Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

from Europe at Dunkirk. ‘For years,’ he scoffed,the Allies have committed their entire armed might—to capture what is in effectjust barren desert.’ ‘We have suffered a setback at the periphery,’ he conceded, ‘butthe centre of our war effort remains totally undamaged.’60This was an unfortunate turn of phrase, as Mr Churchill was now raining explosivesand fire bombs on Hitler’s cities night after night. Goebbels pronounced oncemore that it was the British who had started this bombing of civilians. It was casuistry—true or false, it hardly mattered. Essen, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, and Duisburgwere ravaged within days. Sometimes a handful of Mosquito bombers, each armedwith a one-ton sting, left a trail of sirens across Germany that drove twenty-fivemillion Germans into their wet and stinking air raid shelters.61 In one daring lowlevelraid the heavy bombers breached several Ruhr dams.62 The deluge drownedseven hundred people. Goebbels learned that the British were saying that a Jewishemigré had master-minded this raid.63 On the evening of May 21 Speer, Ley, andGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 773Funk came to see him. They all agreed that the country was in the grip of a ‘Göringcrisis’—an implicit criticism of Hitler too for tolerating the indolent Reichsmarschall.In Das Reich on May 30 he lectured his readers on ‘The Nature of Crises.’ Was it notSchlieffen, he asked, who had remarked that a battle without a crisis was just a skirmish?Just as a man who survived an illness felt a new urge to live, a nation too mustsense ‘the healing power of crisis.’64 And so his silver prose ran on—column aftercolumn of clever dialectics. But he could not fool everybody all the time. Still restingat the Berghof, Hitler checked the speech which Goebbels proposed to deliver onJune 5. Where the minister had written when victory is ours, Hitler crossed it out andinked in instead, ‘When this struggle is over.’65THE speech, to Berlin munitions workers, was his first devoted to the enemy raids.‘There is only one thought in the mind of the entire German people,’ he said, ‘andthat is to repay the enemy in his own coin.’ He spoke of his tour of the Ruhr cities:2,450 people had been burned alive in Wuppertal on May 29. ‘One day,’ he promised,‘the hour of retribution will come.’ He then launched into a fresh diatribe againstthe Jews. ‘The complete elimination of the Jew from Europe is a question not ofmorality,’ he shrilled, ‘but of the security of the state.’66Compounding his problems, both he and Magda were ill. Magda had spent severalweeks in hospitals undergoing a painful operation ; her trigeminal nerve was playingup.67 The surgeon had botched the operation, and the minister sent her off to theWhite Hart clinic in Dresden to recuperate.Infuriatingly, his own eczema had returned. Professor Morell’s assistant Dr Webertreated Goebbels with multivitamins, the muscle tonics Tonophosphan and Cortiron,and injections of Morell’s proprietary liver extract; the latter gave the minister threedays of excruciating headaches. ‘The Reich minister now has so many pockmarksand scars,’ Weber advised Morell, ‘that injections are virtually impossible.’ In mid-July Dr Weber reverted to his own Homoseran injections. Finally cured, Goebbelsgave him two thousand marks, a radio set, and a signed photograph as a reward.68774 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHMagda stayed in Dresden until August. Goebbels sent his young and personablechief aide Dr Werner Naumann, who had just turned thirty-four, to join her there onsick-leave.69 Leaving Hadamowsky or Fritzsche to run the ministerial conferences—the participants hung around outside swapping blasphemous jokes about Hitler andtheir minister—Goebbels spent Whitsun out at Lanke alone, recovering from theeczema.70 With Magda away, some things had not changed. One evening a sentrydetected a pretty girl cycling inside the perimeter fence and apprehended her: atwhich an angry figure limped out of the trees ahead. Volubly cursing the soldier,Goebbels took charge of his young female guest, an actress whom he had invitedround for the evening.71As Düsseldorf, Bochum, Oberhausen, Cologne, and Krefeld were devastated bytwo-thousand ton raids during June, Goebbels ordered newsreel teams to capturethe harrowing scenes for the archives. Dr Gutterer thoughtlessly included some ofthe footage in one week’s newsreel. The screen images of mangled, headless infantsand bulldozers tipping bodies into pits were so terrifying that Magda and the childrenburst into tears at the preview. ‘If these pictures have this effect on my nationalsocialist family,’ shrieked Goebbels at his next conference, ‘just imagine the utterpanic in the public!’ ‘Whoever let that through understands as much about propagandaas a cow about the quantum theory!’72 Colonel Martin asked Magda about herhusband’s callous behaviour toward his staff. ‘If he talks with the children for longerthan a couple of minutes,’ she replied with a sigh, ‘you can be sure that eventuallythey will all be in tears. They just can’t take his brand of mordent sarcasm.’73Guided by increasingly accurate radar, the enemy’s bombers were pulverising theRuhr. Goebbels followed them around, speaking in city after city in an undeclaredpersonal campaign for Hitler’s succession. He ordered cities to evacuate all nonessentialpersonnel —old people’s homes into ancient castles and monasteries, entireschools to provinces remote from the enemy’s airfields.74 Over the next monthshe issued 157 civil defence circulars covering every aspect of the new warfare fromthe procurement of excavators for digging mass graves, the escorting or burial ofenemy bomber crews, and the use of subway systems for fleeing through firestorms—GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 775a new phenomenon in war—to the recovery of the air raid dead.75 He ordered staticwater tanks to be built everywhere. ‘In the big conflagrations,’ Berndt explained tothe gauleiters, ‘many people have died even after the All Clear was sounded becausethey lacked the water to soak their clothing and face-cloths to enable them them tobreathe.’76 Speaking that day at the mass funeral of the Wuppertal air raid victimsGoebbels swore vengeance in their name, and at another rally in the Westphalia Hallat Dortmund, as the wind blew the acrid smell of a burned-out city through thebuilding’s windowless sockets, he confided to twenty thousand Ruhr workers thattheir scientists were working on that revenge even now.77In Stalingrad, he told his staff the next day, wedging his knees