Goebbels: A Biography (78 page)

In the meantime Goebbels had been becoming more involved in the work of the Committee of Three. In February and March it dealt, among other things, with the standardization of wage reductions and the simplification of taxes, with cuts to universities and various administrative reforms, including restrictions on the appointment and promotion of civil servants.
¹³⁰

During the committee’s sessions Goebbels took on the role of activist and hard-liner. On February 27 he demanded from the representatives of the Wehrmacht “more energetic measures” in order to achieve the recruitment figures that had been envisaged and told Keitel, when he tried to respond, how much his agencies were “in need of reform.” During the discussion of cuts to the universities on March 16, he pointed out that “the daughters of wealthy families are studying in order to avoid labor service.” At the same session, during the discussion of a decree against the sabotaging of total war measures, he demanded that the death penalty be introduced for the most serious offenders.
¹³¹

In several instances, however, it can be shown that Goebbels
played up his role in the sessions in his diary entries and exaggerated the “successes” that he claimed. Although he acted as the vigorous proponent of a radical course in the committee, many of the changes that he sought or believed to have pushed through were simply not implemented, or only to a very limited extent.

Thus, on March 16, for example, he saw the “reform of the judicial system […] now being carried out in exact accordance with my views”; in particular the right of appeal in civil cases was to be abolished; in fact, however, there was merely a simplification of the appeal process.
¹³²
Concerning the same session he wrote in his diary that he had strongly criticized the way in which recruitment to the Wehrmacht was being carried out, but there is no record of his contribution in the minutes because, at Keitel’s request, the item had been removed from the agenda. Similarly, he praised his role in getting the Reich Headquarters for Regional Planning abolished; in fact, however, the decision was simply to reduce the scope of its activities.
¹³³
Having banned horse riding in the Berlin Tiergarten, Goebbels did not succeed in persuading Hitler to put an end to horse racing altogether. The latter took the view that “during wartime” they must “continue to maintain […] entertainment for the general public.”
¹³⁴

Above all, Goebbels was aware that the most important obstacle to a rationalization of the administration—the unsolved and “difficult problem of the division of responsibilities between the various ministries”—could not be removed so long as Hitler could not be “persuaded to make clear and tough decisions.” But Hitler was precisely not prepared to do that, as his power depended not least on the carefully balanced rivalry and tension that existed among the individual members of the leadership corps. Goebbels could do nothing but comment with a certain resignation that it was “completely absurd that individual ministries and important agencies are fighting each other while the enemy is achieving one success after another.”
¹³⁵

In the meantime, however, Goebbels had begun to assess the possibilities of undermining the power of the Committee of Three. One evening at home in February he discussed with Speer, Ley, and Funk the possibility “of neutralizing the Committee of Three by reviving the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich.” For this purpose, Göring, the chairman of the Ministerial Council, was to be provided with “a suitable deputy.” Right away Speer and Funk came up
with the appropriate candidate: Joseph Goebbels. “I would be very happy to do it.” Goebbels then continued: “I would assemble a group of around ten men, who are all excellent people, and I would then rule with them, i.e. establish a domestic political leadership.”
¹³⁶

Speer contacted Göring and two days later met the Reich marshal in Berchtesgaden.
¹³⁷
During a long conversation in which the “minor disagreements” of the past apparently no longer played a part, Göring agreed with Speer’s suggestion that the “leadership role carried out by the Committee of Three be transferred to the Ministerial Committee for the Defense of the Reich.” Moreover, both were agreed on “what would threaten us all if we became weak in this war”; they had committed themselves so far in the “Jewish question” that “there is no possible chance of escape. And that’s a good thing.” For “experience shows that a movement and a nation which has burned its bridges fights with far fewer reservations than one that still has the possibility of withdrawal.”

During his next visit to Führer’s headquarters in Vinnytsia on March 8, however, Goebbels learned that “Göring’s prestige with the Führer had declined hugely”; indeed the Führer told him during a tête-à-tête that he wanted to dismiss Göring.
¹³⁸
Thus the plan to reactivate the Ministerial Council had to be postponed. At the decisive meeting on March 18, attended by, in addition to Goebbels, Speer, Ley, and Funk,
¹³⁹
it was agreed in principle to revive the council and for this purpose initially to add to it “a few strong men”; this meant in the first instance Speer, Himmler, and Goebbels. Funk was already a member of the council in his capacity as economics minister. Goebbels had to put up with the fact, as he put it, that “nolens volens” (like it or not), Frick was also a member.

According to the plan, Göring was to propose the changes to Hitler, and then the work of the Committee of Three would be transferred to the reactivated Ministerial Council and dealt with there. In the event that Göring was not in a position to attend weekly meetings of the Ministerial Council, Goebbels would represent him. “It is intended that over time this will develop into a permanent deputization.” This would have had a not insignificant impact on the whole leadership structure. “Lammers would thereby lose his role as Göring’s deputy without much of a to-do, and he would be pushed back into the position of secretary, for which he was intended in the first place. In their spheres of operation Bormann and Keitel are also
effectively secretaries of the Führer and have not the right to exercise power on their own authority.” The reactivation of Göring, which Goebbels energetically pursued during the following weeks, would thus have had far-reaching consequences for the regime’s whole leadership structure.

However, as long as this had not yet happened and as long as the proposals for “total war” were blocked in the Committee of Three, Goebbels’s attempts to secure radical measures for the pursuit of the war were more or less ineffectual, indeed from his point of view were becoming counterproductive. Having appeared in the Sportpalast as the leading advocate of “total war,” he was now in danger of being blamed for its halfhearted implementation. He gathered from the SD reports that there was support for the planned measures but also growing criticism that the steps that had been taken were not radical enough. After reading the SD report he commented: “The point is: No storm has burst forth, as I promised in my Sportpalast speech.”
¹⁴⁰
When he read in the SD report that, on the contrary, sections of the population had reservations about class conflict tendencies in the “total war” campaign,
¹⁴¹
he responded immediately. It was inevitable, he declared in an article in
Das Reich
, that total war would bring about a “certain amount of egalitarianism.” But this did not happen “out of envy or class prejudice” but rather “from absolute necessity, as a result of the goal being pursued.”
¹⁴²
A week later he followed this up with a further article in
Das Reich
objecting to the fact that “for example, a few hotheads are trying to exploit the favorable opportunity to indulge their unadulterated class prejudices.”
¹⁴³

Clearly Goebbels, who had been so eager to appear as the advocate of a “socialist course” in the Nazi Party and who, the previous November, had referred to “war as social revolution” in
Das Reich
, was afraid that he could come under the not unjustified suspicion of wanting to introduce a kind of war communism. All this may have prompted him to gradually withdraw from excessive commitment to total war. There were other fields in which his radicalism could find expression.

In February he learned that the deportation of the Berlin Jews was to begin in March “in stages”; he set himself the target of ensuring that the city would be “completely free of Jews” by the middle or, at the latest, the end of March, from which he hoped for “a great relief of the psychological situation.”
¹⁴⁴

On February 27 the “factory action” began in Berlin, the sudden arrest of more than eight thousand Jews, the majority at their places of work. “Unfortunately,” Goebbels noted a few days later, “the upper classes, in particular the intellectuals, don’t understand our Jewish policy, and some of them support the Jews.” Four thousand people had managed to escape because they had been warned in time.
¹⁴⁵
Moreover, a few days later he noted that “there have been some rather unpleasant scenes in front of a Jewish old people’s home where large numbers of people gathered, some of whom even took the side of the Jews.” And on March 11: “Unfortunately, initially the male and female Jews in privileged marriages were arrested as well, which has produced a lot of fear and confusion.” Goebbels was referring to silent protests, above all by non-Jews who were in “mixed marriages” with Jews who had been arrested during the action. Since a major air raid on Berlin had occurred on March 1, to which we shall return, Goebbels tried to persuade the SD to halt the deportations in order not to add to the tension that already existed in the city. However, the deportations continued. Around two thousand Jews married to non-Jews, who were incarcerated in the Jewish community offices in the Rosenstrasse, were released after a few days. This was not, however, the result of Goebbels’s intervention, nor was it the result of the protests; the SD had not intended to deport this group from the start.
¹⁴⁶

On March 8 and 14, Hitler once again told Goebbels that he was entirely correct in his policy of “getting rid of the Jews from Berlin as quickly as possible.”
¹⁴⁷
A few days later Hitler was “extremely shocked” by the fact that seventeen thousand Jews were still living in so-called mixed marriages in Berlin and gave Frick instructions, as Goebbels discovered, “to facilitate the divorce of such marriages and to terminate them even when a mere wish has been expressed.” Goebbels backed this initiative to the hilt
¹⁴⁸
and, furthermore, noted that he was
convinced that “by liberating Berlin from Jews I have carried out one of my greatest political acts.”
¹⁴⁹
At the ministerial briefing he ordered that the number of “Jewish apartments” that had become vacant should be revealed via word of mouth propaganda.
¹⁵⁰
Furthermore, he asked to be regularly informed about the number of Jews still living in Berlin. He blamed them for “most of the subversive rumors” and did his best to have them “moved out” as soon as possible.
¹⁵¹

At the beginning of 1943 Goebbels succeeded in formalizing the responsibilities that Hitler had given him the previous spring for combating air raid damage across the nation. On January 15 the Air Raid Damage Committee met for the first time under his chairmanship, after Frick had declined to chair it.
¹⁵²

To begin with, however, Goebbels had to deal with the bomb damage on his own doorstep. In the middle of January, for the first time since the air raids of 1941, there had been a significant British raid on Berlin. It had been carried out by around thirty-five planes and caused relatively little damage but cost the lives of thirty people.
¹⁵³
Goebbels had complained in January that the civilian air defenses were very inadequate: “The whole apparatus has become completely rusty during the past few months because of the lack of air raids.” So he had made a “huge fuss” and boasted that he had “gotten the whole operation moving again within a very short time.”
¹⁵⁴

The test came on the evening of March 1, 1943. Over 250 planes attacked the city, killing more than seven hundred people.
¹⁵⁵
Goebbels, who had been staying in Munich, arrived in the morning and inspected the damage. He considered the population to have demonstrated “a magnificent bearing” and he gave instructions to a hastily arranged meeting of the Berlin Party functionaries to ensure that this was sustained.
¹⁵⁶
Goebbels’s behavior is characteristic of the way in which he dealt with air raids. He was concerned above all to ensure that the population affected by bombing should maintain the “right bearing”
(Haltung)
. This was the theme of the propaganda concerning the air war. In fact, by rapidly deploying Party agencies to the affected areas Goebbels aimed to prevent any indications of poor
morale—apathy, war weariness, let alone discontent or protests. But he went even further: He kept visiting the affected areas, as in March 1943 in Berlin, in order to reassure himself that the “population is extremely nice and friendly to me.”
¹⁵⁷
The propaganda minister chatting with the victims of bombing became a central topos of propaganda during the second half of the war. Goebbels continued to be concerned with making absolutely sure that a certain image of the Third Reich be maintained in the propaganda media rather than finding out what the survivors of the bombing really felt. In a proclamation, which appeared in the Berlin press, he expressed “to the population of the Reich capital his acknowledgment of and gratitude” for the superb “bearing” they had demonstrated.
¹⁵⁸

Given the continuing Allied air raids, people feared the worst when, on March 21, for the first time in four months, Hitler gave a ten-minute address in Berlin on the occasion of the Heroes Memorial Day, which was broadcast on all the radio stations. But, to Geobbels’s relief, the anticipated air raid did not occur. Goebbels considered the “construction and style of the speech marvelous,”
¹⁵⁹
but a few days later he was worried that the number of those killed in the war, given by Hitler in his speech as 542,000, which was probably more or less correct,
¹⁶⁰
was “generally considered by the German people to be too low.”
¹⁶¹
There could hardly have been a clearer indication of the decline in the Führer’s aura and in the loss of the political leadership’s credibility.

At the end of March a further British air raid on Berlin, this time with over three hundred aircraft, arrived punctually, as Goebbels had feared, to coincide with Wehrmacht Day.
¹⁶²
Two nights later the Royal Air Force appeared once again with three hundred bombers over Berlin. This time the raid resulted in over two hundred deaths, and the material damage was considerable. Among other things, the German Opera was hit. Goebbels, who sent all available fire engines to deal with it, credited the saving of the building to his own personal intervention.
¹⁶³

But it was not only Berlin that was being affected by the air war. Between March and June the RAF carried out multiple raids on Essen, above all hitting the Krupp factories.
¹⁶⁴
Goebbels was extremely concerned about the damage.
¹⁶⁵
In April, in his role as chairman of the Air Raid Damage Committee, he visited the city, which
had been so badly hit and which, he concluded, “to a large extent would have to be written off.” In Essen he had a meeting with Ley, the West German Gauleiters, and several Oberbürgermeisters. They discussed giving preference to the areas affected by the air war in the provision of necessities, the evacuation of the population, the construction of air raid shelters, and other matters.

On the following day, at his ministerial briefing back in Berlin, he gave his impressions of the trip. The Party was gradually coming to be seen as “responsible for the population’s pastoral care,”
¹⁶⁶
and he gave instructions to the press to give more prominence to the provision of air raid shelters. Reporting the “Essen meeting” and the speech he had given at it would provide a “good opportunity” to do this.
¹⁶⁷