Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

Goebbels.10THE plot and its aftermath marked the start of Speer’s decline. At dinner with Hitlerand Goebbels he was markedly subdued. He had talked with Himmler at midday, butthe Reichsführer S.S. was also backing Goebbels.11 They put their agreed total warplan to Hitler the next day, July 23. He easily nodded it through. Ribbentrop tried(but failed) to exclude his ministry from the plan’s ambit.12 Lammers authorisedGoebbels to call a Cabinet-level meeting on the thirty-first in the Chancellery inBerlin to introduce his plans.The total war decree was published on July 26. ‘At the suggestion’ of theReichsmarschall, it read—Göring’s vanity being a factor even now—Hitler had appointedDr Goebbels as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total Mobilization.13 Goebbelssent a telegram thanking Lammers for the ‘loyal manner’ in which he had seen thingsthrough.14Thus he returned to Berlin as de facto the first man after Hitler. Naumann shoutedto Lieutenant von Oven, waiting on the platform, ‘The Doctor has just won hisgreatest victory!’ Thanks to the traitors, he gloated over lunch, nobody at HQ wouldever dare to intrigue against him again. On July 26 he broadcast to the nation anaccount of how he had crushed the putsch. He hinted at new secret weapons and inhis next article, entitled ‘Going One Better,’ he developed a new argument—thatthe Reich was now regaining the technical superiority which it had lost for a while tothe Allies.In victory he was becomingly magnanimous. Addressing the other ministers in thechancellery on July 31 he invited them to submit ideas voluntarily to him.15 He proposedto slash his own ministry by thirty or forty percent. His special ’total war’ staff856 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHwould be limited to just twenty men. Naumann would chair a planning committee,and Gauleiter Wegener an executive committee.16 Total mobilization could now begin.His target was to find one million men. One million soldiers: equals one hundrednew divisions: equals victory. That was his calculus.17 At ten A.M. the next day Naumannissued the first two ordinances, outlawing token employment (a dodge to evade thelabour-draft); and raising the female labour-draft age to fifty.18To make time for his immense new task Goebbels halved his afternoon nap, atesandwiches at his desk, forfeited his regular evening movie previews, and refused allinvitations. Speer was an unwilling ally, but sat in on only the first Goebbels total warsessions.19 He agreed to release all draft-exempted men aged between seventeen andthirty-four from his arms factories.20 This alone would provide eighty thousand menfor the armed forces. ‘I myself,’ said Goebbels at this time, ‘have only one office witheight people, a few shorthand typists and two colleagues.’21 He worked all monthscaling down his own ministry, shutting its Eastern, Theatre, Music, and GraphicArts departments and annexing the Party’s propaganda directorate (the RPL).22 Heclosed the training colleges for interpreters, music, and the history of art. He turnedover the film industry’s entire rising generation to the Telefunken firm in Berlin forprecision labour. He halted his efforts to overtake Hollywood in cartoon production.He scrapped the need for movie tickets, to release the forty-eight workers whoprinted them. He closed every theatre, cabaret, and circus, dissolved some orchestras,and posted a mandatory sixty-hour working week for everyone. He banned all congressesand conventions.23Briefing Hitler, he predicted that he would extract a hundred thousand men fromthe postal service by cutting red tape and halting junk-mail deliveries; and two hundredthousand more from ‘domestic employment.’24 Only Munich and Berlin wouldbe allowed more than one daily newspaper. To release banking personnel he urgedpeople to pay by cash. He abolished cake-making and closed all restaurants and storesexcept pharmacies, groceries, and cobblers.25 He even tried to dissolve the ReichLabour Service.26 Himmler had to secure a special dispensation to protect his ownGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 857vital tasks.27 Goebbels announced the death penalty for anybody caught violating hisTotal War regulations.28 By these means he expected to raise three hundred thousandmen for the front by September 1, 450,000 more by October and a quarter millionduring November: one million men all told.29AT the Wolf’s Lair on August 2, Hitler and Goebbels discussed how to deal with thetraitors. The Gestapo investigations were turning up some nasty new details. EvenKluge and Rommel were implicated.30 One of those arrested, Major Egbert Hayessen,had incriminated one of Goebbels’ oldest friends, Count von Helldorff, in the plot.31Goebbels’ fury was indescribable.32 Ignoring Magda’s reproaches he and Hitler hadpersonally settled the Berlin police chief’s gambling debts and bought him property.Yet even as Goebbels had been decorating him in February for heroism in the airraids, the count had been plotting his and Hitler’s downfall. Hitler ordered thatHelldorff was to watch each hanging until his own turn came.33 Broadcasting thatnight Goebbels named Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, as another conspiratorand put a million mark ($250,000) bounty on his head. Among Goerdeler’seffects the Gestapo found a draft list of names of future ministers, including bothRommel and Speer.34 Stauffenberg, wrote Goebbels after reading Kaltenbrunner’sinvestigation reports, had worked for months just setting up the putsch. Squanderingimmense amounts of scarce gasoline he had motored around, working on onetraitor after another, until each ultimately fell in with him, as many had since testifiedin court. ‘A good thing we got rid of Stauffenberg,’ he noted. ‘A negative personalitywith talents like that [is] always extremely dangerous.’35Stauffenberg, it seemed, had been in touch with the traitors in Moscow. Hitlershowed Goebbels the latest Soviet propaganda leaflets, signed by German generals:‘Men like Stauffenberg came from our own ranks,’ read one. ‘Soldiers and officers ofthe German army and Luftwaffe, surrender as one man to the bolsheviks.’ 36 Hitlersaid that the quartermaster-general Wagner (who had shot himself) had sent tentimes more gasoline to sectors without tanks than to those with them.37 While bothmen agreed that they could not publicly excoriate the generals in mid-battle Hitler858 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHordered Goebbels to spare no detail of the other traitors’ infamy—for example thatthey had also planned to kill him by planting a bomb in the knapsacks of three soldiersdemonstrating a new infantry uniform to him.38 It was not difficult for Goebbelsnow to persuade him to stage a political show trial rather