Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

the most dangerous point for an attacker was when victoryseemed in sight: he relaxed his efforts while the defender redoubled his. Clipped tothe memo was a British news despatch: the London Daily Mail was bragging, ‘Militarily,the war in the west is over.’ This was the same blunder that the Germans had made atMoscow in 1941.55The German retreat in France had turned into a rout. Field Marshal von Klugelaunched a counter-attack at Avranches, bungled it, and committed suicide.56 ‘TheAmericans,’ noted Goebbels, ‘are now showing off to us the same blitzkrieg tacticsthat we demonstrated to the French and British in 1940.’Once he sat up with Hitler and his advisers until two A.M. discussing what to do;but Goebbels feared that Hitler was operating in the west with non-existent divisionsand useless generals. ‘If there were brutal party men in charge of the varioussectors things would probably be quite different.’57The Americans crossed the German frontier at Aachen in mid September. The warmight be over with dramatic swiftness, in weeks or even days.58 The day of reckoningsuddenly seemed nearer. Goebbels knew that Soviet propaganda was claiming that inthree years the Nazis had murdered two million prisoners in Lublin, Poland.59 Heknew too that the Allies considered him a war criminal.60 It was likely that top Nazislike him would be shot out of hand. ‘It should not be assumed,’ Mr Churchill announcedin London, ‘that the procedure of trial will be necessarily adopted.’61 Duringone trial in Rome the mob had lynched a fascist defendant and tossed his corpseinto the Tiber. ‘These,’ Goebbels mused, ‘are alarming omens which no thinking mancan ignore.’62 He did not intend to be taken prisoner. Hearing that General HermannRamcke had surrendered at Brest, Goebbels was baffled at the paratroop general’slack of any sense of immortality.63 He had decided on suicide; but evidently he hadno notion yet of killing his children, as he discussed with Max Winkler that autumn862 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHwhat would become of them after his death, adding that his son Helmut showed fewof his daughters’ talents and he would like to leave him perhaps a small farm.64Since the daily drive in from Lanke was robbing him of precious hours, Goebbelsmoved back into No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse, while his family stayed out at Lanke.Enforcing Total War was still an uphill struggle. During September 1944 he orderedteenagers mobilized, and directed women to take over all hairdressing.65 Hehad the propaganda companies slashed from fifteen thousand to three thousand men;but the railroad and the foreign ministry declined to make manpower cuts, and Speerstubbornly refused to release the next hundred thousand men from his factories.66He accused Goebbels of organising a useless people’s army. Goebbels called the allegationpuerile—‘We don’t have any intention of pitting unarmed soldiers againstthe enemy,’ he wrote. After hearing Speer pontificating about his responsibility beforehistory, Goebbels dictated: ‘I think we have let this young man get too big for hisboots.’67Hitler ruled in his favour every time. When Speer flourished tables of statistics,Goebbels denounced them as lies.68The people were still waiting for ‘V–2’. ‘If we didn’t have more such weapons,’they said, ‘Dr Goebbels would not have been able to speak so definitely about them.’69S.S. Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler told Goebbels that the ‘V–2’ attack on Londonhad begun on September 8; the rockets were being launched from secret mobilesites in Holland.70 Mr Churchill however was admitting nothing, so Goebbels darednot commence his ‘V–2’ propaganda yet.With France lost, the Luftwaffe’s ‘V–1’ had all but ceased operations. Hitler againconsidered replacing Göring as commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, but again heabandoned the idea. ‘It is horrendous,’ commented Goebbels, ‘the contortions thathave to be gone through… When the good times rolled, the Führer allowed Göringto get too grand; and now the bad times are here, he’s like a ball-and-chain.’71 Thepublic had no time for either Göring or Ribbentrop, Himmler was told at this time:they thought well only of Hitler, Goebbels (and of course the Reichsführer S.S.)72GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 863For all his shortcomings however it was Göring who broke it to Goebbels thatHarald was missing in action in Italy. Goebbels and Magda decided to keep it fromHarald’s siblings, who idolized him. He consoled Magda that her son might havebeen taken prisoner.73SEVERAL times Lieutenant Oven heard Goebbels preface his remarks with the remark,‘If I were foreign minister…’74 He intently followed the Soviet-inspired rumoursin the neutral press about Nazi feelers to Moscow and often speculated onStalin’s reasons for refusing to join in the Allied demand for unconditional surrender.75 The Japanese, he knew, were aghast at recent events like the bomb plot and themilitary collapse in France, and they too expressed dismay at the lack of flexibility inRibbentrop’s foreign policy. The Japanese ambassador General Hiroshi Oshima urgedNaumann to tell Goebbels that Germany must make peace with the Soviets; Japanwas even willing to make concessions to that end.76The topic was dynamite, but Goebbels immediately asked both Himmler andBormann to convey Oshima’s message to Hitler. ‘We’ve got to revitalize our foreignpolicy,’ he noted.77 He was not alone in this view. He found that Dr Ley, rattled thatenemy troops had reached German soil, shared his concerns. Ley mentioned thatmany people hoped to see him replacing Ribbentrop eventually.78The upshot was that Goebbels drafted a twenty-seven page pitch for Ribbentrop’sjob—a memorandum spelling out brutal home truths for Hitler on foreign policy.They had held neither the eastern front nor the Atlantic Wall, he said. They had lostmost of their occupied territories. The only positive factor was the disunity amongtheir enemies—redolent of 1932, when clever tactics had ultimately enabled Hitlerto outsmart them. ’We did not wait then,’ he pointed out, ‘for them to approach us:we approached them.’ Germany, he reminded Hitler, had never yet won a war ontwo fronts.There was however little prospect of negotiating with the western powers althoughthat would, he conceded, conform with Hitler’s own ambitions. ‘Even if for instanceChurchill secretly desired such a solution,’ observed Goebbels, ‘which I doubt, he864 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHwould not in practice be able to implement it as he’s hog-tied by domestic politics.’Britain was in a truly tragic situation, he