Goebbels: A Biography (64 page)

The start of the war had brought about several personnel changes in the radio and film branches of the mass media. Shortly before the beginning of the war Goebbels had appointed a new head of the radio department within the Propaganda Ministry in the shape of Alfred-Ingemar Berndt, the previous head of the press department. However, in February 1940 he had to resign after a major dispute with the head of Reich radio and of the Reich Broadcasting Corporation (RRG), Heinrich Glasmeier. His successor was one of the directors of the RRG, Reich Chief of Broadcasting Eugen Hadamovsky, who continued to hold his previous position.
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At the same time, Goebbels reduced Glasmeier’s responsibilities against the latter’s strong opposition, calling him “stubborn as a mule.”
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The new distribution of responsibilities was designed above all to increase the direct influence of the ministry on the radio programs: A new sub-department created by Berndt within the ministry at the start of the war was given the revealing title of Radio Command Center.
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Above all Goebbels was concerned to reduce the number of talk programs, which had increased since the beginning of the war. He demanded a more “relaxed approach and entertainment.”
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In July 1940 the Propaganda Ministry’s ability to control the programming was increased through the introduction of a single program for all German radio stations,
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and now Goebbels pressed even more strongly for more entertainment and dance music.
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The propaganda minister was relieved that the start of the war had brought about an increase in cinema receipts: The number of cinemagoers had increased, and the proportion of foreign films had declined.
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The program alterations necessitated by the war—for example the withdrawal of anticommunist films—had resulted in heavy losses for the film industry, which, however, could be made up for in the production year 1939–40.
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Goebbels streamlined production: In November 1939 he reduced the number of films to be shot each year to around a hundred; in fact, during the production year 1940–41
considerably fewer were produced.
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Also in November 1939 he introduced pre-censorship for all films for which he was responsible.
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Goebbels’s main problem, however, was the lack of subject matter for films relevant to the war. On December 11, 1939, while lunching with Hitler, he was obliged to sit through a twenty-minute tirade from the Führer “sharply criticizing the cinema, above all the weekly newsreels.” Rosenberg, who was also present, recorded the details of the occasion. According to Hitler, the cinema was paying no attention to the “national mobilization” that was in progress, the National Socialist revolution had not occurred in cinema. Responding to Goebbels’s objection that there were some “good nationalist films,” Hitler replied, “Our cinema has not dared to touch the Jewish Bolsheviks,” which was rather unjust since they had just withdrawn the anti-Bolshevik films from circulation. Goebbels had been simply reduced to silence in the face of this criticism, made in front of a large number of lunch guests.
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Goebbels himself noted the humiliation in his diary: He considered the criticism to have been “not fully justified.” Naturally he was aware that Hitler had criticized him so publicly “in front of all the officers and adjutants,” but added, in order to swallow his irritation, “he has the right to do so; he’s a genius.”
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In any case, shortly afterward Goebbels began vigorously to demand more propaganda films from the film industry. During the first months of 1940 a large number of such films were conceived, but Goebbels was only partially content with the results.
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He shelved “problem films,” which dealt with marriage crises and the world of work, as well as pure entertainment films, which completely disappeared from cinemas during the campaign in the west.
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He demanded that 50 percent of the total number of films in production should be propaganda films even if it risked incurring financial losses.
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The propaganda films included, in particular, a series of shoddy anti-Semitic films:
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the feature films
The Rothschilds
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and
Jud Süss
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as well as the compilation film
The Eternal Jew
. All three films were conceived in autumn 1939 and were shown in cinemas between July and November 1940. Goebbels devoted most of his attention to
The Eternal Jew
. From October 1939 onward he reviewed the raw film several times—among other things he had had film shot in the Warsaw ghetto—commenting, “These Jews must be annihilated.”
⁹¹

The film was re-edited several times with Hitler’s views being taken into account in the process.
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As far as the general public was concerned, however, despite the large-scale propaganda for it,
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the film proved a flop. The SD reported that the film, which among other things compared Polish ghettos to rats’ nests, was only seen by the “more politically active sections of the population,” while “typical film audiences” to some extent avoided it; in some places “there was word-of-mouth propaganda against the film and its starkly realistic portrayal of the Jews.”
⁹⁴
By contrast, what was probably the best known of these films, the feature film
Jud Süss
, was a hit, while
The Rothschilds
achieved only moderate success with the public.
⁹⁵

The anti-Semitic films initiated a wave of propaganda films arriving in cinemas from the end of 1940 onward.
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Among them were “grand films,” involving historical topics such as
Bismarck
,
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Ohm Krüger
(on which Goebbels himself worked),
⁹⁸
and
Carl Peters
,
⁹⁹
for example, but also “contemporary” films dealing with people’s individual fates in the context of the war, such as
Above Everything in the World
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(about the fate of Germans abroad at the start of the war) or the films
Goodbye
,
Franziska
¹⁰¹
and
Request Concert
,
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in which partings and separation were dealt with. Goebbels was only partially satisfied with the results. In February 1941 he (once again) demanded: “We must film stuff that is true to life, portraying real people.”
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From February 1941 onward he worked on material for a film that was probably prompted by the Führer’s Chancellery in which “euthanasia” was advocated; Goebbels considered it a “real discussion film.”
¹⁰⁴
After the halt to “euthanasia” in autumn 1941, however, the film
I Accuse
, directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, was shown in cinemas only in a toned-down version.
¹⁰⁵

Numerous films that celebrated German military successes, such as
Stukas, U-Boat Going Westwards
, or
The Lützow Squadron
also came under the category of propaganda film. They arrived in cinemas at a time when preparations for war against the Soviet Union were moving ahead at full steam. They were often initiated and partially produced by the Wehrmacht, and some of them were very much disparaged by Goebbels.
¹⁰⁶

Apart from having to gear the mass media film and radio for war, during its first months Goebbels made a considerable effort to underline his responsibility for war propaganda. In the meantime, in order to emphasize his central role in this sphere he had developed
an important mouthpiece of his own. From the end of May 1940 he regularly published editorials in the prestigious weekly journal
Das Reich
, published by Deutsche Verlag, which was controlled by Max Amann. Clearly aimed at the German intelligentsia,
Das Reich
was also intended to make an impact abroad. The fact that Goebbels wrote editorials for it almost every week not only provided him with a useful source of income and satisfied his journalistic ambitions,
¹⁰⁷
it also provided him with an organ that underlined his claim to dominate the public sphere. From autumn 1941 onward his editorials were read on the radio on a regular basis.
¹⁰⁸
Goebbels ensured that the Propaganda Ministry gave the journal exclusives, which emphasized its privileged position within the German press.
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By the beginning of July the new journal’s circulation had climbed to almost five hundred thousand copies
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and by December 1940 to almost nine hundred thousand.
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In autumn 1940 German domestic propaganda was showing signs of fatigue. Despite the triumphal successes of the Wehrmacht and various German diplomatic maneuvers, there was no end to the war in sight and the air raids were getting on people’s nerves.
¹¹²
Goebbels tried to get on top of the rather flat mood and prepare the population for another winter of war with the usual winter propaganda campaign covering the whole of the Reich with a wave of rallies and meetings, which this year was fought under the motto “Our Banners Lead Us on to Victory.”
¹¹³
As far as press guidance was concerned, however, it was not Goebbels but Dietrich who took the initiative. By introducing the so-called daily official line at the beginning of November, Dietrich tried to concentrate the propaganda lines, which during the previous weeks had been somewhat indecisive, and, over the longer term, to secure for himself more influence over the direction of the press. From now on, at the start of the press conference a list of numbered instructions was read out, which contained all the official lines for the press. If other agencies wished to issue instructions to the press, they had to submit them beforehand to the head of the German Press department. Then, at the “official line conference” (
Tagesparolenkonferenz
), which took place at 11:30, Dietrich, or his Berlin representative, would decide what would be contained in the daily official lines. This new regulation affected Goebbels in particular, who from now on was obliged to coordinate his press instructions more closely with Dietrich. In his diary, however, he portrayed
this new regulation as a move against the Foreign Ministry, which, starting immediately, could only “deliver the material” for the daily guidance of the press.
¹¹⁴

The relationship with the Foreign Ministry was, as in the past, extremely cool. Goebbels continued to resist the agreement of September 1939 that his ministry should receive liaison officers from the Foreign Ministry. He had also been unable to prevent the Foreign Ministry from sending in February 1940 its own press officers to German foreign missions, although for years the press work there had been carried out by desk officers provided by the Propaganda Ministry.
¹¹⁵
When in November 1940 the Foreign Ministry once again established a liaison office in the Charlottenburg radio station, its furniture was forcibly removed by the head of the studio; the Foreign Ministry then tried to reoccupy the rooms with the help of the SS. Goebbels engaged in the negotiations over the question of the responsibility for foreign propaganda, which began again in November 1940, without much enthusiasm.
¹¹⁶
He aimed rather gradually to defeat the Foreign Ministry by building up his own propaganda agencies.
¹¹⁷
He carefully collected negative comments by Hitler about Ribbentrop and his ministry.
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Even if Goebbels sometimes worked together with Dietrich in his conflicts with the Foreign Ministry, he could not prevent the latter from emphasizing his relatively independent position in the press field in a way that was clearly embarrassing for the propaganda minister. In February 1941, for example, Goebbels gave the press a massive scolding. He told the head of the press department, Hans Fritzsche to take steps against the
Berliner Börsenzeitung
and the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
since they “contravene my instructions.”
¹¹⁹
“At the press conference,” he wrote in his diary, “the journalists are not encouraged to show initiative. There it’s simply a matter of: banned, blocked, undesirable. If this goes on then during the war the nation will fall asleep.”
¹²⁰
It was clear to all those involved who was the target of his criticism.

After Goebbels had expressed strong criticism of the German press at the ministerial conference of February 10 and afterward, among a smaller group, had gone on to upbraid Fritzsche and Karl Bömer,
¹²¹
at the press conference on the following day the Reich press chief issued a “special commendation” to the German press for its work,
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to which Goebbels objected as an “underhand edict to the
press”: “a soft, puffed-up individual, a born mediocrity.”
¹²³
These conflicts with Dietrich and Ribbentrop had, however, shown that Goebbels could by no means call himself the unchallenged ruler of the German press.

Thus Goebbels had good grounds to do what he could to consolidate the organization of his propaganda machine and secure it against the influence of competitors. He had still not named a successor to his state secretary, Karl Hanke, who was on leave and in the meantime serving in the Wehrmacht. The most promising candidate was the head of the propaganda department, Leopold Gutterer, to whom, in August 1940, Goebbels subordinated all the ministerial departments involved in specialized functions with the exception of the two departments responsible for press matters, in other words Dietrich’s area of responsibility.
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In October 1940 he discussed a reorganization of the ministry with Gutterer. The first idea was to put a stop to the rampant proliferation of, at the time, fifteen departments (a new department for journals was established as number sixteen in July 1941),
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by subordinating them to five main departments and so provide for greater clarity. The departments responsible for cultural and political matters would be combined into two groups, headed by Hinkel and Berndt. State Secretary Hermann Esser, however, had concerns about the prominence given to Berndt’s role and put forward plans of his own for the ministry’s reorganization. But these were so far-reaching that Goebbels decided to abandon the whole reorganization project in order to avoid causing disquiet within the ministry.
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Finally, in May 1941 he appointed Gutterer state secretary; he was convinced that he would “be a loyal follower.”
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Given the strong competition within the propaganda sector, loyalty to the minister was evidently the most important criterion for Gutterer’s appointment.