Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

vehicle for the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, aformer mayor of Calcutta whom he interviewed in July.35 The bamboo rod, he ordered,must become a symbol of British rule in India ‘like the police truncheon inthe System era [i.e., the Weimar republic] in Germany.’36As Churchill travelled to Washington Goebbels asked his editors to comment onthe prime minister’s habit of fleeing abroad each time things went wrong. ‘Tobruk,’he wrote, as Rommel captured the strategic North African port, ‘is our revenge forCologne.’ While Britain’s drunken dilettante was squandering his bombers on civiliantargets, she was losing vital battles elsewhere through lack of air power. ‘Churchillis victorious in Parliament,’ he mocked after the British prime minister survivedanother vote of confidence in July 1942: ‘But Germany wins the wars.’37This did not include however the guerilla war. When Heydrich died of his injuries,the Nazis liquidated the Czech village which had harboured his assassins.38 The Czechsas a whole had condemned the murder, and when Schirach talked loosely of riddingVienna of its Czech minority Bormann reminded all the gauleiters that Hitler hadforbidden any such measures.39 There were other gaffes. In France S.S. BrigadeführerCarl Oberg announced plans to execute all the male kinsfolk of assassins: their womenGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 711would be sent to hard labour, and their children to orphanages. Goebbels said thatOberg’s proposals violated every propaganda principle. The inclusion of women andchildren was a gift to the enemy, he said; and hostages should always be taken fromthe same political spectrum as the culprits.40He attributed the ominous growth of partisan warfare in Russia to the absence ofany coherent Ostpolitik.41 Earlier in 1942 he had issued guidelines on how to winover all the occupied populations.42 Russian prisoners were unanimous under Naziinterrogation that they ‘preferred to die on their feet than to live on their knees.’43 ToHitler he hinted that they should set up puppet governments in the Ukraine andBaltic states.44 ‘You can’t rule Russia from Berlin,’ he said, criticizing Rosenberg.45He felt the latter was impractical, naïve, and hopeless at organisation.46 He drafted adecree guaranteeing religious freedom to the Russians, and determined to secureHitler’s approval the next time they met.47 He felt sure that Hitler was being kept inthe dark about the partisan war. From all quarters he was urged to take it up withhim.48 He sent Walter Tiessler to point out to Rosenberg once again that their enemywas bolshevism, not Russia as such. Rosenberg ducked the issue, and the infightingwent on.49Another problem was that German visitors to Russia, like the archæologists thatRosenberg had recently sent, were finding things there less primitive than Goebbelshad painted.50 The Germans were learning that the Russians too were capable offighting and dying for a cause. Russian commanders outnumbered in the fighting forSevastopol had chosen to blow up their entire position rather than surrender. Knowingthe German weakness for heroic idols, Goebbels suppressed all such reports.‘National Socialism,’ he lectured to his staff, ‘teaches that bolshevism is not an ideology,but the effluence of subhuman, criminal, and Jewish instincts.’ He could neverforget that in their midst lived five million former communist voters: the disease wasonly in remission; it had not been extinguished. The sewer rat, he said, reverting tocustomary Nazi imagery, would always prove more hardy than the domestic pet.Thus their reporting must distinguish between the heroism of the German soldierand the animal survival-instinct of the Russians.51 He wrote an essay on this problem712 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHfor Das Reich and circulated it throughout the party. ‘The superior race will triumphover the inferior one,’ he asserted, ‘no matter what infernal means the latter may useto escape its personal fate.’52BRITAIN’S fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. Rommel’s exhausted Axis armiesreached El-Alamein and dug in, Goebbels’ propaganda blared promises of independenceto the Egyptians. On the high seas Hitler’s submarines had sunk seven hundredthousand tons of shipping during June. In the first days of July his submarines andbombers in the Arctic mauled the Russia-bound Anglo-American convoy PQ.17 sobadly that the next convoy-run was abandoned.Stalin, speculated Goebbels, must be furious with Churchill’s failure. Perhaps hewould one day be willing to come to terms. Germany would certainly not reject anyovertures.53 From his close study of Soviet newsreels he concluded that Stalin was aquiet, dogged type; head and shoulders above the pigmies of the western democracies.‘That man has style,’ he said.54 Moscow’s clamour for a Second Front—a Britishinvasion of the continent—grew throughout July.55 On the twenty-third Goebbelswarned his staff that given Churchill’s ‘unstable’ character an invasion in the westwas quite probable.56 German propaganda had, he pointed out, no interest in provokingsuch an event; on the contrary, they must do all they could to help Mr Churchillrepresent his air raids as a viable substitute for a Second Front.57 He dealt with suchan invasion in a Reich article on August 2, entitled ‘Don’t even try it.’ Its sardonictone almost violated his own guidelines: ‘We extend to the British a hearty invitationto come over,’ he taunted. ‘We hope they’ll bring a few Americans along too…’58Churchill hurried to Moscow. Goebbels ordered the Nazi media to dwell on everydetail of the prime minister’s humiliation—for example, that Stalin did not evenbother to meet him at the airport.59Hitler had meanwhile shifted his summer HQ to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. In midAugust he asked Goebbels to fly down to discuss the domestic situation ‘and foreignpolicy,’ as the minister noted. ‘He also intends to give me special powers to take overcivil defence.’60 He had spent several days touring the blitzed cities.61 As his planeGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 713landed at Vinnitsa on August 19 events in France were taking a dramatic turn. Twobrigades of Canadian troops were storming the beaches on either side of Dieppe. Bymidday the landing force had been all but wiped out.62 Hitler told Goebbels the nextday what had happened. A German Channel convoy had stumbled on the invasionforce. ‘Thus,’ dictated Goebbels in his diary, ‘we had the first report that somethingwas afoot out there in the murk and fog as early as 4:28 A.M.’ A German submarinechaser had rammed one landing craft, a second