ‘Victory at any Price.’1 Aquarter of a million troops had already died in Barbarossa. British air raids and reducedfood rations were eroding public morale.2 Goebbels ordered propaganda onslaughtson the enemies within: he listed black marketeering, excessive paperwork,and—an eternal quest—the surliness of public servants like waiters, transport workers,and post office clerks.3 Oblivious of the double-standards involved, he persuadedHitler and Bormann to crack down on the sybaritic lifestyle of top Nazis.4 He thenprivately authorised the party’s acquisition and total renovation of a château in hisnative Rheydt for his exclusive use.5 He generously started public collections of textilesand mosquito nets for the eastern front.6 To the former he contributed a suit,Magda her riding breeches—Hanke had now gallopped out of her life—and Haraldhis Hitler Youth uniform; they also gave raincoats, trenchcoats, and gabardine coats,as well as two silk dresses, a long evening dress, and a nurse’s cloak.7Hitler had repeatedly ordered the church problem postponed, like the Jewish problem,until the war was over. Disregarding him, the party’s ‘radicalinskis,’ as Goebbelscalled them, confiscated several church buildings in Berlin.8 Hitler reassured himthat once this war was over he too would give no quarter to the clergy who wereacting in such a ‘vile’ way while their soldiers were fighting for their lives. The momenthis hands were free who would settle this mutinous clergy’s hash, once and for706 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHall. Goebbels looked forward to this new battle as one of the great ideological conflictsof all time.9Death and destruction continued to come from the heavens over Germany. Goebbelshad believed that the Lübeck raid was just a fluke, but he was mistaken. After a punyraid on Cologne led him to remark that that was all the British were now capable of,on April 23 they began a series of four fire raids on Rostock.10 It seemed that shuttingdown their evening broadcast had not hampered the British navigators at all. Even soGoebbels was unwilling to resume broadcasts, fearing that Göring would make hima scapegoat for the next catastrophe.11 Hitler told him that he was ordering reprisalraids against historic British towns like Bath. Goebbels hoped for propaganda profitfrom wiping out these ‘cultural centres, watering holes, and middle-class towns,’ oras he called it, ‘Answering terror with terror.’12Sensing that these fire raids had inclined Hitler toward radical solutions, Goebbelsfelt it a propitious moment to mention the Berlin Jews again. Hitler reiterated hisstand-point. ‘He wants to force the Jews right out of Europe,’ dictated Goebbels.‘The Jews have inflicted such suffering on our continent that the harshest punishment… is still too mild.’13FOR most of May 1942 he lingered out at Lanke fighting his eczema. Gutterer chairedthe ministerial conferences in his absence. Returning with his affliction still uncuredhe heard that unknown assassins had maimed Heydrich in Prague. This episode triggeredfurther antisemitic impulses in Goebbels, who was already concerned for hisown security (he had years before remarked to journalists that if there was one wordthey had to shun as the Devil shunned Holy Water it was surely ‘assassination.’) Itcheered him when his old comrade Kurt Daluege, standing in for the mortallywounded Heydrich in Prague, had a thousand intellectuals shot. ‘Assassinations canset a bad example if we don’t act ruthlessly against them,’ noted Goebbels, and hetook harsh action against the remaining Jews in Berlin, ordering the arrest of fivehundred and notifying their community that he would have one hundred shot forevery Jewish act of sabotage or murder, though his authority to do this seems ob-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 707scure.14 ‘I have no desire,’ he explained in his diary, ‘to have a bullet pumped into mybelly by some twenty-two year old yid from the east. Give me ten Jews in a concentrationcamp, or under the sod, to one at large any day.’15The fate awaiting the deportees was evidently deadly and swift. Only nine daysafter one round-up, that on May 27, the Berlin Gestapo was already writing to thetax authorities attaching a list of ‘those who have since died’ and the assets they haddeclared.16 Lunching with Hitler on May 29 Goebbels persuaded him to instructSpeer, now munitions minister, to have Jewish munitions workers replaced by foreigners.That would remove the exemption from deportation on hundreds of Jewishfamilies. Implying that he was well aware of the ultimate fate of the evacuees Goebbelsdictated that he saw a major danger in having forty thousand Jews ‘with nothingmore to lose’ running loose in the Reich capital. He incidentally also advised Hitlerto liquidate Berlin’s prison population while he could. ‘We have lost so many idealistsin this war,’ echoed Goebbels, thinking of Tonak, ‘that we have to exact a likemeasure from the negative criminal fraternity.’17Hitler told him he saw the hand of the Jews behind many plots fronted
