Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

certainly asked Hitler more often now about striking another deal with Stalin.He shared Himmler’s nervousness about Ribbentrop’s ‘lack of flexibility’ in foreignpolicy. He clutched at every straw. When Moscow informed Washington that theywere insisting on the Polish-Soviet border that Hitler had agreed to in 1939, Goebbelshoped that this was an overture to Berlin.29AIR raids had killed ten thousand more Germans during the month of October 1943.30Over Berlin however the night skies were still silent. After three weeks of quiet,Goebbels mused, one tended to forget all about air raids.31 November brought blanketsof low cloud, fog, and drizzle across the city—these probably closed down theenemy bomber airfields too. If the bombers stood down until February or March1944 their secret weapons should be ready. Ley told Goebbels that the boffins atPeenemünde expected to have them operational by late January; young professorWernher von Braun had boasted that his rocket missiles would turn the tide of thewar against Britain.32As the nights drew in, Goebbels wondered every evening whether the bomberswere coming back. He began to haunt his new two-storey command bunker underWilhelms Platz. From here, thirty feet below ground, he could follow the invadingbomber streams and watch as Schach and the men of the S.A. brigade ‘Feldherrnhalle’,their uniforms distinguished by red tabs and piping, plotted the damage reports on aperspex wall map of Berlin.33 Every household now had fire-buckets, syringes, sandboxes, fire-beaters, shovels, sledgehammers and axes at the ready. Count von HelldorffGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 799would be in charge of the fire-fighting. The air raid wardens had been drilled. Everyman in Berlin knew what to do if the firestorms came.Goebbels had to leave Berlin for three days for the twentieth anniversary of theMunich putsch. He listened with half an ear to General Jodl’s lecture to the gauleiters,and with no interest at all to Göring’s.34 For Goebbels, the highlight was a dinneralone with Himmler. They talked about security operations in Berlin.35 The People’sCourt and military tribunals in Berlin had crushed some unrest in Berlin caused bythe last air raids. Lieutenant-General Paul von Hase, the city’s Prussian, monocledcommandant, told Goebbels on the fifteenth that he had condemned a dozen officersto death; Goebbels persuaded him to commute some of the sentences.36Still the bombers had not come. Altogether Goebbels’ evacuation measures hadreduced the city’s population by some two million, to 3,300,204.37FROM late November 1943 the British bomber commander Sir Arthur Harris—‘themass murderer,’ as Goebbels called him—now really did attempt to repeat in Berlinwhat he had achieved in Hamburg. The city’s outline on the radar screens was unmistakeable,with its hundreds of lakes, canals, and rivers. In sixteen air raids until thespring Harris would commit over nine thousand heavy-bomber sorties against this883 square-mile city, with the stated aim of killing as many of its inhabitants as possible,using the most refined tactics that human ingenuity could devise.38Flanked by special squadrons carrying electronic jamming equipment, approachingstealthily behind showers of aluminium foil while decoy squadrons dropped markerflares and feinted away to the north and south, the leading squadrons of Harris’ mainbomber force arrived over Berlin late on November 18. Seen from the ground it wasa frightening, Kafkaesque spectacle as the first waves of Pathfinder Lancasters arrivedabove the clouds, their engines’ roar filling the horizons, and suddenly lit upthe night sky with flares, followed by deadly displays of aerial pyrotechnics colouredin red, green, or yellow to indicate the different aiming points for each wave. Thesearchlight beams probed and flickered, and silent flashes high above the clouds showed800 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHthat the ‘eighty-eights’ and the 105-millimetre heavy gun batteries defendingGoebbels’ city were engaging their first targets.That first night only fifty or sixty of Harris’ bombers ventured all the way intoBerlin’s airspace. Damage was negligible. The city’s morale, astonishingly, soared. Itwas like wearing a new white suit, said Goebbels, who ought to know: you wereterrified of the first mud-splash until it happened—after that you took the rest inyour stride.39Four days later, on Sunday November 22, Harris tried again. With Berlin seeminglysafely shrouded in low, rainsoaked clouds Goebbels was speaking in a high schoolin suburban Steglitz when a slip of paper was handed to him. His face perceptiblypaler, he continued but lost his thread. He had uttered only a few more sentenceswhen the sirens started. A phone call to the Wilhelms Platz bunker told him that thebombers were already overhead. With bombs bursting all over the city he raced backto the bunker, his car twice just missing fresh craters. The bunker was filled with theclatter of teleprinters, hobnail boots, and unattended telephones. Chain-smoking,he watched as S.A.men grease-chalked the first reports onto the perspex damagemap.The Opera and the Schiller theatre were blazing; the Scala burlesque, and thefamous Ufa and Gloria Palace movie theatres—where Lida Baarova had been heckledin 1938—were already gone. The government district was devastated. Abouttwelve hundred Berliners died and two hundred thousand more were left homelessincluding both his mother and his mother-in-law—their home in Flensburger Strasseflattened by a two ton blockbuster bomb.For the first time in years Goebbels had no time to dictate a diary. The next eveningthe sirens sounded again. He rode out the attack in the command bunker. Incendiarieshit the State theatre and the Reichstag building but both blazes were extinguished.The Kaiserhof hotel—another historic station in his via dolorosa—caught fire andcollapsed onto the bunker’s entrance. Gutterer, on duty at the propaganda ministry,saved that building almost single-handed too. Goebbels called in fire brigades fromas far away as Hamburg. He appealed to Potsdam for troops to fight the fires. Thearmy had an emergency plan called Valkyrie; Major-General Hans-Günther von Rost,GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 801chief of staff of Third Army district, gave it a dry run and sent in not only infantry buttanks as well, at two A.M. Goebbels angrily phoned Rost’s superior, GeneralKortzfleisch, to order the tanks off the streets before foreign journalists saw them.40He asked what the devil was going on: in July 1944 he would find out.It was four A.M. before he got back to No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse. The housewas a sorry sight, its windows smashed but otherwise