Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

total war conference that Lammers called in theChancellery on March 16. Goebbels took Speer, Ley, and Funk to see him for threehours on the seventeenth, but he seemed totally out of touch with reality. He wasastonished when Goebbels told him that 616 people had died in the latest raid onBerlin.44 He agreed to ask Hitler’s consent for the revival of the Reich Defence Committee.45 But Hitler was in no mood to listen . He wanted only to hear that theLuftwaffe was hitting back at Britain; when he came to Berlin for Memorial DayGoebbels proposed that they take out London’s wealthier suburbs one by one, ratherthan those of the working class.46Meanwhile Berlin and other cities, particularly in the Ruhr, would just have tobear the onslaught. Many a hardened soldier on home leave soon wished that he wasback on the battlefield. Even Count von Helldorff pleaded to be posted to an S.S.unit; Himmler ordered him to stay in Berlin.47‘COUNT Helldorff,’ Himmler had been notified in January 1943, ‘is very often questionedby Dr Goebbels about the evacuation of the Jews, and about communism andother political affairs in Berlin.’48Talking with Hitler into the small hours of January 22, Goebbels had again badgeredhim to let him get on with ridding the city of its Jews. It had become an obsession.He devoted twenty-six percent of his speech of January 30 to attacking theJews.49 His staff instructed field offices to link them closely to the concept of bolshevism.‘The Jews of the [pre-1933] Berliner Tageblatt portrayed the communists as harmless,’his ministry said. ‘But we’re not falling for this Jewish trick of playing down thebolsheviks until they can cut the little man’s throat. Recent events in Latvia, Estonia,and Lithuania speak for themselves’—a reference to the pogroms and counter-pogromsin the Baltic states in 1940 and 1941.50GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 759So far, seventeen thousand of Berlin’s Jews had gone. The trains began heading forAuschwitz, the most brutal of all Himmler’s slave labour camps and with the highestmortality rate. Working closely with the S.D., Goebbels planned one final suddensweep for the night of February 27 when the remaining Jews would be rounded upand held, ready for deportation in trainloads of two thousand at a time.51 He sethimself the target of evacuating the very last Jews by the end of March. During hisTotal War speech he had called them the incarnation of evil (he had said that neitherforeign protests nor crocodile tears would deter Germany from ‘the exter–’, hebegan, then checked himself and continued, ‘the neutralisation of Jewry.’ On the dayafter the speech, February 19, one thousand more Berlin Jews were shipped toAuschwitz. ‘Experience goes to show,’ he dictated cynically a few days later, ‘that amovement and a party which have burned their boats fight more ruthlessly thanthose which still have an avenue of retreat.’52The police bungled their swoop on Berlin’s Jews. Goebbels had arranged to use theloyal units of the S.S. Leibstandarte to cordon off factories while police seized theirJewish labour force for deportation. ‘Misguided’ fellow-Germans, wrote Goebbels,had however tipped them off and four thousand slipped through his fingers. ‘We’llget our hands on them yet,’ he added.53 For several days there was chaos, compoundedby the horrific air raid of March 1, as the manhunt for missing Jews went on. In thefirst six days of March five more trains left for Auschwitz (carrying 1,736, 1,758,1,732, 1,143, and 662 Berlin Jews). ‘War is no time to be sentimental,’ commentedGoebbels.54 But there was widespread public disquiet at the continuing manhunt,especially after the air raid, and unfortunate scenes outside one Jewish old folks’home where crowds intervened on their behalf: Goebbels professed distress at thetactless timing.55 He told the S.D. to go easy for a few weeks. After one more transport,of 947 Jews to Auschwitz on March 12, the operation was halted for five weeks.Widespread damage had however been done. General Dittmar remarked that publicconcern was growing about Hitler’s military leadership, about the air raids, andabout the Jewish problem.56 It did not surprise Goebbels that most of the hate mailafter the total war speech came from Jews.57 A significant number of letter writers760 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHprotested about his picking on the Jews, and some even saw a poetic justice in the airraids on Nazi Germany.58As more than once before he sought absolution from his Führer. After seeing himon March 8 at Vinnitsa he again noted for the record that Hitler had endorsed hisplans to rid Berlin of its Jews. There was much the same diary entry after Hitlerphoned him on the fourteenth, and on the twentieth he noted how pleased the Führer,visiting Berlin, had been when he told him that most of the Jews had now gone.59 Thewar had, agreed Hitler, enabled them to tackle a number of thorny problems. In midApril however Goebbels found his city once more ‘overrun’ with Jews claiming exemptionfrom deportation. He ordered a thorough screening. ‘I am convinced,’ hedictated, ‘that by ridding Berlin of the Jews I have achieved one of my greatest politicalgoals.’60GOEBBELS’ chronic ailment, eczema, had returned. He tried to rest out at Lanke. Magdareturned to her clinic and remained there, bedridden and despairing, for severalweeks.61 She began drafting her will; once she joined her husband out at Lanke, buthe found the melancholy of the Brandenburg landscape getting him down. Morell’sassistant Dr Richard Weber gave him a course of the hormone treatment Homoseranand the eczema began to go.62Round-the-clock bombing by the British and Americans had now begun, givinghim a headache which no jabs could cure. The British rained fake ration cards on thecities too.63 True, Germany had still lost only sixteen thousand dead in the raids, butthey eroded Nazi prestige and they added to Goebbels’ work load as chairman of theinter-departmental committee which directed relief operations.64 He had acceptedthis post in January as a stepping stone to power; now it was proving anything but asinecure. Among his proposals was one that the most heavily bombed cities be grantedthe right to wear the Iron Cross in their coat of arms.65 Goebbels had to suppressuntimely song-hits like