Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

The operas, the great works ofart and poetry, the ill-defined sensations of national pride and humiliation, all theseimpressions are encoded and stored away by the neurons of the brain. And thusgradually one man comes to differ from the next.Since prehistoric times the human brain has remained impenetrable and marvellous.Surgeons have trepanned into the human cranium in the hope of fathoming itsGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 15secrets. The Greeks, the Romans, and the mediæval Arabs all opened up their fellowhumans’ skulls to gaze upon the brain. In 1945 the American army took Benito Mussolini’sbrain away for examination; they did the same with Dr. Robert Ley’s brain,and the Russians with Lenin’s. But no instrument has yet explained the brain’s capacityfor evil.THE BRAIN which indirectly occupies us now has ceased its machinations one eveningin May 1945. Here it is, punctured by a 6·35-caliber bullet, lying in the ruined gardenof a government building in Berlin. Next to its owner are the charred remains ofa woman, the metal fastenings tumbling out of her singed, once-blonde hair. Aroundthem both, callously grouped for the photographer, stand a Russian lieutenant-colonel,two majors, and several civilians.It is May 2, 1945: five P.M., and the building is the late Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.The lieutenant-colonel is Ivan Isiavich Klimenko, head of Smersh (a Russianacronym for Soviet Counter-Intelligence) in a Rifle Corps. He has been led here bythe Chancellery’s cook Wilhelm Lange and its garage manager Karl Schneider. It hasbegun to pour with rain. Klimenko’s men slide the two bodies onto a large red-andgiltdoor torn from the building. They scoop up a fire-blackened Walther pistol foundbeneath the man’s body, and another pistol found nearby; a gold badge; an engravedgold cigarette case, and other personal effects. All will be needed for identification.1Driving a Jeep, Klimenko leads the way back to Smersh headquarters set up in theold jailhouse at Plötzensee. On the following day he returns to the Chancellery, stillhunting for the Führer. Below ground, inside the bunker, he finds the bodies of sixchildren in pretty blue nightdresses or pyjamas. He ships them out to Plötzensee too,together with the corpse of a burly German army officer, a suicide.The Russians bring all the guests of the five-star Continental Hotel out to Plötzensee,including a textiles merchant, a chaplain, and a hospital assistant, and invite them toidentify the cadavers.2 Even if the receding hairline, the Latin profile, the overwidemouth, and the unusually large cranium are not clues enough, then the steel splintwith its two ringlike clamps to clutch the calf muscles, and the charred leather straps16 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHstill tying it to the right leg leave no room for doubt at all. The foot is clenched like adead chicken’s claw: a club foot.This is all that remains of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the malevolent genius whose oratoryonce inspired a nation to fight a total war and to hold out to the very end.The Germans carry all the bodies outside on tarpaulins, and a Red Army trucktransports them to a villa some ten kilometres north-north-east of Berlin where theSoviets are equipped to perform autopsies.Soviet officers bring in Professor Werner Haase, one of Hitler’s surgeons, andFritzsche, one of Goebbels’ senior deputies, to view the bodies.3Haase identifies them; Fritzsche hesitates, but the club foot and the orthopædicshoe clinch it for him. ‘Check the Gold Party Badge,’ he suggests.The badge is cleaned of soot and dirt, and reveals the number 8762—Goebbels’membership number in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Naziparty).“It’s Dr. Goebbels,’ Fritzsche confirms.4This is almost the last public appearance of Dr. Joseph Goebbels. A few days laterthe Russians summon Hans Fritzsche out to G.P.U. (secret police) headquarters atFriedrichshagen, in south-east Berlin and show him a notebook partly concealed bya metal plate: he recognizes Goebbels’ handwriting, and asks to see more. The Sovietofficer removes the plate and reveals a diary bound in red leather. ‘We found twentyof these, up to about 1941, in the vaults of the Reichsbank,’ he says.The Russians arrange one final identification ceremony. In a copse nearFriedrichshagen that Whitsun of 1945 they show Goebbels’ entire family, now restingin wooden coffins, to his former personal detective, the forty year old Feldpolizeiofficer Eckold. He identifies his former master without hesitation.5AMONG the personal effects was a gold cigarette case inscribed ‘Adolf Hitler,’ anddated ‘29.x.34’. That was Paul Joseph Goebbels’ birthday. He had first opened hiseyes and uttered his first scream at No.186 Odenkirchener Strasse in the smokyLower Rhineland town of Rheydt on October 29, 1897;6 it was a thousand-year oldtextiles centre, set in a landscape of traditionally pious Catholics and hardworkingGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 17country folk. ‘The daily visit to church,’ writes Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels’ mostrecent biographer, ‘confession and family prayers at home and their mother makingthe sign of the cross on her kneeling children’s foreheads with holy water, were asmuch a part of their life as the daily bread for which their father toiled at Lennartz’gas-mantle factory.’7 Their father Fritz Göbbels—that is the spelling in Paul Joseph’sbirth certificate—was W. H. Lennartz & Co’s dependable, Catholic though certainlynot bigoted bookkeeper.8 It is not over fanciful to suspect that he chose the child’ssecond name in honour of Dr Josef Joseph, a revered local Jewish attorney and closefamily friend; the child had often been sent round to talk literature with this neighbour.9 Fritz persevered with the Lennartz company almost until he died, struggling,through thrift and application, to provide a better life for his family than he hadknown himself.He himself had been born here to a tailor’s family from Beckrath south-west ofRheydt. He had the same bulbous nose as his father Conrad Göbbels10 and as hisbrother Heinrich, a paunchy commercial traveller in textiles with all the ready witthat Fritz so sorely lacked. Fritz’s mother Gertrud was a peasant’s daughter. Fromfirst to last his relations with his youngest son Joseph were strained. Aware that hisown career would see little more advancement, he made sacrifices for ‘little Jupp’(Jüppche), which were most inadequately repaid. He struggled painfully for promotionin the firm from errand boy to clerk, then to bookkeeper with a