Goebbels: A Biography (73 page)

On May 27, 1942, Goebbels received “alarming” news: An assassination attempt had been made on Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. Although there was no immediate threat to Heydrich’s life, his condition was “giving cause for concern.” Significantly, Goebbels continued with his diary entry by announcing an even tougher “fight against the Berlin Jews.” “I have no desire to have a 22-year-old eastern Jew—the saboteurs of the anti-Soviet exhibition included types like that—putting a bullet in my guts. I prefer ten Jews in a concentration camp or under the earth than having one in freedom.”
⁷

Heydrich’s condition, which at first had appeared to stabilize, deteriorated after a few days. To start with, Goebbels speculated as to whether the attack on Heydrich had been carried out by British or Soviet agents; it became clear later that Czech resistance fighters, who had been trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and parachuted in, were responsible.
⁸

Goebbels was clear about who was behind the assassination: “As
planned, I have 500 Jews in Berlin arrested and inform the leaders of the Jewish community that for every Jewish assassination attempt or every Jewish attempt to revolt 100 or 150 of the Jews in our hands will be shot.”
⁹
The arrests had in fact already been carried out by the Gestapo at the end of May. Once again Goebbels had exaggerated his own role. He applauded the tough repressive measures, the death sentences, and mass arrests carried out by the German occupiers in Prague.
¹⁰

On May 29 he met Hitler for a lengthy conversation.
¹¹
It was naturally concerned above all with the assassination and what lay behind it. Hitler advocated taking “very energetic and ruthless measures against those groups who are likely to carry out assassinations.” In this context Goebbels brought the conversation around to his intention “to evacuate all the Jews from Berlin,” since “there are 40,000 Jews free to go around the capital who have nothing more to lose”; this was “simply an invitation for assassinations.” Hitler agreed at once; where Jews were still employed in the armaments industry, Speer should replace them with foreign workers.

Then the conversation turned to the “eradication of criminals.” If, during the war, “a really dangerous development occurred,” then, both men were agreed, “the prisons should be cleared through liquidations.” Hitler stated “once more his demand for the loss of idealists to be balanced by the loss of negativists,” a line of argument that Goebbels found “absolutely convincing.”

In any case they had to “liquidate the Jewish threat, whatever it costs to do so.” What he would like to do most, Hitler said, would be to “settle them in central Africa,” because then they would have to live in a climate “that would certainly not make them strong and hardy.” In any case, Hitler’s aim was “to make western Europe completely free of Jews.” Hitler’s statements indicate that, while the mass murder of Jews had already been under way since the summer of the previous year, the final decision over how and where the remaining Jews would be murdered had still not been made. This was, however, to change radically during the coming weeks.

On the morning of June 4 Goebbels learned that Heydrich had just died. “The loss of Heydrich is irreplaceable,” he commented, still very much in shock over the events. Heydrich, who apart from his position in Prague had remained head of the Reich Security Main
Office and thus had held a key position for the systematic mass murder of the Jews, “was the most radical and successful fighter against enemies of the state.”
¹²

A few days later there was an elaborate state memorial ceremony for Heydrich in Berlin.
¹³
Hitler, who used the occasion for a lengthy conversation with Goebbels, appeared rather depressed: “The Führer is seriously concerned about the large number of deaths being suffered by the Party. The Party and state leadership now hardly ever get together except for state memorial ceremonies.”
¹⁴

The occupying authorities in the protectorate continued to take “revenge” for the Heydrich assassination. On June 10 the security police murdered all the men of the village of Lidice near Kladno, 199 people in all, deported the women to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and the children, after the most “racially valuable” ones had been removed, to the Chelmno extermination camp.
¹⁵
On June 11 the Germans announced the Lidice act of retaliation on the radio: Its population had been supporting the enemy parachutist agents, and so they had to make an example of them.
¹⁶

Goebbels was unimpressed by the fact that enemy propaganda attacked the mass murder as a barbaric act: “We must do what we consider necessary and what the vital interests of the German Reich and the German people require.”
¹⁷
The press, however, was instructed not to report anything about the “punishment measures” in the protectorate.
¹⁸

One of these “retaliation measures” was directed against the Prague Jews. On June 10, 1942, a thousand of them were deported to Majdanek and locked up there as well as in surrounding camps.
¹⁹
Under the impression of the assassination attempt on Heydrich and his subsequent death, however, the Nazi leadership decided to accelerate the preparations, in which Heydrich had played a leading role and which were already under way, for extending the mass murder of the Jews to the whole of Europe. Thus, with his proposal of May 29 to deport the Berlin Jews Goebbels was fully in line with the radicalization of the regime’s Jewish policy. In July the trains began to arrive at the Auschwitz extermination camp from all over Europe.
²⁰

During 1942, leading representatives of the regime, including Hitler, made repeated public statements about the extermination and annihilation of the Jews, thereby sending clear signals about the fate
of the people who were being deported to the extermination camps. Goebbels participated in this intentional breach of the secrecy surrounding Jewish policy when, for example, in June 1942, in connection with the air war, he wrote of the impending “extermination” of the Jews and kept forcing the press to take up anti-Semitic topics. In general, however, during 1942 propaganda responded to the “final solution” with silence, a silence that, in view of the bits of information and rumors about the mass murder that were going around, was eloquent and uncanny. The fact that in this way many people acquired a rough idea that the regime was perpetrating a crime on the Jews of unimaginable dimensions was one of the factors that facilitated Goebbels’s “direction of morale,” by underlining the seriousness of the situation in the third year of the war; they had burned their bridges behind them.
²¹

A few days before Heydrich’s death, on the morning of May 31, Goebbels received the first news reports “of a massive air raid by the English on Cologne.”
²²
In fact, the night before, the RAF had attacked Cologne in unprecedented numbers. It was the first thousand-bomber raid in military history, an exceptional effort by RAF Bomber Command, which anticipated that the raid would completely destroy one of the most important German cities, a devastation that was intended to have a strong demoralizing effect on the whole of Germany’s civilian population. As a result, British propaganda made much of the fact that one thousand bombers were involved and announced there would be more devastating raids.

Goebbels considered that such a large number of enemy planes was “quite out of the question” and assumed that three hundred bombers at most had participated in the raid. The press was therefore instructed not to discuss the number of enemy planes.
²³
Apart from that he agreed with Hitler that German propaganda should not gloss over the damage, not least in order to have arguments with which to justify “retaliation.”
²⁴
During the night of May 31 the Luftwaffe responded with a “retaliatory attack” on Canterbury, with Goebbels ordering it to be given prominent propaganda coverage.
²⁵

Despite the enormous number of planes that appeared over Cologne, however, the city was not destroyed, and the demoralizing effect that the British had anticipated did not occur. Almost five hundred people were killed during the bombing of Cologne, more than in any other raid up to that point, and over 250,000 dwellings were destroyed; the cathedral city with its 750,000 inhabitants had been badly hit but by no means completely destroyed.
²⁶

After the raid on Cologne Goebbels published an article in
Das Reich
in which he wrote that the air war was above all a “war of nerves.” He gave the number of victims of the raid on Cologne as 305 and estimated the number of all air raid victims at 7,430.
²⁷
Following the raid on Cologne at the end of May, there were over fifty further major raids by the RAF on German cities during the next seven months of 1942, with more than one hundred bombers involved on each occasion.
²⁸

In June 1942 Goebbels judged the nation’s mood as being somewhere between “not particularly positive” and “relatively depressed.”
²⁹
He blamed this state of affairs on the continuing air raids and worries over how long the war would last but also on the precarious food situation,
³⁰
with which he was obliged to get involved throughout the summer.
³¹
The military situation in the east, however, in other words the impending summer offensive, and surprisingly positive news from the North African theater promised to bring about an improvement in the nation’s mood.

While Field Marshal Rommel’s offensive had come to a halt relatively quickly—in the so-called First Battle of El Alamein, which lasted throughout July, Rommel had not succeeded in breaking through the British defenses
³²
—at the end of June it appeared as if there was going to be a triumphant military success on the Eastern Front. On June 28 the Wehrmacht began its real summer offensive in the southern sector of the front, by the end of July achieving its operational goal of reaching the River Don on a broad front.
³³
In a second phase of the offensive Army Group B marched toward Stalingrad, reaching it in August; Army Group A advanced toward the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea until the offensive came to a halt at the beginning
of September.
³⁴
In view of the not particularly positive news from North Africa, at the beginning of July Goebbels’s propaganda began to focus on the successes in the east.
³⁵

In this situation Goebbels took umbrage at a radio talk by Colonel Dietrich von Choltitz, who as a regimental commander had played an important role in the taking of Sebastapol at the beginning of July. Choltitz reported his experience of battle in a way that contradicted Goebbels’s line: “It’s intolerable the way he praises the Bolsheviks’ fighting spirit.”
³⁶

Goebbels gave his opinion of the talk at his ministerial briefing. On May 7 he stated, “The German people [have been] freed from the bacillus of communism and Bolshevism only after a long cure. But they’re still susceptible to Bolshevism.” Two days later he used his briefing to give his staff what amounted to a speech on this issue, the minutes of which ran to ten pages. Objecting to a “Dostoyevsky philosophy of war” and “salon Bolshevism” tendencies, he warned his staff that he would “ruthlessly crush any further example of the tendencies that I have outlined here.”
³⁷
Moreover, in an editorial in
Das Reich
with the title “The So-Called Russian Soul” Goebbels inveighed against the danger of creating myths. The Russians had “a kind of primitive tenacity” that did not “deserve the honor of being called courage.”
³⁸

Assessing the impact of his article, he reckoned that the majority of his arguments had had an effect, but there was “still a remnant of suspicion that Bolshevism had done more for the Russian people than we were now prepared to accept.”
³⁹
He gained a similar impression from a conversation with Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the SS Leibstandarte division deployed in the east, who was visiting him. It was clear that “in the end lengthy stays in the Soviet Union have a fascinating effect on National Socialists as well.”
⁴⁰
These were the fears of a man who in the mid-1920s had admired Lenin, had read Dostoyevsky with enthusiasm, had called himself a “German communist,” and had seen Russia as a natural ally. His continuing attempts to eliminate any remnant of the German people’s admiration and respect for Russia and Soviet communism can also be seen as an obsessive attempt to kill off the last germ of this dangerous sickness in himself.

Successes in the east were counterbalanced by further setbacks in the air war. Goebbels normally noted the increase in British raids, which were mainly on west German targets, in the military section of his diary entries,
⁴¹
rarely commenting on them, however. He was only too well aware that there was a direct link between the eastern offensive and Germany’s relative inability to fend off the air raids. At the beginning of August he took part in a meeting of Gauleiters hosted by Göring at which the Reich marshal told him that during the next few months they were expecting an increase in Allied air raids and that, because of its heavy involvement in the east, the Luftwaffe had few resources with which to confront them. Various practical questions affecting civilian air raid defense were also discussed.
⁴²
In particular, however, it was necessary to come to grips with the possibility of growing disquiet, and this was the main reason that after the meeting Goebbels embarked on a tour of inspection of the western areas that had been particularly affected.

On the morning of August 7 he arrived in Cologne accompanied by the Gauleiters Josef Grohé (Cologne) and Friedrich Karl Florian (Düsseldorf). Goebbels was pleasantly surprised by the “healthy optimism” that he found among the city’s population.
⁴³
He made detailed inquiries of the various agencies involved in the provision of aid and then toured the heavily damaged city.

In the afternoon he gave a speech in the Cologne-Deutz engine factory. He emphasized that “we must accept the wounds that the British air force is now inflicting on us in the west in the interests of pressing ahead with our victorious offensive in the east.” Goebbels made sure that not only this speech but also his whole trip was prominently reported in the press. He was quoted in
Das Reich
, for example, saying that “children have become heroes here.”
⁴⁴

That evening he traveled to his beloved home city of Rheydt, which he found “completely undamaged.” He naturally found being accommodated in Schloss Rheydt, a Renaissance palace, which had hitherto been used as a museum and had recently been extensively renovated, particularly “pleasing.” It had been placed at his disposal by the city authorities.
⁴⁵

On the following day he visited the cities of Neuss and Düsseldorf,
which had been damaged in air raids.
⁴⁶
The Gau capital, Düsseldorf, was still suffering from a kind of “shock effect,” for it had suffered its first major raid only a few weeks earlier. He spent that night and the next day once more in Rheydt. At midday he met his schoolfriends Beines and Grünewald, who gave him the latest “city gossip,” and in the evening he spoke at another rally in the city.
⁴⁷

A few days later he discussed the situation with Hitler, whom he had provided with a fifty-page report of his tour
⁴⁸
and whom he was now visiting at his headquarters in Vinnytsia in the Ukraine. As far as the propaganda treatment of air raids was concerned, the dictator agreed with him that he did not want any “sensational treatment of the damage that had been caused” but a “vivid depiction of the steadfast bearing of the population under the air raids.”
⁴⁹
On this occasion Hitler told him “in confidence” that “the English raids on certain cities, however cruel they may have been, have a positive side.” Looking at the city plan of Cologne he had come to the conclusion that “to a large extent streets that had been flattened would have needed to be flattened in order to open up the city, but flattening them would have imposed a serious psychological burden on the population. So the enemy has done the work for us.”