B006OAL1QM EBOK (41 page)

During April the inner circle debated and argued what was best for the Führer to do. According to Naumann, Goebbels advocated that Hitler should move south; Semmler, however, records that he persuaded the Führer to stay in Berlin and remain faithful to the oath he had taken on 30th January 1933 when he had sworn he would never leave the Reich Chancellery, and that no power on earth could force him to abandon his position. If a legend were to be established as Goebbels' last fulfilment of his duty, the Leader must die within the precincts of the building which was the symbol of his authority. Hitler apparently agreed that he should accept his fate and resisted the strongest pressure that was put upon him to move south, though not without misgivings. At the birthday conference on 20th April in Berlin he still left it in doubt whether he might not move south to Berchtesgaden and the Bavarian Alps and take command of this sector from Kesselring. At this meeting he appointed Grand-Admiral Doenitz to the Northern Command, with headquarters at Ploen in Schleswig-Holstein.

At the birthday conference the six remaining leaders of the Nazi movement had gathered round the table with their Service Chiefs for the last time. There can hardly have been in all history a group of men who so hated and distrusted each other; yet they were somehow still kept in association together by the aura of power that emanated from their deranged Leader. Goebbels and Bormann, who were to stay with Hitler to the end, sat side by side with Speer, Himmler and Goring, who were to betray him, and Ribbentrop, who deserted him. Among them only Goebbels firmly believed that Hitler should uncompromisingly sacrifice himself in the tradition of a god. The rest, except possibly Bormann, to judge from their actions during the following days, wished only for some compromise that would bring this hopeless war to a speedy end and salvage what was left of the broken body of Germany.

Goebbels never forgot his ambition for office. Göring and Ribben-trop he had long since come to disregard; they lacked power and were irritants without the status any longer of enemies. So useless had Göring become that Boldt describes him as quite ostentatious in his boredom at one of Hitler's midnight conferences in the Bunker; “he put his elbows on the table and sank his huge head into the folds of the soft leather of his attaché case” and obscured the Führer's map.
²⁵
Speer had no ambition for power and Goebbels tolerated him because of his executive efficiency. But of Bormann and Himmler he had learned to be wary. Both had power; Bormann because he became Hitler's closest companion and guardian, Himmler because, as head of the S.S., he was second only to Hitler in his control of force, and had become Minister of the Interior, a post Goebbels had badly wanted when Frick had been retired from that office in 1943. With both these men Goebbels had come to some sort of terms. In February he had achieved a private interview with Himmler in the sanatorium of Hohenlychen some twenty-five miles north of Berlin; it seems likely he had put proposals that they should combine to persuade Hitler to remake his Cabinet along lines which Goebbels had spoken of to his wife in Semmler's presence, with himself as Reich Chancellor, Himmler in charge of the Armed Forces and Bormann as Minister for the Party. Since nothing more was to be heard of this particular plan, it is to be assumed Himmler preferred to bide his time. Indecision was to characterise every move Himmler made, or did not make, during his last days of power. Semmler's comment is again revealing:

Goebbels obviously dislikes Himmler, although in their work they get along together. Goebbels, who is at bottom a man of fine feeling, cannot stand ‘unæsthetic men’. He puts Himmler in this category. The Asiatic cut of his eyes, his short fat fingers, his dirty nails, all revolt Goebbels. But Himmler's extreme radical point of view and his use of brutal methods to get his own way make him attractive to Goebbels.
²⁶

Later, according to Schwerin von Krosigk, he was intriguing to replace Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister, though what powers this could bring him at such a time is hard to determine.

With Hitler Goebbels became as close a companion as he could, restoring at moments something of the intimacy of the happy days of friendship when the Führer had been a constant visitor to Magda's flat in the year following her marriage. Count Schwerin von Krosigk, one of the minor figures associated with the last period of Hitler's life, but one who kept a useful diary, records how Goebbels told him that he had been comforting the Führer by reading aloud to him from Carlyle's
Frederick the Great.
²⁷
He referred to the passage he had been reading, in which that revered figure in German history, whom both Hitler and Goebbels took for their personal symbol, sat like Job while messengers of tribulation followed each other to bring their news of disaster. Like Hitler he had had his little phial of poison. Yet Frederick in the midst of the misfortunes of the Seven Years' War in which not the least was the hostility of Russia, wrote to Count d’ Argenson in words of such eloquence and noble courage that Goebbels' practised voice must have made them resound in Hitler's ears:

The school of patience I am at is hard, long-continued, cruel, nay barbarous. I have not been able to escape my lot: all that human foresight could suggest, has been employed, and nothing has succeeded…. But for my Books, I think hypochondria would have had me in bedlam before now. In fine, dear Marquis, we live in troublous times and in desperate situations—I have all the properties of a Stage-Hero; always in danger, always on the point of perishing. One must hope the conclusion will come; and if the end of the piece be lucky, we will forget the rest.

As if Providence itself had responded to the great King in his need, the Russian Czarina had suddenly died and her successor, Peter, who favoured Frederick, came at once to the throne. Goebbels told how he roused Hitler's spirits with Carlyle's comment, and the tears welled up in the Führer's eyes:

We promised Friedrich a wonderful star-of-day; and this is it—though it is long before he dare quite regard it as such. Peter, the Successor, he knows to be secretly his friend and admirer; if only, in the new Czarish capacity and its chaotic environments and conditions, Peter dare and can assert these feelings? What a hope to Friedrich, from this time onward! Russia may be counted as the bigger half of all he had to strive with; the bigger, or at least the far uglier, more ruinous and incendiary; and if this were at once taken away, think what a daybreak when the night was at the blackest!

After the reading, horoscopes were at once called for—for the Führer and for the Republic. They were kept by Himmler in a special research department. Both foretold a victory in the second half of April, after terrible reverses. The excitement was intense.

The daylight and sunrise came to Goebbels, if not to Hitler, on 12th April. That afternoon he had been visiting the headquarters of the Ninth Army at Küstrin where, in the course of an address to the officers of the Army staff, he had once more referred to the story of Frederick's deliverance only to be asked afterwards by one of the officers with a taste for irony what Czarina would die this time to save Germany. In the midst of an air-raid on Berlin that night the news came through of Roosevelt's death, and Semmler, together with other members of Goebbels' staff, met him on the steps of the Ministry and told him the glad news the moment he got out of his car. Semmler noticed Goebbels turn pale; the news must have seemed quite incredible. He ordered champagne to be served in his study. He rang Hitler at once at the Chancellery, speaking in a tense, excited voice, words that were later remembered by some of those present.

“My Führer,” he said. “I congratulate you. Roosevelt is dead. Fate has laid low your greatest enemy. God has not abandoned us. A miracle has happened. This is like the death of the Empress Elizabeth in the Seven Years' War. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This is Friday 13th April. It is the turning point.”
²⁸

Then these self-deluding men began to speculate on Roosevelt's successor. Would it be Truman? If so, he would be much more moderate. When Goebbels had finished talking to Hitler, he rang up the Ninth Army to tell them about the death of this American Czarina. No straw was too slender for clutching in April 1945, no historical parallel too remote for those who believed in Providence. Both Hitler and Goebbels were in a high state of excitement which did not wear off until the following day. The Allies did not cease hostilities, and the war went on without Roosevelt. By the evening Goebbels was downcast. “Perhaps fate has again been cruel and made fools of us,” he said.

A few days later, on 17th April, Goebbels referred to a new colour film,
Kolberg,
which had been recently released. It is one of the anomalies of Goebbels' attitude to total war that the production of such lavish films as this seemed to be maintained in spite of the desperate situation in which Germany was now placed.

“Gentlemen,” said Goebbels, “in a hundred years' time they will be showing another fine colour film describing the terrible days we are living through. Don't you want to play a part in this film, to be brought back to life in a hundred years' time? Everybody now has the chance to choose the part which he will play in the film a hundred years hence. I can assure you it will be a fine and elevating picture. And for the sake of this prospect it is worth standing fast. Hold out now, so that a hundred years hence the audience does not hoot and whistle when you appear on the screen.”
²⁹

This was the last occasion on which Semmler was present at a Ministry conference to record what Goebbels said. He noted how the Minister left the meeting of some fifty men with a pale face and burning eyes, and that those present did not know whether to laugh or to swear. Semmler himself sent his wife with their child south in an official lorry, and gave her the diary to take with her.

Meanwhile another family exodus also took place. Goebbels' mother was still staying with her daughter Maria and her son-in-law at their flat in Berlin. They put off their departure to the very last moment, and then found that there was no transport. The old woman of seventy-five walked alongside her daughter out of the burning city; Maria had put her three-month-old child in a wheelbarrow and pushed her to safety. Her husband's hands were badly burned, and one of his arms was in a sling. They ended their flight in Icking, a village near Munich.
³⁰

On 19th April, the eve of Hitler's birthday, Goebbels delivered his last important broadcast. He tried to give it the ring of hope, to pin his faith to a lucky star, but the words have a valedictory sound, as if he could not prevent some revelation of his purpose to die beside the Führer:

I may have spoken in a happier or perhaps a less happy hour, but never before have matters been on the razor's edge as they are today. Never before has the German people had to defend its bare life under such enormous dangers and, by a last all-out effort, make sure that the Reich does not break apart.

This is not the time to celebrate the Führer's birthday with the usual words or to express our traditional good wishes to him. I have shared joy and sorrow with the Führer, the unparalleled victories and the terrible setbacks of the crowded years from 1939 to today, and I still stand at his side and am convinced that fate will after the last hard test award the laurel wreath to him and his people. I can only say that these times, with all their sombre and painful majesty, have found then-only worthy representative in the Führer. To him alone are thanks due that Germany today still lives, and that the West, with its culture and civilisation, has not been completely engulfed in the dark abyss which yawns before us….

Wherever our enemies appear they bring poverty and sorrow, chaos and devastation, unemployment and hunger with them. What remains of the loudly proclaimed ‘freedom’ is something that would not be considered worthy of mankind in the darkest parts of Africa. We, on the other hand, have a clear programme of restoration which has proved its worth in our own country and in all other European countries where it had a chance. Europe had the chance to choose between these two sides. She has chosen the side of anarchy and has to pay for it today.

By 20th April, the date of the birthday conference which Goebbels attended with Hitler's remaining ministers, it was clear that the Russians would soon encircle Berlin and that any who wished to move south must do so at once before the surface routes were closed. Hitler faced these anxious men in the confined quarters of his Bunker after the birthday ceremonies and speeches were all over; he gave no indication at the conference whether he would leave for the south or not. One by one ministers, generals and staff officers said good-bye. Goring, the failure, found no warmth in these last words with Hitler; he left the Bunker after a cold and formal leave-taking and made his way south to Obersalzberg. Himmler left for the northern sanatorium of Hohenlychen and Ribbentrop also disappeared to the north. Hitler would see none of them again.

Goebbels kept aloof from this luxury of departures. For him and his staff—though there were desertions among the juniors—work was as normal though Berlin now echoed to the sound of guns as well as bombs. Speer had managed to persuade Goebbels to let the
Volkssturm
make their stand outside the city and so spare the central areas from becoming a battlefield. Goebbels also gave way to Speer over the destruction of Berlin's bridges, which he had intended to blow up and which would have paralysed transport vital to the life of the population. Speer's mission now, as he saw it, was the preservation of Germany's resources against Hitler's and Goebbels' orders when this was necessary, a mission which he shared with Kaufmann, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, with whom he had an agreement to the same effect in that important area. Between them these two men, the Minister and the Gauleiter, saved Germany from a considerable measure of destruction which, coupled with the bombing, could only have led to the death of large numbers of the population from starvation and privation, the end ordained for them by their Führer.