Goebbels: A Biography (72 page)

In response to the increasing seriousness of the situation Goebbels appeared more and more often in public wearing his Party uniform, although this only emphasized his unattractive appearance. In the meantime he had more or less geared his routine to wartime requirements. As a rule his working day began at nine o’clock. To start with, his military adjutant briefed him on the contents of the Wehrmacht report, which, from the middle of 1941 onward, as was the case with his diary, was recorded by a stenographer. The “diary” now became quite large, as Goebbels included not only personal observations but also letters that he had received, reports, notes about conversations, press statements, and other matters. After that the minister left for the “conference” at eleven o’clock (the time was postponed several times during the war) in order to brief the senior officials of his ministry and the officials of the (Party’s) Reich Propaganda Headquarters, the Party Chancellery, the Foreign Ministry and so on, who were liaising with the ministry about the current propaganda line. The whole thing was not a conference in the normal sense but rather a detailed briefing by Goebbels in which he often dictated the key phrases of the daily propaganda line himself.

Goebbels kept his distance from his staff; indeed he had developed a certain air of unapproachability. Thus he repeatedly gave orders that he was not to be spoken to on his way from his office to the daily ministerial briefing; he also reprimanded staff for hanging around in
his anteroom without an official reason for doing so and disturbing him with their conversations.
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He ruthlessly exploited his powerful position to bring insubordinate personnel in his sphere of operations to account. When, in October 1940, a desk officer from the Vienna Party propaganda headquarters wrote a “stupid but very aggressive article against Berlin” in a local newspaper, he gave instructions for “the man to be relieved of his position immediately and to have him locked up for a few days.”
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In May 1940 he ordered Wilhelm Fritzsche “to issue a very tough warning to the editor of a newspaper in Lippe” for daring to raise the question as to “whether it was as important to broadcast the program ‘Request Concert’ in the afternoon as broadcasting a football match.” The journalist was “to be informed that if he repeats such an incredibly impertinent intervention in political matters in the future he can expect to be sent to a concentration camp.”
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When, in February 1942, the cultural section of the
Westdeutscher Beobachter
dared to write a “really mean article against Berliners,” he ordered the journalist responsible, who was its Berlin correspondent, to leave the city “by 10:00 this evening,” threatening him that otherwise he would send some Berlin stormtroopers to set him straight.
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Goebbels’s maintenance of personal distance in his official life mirrored the almost total isolation of his personal life. During the 1930s he had no longer been keeping up with friends from his school and student days or from his early years in Berlin; during his occasional visits to Rheydt he sometimes invited old mates and acquaintances, but this was probably above all in order to reassure himself how far he had come from his petit bourgeois and provincial background.
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On several occasions in 1942–43 he met Schweitzer/Mjölnir, who had failed in the tasks he had been given by the Propaganda Ministry and, in the meantime, had found employment as a graphic artist with the propaganda troops. But in the remarks in his diary Goebbels was pointedly concerned merely to comment on his former friend’s professional and political development; he was pleased to be able to “recruit him once again for my work.”
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In June 1943 he received a letter from Fritz Prang, by now “with a propaganda unit on the southern front,” and Goebbels was pleased that “his remarks reflect strong political commitment”; once again in his view there was no need for any comment of a personal nature.
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After having been forcibly kept intact by Hitler in 1938–39, Goebbel’s relationship with Magda appears to have developed above all into a marriage of convenience that worked. The diaries endeavor to create the impression of a harmonious family routine marked by affection and mutual respect. There are no further references to arguments with Magda or infidelities on the part of either of them; above all he is concerned about her continuing rather delicate health.

The only person who was really close to him appears to have been his mother, who after 1942 was living mainly in Berlin.
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Goebbels valued his mother as a woman from the people who allegedly had a real insight into the state of the population and its mood.
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“For me, with her primitive character and peasant cunning, she represents the voice of the people. I idolize her,” he noted in April 1941.
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Sometimes, for example at family celebrations, he met his other relatives, above all his sister Maria.
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During the war his constitution continued to cope with the heavy workload and extreme stress from which he suffered almost permanently. He was, however, susceptible to kidney complaints, which sometimes prevented him from leaving his bed.
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In addition he suffered from a skin ailment. In February 1942, shortly before the end of the winter crisis a “nervous rash,” which he had had for some time, became worse. He could no longer sleep properly and hoped to get relief from X-ray treatment.
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During the spring his eczema caused him so much trouble that in May he was forced to spend a few days in Lanke receiving special treatment.
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When the rash returned in the autumn “like a rose garden,” he felt that it was because “this is such a tense and stressful time.”
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In April 1943 the rash came up again so severely that for several days he was incapable of working.
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Moreover, he evidently suffered from periodic bouts of slight depression. In the autumn, and especially during the war, he was regularly prone to attacks of melancholy, which he tried to suppress with increasing activity, but to a certain degree he also indulged in them.
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Even if, in view of the seriousness of the war situation, Goebbels never tired of exhorting the German people to make ever more sacrifices and tried gradually to gear them to an acceptance of “total war,” these efforts had little effect on his own opulent lifestyle. With his family he continued to inhabit three large properties: one in the Göringstrasse, one on the Bogensee, and one on Schwanenwerder; however, he evacuated the “summerhouse” in the summer of 1943
because of the threat of air raids. In 1940 he had acquired a new Mercedes: “a magnificent car.” But, he added regretfully—even he had to make some concessions to the wartime situation—it was “only suitable for peacetime.”
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His financial situation, which in the past had often been precarious, had now been put fully in order. Thus, in the year 1943, for example, Goebbels’s income was over 424,000 Reichmarks, of which only 38,000 came from his ministerial income, while 375,000 came from his literary and journalistic activities, the majority, around 300,000 Reichmarks, from his editorials in
Das Reich
.
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Although Goebbels had succeeded, during the course of 1940, in repairing his somewhat damaged relationship with Hitler and managed to get close to him again, the future course of the war was to cause complications. The fact that after the outbreak of the war with the Soviet Union Hitler spent most of his time in various headquarters provided, on the one hand, a certain relief for Goebbels, who was now spared the hours spent visiting him at midday and watching films in the evening in the Reich Chancellery. On the other hand Goebbels was vitally dependent on direct personal contact with Hitler in order to be able to establish what propaganda line was to be taken and, above all, to secure the continuing flow of praise from his Führer, so necessary to his self-esteem. Apart from frequent telephone calls to Hitler or Dietrich, who informed him of the latest propaganda line from Führer headquarters, after the start of the Russian campaign Goebbels made a habit of visiting Hitler in his headquarters every few weeks and carrying out intensive conversations with him, a habit that he continued until the end of the war. He also used Hitler’s presence in Berlin to have detailed conversations with the Führer. The exceptionally long entries in his diaries concerning these conversations indicate how important they were for Goebbels, and not just from a political point of view. Given his fixation on Hitler, they were also a source of strength and inspiration for him. However depressed and doubting he was when he arrived at headquarters, he invariably departed mentally fortified and full of confidence.

Goebbels’s account of these conversations was always structured in the same way. First he noted his impression of Hitler’s appearance, state of health, and mental vigor. Then he gave a detailed account of the conversations, which often lasted a whole day or longer. They usually began with the military and international situation and then the domestic situation was discussed. Usually they took the form of
monologues by the dictator to which Goebbels contributed interjections, questions, and comments. The conversation then became somewhat more intimate. They discussed personalities (in this way Goebbels was able to discover who was in the Führer’s favor and who was in the firing line). Toward evening cultural matters were discussed, with Hitler seldom failing to declare how much he missed peacetime with its cultural delights and the society of artists. Finally, the dictator almost always made attentive inquiries about Goebbels’s family and indulged in almost wistful reminiscences of the “days and evenings he had spent with our family in the Reichskanzlerplatz.” For example, on October 27, 1943, he assured Goebbels that “our life together then” seemed to him “the happiest time of his life.”
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The whole thing very quickly became a ritual, which Goebbels eagerly recorded in order to reassure himself about the extent to which he was in the Führer’s favor and had his trust.
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His accounts of these conversations featuring an astute, benevolent, indeed humane dictator show how naive he was and, inhibited by his personal dependence on Hitler, how he allowed himself to be captivated by the latter’s conversational tactics and skill in personal relations. Moreover, by discussing a combination of political, cultural, and personal topics, Hitler used the conversations in a psychologically skillful way to convey the impression to his propaganda minister that he held a special position in the esteem of the Führer.

Credit 24.1

Constant activity on the home front meticulously recorded by the media. Reich Minister Goebbels visits the National Socialist German College in Feldafing on July 8, 1942.

In spring 1942 the military situation began to improve from the regime’s point of view, both on the Eastern Front, in particular in the Crimea,
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and later, albeit briefly, in North Africa. Goebbels immediately saw the danger of the population becoming too optimistic. In view of the “good news at Whitsun”
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—on May 23 the OKW report mentioned for the first time a major German offensive on the Eastern Front
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—Goebbels at once went about “ensuring that our news policy does not become too effusive.”
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The really great summer offensive in the south of the Eastern Front, however, was still to come. Goebbels made his own contribution to the success of the operation by using
propaganda to employ diversionary tactics and spread disinformation.
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With the aim of winning the population’s support for the forthcoming military efforts, at the end of May he published an editorial in
Das Reich
with the title “What’s It All For?” In it, while not outlining actual political war aims, he nevertheless tried to give “the ordinary man” a foretaste of life in a future Greater German Reich. Concerned to persuade his readers of the rosy prospects that lay ahead, he produced a kitsch vision of the postwar world: “We are dreaming of a happy people in a country blossoming with beauty, traversed by wide roads like bands of silver which are also open to the modest car of the ordinary man. Beside them lie pretty villages and well laid-out cities with clean and roomy houses inhabited by large families for whom they provide sufficient space. In the limitless fields of the east yellow corn is waving, enough and more than enough to feed our people and the whole of Europe. Work will once more be a pleasure and it will be marked by a joy in life which will find expression in brilliant parties and contemplative peace.”
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