B006OAL1QM EBOK (40 page)

A hypochondriac, he feared he had cancer, when all that was wrong with him were his duodenal ulcers. He was also the victim of nervous superstition. “Goebbels is very superstitious,” wrote Semmler. “The more obscure the situation and the gloomier the future, the more this is apparent.” He claimed to Semmler that his mother once had second sight, until a Jesuit father had “freed her of the obsession”. Semmler continues:

Goebbels too had had similar experiences. When he was a student at Würzburg his grandmother had appeared to him a week after her death. Another time he had seen his brother in the room, although at the time he was a prisoner in a French camp.
¹⁴

Semmler himself witnessed Goebbels' fears when he accidentally knocked Hitler's autographed portrait from the Minister's desk. A piece of the broken glass transfixed the image of the Führer's left eye. “The whole evening Goebbels remained upset by this occurrence.” In 1944 he even went so far as to try to trace a fortune-teller who had in 1923 successfully foretold Hitler's rise to power, so that she might prophesy the outcome of the war, but his agents failed to find her after twenty years had passed.

Goebbels by now was poverty-stricken as a propagandist, whatever he might be as a man of action. He became the prophet of doom, calling on the German people to resist to the death and to destroy everything they possessed that could be of use to the advancing enemy. His attempt at using atrocity propaganda backed by photographs of women and children tortured by the Russians only led to a refugee problem. The roads were blocked by Germans preferring to be overtaken by the Allies in the West rather than the East. A strange new facet to Goebbels' deep-rooted radicalism emerged from the final tumult of press and radio. Death was the leveller through the agency of the bombs:

Together with the monuments of culture there assemble also the last obstacles to the fulfilment of our revolutionary task. Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe. In the past, private possessions led us to a bourgeois restraint. Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only smashed the prison walls which held them captive…. In trying to destroy Europe's future, the enemy has only succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone.
¹⁵

For Goebbels all this destruction of the symbols of the past was turned into a symbol of some vague future in which the phoenix of a new Germany would emerge from the ashes and the rubble to flout the greedy capitalists of the West and the Communist barbarians of the East. Leave nothing for them to take, he urged. Scorch the earth, raze the factories and mine the transport. He did not care about the fate of the people. He was concerned now quite simply with the foundation of the great legend of Hitler and the Nazi movement. In the end he thought only of posterity, as Fritzsche who knew him so well has pointed out: “He furtively looked with both eyes toward posterity. If you want to understand what he wrote towards the end, you have to bear this in mind.”
¹⁶
To one of his officers he said: “Only after my death will people really believe me.”
¹⁷

With more than one member of his staff Goebbels argued the case for adopting poetic licence in the handling of news. All along he had never hesitated to treat news as a stimulant to the German war effort rather than as a presentation of fact for fact's sake. Now during the last months of the war he introduced what Semmler, writing in November 1944, called a new reference in the vocabulary of propaganda, intended only for internal use in the Ministry. This was ‘poetic truth’ as distinct from ‘concrete truth’. In order to help the public, Goebbels claimed that it had become necessary to create imaginary news where the facts themselves were incomplete—hence the flow of atrocity stories when news of any real atrocities which may have occurred were an insufficient stimulant, and his fictitious accounts of action by the armed forces or the virtually non-existent German resistance in order to inspire a higher level of heroism in the German civilian morosely waiting for his town or village to be occupied.

The German resistance movement—entitled the Werewolves and technically always in readiness for operation under Himmler to assist the German Army behind the lines of the Allied forces when they had entered Germany—was in fact operational only on the radio, for Goebbels saw the value of the idea from the point of view of poetic truth before there was any evidence of concrete truth becoming available. News from Radio Werewolf began on 1st April; the German people were told that they, too, had a resistance movement, and so a long-kept secret was revealed without any authority from Himmler. Goebbels by this time did not care that he had no contact with the inefficient Werewolf organisation; its headquarters were at Flensburg on the Danish border, near the final centre for the German High Command, and an admirable place from which to organise a capitulation when Hitler was finally cut off in Berlin. Goebbels poured out his last verbal stimulants in the name of resistance, adding for better measure that victory was certain because as soon as the Americans and the British came finally face to face with the Russians, war would be declared between them and Germany would no longer be the target for destruction.

He never ceased to goad the German people into final self-immolation. On 30th January Hitler had appointed him Defender of Berlin. Goebbels, a civilian, became in effect a leader of German armed resistance, and his appointment revealed, to the horror of the people of Berlin, that Hitler intended the city to become a battle area. He assumed an officer's cap, but wore no insignia of rank, and added military conferences to his established duties at the Ministry. It was evident that he intended to go down working. While other ministries were evacuating south or preparing to evacuate, Goebbels kept his staff labouring at full stretch. On 4th February and again on 23rd February the Ministry building was seriously damaged in the airraids. Goebbels put his staff into the basements and turned his private residence into an annexe for the Ministry to house his senior officials.

In his nihilistic mood Goebbels conceived in February the infamous idea of repudiating the Geneva Convention. This so roused the humane Dr. Semmler that he himself decided to take action. No doubt he remembered what Magda Goebbels had told him the previous November:

Frau Goebbels knows better than I do that her husband is a genius who now and then turns into a very Satan. We were talking about this yesterday over a cup of tea, and she several times asked me to do what I could to modify decisions, taken in angry and reckless moods, which showed the devil in his nature. She told me she had often asked other members of his staff to do the same.
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Goebbels was maddened by the appalling destruction of Dresden during a single air-raid in mid-February, when four-fifths of the city was destroyed and thirty thousand people were estimated to have been killed. Semmler wrote:

For the first time I saw Goebbels lose control of himself when two days ago he was given the stark reports of the disaster in Dresden. The tears came into his eyes with grief and rage and shock. Twenty minutes later I saw him again. He was still crying and looked a broken man. But then there came a passionate outburst of rage; his veins swelled and he became red as a lobster.
¹⁹

It was as a consequence of this anger that Goebbels thought of proposing to Hitler that the Geneva Convention be repudiated to stop the heavy air-raids. He argued that the Allied air-crews held in captivity should be shot as a reprisal. Semmler did what he could to oppose the idea. When he heard that Hitler had approved it, he took the only action open to him and dropped a hint of what might happen to a foreign journalist who was in a position to see that news was passed on to London. Official British spokesmen then issued sharp warnings of retaliation if these rumours of a repudiation of the Convention were well founded, and this in turn led to the abandonment of the order by the Reich Chancellery. Goebbels was furious that the news had leaked out but never discovered that the source of the leakage was the man who ate at his own table.

Destruction: this was the last obsession of the inner circle drawing together round Hitler. Destruction of Germany and her resources, of the German people who had preferred their bourgeois comforts to the great social revolution offered them by the most powerful ruler the nation had known since Frederick the Great. Destruction finally of themselves as the little phials of poison were passed like precious stones from hand to hand. Hitler knew and approved of this, and himself possessed supplies of poison to give out to those whom he regarded as loyal and devoted followers, the blessing of death conferred by the Leader. Magda Goebbels was one of the first to get her ration from Professor Morell, Hitler's obnoxious and unqualified medical adviser who had materially helped to reduce Hitler to a pathological wreck with his experimental drugs, but who was nevertheless trusted by the Führer's inner circle and frequently consulted by Goebbels. Morell gave her what she wanted, a close large enough for herself and her six young children, something that would work quickly. Afraid of upsetting her husband, she had to turn to Semmler and his colleagues for comfort.
²⁰

In the evening nowadays she often comes into our room and opens her heart to us. I feel sorry for her. She sees her future quite clearly. She admits she is afraid of death, and she knows it is drawing closer every day. She does not like talking to her husband about these things. He has enough to do looking after his own sanity. Today she said that she had managed to attain some sort of composure about her end, but she still could not bear the thought of ending the lives of her children. “When I put my six children to bed in the evening, four-year-old Heide, five-year-old Hedda, seven-year-old Holly, nine-year-old Helmuth, ten-year-old Hilde and twelve-year-old Helga, and when I think that in a few weeks' time I may have to kill these innocent creatures, I go nearly crazy with grief and pain. I am always wondering how I actually will do it when the time comes. I cannot talk about it with my husband any more. He would never forgive me for weakening his resistance. As long as he can go on fighting, he thinks all is not lost.”

A few days before that her husband had suggested she should move westward with the children—anywhere where they might meet the British. “They would do nothing to you,” he said. Magda Goebbels rejected this idea without hesitation; “I do not leave without you,” she declared.
²¹

This was towards the end of February. Earlier in the month, on 10th February, she had written what comfort she could to her elder son, Harald Quandt, who was a prisoner of war in England:
²²

My darling son,

It is nearly four weeks since I wrote to you last, but I have been thinking of you all the time more than ever, and I was afraid you might be worried about us, the news, of course, being far from rosy. I want to reassure you, though, and tell you about the latest events as well as possible.

First of all, we are well and in good health and in good spirits, and since in such grave times the family should be together, we have all moved to Berlin and have shut the house at Lanke.

In spite of the air-raids, our house here is still standing up, and we all of us, including grandmother and other members of the family, are well provided for. The children are full of fun and merely concerned with the boon of being excused school. Thank goodness they don't realise the gravity of these times yet.

As for Papa and myself, we are full of confidence and we do our duty to the best of our ability.

I have had no proper news of you since November, but Father tells me that you are better. Do please write to me soon about the exact nature of your wounds. I want to know exactly which teeth you have lost and whether the shot in your hips will make you unable to walk.

I embrace you with all my love and my thoughts are with you all the time.

Your Mother.

On one of the last occasions Magda was to see her sister-in-law Maria, she seemed no longer to entertain any hope of survival, neither for herself nor the children. Maria implored her at least to spare her youngest daughter and let her live together with her own family. But Magda was adamant. “I will certainly not leave Joseph now,” she said. “I must die with him and the Führer. And when I die the children will have to die too, all of them. I couldn't bear to leave even one of them alive, not even with you.”
²³

Naumann has revealed that he was among those who tried to persuade Magda to save herself and the children. With their house in Berlin turned into the headquarters of the Ministry, Goebbels had sent her with the family to Schwanenwerder. There Naumann had arranged for one of the freight barges in common use on the lakes and canals near Berlin to be stocked with provisions and moored near the house. His plan was that she should hide with the children in one of the lakeside shelters till the worst weeks of the occupation of Germany were over and then give herself up to the authorities. Goebbels also wanted her to do this. But she refused. Her devotion to Hitler was absolute. She had only to dwell on the indignities she imagined the invaders would heap upon her to know what she must do. Early in April she returned to Berlin and took her place alongside her husband and her Führer.

Meanwhile Goebbels himself, as Gauleiter and Defender of Berlin, ordered the city to prepare itself for a fight to the finish. While the ministries, including the Reich Chancellery, Hitler's own staff, were packing the bare essentials for continued administration into lorries in preparation for the long haul south, Goebbels watched the evacuation with a scorn born of his fanaticism. He realised all that mattered now was an heroic finish, that death should be proud to take him and his Leader. But the witnesses to this noble end were vanishing—in trains and cars and lorries. He would not release his own staff. They must work till there were no desks or typewriters or telephones to work with, and then, like the rest of the Berliners, it was their duty to man the barricades against the Russian armies. Whilst the younger members of his staff were planning among themselves to escape—most of them to the West to meet the Americans and the British—Hitler and Goebbels were planning the defence of the city, in which strong-points and shelters were being hastily constructed. Goebbels heard with contempt of the white flags with which the Germans were greeting the Allies in the West. “If a single white flag is hoisted in a Berlin street I shall not hesitate to have the whole street and all its inhabitants blown up,” he threatened on 5th April. “This has the full authority of the Führer.”
²⁴
The Ministry staff were organised into a special
Volkssturm
unit of their own under Werner Naumann and called the Wilhelmplatz Battalion.