B006OAL1QM EBOK (23 page)

Although Goebbels did not directly order the industry to make more than a handful of films during his twelve years as Minister, he never stopped interfering with what was being done. Klitzsch, the head of UFA, liked to be left alone to make harmless pictures with few political implications. But Goebbels could not leave him or anyone else alone. He soon learned how to throw his weight about over advance scripts and finished films alike, and it was here that his constant surveillance became irksome to the producers. He demanded cuts, he suggested additions, he exercised his authority to have productions shelved, he interfered with casting, and all the time he used his new social position as a Reich Minister to exact favours and to ingratiate himself with actresses.

On the other hand, certain of the artists of distinction whom he sought to exploit learnt how to handle and to some extent forestall his requirements. Emil Jannings, for example, who had returned to Germany from Hollywood before Hitler came to power, was not a Nazi and chose to appear in a succession of films which had no relation to current problems. Then followed a duel of wits between them.
³²
Jannings in private called Goebbels
‘Hinkefuss’
(the lame duck) and even imitated his limp in
Der Zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug),
a film which Goebbels ordered to be withdrawn and which Jannings managed to persuade Hitler to reinstate on the screen because of its popularity. For as long as he could Jannings used his powerful position as a great star to evade Goebbels' attempts to commit him to appearing in a Nazi prestige production. But eventually he was cornered and forced to play in the violently anti-British film
Ohm Krüger,
the script of which Goebbels supervised and, in part at least, wrote himself with Jannings particularly in mind.

The most tragic of Goebbels' interventions was his persecution of individual men and women in the film industry whose private lives offended the Nazis. Although he failed completely to break up the devotion of Hans Albers for Hansi Burg, a well-known Jewish actress in exile whom he supported while she was away from him and married only after the war, he so harried another popular actor, Joachim Gottschalk, because he would not divorce his Jewish wife that he drove them both to commit suicide; they killed their three-year-old child as well rather than leave it to be an orphan brought up in Nazi Germany. This suicide, which formed the basis for the story of the post-war film,
Ehe im Schatten,
shocked everyone. Goebbels, who was also shocked, though for different reasons, forbade people to attend the funeral, but a large gathering of men and women famous in the film and theatre refused to take notice of the ban and went to pay their respects to their colleagues who had died rather than be parted.

Goebbels previewed every issue of the newsreels that he could, and every major production of the feature studios. In addition to this, he viewed foreign films, particularly those which he had forbidden release in Germany. He saw every anti-Nazi film of which he could obtain a print. For example, he complained bitterly to an American correspondent, William Bayles, after seeing a Hollywood film
I Was a Nazi Spy,
in which the lavish good taste of the interior decoration of his office was travestied as a soulless building full of Nazi flags and emblems.
³³
He looked at these films quite dispassionately and professionally as good or bad examples of propaganda. When the films were shown at his own home he would see them either alone or with a small circle of his immediate staff (his aides and secretaries) and house guests.

Acute as was Goebbels' insight into events and situations, his failing tended to lie in his understanding of people. Both men and women were elements in his life that he made use of. He had no capacity for real sympathy or for intimacy. He had charm; innumerable people testify to this. But the charm, like the venom that often lay beneath it, was a self-conscious exercise. It is difficult to find people who liked him.

The professional observers, the foreign correspondents, who had to deal with him are broadly-speaking of the same opinion about him. Edgar Mowrer, the American journalist, says he was “agreeable in manner, confident with a pen, middle-class in conviction, cynically adaptable in opinion, unusually intelligent… supreme in that insolence which goes so far to impress wavering votes”.
³⁴
William Shirer, another American correspondent, refers to his “evil but fertile brain”;
³⁵
he makes constant ironic reference to him as a liar and he even considers the much-praised voice “unpleasant”. Lochner is content to say: “I loathed Dr. Goebbels.”
³⁶
Goebbels was equally unpopular with his colleagues. Dr. Schacht at the time he was President of the Reichs-bank told Vernon McKenzie: “I would have hit Goebbels many a time if he hadn't been a cripple!”
³⁷
—this because of his acid sarcasm which he did not hesitate to use in conversation. For von Hassell, the diplomat who was finally executed after the Generals' plot, Goebbels was “the most dangerous of the party leaders” and “a filthy dog”.
³⁸
The American Ambassador, William E. Dodd, characterised him in his diary as “far cleverer than Hitler” and “a past master” at oratory. “He makes a point of stirring animosities and hatreds,” he added.
³⁹

A somewhat different approach to the character of Goebbels is made by Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Germany from 1931 to 1939. He wrote of him:

The ‘little doctor’ was probably the most intelligent, from a purely brain point of view, of all the Nazi leaders. He never speechified; he always saw and stuck to the point; he was an able debater and, in private conversation, astonishingly fair-minded and reasonable. Personally, whenever I had the chance, I found pleasure in talking to him. In appearance and in character he was a typical little Irish agitator…. When, however, he was on a public platform or had a pen in his hand no gall was too bitter and no lie too blatant for him.
⁴⁰

Goebbels, however, was prepared to face unpopularity. To him it was the price of power. He preferred to be feared rather than loved, and even went so far as to admit this later on in his career to one of his war-time secretaries, von Oven. There was only one person in his public life whom he had ever addressed by the intimate term
‘du’
. This had been his early associate Karl Kaufmann.

One of the difficulties with which Goebbels had to cope was the handling of the foreign correspondents—men over whom it was difficult for him to exercise control and whom he knew in many cases were critical of him and his methods of handling the news that they were after. From 1934 he normally used the method of press conferences at the Ministry to announce new decrees or other more important changes to the foreign correspondents. William Shirer, the American correspondent, describes in his diary how on 16th March 1935 he was summoned with the others to the Ministry, and how Goebbels “limped in, looking very grave and important” before reading in a loud voice too fast for dictation the text of the new law introducing conscription in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. Then he left his officials to give guarded answers to the questions the correspondents began at once to shoot at them.
⁴¹

During the first year of the Ministry Goebbels made the mistake of neglecting the foreign press, as Louis Lochner points out;
⁴²
Lochner, an American journalist, was President of the Foreign Press Association at the time and was after the war to edit a section of Goebbels' wartime diaries. Later Goebbels gave tea-parties, receptions and
Bierabende
for the journalists who, after all, were the men that created the main picture of the uew Germany for the public abroad. Even with them, however, the same kind of prevarication as that invented for the home press was thought sufficient to pass muster. In important press conferences he was quite prepared to give out patent lies as, for example, on the occasion described by Lochner when he claimed to the correspondents at a conference on 10th November 1938 that the accounts of the wanton destruction of Jewish property by Nazi hooligans the day before (events which the journalists had all witnessed for themselves) were “stinking lies”
(sind erstunken und erlogen)
.
⁴³
What possible good could such denials do, thought the astonished journalists as Goebbels went on vituperating in utter disregard for the obvious truth. Goebbels merely said what he wanted the correspondents to hear him say. He could then watch for their reports and take action if he found they went too far in their criticism. According to Vernon McKenzie, another American journalist, foreign correspondents in Germany, although not subject to direct censorship, were held responsible for what Goebbels regarded as the accuracy of their published reports, and formal expulsion orders could be and were issued if warning proved insufficient. McKenzie claims that some twenty-five expulsion orders were served on foreign correspondents in the six years prior to the war, and that others left ‘voluntarily’ when warned to do so since, to quote one of the Nazi formulas, their “safety could not be guaranteed”. In all over fifty correspondents left Germany because, either directly or indirectly, they were ordered to go. Among those expelled were Dorothy Thompson, Edgar Mowrer, and one of the London
Times’
leading correspondents, Norman Ebbutt.
⁴⁴

Over and over again Goebbels showed his ignorance of the character of countries outside Germany, although he had the foreign press studied by his monitors. In the whole of his life he spent in all only a few weeks abroad on brief visits such as his few days in Geneva in 1933, his official visit to Greece in 1936, and an occasional visit to Italy. He tended to regard the rest of the world as if it were, from the point of view of propaganda, an unattached annexe to Germany which should be treated as far as possible in the same manner. He certainly did not understand world reaction to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. This reached its height in the appalling pogrom of November 1938, the facts of which, as we have seen, Goebbels tried to persuade the press to dismiss as the exaggeration of rumour. The old Party propaganda technique of the repetition of lies in a situation where the truth is totally withheld might on many occasions be made to work in the vacuum of Germany, but it was useless and at times farcical in a world which still had free access to the news. This is constantly borne out in the exasperated comments made by experienced foreign correspondents such as Shirer and Lochner.

He was not, however, content to leave the fate of world opinion of the régime to the representatives appointed by the foreign press. In the years before the war an elaborate system of public relations was built up abroad by the Germans themselves. In 1934 some 260 million marks were spent on propaganda outside Germany. Some 300 German-language newspapers were published abroad, and it has been estimated that the Nazis either owned or had financial interest in about 350 newspapers published in other languages.
⁴⁵

The German news agencies became highly efficient services. For example, Transocean, which operated for Goebbels in South America, was by 1939 sending out free news in excellent Spanish with free photographic illustration in matrix form for immediate use in the press. Sometimes as much as 20,000 words a day would be made available to the Latin American press. The tenor of this news was always anti-British. Transocean was careful to mix its doctored material with scrupulously accurate local news.
⁴⁶

In his initial efforts to gain ground in the United States, Goebbels went so far as to engage Ivy Lee, the American public relations pioneer and expert who had made his name through popularising John D. Rockefeller, reputed at the time to be the most unpopular man in the United States. Goebbels must have considered him to possess the necessary experience to popularise Hitler. He had, at any rate, the right references and, according to the American Ambassador, William E. Dodd, Goebbels paid Lee $33,000 a year.
⁴⁷
The advice Lee gave was sound—get friendly with the correspondents. Goebbels responded by expelling the very ones best qualified to spread alarm and despondency about Germany in the eloquent articles and books they wrote when they reached home. The result was a series of anti-Nazi books which were widely read in every country in which they were published. On the other hand, as we have seen, Goebbels established a recognised system of press conferences in 1934, probably as a result of Lee's advice.

Propaganda attache's were posted to the German embassies abroad. Just as Goebbels constantly sent instructions to the German press (which on occasion fell into the more enlightened hands of the foreign correspondents, as Shirer reports),
⁴⁸
so he sent out secret instructions on the propaganda line to his foreign agents. These dangerous documents again sometimes got into the wrong hands, and shed as true a light on Germany's policy as Hitler's
Mein Kampf
for those who were prepared to face its appalling literary style and prolix argument.