Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

and broke the silencefinally with an expletive, ‘Dreckhammel!’—though whether the Duce, Badoglio, themonarchy, or all Italians were the animal so specified remained unclear. ‘Finis Italiæ!’he exclaimed after another silence.The phone rang, Hitler ordering him to catch the five-thirty flight over to HQ thenext morning. That was something. Goebbels brightened. Sitting at Oven’s desk, hemimicked in a faint piping voice the Italian crowds he had seen on the newsreels:‘Duce… Duce… Duce…!’ Then he exclaimed, ‘So now we’re on our own.’15Fascism in Italy had disappeared. Mussolini had been toppled—in fact by just sucha senate as Goebbels had been urging upon Hitler since 1933. The Wolf’s Lair hostedthe next morning a meeting which was the closest to an emergency Cabinet since1939. From all over occupied Europe the planes flew into Rastenburg, disgorgingHimmler, Guderian, Göring, Speer, an ailing Ribbentrop, and Admiral Dönitz ontothe runway. Rumours swept Germany. Some said that Göring had fled or been shot.Unfortunately this was not true. General Guderian confided to Goebbels his ownmisgivings about the war. Goebbels listened attentively (but assured his diary thatthe general was an ‘ardent and unconditional’ supporter of their Führer.) Both menfelt it was time to start talking with the enemy.16784 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHHitler’s eyes however glinted with a sudden determination. He talked about droppinga paratroop division onto Rome to arrest the king and Badoglio. Ribbentrop,shocked at the repercussions, and even Goebbels whose awe of the Catholic churchhad never really left him, talked Hitler out of a plan to smoke out the Vatican as well.Rommel, flown in from Greece, urged that any military operation be carefullythought out. Goebbels sided with Hitler, feeling that they would achieve more withless by striking instantly.17 With the issue still unresolved, he flew back to Berlin onthe twenty-seventh. Gutterer, Martin, and Hadamowsky met him at Tempelhof withhis corpulent chief of staff Gerhard Schach. Radiating false confidence he assuredthem (untruthfully) that Hitler had taken all the necessary decisions: ‘UnfortunatelyI am not at liberty to tell you what they are.’Goebbels spoke of his puzzlement at Canaris’ failure to give any warning of Mussolini’soverthrow.18 ‘I am not having anybody “arresting” me,’ he said. He stowed a6·35 millimetre pistol in his desk, and set up an in-house machine-gun company forthe protection of the ministry.19 Against whom? The summer air was clammy, hecould hardly breathe, and nobody spoke their true feelings any more.AS a distraction from the worsening news he had his two oldest girls, Helga andHilde, brought into Berlin. That night, July 27–28, over seven hundred British bombersdropped 2,312 tons of bombs on Hamburg creating a firestorm as the entire centre,tinder-dry in the summer drought, caught fire. There was no escape from the holocaust.Twice Goebbels phoned Karl Kaufmann, the Hamburg gauleiter, one of theirbest: ‘We’ve got fifteen thousand dead,’ shouted Kaufmann, his voice cracking. (RichardOtte, taking dictation the next morning, thought that Goebbels might evenhave said fifty thousand.) He was talking of evacuating the whole city; Goebbelsagreed, and ordered all non-essential personnel to leave Hamburg at once.As Goebbels entered his ministerial conference at eleven A.M. Berlin’s sirenssounded. He waited wordlessly for the nerve-wracking wail to die away. From timeto time slips of paper were laid before him, but the American squadrons turned awayshort of Berlin.20GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 785Speer said the next day, ‘If the raids continue on this scale three months will see usrelieved of many a problem that exercises us today. Things will slide downhill smoothly,irrevocably, and comparatively fast!’21 The raids did continue. That night the Britishdropped 2,277 tons of bombs. Speer told Hitler that if this happened to six morecities the war would be over.22 ‘Things are blacker than Speer paints them,’ exclaimedMilch at an air ministry conference. ‘If we get just five or six more attacks like theseon Hamburg, the German people will just pack up, however great their willpower.’23On the last night in July Goebbels had leaflets issued to every household ordering allchildren, old people, and non-essential civilians to leave Berlin.24 When he addresseda panicky meeting of ministers and state-secretaries, with Hitler’s sanction, in hisministry on August 2, Milch kept shouting: ‘We have lost the war! Finally lost it!’Goebbels had to appeal to his honour as a field-marshal before he would quietendown.25Subsequently Hitler agreed that Goebbels should brief all the ministers and statesecretaries—but nobody else—like this more often, provided that he did so at theChancellery rather than in his own ministry, and provided he was consulted eachtime first.26It was another important step up the ladder of real power.RUMOURS ran riot through Berlin’s rapidly emptying streets.27 One had it that 150,000had died in Hamburg. Goebbels confidentially informed the gauleiters that 18,400dead had been recovered so far; he asked them to use schoolchildren to spread counter-rumours through their parents.28 Soon the whisper was that the reprisal bombardmentof London had secretly begun.29 In fact nearly fifty thousand people haddied in Hamburg, literally incinerated inside the bunkers, torn apart by explosives,tossed into the flames by the fiery tornados.With Berlin obviously Churchill’s next target for saturation raids, he forced thepace of evacuation. Fifteen or twenty trains a day carried schoolchildren, infants,mothers, and the elderly eastwards to safety.30 There was opposition from parentsand the host provinces, but Goebbels appealed to all the eastern gauleiters to display786 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHthe proper ‘socialist spirit’ toward these people, who had often lost all they had.31 Hefelt himself like the commander of an important battle front. He intended to showthe generals how to win. ‘In seven years,’ he told his staff, ‘I earned one title, asConqueror of Berlin. In seven weeks I intend to add another: its Defender.’32 He wasin his element. ‘Grievous though it was,’ he wrote to Hitler afterwards, ‘I never feltas good as I did during the bombing of Berlin; because all the medal-hunters got coldfeet the moment the going got really tough.’33He did not want a blood bath in his city. The evacuation was brought under controlas the party and welfare agencies struggled to get the frail and the defenceless out ofthe railroad stations before the bomber hordes