Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

theresumption of the British air raids. Single-line references to enemy air activity in theHigh Command communiqué would no longer suffice. He set up propaganda companieswith no other task than to dramatise the coming blitz and the heroism of thepeople.11IN this secret speech to Berlin’s top journalists, Goebbels was astonishingly frankabout the fate of Berlin’s Jews. Justifying the reporting restrictions imposed, he explainedthat every ill-considered sentence was liable to be reported abroad by theJews. ‘This conduct of the Jews is understandable enough,’ he added, according tothe transcript. ‘In Berlin there are still forty-eight thousand of them.12 They knowwith deadly certainty that in the course of this war they will be deported to the eastand left to their murderous fate. They can already sense the inexorable tread of physicalannihilation and therefore, so long as they live, they inflict damage on the Reichwhenever they can.’13Small wonder that the world’s Jews mobilized against Nazi Germany. In London,rabbis rallied to the slogan, ‘England awake!’ Goebbels derided this as a plagiarism ofthe Nazis’ own rallying-call.14 In Jerusalem, Jews at the Wailing Wall placed an ancientcurse on him. ‘I have yet to observe any untoward effects,’ he noted.15His humour was ill-chosen. The deportations from Berlin had resumed. To silencepublic disquiet Goebbels ordered the bourgeois press to feature reports on hostileJewish activities abroad.16 Trainloads of elderly Jews had begun leaving Berlin in Junefor Theresienstadt, the model camp for ‘old folks’. On July 11 the first trainloadbound for Auschwitz left Berlin with 210 Jews aboard.17 In mid August Berlin packedoff 1,004 more Jews to Riga, followed by 790 on September 5; on the twenty-sixth811 would be shipped to Reval. That day he noted that all Jews were to be excludedfrom fats and meat rations, except those still working in the munitions industry whowould receive only the heavy-labour supplements.18 (The actual regulations were720 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHeven more pitiless than his diary suggested: meat and bread rations were cancelledfor all Jews other than those married to non-Jews or wounded in the first world war;further, no Jews were to receive milk except infants, an interesting detail; any foodpackets received from abroad were to be deducted from Jews’ ration cards; gifts oftea and coffee were to be confiscated and distributed to field hospitals.19)Seventeen thousand Jews working in industry were still exempt from deportation.According to Goebbels’ diary, Hitler agreed with his venomous comments on howtheir intellectuals and economists were everywhere discovering ‘indispensable’ Jewishskilled workers who just had to be spared.20 In Goebbels’ view, since they nowhad 240,000 foreign workers in Berlin it should not be too hard to replace the exemptJews too.21 Two more trainloads of Jews left Berlin in October carrying 963Jews to Riga and 791 more vaguely—and sinisterly—simply to ‘the east.’He was still dissatisfied, as the level hardly seemed to decline. He learned thatmany of Berlin’s judges were half-Jews transferred there by other cities in the beliefthat they would be less of an eyesore there. ‘Berlin is not a garbage tip,’ he exclaimed.‘I fought to make Berlin a model national socialist city.’22 In a letter to the new ministerof justice Otto Thierack he proposed simply declaring all Jews ‘unconditionallydisposable’—the word he used, ausrottbar, has uglier connotations—and commendedto him ‘the concept of annihilation through work.’23 Thierack however was unexpectedlyunsympathetic. Some, he pointed out, were half-Jews whose sons had alreadydied in this war. ‘So long as the Führer won’t allow us to address the broaderissue of those with Jewish blood or in-laws,’ Thierack said, ‘we can’t carry out anAktion confined to the legal system.’24 At a meeting chaired by Eichmann that monththe civil servants became bogged down in bureaucratic minutiæ.25 Frustrated,Goebbels said that he was sure their Jews were a vital link to the enemy, helping theBritish bomber crews to select and find their targets. He set himself a new target: hewould rid Berlin of its remaining Jews by March 1943.26Ugly rumours were already circulating abroad, fuelled by British propaganda. TheDaily Telegraph quoted Polish claims that seven thousand of Warsaw’s Jews were beingkilled each day, often in what it called ‘gas chambers’; one of Goebbels’ worried civilGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 721servants telexed a request for information to Hans Frank’s press office in Krakówand to the propaganda field office in Warsaw. The reassuring reply spoke of the Jewsbeing used to construct defences and roads. Be that as it may, in Goebbels’ files theoriginal press report, which had just summarised the British newspaper item, wasrubber-stamped Geheime Reichssache, top state secret.27How much did Goebbels know? In his surviving files there is plenty that implies abroad general knowledge of the atrocities. Reporting back to him on November 11,his legal expert Dr Hans Schmidt-Leonhardt, whom he had sent to inspect conditionsin Hans Frank’s Polish dominions, noted that the Warsaw police had deemed ittoo dangerous to visit the ghetto there; in the Kraków ghetto he had found all theJews put to work; in Lublin the ghetto had already been cleared away, and there werenow bloody disturbances. ‘As a Geheime Reichssache,’ dictated the lawyer, ‘Frank relatedto us the following characteristic recent instance:—’ But whatever it was wecannot know, as Goebbels’ shocked staff cut off the rest of the page that is filed in hisministry’s records.28In February 1943 Dr Fritz Prause, a senior staff member, briefed Goebbels on thecontinued terrorist incidents resulting from their occupation policies—the Germanshad begun rounding up Poles in cinemas and churches for slave labour. A posterappealing to ‘Poles of German origin’ had generated speculation about the likely fateof the rest. ‘The rumour is spreading,’ Prause reported, ‘that the same fate nowawaits the Poles as has been meted out to the Jews, and there is not a Pole in theGovernment-General who does not know precisely what has been done to them.’‘One thing is certain,’ recommended Dr Prause: ‘That the current derogatory slogan“Pole equals Jew” is no longer viable for the Government-General, particularlysince the above-mentioned rumours dwell heavily on what is known to have becomeof the Jews.’29The wave of terrorist attacks continued. In the first quarter of 1943 forty-fourGermans were assassinated in Warsaw. In April