Goebbels47: Things have not Panned outHOW much longer,’ Dr Goebbels challenged his loyal press officer Schirmeisterthat autumn, ‘do you think this war’s going to last?’‘If it goes on like this,’ hedged Schirmeister, ‘we might end it next year.’Goebbels looked at him expressionlessly. ‘I don’t know,’ he murmured.1As Germany’s fortunes declined, his own would improve. The more the skies darkened,the more the people needed reminding that the darkest hour comes before thedawn; the more Hitler immured himself in his remote HQ, the more somebody elsehad to take control at the centre. From December 1942 Goebbels started to cultivatehis fellow gauleiters, inviting them round to his ministry.2 Many of them wereveterans of the earliest days of the party. He saw in them an elite upon whom to fallback when the going got tougher. He was apprehensive lest any gauleiter suspect hemight be trying to usurp Hitler’s powers, let alone those of the roughneck MartinBormann, their titular head; Bormann took pains to hold Goebbels and all others ofsuperior intelligence at arm’s length from his Führer.Writing in Das Reich Goebbels had defined, ‘Nations and mankind alike are at theirstrongest when fighting for survival.’3 It was to this survival instinct in the Germansthat he now appealed. The British recognized the magnetism of his ‘Strength throughFear’ propaganda and tried to undermine it by attacking him, calling him the biggest,most ridiculous, and most contemptible of liars. ‘Even so,’ one British commentatorconceded, ‘he’s the best political brain of the whole Nazi bunch. That’s why he’s gotto be watched.’4 To defeat him they resorted to innuendos broadcast by their734 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH‘Soldatensender Calais’ transmitter. They broadcast a lurid and wholly fictitious accountof Goebbels’ Christmas Eve to blacken his name.‘The chief,’ noted one ofSefton Delmer’s experts afterwards, ‘has been at the height of his form over theChristmas season.’5That autumn there was a genuine attempt on his life. In November a Dr HansKummerow, a technician with the Löwe radio company in Berlin, confessed to plottingto blow him up with a remote-controlled bomb which he would plant, disguisedas an angler, beneath a bridge on Schwanenwerder. Schirmeister attended the trial;he told Goebbels that it had revealed a picture of a ‘totally degenerate’ intelligentsia.From now on four detectives and a police car escorted Goebbels wherever he went.At Lanke machine-gun nests were emplaced around the house.6 As a surprise Christmasgift Hitler sent over an armour-plated Mercedes. Goebbels called it an ‘armouredcoffin’ but Hitler gave him no choice but to use it.7That Christmas was overshadowed by renewed problems with Magda’s health. Afteranother minor heart attack she was again hospitalized at the West End sanatorium.Two blood transfusions led to complications, and Goebbels recorded whatwere possibly genuine concerns for her life. Surrounded by their children they celebrateda cheerless wedding anniversary at her bedside. He lamented in his diary,‘It’s a shame that I so seldom get to see the children.’ She struggled out to Lanke forNew Year’s Eve and Helga and Heide were allowed to stay up chattering until midnightas a treat.8 Then it was back to bed for their mother. Belatedly thanking policegeneral Kurt Daluege in January 1943 for the gift of a pheasant, Magda apologized,‘I have been in a sanatorium for some weeks after a heart attack and I’m going tohave to stay in for some time.’9The plight of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad worsened beyond relief. Broadcastinghis usual New Year’s message Goebbels suggested however that his listeners comparetheir situation with that in December 1941 when the entire army, struggling at Moscow,had been saved by their Führer’s sheer willpower alone. ‘A battle without acrisis,’ he said, ‘is not a battle but a skirmish.’ They had confounded every predictionthat their enemies had made for 1942. The Germans had conquered that summer anGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 735area twice that of the British Isles rich in raw materials, in grain, and in industry.‘Now we’ve got the upper hand,’ he suggested. A world war was however once againupon them. ‘Across all the seven seas rages the termagant of destruction,’ he said, ‘avengeful goddess of history, raising her arm to smite the Anglo-Saxon powers whoseministers so frivolously and needlessly unleashed this war.’ Hinting once again at thecoming of a more total warfare he sprinkled his oratorical glitter across the entireGerman people—across the workers toiling for twelve or fourteen hours at thefactory bench or tilling the field, across the intellectuals, the doctors, the teachers,the civil servants, and even the journalists. ‘The continents tremble from the roar ofour weaponry.’ Nobody knew how long this war would last, he allowed. It mightwell end as suddenly as it had begun. ‘Yonder,’ he promised, as the last hours of theold year slipped away, ‘we can already see the light.’10He had repeatedly forbidden editors to predict that the Soviets were at their lastgasp.11 ‘It is not known to us,’ his ministry cautioned, ‘how far the
