Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

she replied, ‘my husband is gauleiter of Berlin. Life without myhusband would have no purpose for me—nor did I bear my children to have themput on display in the Soviet Union and America as the children of the propagandaminister Goebbels.’A day or two later she ran into a former musician friend of her husband’s in Unterden Linden; she knew him well enough to have dropped a broad hint in a letter, yearsbefore, that she had only married Goebbels to be near ‘him,’ meaning Hitler. Sheadded that she had now brought all her family into Berlin; if things got worse, shesaid, they would move into Hitler’s bunker. She turned and waved to him as theyparted. The musician thought involuntarily of the last days of Pompeii.20908 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHFINIS Germaniæ was the spirit of the leading article that Goebbels published that day.The ‘bloodthirsty and vengeful’ enemy coalition was wasting away; it had ‘to triumphswiftly or triumph not at all.’ The article displayed a confidence bordering oncomplacency: ‘I know for certain that the Führer will find a way out of the dilemma,’he soothed his readers. The rest was written purely for posterity. ‘We have no causeto hang our heads before the enemy,’ he wrote. ‘What the German people has achievedin this war is already history. No filthy hand of foe shall ever fling aside the crown oflaurels that already adorns our nation’s brow.’ Now, he recommended, was a time forall to fight—‘And what life is too precious to sacrifice pro patria!’ ‘So let each andevery one of us swear a private oath, devoid of any pathos, to choose to die ratherthan accept the yoke of servitude.’ They were traversing the final phase of this war, hewrote. ‘One cannot humanly conceive of how it can last much longer.’21Indeed it could not. At dawn on the sixteenth Marshal Georgii KonstantinovichZhukov and Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Koniev threw eighteen Soviet armies at Berlin—not Prague. At night the children looked out of their window and asked whythe flashes lighting the horizon produced no rain. Dr Goebbels was in hourly contactwith General Busse. He commandeered a fleet of Berlin omnibuses to rush soldiersto the battlefield.22 To Hitler’s anger Goebbels sent five of the Volkssturm battalionsalthough they were supposed only to be used for immediate neighbourhood defence.23Goebbels suspected however that this was already the last battle. He asked LieutenantOven to help him burn his private papers—including pictures of parents, yellowingand mounted on thick card, snapshots of the little Joseph in a sailor suit,school reports, a letter of the Rheydt Cotton Trading Association, academic diplomas,and hotel bills. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, holding up a studio portrait photograph.’Now there was a woman of perfect beauty!’ The portrait, of actress LidaBaarova, joined the others in the flames.24He dedicated to Hitler, on the eve of his birthday, a last brilliant broadcast honouringhim as the man whom the German nation had in free elections chosen as theirleader. ‘If Germany still lives today,’ he thundered, ‘if Europe and the cultured andcivilized Occident have still not been swept away for ever into the fathomless mael-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 909strom that yawns black and ominous before us, then they owe it to him alone. Hewill be the Man of the Century.’ What, he continued, had the enemy to offer? ‘Nothingbut their superiority in numbers, their brutish mania for destruction, their diabolicalrage that masks the chaos of mankind in dissolution. An entire violated continentstands testimony against them. In every country of Europe once flourishingcities and villages have been turned into cratered wastelands.’ Now however the finalact of this mighty tragedy had begun. ‘The chief of the hostile conspiracy has beencrushed by Fate, the same Fate which left the Führer on July 20 standing erect anduninjured midst the dead and dying and rubble so that he might complete his works.’‘Pay heed, ye Germans!’ he declared into the microphone. ‘Millions of people, inevery country on Earth, are looking to this man, wonderingly and perplexed: doeshe know a way out of this mighty misfortune that has beset the world? He will showit to the nations.’25The underlying message was vintage Goebbels: blind, self-sacrificing loyalty to hisFührer. A message went to Magda to have the children brought to No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse ready to brighten the Führer’s birthday the next day. At midnight hewent over to the Chancellery bunker. With glazed and red-rimmed eyes Hitler spoketo them of his hardening resolve to hold northern Germany and Norway if the Reichshould indeed be sliced in two, and to defend the Alps and Bohemia-Moravia. To DrLey he hinted that he would move into this southern ‘fortress’ himself.26 Goebbelshowever had already decided to defend Berlin to the last since the army generals hadproven incapable. Ley urged him at least to send his family to safety. Goebbels wasobstinate. ‘I shall die here, if I have to, and Magda has decided to do likewise.’27 Notfor him the humiliating surrender of a Paulus. ‘What does he do, this man who hasordered and exhorted his men to stand and die?’ he had said in 1943. ‘He trots offinto captivity, not forgetting to pack his little suitcase on the way!’28At mid-day on April 20 there was a small birthday parade. Goebbels followed Hitlerup the winding staircase into the garden. Hitler turned up the collar of his greygreatcoat and walked down the line of youngsters handing out medals to the teenagerswho had fought the Russians off with flak guns or bazookas. At four P.M. he went910 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHback down into the bunker, never to come out alive again, and Goebbels returned tohis residence.The High Command and war department evacuated Berlin, traveling to Bavaria,leaving skeleton staffs in Berlin. Dr Friedrich-Wilhelm Kritzinger, Lammers’Staatssekretär, broke it to Goebbels that every other ministry had now left for thenorthern ‘fortress’. Furious at this news Goebbels demanded to know how he wasexpected to defend Berlin without them?29 Thus his own ministry staff found thatthey, like their minister, were hemmed into the Reich capital. (Most of the women,around three hundred