Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

her senses.Goebbels again raised the topic of secretly negotiating with the enemy, pointing outthat Germany had never yet won a war on two fronts. Hitler responded that, if onlythe Russians did not have the upper hand right now, Stalin would still be a morelikely prospect than Churchill. At Keitel’s sixty-first birthday celebration later thatevening Goebbels noted that Hitler was far less frank to his generals. Hitler also saidthat victory would go to the side which kept its nerve the longest. ‘The stronger thewind howls,’ Goebbels dictated in his 144-page diary entry for this day, ‘the moreobstinately the Führer pitches into it.’Before parting, Goebbels cunningly persuaded Hitler to receive his arch-enemy inthe High Command, Major General Hasso von Wedel, chief of Wehrmacht propaganda.He banked on Hitler taking an instant dislike to this pot-bellied, indolentepicurean. He wished he could cook Otto Dietrich’s goose as effectively.10He was confident that he and Hitler were growing together again. At the Wolf’sLair on October 26, 1943 they spent the whole day side by side from Hitler’s firstmorning stroll until his nocturnal tea party ended at 3:30 A.M. the next day.11 Hisrival Rosenberg would see Hitler soon after—for the last time.12THREE days later Joseph Goebbels turned forty-six. He ordered the ministry’s eveningcourier limousine to ferry three ladies of his choice out to join his family celebrationat Lanke, and to bring a score of foreign movies for their delectation.13796 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHHis existence at Lanke was almost too idyllic. Each morning S.S. SturmführerRach drove him in the large dark unmarked Mercedes into Berlin, taking the Prenzlauhighway rather than the more obvious autobahn, with a carload of detectives behind.14 They returned between six and seven P.M., and Magda lined up the childrenwith their butler Emil, a forty-six year old six-footer, standing behind them in hislivery. To Goebbels it was often too quiet out here. One Sunday he said with a sigh,‘Three days like this in a row and I’d go raving mad.’ He needed the pumping adrenalin,the blinking lights on the telephone console, the burden of life-and-death decisions,the Machiavellian intrigue. He probably even needed the hatred of his enemies. Hesaw them everywhere—not only in Ribbentrop, and Dietrich, and Rosenberg, butin Hans Lammers for example, a member of the ancien regime who seemed dangerouslyinterested in becoming Reich chancellor. ‘I’ll find enough allies,’ predictedGoebbels to his diary, ‘to put a stop to that.’15The British press dropped strong hints that Berlin’s ordeal was about to resume.The Luftwaffe generals assured Goebbels that this time the enemy would lose thirtyor forty percent of their planes each night.16 Goebbels was ready. Speer’s engineershad excavated half of Wilhelms Platz next to the Kaiserhof hotel and built a deepunderground command post for Goebbels as gauleiter. They had also strengthened110,000 basements throughout the city to provide rudimentary shelters for threemillion people, with space for seven hundred thousand more in bunkers in the citycentre.17The American bombers were also becoming more active at long range, but bloodylosses at Schweinfurt and elsewhere still kept them at a respectful distance fromBerlin. From the interrogations of captured American aircrews, Goebbels deducedthat many were homesick and few had wanted to fight Germany.18The British were still the greater danger, and not every city was as well prepared asBerlin. Using German émigrés—the very people whom Goebbels had hounded outof Germany—to broadcast confusing orders to the defences, the British concentrated444 heavy bombers on Kassel on October 22: 380 dropped their bombs withinthree miles of the aiming point, a colossal concentration which unleashed Germa-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 797ny’s second firestorm. Sixty-five percent of the city was destroyed.19 Goebbels arrivedthere on November 5 to investigate the disaster. The local gauleiter Karl Weinrichturned up late at the freightyard where the minister’s train was forced to halt, thendrove off downtown in a heated, armoured limousine; Goebbels followed in an opentoppedVolkswagen with the local police chief at his side.20 Much had been done toprepare Kassel for air raids, but not enough: in other cities the gauleiters had orderedbasement connecting-walls torn down to provide tunnels of escape in theevent of firestorms. Weinrich, the worst type of good-time gauleiter, had done nothingeven to evacuate the children.21 Goebbels harangued the Party dignitaries in thestill undamaged city hall. ‘I expect that you realize, Mister Weinrich,’ he concludedsarcastically, ‘that the British can be blamed for only a fraction of the five thousanddead in Kassel—including a thousand children.’ (The death toll from the firestormrose to eight thousand, nearly six thousand of them killed by carbon monoxidefumes.)22 Goebbels had Weinrich dismissed immediately from the party and from allhis offices.23Hartmann Lauterbacher, the young gauleiter of Hanover who drove them up theautobahn to his city, was all that Weinrich was not. He had prepared his city well,with shelters big enough for thousands, underground command posts, water tanks,and mobile kitchens. In the thick of one raid he had led police and soldiers throughthe blazing streets to rescue four thousand civilians entombed in a bunker and indanger of asphyxiation.24These latest raids taught Goebbels and his men a lot for Berlin. He issued instructionsthat bunkers had to have wider exits and be built in open spaces (he withheldfrom the public the gruesome details of what had happened inside Hamburg’s superheatedbunkers).25 On the same date he forbade military honours for the burial ofbomber crews, deeming funeral music, graveside salvos, and official wreaths inappropriateaccompaniments for the burial of ‘mass-murderers’.26THE Russian advance gathered momentum. The Dniepr line was breached. The RedArmy retook Katyn. Goebbels resigned himself to Soviet claims that the Nazis had798 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHthemselves carried out the Katyn massacres. ‘In fact,’ he conceded, perhaps referringobliquely to the fate of the Jews whom he had expelled, ‘that’s one problem that’sgoing to cause us a lot of difficulty in future. The Soviets will indubitably take pains tofind as many such mass graves as possible to pin onto us.’27 Putting Nazi officers ontrial in Kharkov the Russians alleged that they had used ‘gas vans’ for exterminations.Tackled by Fritzsche about these allegations, Goebbels promised vaguely to ask Hitlerand Himmler about them.28He