Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

second. If there’s ever a third, Idon’t want to be propaganda minister.’29The Sports Palace speech was soon forgotten. It marked a turning point in Goebbels’career but not in the war effort. ‘After Stalingrad,’ he reminded Hitler in July 1944,‘I proclaimed total war… But it remained only superficial.’30 He had worked offmany private complexes in the speech, and settled many old scores; he had referredto ‘a certain social stratum’ which was interested only in preserving its almost peacetimelifestyle. National socialism, he had said, heeded neither class nor profession.‘Rich and poor, high and low, all shall have the same claims made upon them.’ ‘It’stime to put an end to bourgeois pruderies,’ he had also said, and: ‘It’s time to take offthe kid gloves and clench our fists.’ His speech had also referred to the idle classeswho ‘lolled around in stylish bars’ with no greater concern than the welfare of theirstomachs. Every morning in the Tiergarten, he had scoffed, people could see thehorseback cavalcades—an unconscious echo of his old attack on the hobby-horseman‘Isidor’ Weiss—while indolent ‘travellers of leisure’ snapped up all the seats inrailroad cars. Not surprisingly after this speech the middle class suspected Goebbelsof planning to eliminate them, and Berndt had to issue a secret denial during May.31Total war remained a chimera. Goebbels closed down some stores and restaurants,about half the newspapers, and the Ruhleben racetrack; he banned manicures, pedicures,and permanent-waves.32 Even so General von Unruh reported that they wouldnot meet the target of 800,000 men.33 What happened was often a parody of total756 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHwar. Magda, convalescent and dizzy, was put to work in the Telefunken factory, butnone of the other minister’s wives followed suit. Goebbels patriotically laid off hisdomestic staff, including his treasured chef; Ribbentrop, his arch-enemy, snappedthem all up for his own expanding household.34 The inertia produced by easy earliervictories proved impossible to dispel. Goebbels shut down Rothe’s, the exclusiveflower shop where Emmy Göring shopped, but every other luxury flower shop andeating place seemed to have its protectors. Professor Morell saved the Stadtkrugrestaurant in Vienna by a word in Hitler’s ear.35 Göring pleaded for Horcher’s. WhenGoebbels sent in hired thugs to smash its windows Göring posted two policemenpermanently outside; Goebbels phoned Göring at the Obersalzberg and threatenedto use his powers as gauleiter; Göring retorted that his Luftwaffe would in that eventtake over Horcher’s as an exclusive officers’ club.36The Reichsmarschall seemed however to be Goebbels’ only hope of neutralizingthe incompetent Committee of Three (Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann). Speer flewdown to the Obersalzberg on Sunday February 28 to suggest that Göring reactivatethe moribund Reich Defence Committee. He phoned Goebbels later that afternoonto come down too and at four P.M. on Monday Goebbels was driven up the hairpinbends to Göring’s villa. The Reichsmarschall received him wearing what the propagandaminister wearily described as a somewhat baroque costume—‘But that’s howhe is, and you’ve got to take him quirks and all.’37 They needed his name, his authority,his clout; but no more.For five hours they wrangled until everybody agreed to let bygones be bygones—Goebbels dismissed their past differences with a wave of the hand. Göring bellowedwith laughter when he hard of Goebbels’ run-in with Unruh. Cunning as a fox,Goebbels intimated that it was everybody’s duty to rally round the Führer at thistime of crisis. But he also left Göring with no illusions that like him the Reichsmarschallwas up to his neck in blood. (‘I am in,’ Shakespeare’s King Richard the Third hadmoaned, ‘so far in blood, that sin will pluck on sin…’) ‘Göring,’ dictated Goebbelsthe next morning, ‘is quite clear about what threatens us all if we go soft in thiswar… Above all we have committed ourselves so far in the Jewish Problem that forGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 757us there is no escape any more, none whatever.’ The same would go for Himmler,whom Göring promised to win over too.38With Göring’s backing secured, Goebbels took the sleeper back to Berlin thatnight, March 1, 1943. Mr Churchill’s bomber squadrons got there before him andGöring’s stock temporarily slipped again. Berlin’s deathroll from this one raid toppedsix hundred.39 One bomb had fallen two hundred yards from the Goebbels home inSchwanenwerder; he decided to bring his children to No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse,where they now had the deep shelter. Many officials, particularly Goebbels’ deputygauleiter, had lost their heads; inadequately drilled in civil defence, thousands hadcrouched too long in their shelters while buildings which could have been savedburned to the ground. Several plunderers had been caught: they lost their heads too(as Reich Defence Commissioner, Goebbels had the power of life and death in Berlin.)40War had a brutalising effect. Watching rescue operations S.S. ObersturmbannführerEichmann found one elderly couple crushed beneath girders, whimpering to be putout of their agony; he told his corporal to oblige.41 At a wrecked hospital Goebbelslooked on as the bodies of patients and nurses were pulled out of the rubble; he tooswore revenge, enraged at the thought that ‘some Canadian thug’ who probablycouldn’t even find Europe on the globe could do this to his city. After the British nexthit Essen, the S.D. reported that many people were asking about when Germanywould begin hitting back. Speer confided that powerful new weapons were in production,and Goebbels began hinting at them with increasing frequency in his speeches.When he arrived at Hitler’s HQ, now at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, on March 8 hefound everybody livid with Göring.42 For hours Hitler let fly about the Luftwaffe’suseless commander-in-chief and his corrupt entourage of high-living World War Icronies—they were all currently shopping for looted art works in Italy. As Hitlerwent on to discuss Rosenberg’s talents and Goebbels’ propaganda offensive againstbolshevism43, further disastrous news came: the British bombers had struck at ancientNuremberg. Goebbels tried hard to salvage the absent Reichsmarschall’s reputation—he phoned Nuremberg and assured Hitler that the damage was less than758 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHfeared—but in vain. ‘Given the prevailing mood,’ he dictated to his secretary afterwards,‘I consider it inopportune to raise the question of Göring’s political leadershipwith the Führer. Now is not the right time.’Göring was missing from the next