Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

Mar 19, 1945.40 Diary, Mar 21, 1945.41 Ibid., Mar 30.—Magda Goebbels to Zeller (for Hanke) Apr 9, 1945 (ZStA Potsdam,Rep.90 Go 2, vol.2)42 Diary, Mar 22, 1945.43 Ebermayer & Meissner, Revue, No.26, Jun 28, 1952.44 Naumann testimony, May 18, 1950 (IfZ, ZS.1134).45 Hitler’s war conference, Mar 23 (Heiber, op. cit.); JG diary, Mar 27; Sündermann, ‘Mar24, 1945,’ 322.896 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH58: Death of Another EmpressSO Dr Goebbels remained in Berlin, a prisoner of his own pride and his ownroutine from the moment he strapped on his leg-calipers each morning. In thewest General Eisenhower’s armies had swept across the Rhine and a pincer operationwas about to shut off the Ruhr, the Nazis’ last arsenal. The Rhinelanders hadseemed almost to welcome the Allies: the civilians saw relief from the air raids, andfrom the threat of pestilence and starvation. The wording had become circumspect.‘In fact,’ he dictated as April began, ‘events in the west seem likely to give the enemysome hope of overwhelming us militarily quite soon.’1 Lieutenant Colonel Rudi Balzerbrought back from the western front shocking reports of the collapse of moralewhich confirmed what Field Marshal Kesselring had said a few days earlier.2 The cityof Mannheim had telephoned the approaching Americans offering to surrender.3 Colognesurrendered in an hour. In Frankfurt German women were embracing theAmerican troops. Townsfolk were openly hanging out the white flag and jeering attheir own soldiers. Goebbels sent in thirty of his finest orators—he had no choice,because the printed media had virtually disappeared. In the south Hitler’s last oilproducingfields in Hungary were about to be overrun. Dictating the diary eachmorning gave him little cheer. If only he could get Hitler to broadcast, as Churchillhad in 1940 and Stalin in 1941, it would be like a battle won.The scale of the air war was now such that when nine-hundred American heavybombers attacked Hanover and Berlin he dismissed it as a ‘medium scale’ operation.His field office in Hamburg reported that people were commenting scornfully onGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 897the swift execution of the German officers who had allowed the Rhine bridge atRemagen to fall into American hands and suggesting quite openly—in letters towhich they did not hesitate to append their full names and addresses—that theReichsmarschall should face a firing squad as well.4THE British and Americans had now crossed the Rhine in strength and had floodedinto central Germany as far as Würzburg. Hitler suspected treason in the west, andsent for Goebbels at noon on March 27, 1945. For an hour they strolled through thechancellery garden beneath his study window, talking. Goebbels noticed how stoopedthe man had now become; and that the gardens had been torn up, as reinforcingwork on Hitler’s subterranean bunker proceeded. Hitler had decided to stay in Berlin,and the mood of the generals around him was already one of despair. Goebbelsremarked that they should have quit the Geneva Convention when he said: he blamedSpeer and Bormann for talking Hitler out of it. They were still half-bourgeois, thesemen—‘They think, but don’t act, as revolutionaries.’ Goebbels warned of the collapsingmorale in the west, and urged Hitler to broadcast to the nation like Churchilland Stalin in their moment of crisis. Fifteen minutes would do the trick, he said.GOEBBELS saw Hitler again on March 30. A day or two before, he had asked Himmler’ssecurity service, the S.D., to scour its files for the old, forbidden horoscopes that hadbeen cast for the birth date of the republic, November 9, 1918, and the birth date ofHitler’s Reich, January 30, 1933.5 The tracts were on his desk at the ministry on thetwenty-ninth. ‘Both are in startling agreement,’ he furtively informed his diary. ‘I canwell understand,’ he hastened to add, ‘that the Führer has prohibited any traffickingin such unverifiable things. Even so it is not without interest to see that both theRepublic’s horoscope and that of the Führer are prophesying that our military affairswill look up in the latter part of April. In May, Jun, and July things will go downhillagain but hostilities will cease, it seems, in mid August. God grant,’ he dictated cynically,‘that this be so.’ fearful lest these pages fall into the wrong hands he added: ‘Formyself such astrological prophecies are of no account. But I intend to exploit them898 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH… because in times of crisis people will clutch at the slightest straws.’6 Among thesepeople he counted his Führer; but Hitler had slept for only two hours and was in nomood for horoscopes. Just six days ago, said Goebbels, produced his tattered copy ofCarlyle, he had found himself reading the description of the most harrowing days ofthe Seven Years War. The great monarch had seen no way out of the imminent defeat;Frederick had set himself a final deadline, and wrote to the Count d’Argenson that ifthings did not look up by then he would swallow that phial of poison. Three daysbefore that date, continued Goebbels, reading from the book, the Empress Elisabethof Russia had suddenly died. Her half-witted successor Peter the Third had offeredpeace to Frederick, and the House of Brandenburg was saved. Why should they nothope for precisely the same kind of miracle now? Looking up, Goebbels saw tearsflooding into Hitler’s eyes.7For some days Goebbels had pleaded with Hitler to broadcast a flaming oration tothe Reich. But Hitler displayed what was to Goebbels an incomprehensible aversionto facing the microphone now.8 The S.D. had informed him after his New Year’sspeech that people felt that it had not said anything new, explained Hitler; now hewanted to wait for good news from the western front before broadcasting again.That might take some time. The news from there was devastating. The Me262 jetswere scoring notable successes but the mass desertions of his troops could not beignored. There were, Goebbels suggested, a consequence of Hitler’s having rejectedhis drastic suggestion after the Dresden massacre that they repudiate the GenevaConvention and start executing Allied prisoners. Hitler agreed. Goebbels also criticizedtheir efforts at starting guerrilla warfare. Admittedly, the collapse in the westhad come with breathtaking speed, but their operation ‘Werewolf’ movement—anattempt to create