Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

department stores, andthe release of two-thirds of all streetcar and railroad conductors. Dr Lammers, thebone-domed top civil servant, placated Goebbels that while he was the ‘harbinger’he would not be able to dispense with Lammers’ services or those of Bormann andField Marshal Keitel as advisers.35 Impatient for action, Goebbels dictated a vigorousarticle on total war for Das Reich, attacking their country’s parasites and sluggards.36On January 4 Lammers agreed to call a Cabinet-level conference on the seventh. ‘Iam today firmly convinced,’ Goebbels recorded, ‘that if we give it all we’ve got we’llsmash the Soviet Union this coming summer.’37 As he understood it, the idea wasthat, after Lammers had put their finished plan to Hitler, a triumvirate would implementit with dictatorial powers delegated to them by their over-burdened Führer.38The three he had in mind were himself, Lammers, and Bormann. Göring, as presidentof the defence committee and chief of the Four Year Plan, had far too much onhis plate already. Not that Goebbels gainsayed Göring’s authority—in fact he woulddraft a fulsome letter to him on his fiftieth birthday a few days hence.39There is no doubt that Goebbels, perhaps over-simplifying, saw Total War as theultimate answer to his embattled country’s difficulties.40 ‘Total War,’ he felt, ‘shouldhave been brought in eighteen months ago.’41 They had the manpower, if only theycould drain it off the home front.Lammers held the promised conference on January 8—delayed one day by Speer’stardiness. Sauckel at once threw a spanner into the works, declaring himself quitecapable of raising the manpower without ‘total war’. Funk and Bormann gave onlylimited backing to Goebbels’ plan.42 Frustrated, Goebbels re-ran Russian newsreelsof the seige of Leningrad which showed what people were willing to do if pressed.43GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 739More conservative than the Goebbels plan, the document which Lammers draftedand Hitler eventually signed spoke of releasing up to 700,000 men to the armedforces; however it provided for a three-man committee to run total war acting only‘in close touch’ with Goebbels.44 He tried for several days to become at least anequal wheel on this unwieldy wagon. Lammers tried in vain to appease him.45 Goebbelsfelt slighted; he was sure that ‘certain circles’ were trying to freeze him out.46 Whenhe phoned the Wolf’s Lair, Lammers rebuked him that this was what the Führerhimself had decided.47 The whole episode probably recalled to Goebbels his gallingomission from Hitler’s first cabinet in 1933.48When Hans Lammers presided over the first meeting on January 20, Goebbelsrather pathetically called it the Committee of Four in his diary; but he was verymuch a junior partner.49 He harangued them all for an hour and dictated mechanicallyafterwards, ‘I am still seen and recognized as the driving force.’ This howeverwas not true. Within his own four walls he muttered to personal staff that Lammershad ‘wet blanketed’ his ideas.50 For the next month he grappled with the bureaucraticred tape with which Lammers deftly packaged each measure that his three-man committeehesitantly approved.THUS Goebbels began dreaming about a spectacular mass meeting at which he wouldappeal over their heads to the people, and ask them what they desired. Vox populi—the voice of the street: ugly enough, but the next best thing to a dictatorship of theproletariat.During these first three weeks of January 1943, meanwhile, the Sixth Army wasdying in Stalingrad. The airlift of food and ammunition failed as the airfields werelost, aircraft engines froze, and aircrew morale slumped. Although Hitler continueda news blackout policy, hoping for better times, millions of Germans now suspectedthat something was going badly wrong. Goebbels promised to persuade Hitler torelease the awful news.51 Colonel Martin reported to Berlin that Hitler seemed to beout of touch with reality.52 He was acting as though this were Moscow, and the monthwere December 1941. The same tactics would not work twice. Attending one min-740 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHistry meeting, the army’s radio commentator General Dittmar was horrified at thesuperficiality on display. ‘Even that clever-dick Hans Fritzsche asked me how closewe are to relieving Stalingrad,’ he noted.53 Five more days would pass before theHigh Command vaguely admitted that the Sixth Army was encircled, and had beenfor two months.54 Goebbels was furious at these tactics. On January 21 he dictatedthat it was high time to make a clean breast to the people. ‘It should have been donelong ago,’ he wrote, adding in almost treasonably critical language: ‘But the Führerwas against it until now.’ Perhaps Stalingrad might yet become a symbol, as the Alcazárof Toledo had been for the nationalists in the Spanish civil war. He announced to hisministerial conference that he was going to see Hitler the next day to demand thatthey adhere in future to the unvarnished truth—and to total war.55It was misty, grey, and damp as he arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on January 22. Hitler’sjug-eared chief adjutant General Rudolf Schmundt had just returned from theStalingrad front. He besought Goebbels to force through his total war plans. WhenGoebbels protested to Hitler about being frozen out of the Lammers committee,Hitler expressed surprise: ‘You yourself had Bormann inform me that you were happywith the role of “harbinger,” he said, ‘and preferred to leave the implementation tothe experts.’ (So Goebbels later recalled.56) Strolling around the compound withGoebbels and his Alsatian bitch Blondi, Hitler blamed the coming catastrophe inStalingrad on Göring and their allies. The Hungarian troops had abandoned theirtanks and stormed the empty hospital trains waiting to carry casualties away.57 Therewas however one good thing about their allies’ failure, he remarked. If at the end ofthe war Germany stood alone the spoils of victory would be hers alone too. He hadresigned himself, he said, to the loss of all twenty-two divisions in Stalingrad. Thephone rang incessantly as they talked, bringing fresh messages of woe.58Goebbels then told him of his plans for total war. He promised to raise 1·5 to twomillion soldiers by the coming summer. Hitler winced at the mention of femalelabour service, but otherwise endorsed everything.59 ‘He would prefer,’ dictatedGoebbels with probably less than utter candour, ‘that I do not join the three mancommittee myself—so as not to become bogged down with the