Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

Koblenz. Dr Hölder, president of the German federal statistics* A listing of the author’s relevant microfilmed records is on pp. n of this work.Most can be ordered from Microform Academic Publishers Ltd., Main Street, EastArdsley, Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF3 2AT, England (tel. +44 924 825 700; fax829 212).GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 9agency (Statistisches Bundesamt) in Wiesbaden, provided essential data on Jewishpopulation movements with reference to Berlin. Two staff members (Lamers andKunert) of the Mönchengladbach archives provided several of the early school photosand snapshots of girlfriends reproduced in this work. André Mieles of the DeutschesInstitut für Filmkunde (German Institute of Cinematography) provided many of theoriginal movie stills and other fine photographs of filmstars. I owe thanks to TadeuszDuda and the Jagiellonski Library of University of Kraków, Poland, for the photographsreproduced from Horst Wessel’s diary in their custody. Dr Werner Johe of theForschungsstelle für die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Research Office forthe History of National Socialism) in Hamburg volunteered data from the diary ofGauleiter Albert Krebs. Karl Heinz Roth of the Hamburg Stiftung für Sozialgeschichtedes 20. Jahrhunderts (Foundation for the Social History of the Twentieth Century)assisted me in dating certain episodes in 1934. The state archives of Lower Saxony(Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv) in Wolfenbüttel let me read Leopold Gutterer’spapers and I am glad to have been able to interview Dr Gutterer, now over ninety, onseveral occasions for this book. I was fortunate to obtain access to the papers ofEugen Hadamowsky as well as those of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and of the propagandaministry itself at the Zentrales Staatsarchiv in Potsdam while it was still in thecommunist zone of Germany; most of the files—e.g., vol.765, Goebbels’ letters tohis colleagues at the Front—had remained untouched since last being used by DrHelmut Heiber in 1958. In those last dramatic days before November 1989, archivistDr Kessler gave me unlimited access despite cramped circumstances; those filestoo have now passed under the less liberal control of the Bundesarchiv.Although any biographer of Goebbels owes a debt to Dr Helmut Heiber, who firsttrod the paths to the papers in Potsdam, he will forgive me for not using his otherwiseexcellent published volumes of Goebbels’ speeches; often important phrases—faithfully reported by local British and other diplomats in the audiences—were omittedfrom the published texts on which Heiber relies; these diplomatic records, aswell as other important documents, I have extracted from the holdings of the PublicRecord Office in London, capably helped by Susanna Scott-Gall as a research assist-10 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHant. Shortly before its completion Manfred Müller, an expert of the early years ofthe Goebbels family, generously commented on my manuscript and let me read hisown biography of Hans Goebbels, the brother of the Reichminister.The Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) in Munich gave me the run of its library andarchives and made available to me its files of press clippings on Nazi personalities.But here too a possessiveness, an unseemly territorialism came into play as the IfZcontrived to protect its virtual monopoly in unpublished fragments of the Goebbelsdiaries. Before coming across the Moscow cache, I had asked the IfZ, while researchingthere in 1992, for access to its Goebbels diaries holdings for the two years 1939and 1944; on May 13 the director of the IfZ refused in writing, stating that it was theinstitute’s strict and invariable practice not to make available ‘to outsiders’ collectionsthat it was still processing. This was why—since I could not conceive of completingthe biography properly without those volumes—I travelled to Moscow, whereI had learned that the original Nazi microfiches were housed; here I accessed, to theMunich institute’s chagrin, not only the volumes for 1939 and 1944 but the entirediaries from 1923 to 1945—but not before the institute, in an attempt to secure myeviction, had urgently faxed to Moscow on July 3, 1992 the allegation, which theymany weeks later honourably withdrew†, that I was stealing from the Soviet archives.Foul play indeed—methods of which Dr Goebbels himself would probablyhave been proud. That was not all. A few days later, hearing that the Sunday Timesintended to publish the diaries which I had found in Moscow, the same institute, witha haste that would have been commendable under other circumstances, furnished tojournalists on the Daily Mail, a tabloid English newspaper, the diary material which ithad denied to me two months earlier: as of course they were entitled to. There wasone pleasing denouement. The tabloid newspaper—which had paid out £20,000 inanticipation of its scoop—found that neither it nor its hired historians could read theminister’s notoriously indecipherable handwriting. It abandoned its serialisation inimpotent fury two days later.† Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 22, 1992GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 11Of course this biography is not based on Dr Goebbels’ writings alone. In no particularsequence, I must make mention of Andrzej Suchcitz of the Polish Institute andSikorski Museum in London who provided to me important assistance on the provenanceof Goebbels’ revealing secret speech about the Final Solution of September1942; the George Arents library at the University of Syracuse, N.Y., who allowed meto research in the Dorothy Thompson papers; and to Geoffrey Wexler, ReferenceArchivist of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, who gave access to Louis PLochner’s papers, copies of some of which are also housed in the Franklin D RooseveltLibrary at Hyde Park, N.Y. I also owe thanks to the latter library for the use of othercollections including William B Donovan’s papers and the ‘presidential safe files’; Iused more of Donovan’s papers at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle,Pa.Dr G Arlettaz of the Swiss federal archives in Berne, Dr Sven Welander of theLeague of Nations archives at the United Nations in Geneva, and Didier Grange ofthe Geneva city archives provided valuable information and photographs on Goebbels’‘diplomatic’ visit to Geneva in 1933. In Germany I was greatly helped by the officialsof the Nuremberg state archive which houses reports on the post-war interrogationsof leading propaganda ministry and other officials (some of which I also read at theNational Archives in Washington D.C., where my friends John Taylor and RobertWolfe provided the same kindly and expert guidance as they have shown for severaldecades.)Dr