Goebbels: A Biography (65 page)

In the autumn of 1940 it appeared as if Goebbels’s hard work in the field of war propaganda was going to be rewarded in another fashion. It seemed as if the Goebbels family would succeed in restoring their close relationship with Hitler. When Goebbels was staying in Kraków at the beginning of September, he had a telephone call from Magda
in which she told him that the day before, Hitler had called while they were celebrating Helga’s birthday at Schwanenwerder and had given her a very generous present. “I find that sweet of him.”
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A few days later, now in Berlin, Goebbels received Hitler for tea at home. “The Führer played with the children as if the outside world no longer existed,” noted the proud father.
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When in October Goebbels was suffering from “stress because of overwork,” Hitler expressed concern: “The Führer orders me to make sure I get more sleep.” Goebbels responded obediently: “I must try to get some in the afternoons.”
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When, on October 29, his birthday, Magda produced another girl—they decided to call her Heide—Hitler shared the Goebbels family’s joy.
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On November 11, Magda’s birthday, Hitler surprisingly arrived in the afternoon to offer his congratulations. The Goebbelses used the opportunity to show him their new house in the Göringstrasse, which he liked “very much.” In the evening they had a small soirée there to which Hitler came, staying until four o’clock in the morning. He was “quite confident and relaxed, just like in the old days,” and talked about the political situation and vegetarianism, which he saw as a “coming religion.” Goebbels’s account of the evening reads just like a near-perfect idyll. “Apart from that, he is longing for peace, happiness, and the joys of life. We all dream of what we’re going to do when the war is over.”
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A few months later, in February 1941, Magda traveled to Obersalzberg with the children for a week, staying in the Görings’ house.
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On the telephone she told Goebbels “of her visit to Hitler: It was all very nice.”
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On March 25, 1941, Hitler, the Italian foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, and the Yugoslav prime minister, Dragiša Cvetković, signed an agreement for Yugoslavia to join the Tripartite Pact. Yugoslavia’s decision to join the Axis provoked considerable opposition, however, and two days later Cvetkovic’s government was overthrown by a pro-British military coup with the regent, Prince Paul, replaced by the underage King Peter II.
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The situation was unclear; for the moment, Goebbels ordered German propaganda to adopt a moderate line.
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This line was retained even after Hitler had decided, on
March 27, to rapidly remove the new Yugoslav government. In December 1940 he had prepared for the intervention of German troops in Greece and, at the beginning of March, German troops had already been moved into Bulgaria from Romania; the lack of clarity in the Yugoslav situation now gave him the opportunity to move against both states.
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Goebbels noted, however, that “public opinion in the Reich is already running far ahead of events,” in other words that war against Yugoslavia was now anticipated.
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Goebbels’s diary entry for March 29 makes it clear that he had been initiated into the secret of the forthcoming war. But, at the same time, he noted that “later a major operation is being mounted—against R.” This is the first reference in his diaries to the forthcoming war against the Soviet Union. Goebbels continued: “The whole thing poses certain psychological problems. Parallels with Napoleon etc. But we’ll easily get over them with anti-Bolshevism.” Moreover, he appears to have had no difficulty in coming to terms with the surprising change in German policy—at the end of 1940 he was still assuming the Soviet Union would remain neutral. Here too he was simply going along with the brilliant decisions of his Führer, despite his not having been involved in the decision-making process.

At his ministerial briefing Goebbels issued detailed instructions for the propaganda campaign against Yugoslavia—the German attack had begun on April 6—which he summed up in his diary as follows: “Propaganda line: tough against the clique of Serbian generals. Don’t attack the people. Cosset the Croats! Suggest autonomy. Focus against Serbia. Slovenia in the middle between Serbia and Croatia.” As far as the Greeks were concerned, “For the time being we should treat them gently and with consideration. Until they start becoming uppity.”
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The war in the Balkans made rapid progress. On April 12 Yugoslavia capitulated;
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the war in Greece went on for a few more days,
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but already on April 28, Goebbels could note the march into Athens.
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Propaganda during these weeks was marked by the same triumphal confidence in victory that had been displayed in 1940.
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Two weeks after the German entry into Athens, on the evening of May 12, Goebbels received some “frightful news”: “Contrary to the Führer’s instructions Hess has taken off in a plane and has been missing since Saturday. We must assume he’s been killed. […] According
to the Führer’s communiqué he had insane notions of making illusory peace overtures. […] The Führer is completely shattered. What a spectacle for the world: a mentally deranged second man after the Führer. Dreadful and unimaginable.”
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Goebbels’s shock is understandable given the fact that only a few months before, after meeting with Hess, he had come to the conclusion that he was “a reliable man in whom” Hitler could “have total confidence.”
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But it got worse. The explanation for the flight that Hitler had attempted in his communiqué of May 12 could only be maintained for a day. On May 13 a clearer picture had emerged: “Hess landed by parachute in Scotland, let his plane crash and sprained his foot. Then he was nabbed by a peasant and later arrested by the Home Guard. A tragicomedy. One wants to laugh and weep simultaneously.”
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On the same day Goebbels flew to Berchtesgaden, not without having warned those attending his ministerial briefing on no account to show “a hint of pessimism or any weakness or depression.”
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The press was instructed “not to give [the matter] undue prominence beyond what is necessary for informing the nation.”
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In Berchtesgaden Hitler showed him the letters that Hess had left behind for him, in Goebbels’s opinion “a chaotic confusion of primary school dilettantism.”

Hitler decided to abolish the position of the Führer’s deputy, to rename Hess’s office the Party Chancellery, and to appoint Hess’s deputy, Martin Bormann, to head it. Hitler then informed the Gau and Reich leadership, who had been summoned to Berchtesgaden, about the situation. This prompted, as Goebbels noted, “first astonishment” and then “huge outrage.”
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Back in Berlin, on May 14 Goebbels explained the situation at his ministerial briefing: “Watchword: at home be composed with provisional news embargo, abroad rejection of the lies, and hint at the facts of the case.”
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He quickly came to the conclusion that the whole affair would have to be “systematically kept quiet” and, on May 19, he finally told those attending his ministerial briefing that the Hess case was over.
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This tactic seemed to work. He noted that the excitement about Hess was slowly subsiding, “nothing more than a half-week wonder.”
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He was pleased that they had been able to overcome the “blow to morale” caused by the flight of the Führer’s deputy relatively quickly.
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Initially he expressed skepticism about Hess’s successor, Bormann, with whose work he had previously not always been
happy:
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He had secured “his position more by intrigue than by work.” But soon he noted that he was getting on “quite well” with him. “He does everything I want.”
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From May 1941 onward there are an increasing number of references in Goebbels’s diaries to the forthcoming war with the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the month he noted: “Russia is increasingly becoming the focus of interest. Stalin and his people are remaining completely inactive. Like a rabbit in front of a snake.”
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A little later he learned: “It’s going to begin in the east on May 22.”
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But the attack was postponed several times.

He appointed Eberhard Taubert, his longstanding specialist for anticommunist and anti-Semitic propaganda, as his contact man to Rosenberg, whom on April 20 Hitler had appointed his “Representative for the Central Coordination of Issues Concerning the Eastern Territories.”
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He was informed by the Wehrmacht that thirteen propaganda units were going to be established.
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On May 22 the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, informed him about the “Eastern Question” and told him who was to be appointed Reich commissioner in Moscow, the Ukraine, and the Baltic states: “He is to go to Moscow, [Arno] Schickedanz to the Ukraine, [Hinrich] Lohse to the Baltic. R will fall to pieces like tinder. And our propaganda will be a masterpiece.”
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Goebbels, who until the end of March had remained completely in the dark about the preparations for the war against the Soviet Union, now tried ostentatiously to place himself completely at the service of the new task. The aim was above all to focus propaganda on diverting attention from their own aggressive attentions. Thus, on Hitler’s orders, at the end of May Goebbels published in the
Völkischer Beobachter
, though not under his own name, an anti-Roosevelt article describing the latter’s most recent fireside chat as the “typical product of a Jewish windbag.”
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He found it particularly embarrassing, however, that his deception policy was counteracted by a security lapse in, of all places, his own ministry. In May 1941 Hitler ordered a Gestapo investigation of the head of Goebbels’s foreign press department, Karl Bömer. Bömer was suspected of having made remarks at
a reception, probably under the influence of alcohol, which could be interpreted as referring to German preparations for war against the Soviet Union. Goebbels became heavily involved in the affair, which he blamed partly on Bömer’s careless behavior (“It comes from his being drunk”) and partly on an intrigue launched by his rival, Ribbentrop.
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Although Goebbels strongly supported him, he could not prevent Bömer from being sent to prison.
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This had the effect of poisoning the relationship with the Foreign Ministry over the long term.

The embarrassment of the Bömer case was an additional incentive for Goebbels to try to perform exceptional propaganda feats during the weeks before Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Russian invasion. The main emphasis was, in the first place, on feigning an impending invasion of Britain: “I am having an invasion song written, new fanfares composed, arranging English broadcasts, organizing English propaganda units, etc.”
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On the other hand, at the beginning of June he produced the first directives for propaganda “to R”: “No anti-socialism, no return to Tsarism, don’t refer openly to the breakup of Russia because otherwise we shall alienate the Army, which has designs on expanding Mother Russia, against Stalin and the Jews behind him, land for the peasantry, but maintain the collective farms for the time being so that at least the harvest can be rescued, strong attacks on Bolshevism, denounce its failure in every sphere. And otherwise wait and see how things develop.”
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The deception strategy appeared to be working. “Our deception strategy,” Goebbels noted proudly, “is functioning perfectly. The whole world is talking of an impending military pact between Berlin and Moscow.”
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On June 12, as a further diversionary tactic, Goebbels wrote an editorial for the
Völkischer Beobachter
with the title “The Example of Crete,” in which clear hints were dropped of an impending invasion of Britain; he had it approved by Hitler personally. Some of the edition was distributed and then, as part of the deception tactic, confiscated. “London will hear about this within 24 hours through the American embassy. That’s the point of the exercise.”
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Also, the “relaxing” of the radio program for the coming summer, with which Goebbels was heavily involved in May and June and which he publicly announced, was intended, as was the lifting of the ban on dancing in June, to divert attention from the preparations to attack the Soviet Union.
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On June 15 Hitler ordered Goebbels to come to the Reich Chancellery and told him that the attack would begin in about a week’s time. Hitler estimated the “action” would take approximately four months. Goebbels thought it would be significantly shorter: “Bolshevism will collapse like a house of cards.”
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Hitler once again gave Goebbels a detailed explanation of the reasons for the war: “We must act. Moscow wants to keep out of the war until Europe is exhausted and bled dry. At that point Stalin is aiming to act, to Bolshevize Europe and begin his reign.” But the war was also necessary from the point of view of their ally Japan: “Tokyo would never act against the USA if Russia was still intact in its rear. Thus Russia must be destroyed for this reason as well. England wants to maintain Russia as its hope for the future. […] But Russia would attack us if we became weak and then we would have a two-front war, which we shall avoid through this preventive action. Only then shall we have our backs free.”

Finally, there was another reason for the attack: “We must also attack Russia in order to free up manpower. So long as the Soviet Union exists Germany is compelled to maintain 150 divisions, whose personnel is urgently needed for our war economy, for our weapons, U-Boat, and airplane programs […] so that the USA can no longer threaten us.”

Goebbels summed up: “Bolshevism must be destroyed, and England will then have its last conceivable continental sword struck from its hand.” He was in full agreement with Hitler: “And when we’re victorious who will question our methods. We have done so many things that we must win because otherwise our whole nation, with us at the forefront with everything that is dear to us, would be eradicated.” In this way Goebbels and Hitler had referred with remarkable clarity to the real reason for the continuation of the war. The regime had become so involved in its criminal policy that it had to continue the war to the bitter end.