Goebbels: A Biography (79 page)

The more the Reich was threatened by Allied bombers and the more the situation at the various fronts became critical, the more Goebbels endeavored to provide the population with relaxation through the most important mass media of the time: radio and film.

Goebbels’s demand, which he had been making increasingly urgently since 1941, for more entertaining and reasonably priced films was largely being fulfilled by the film industry right up until the end of the war.
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The diaries show clearly that he was also prepared to admit—more or less unwillingly—that his demand for quality and good taste was increasingly being left on the cutting room floor and also that his ideas of “contemporary” topics and “homely patriotism” could not be realized. In his analysis of Goebbels’s film policy, the film historian Felix Moeller suggests that the “Film Minister” was unhappy with almost half the films produced during the second half of the war. In 1944 he banned more films on the grounds of their poor quality than ever before, and yet the majority of films were shown.
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In September 1943, Goebbels noted that “a few entertainment films are being strongly criticized as no longer appropriate for the present time.” In fact he was finding himself confronted with an insoluble dilemma. For, as he continued, how “can one gear an entertainment
film that was shot a year ago to the situation that exists 12 months later?”
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In December 1943 he noted that “the current standard of films is beneath contempt.”
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In 1944 he was particularly displeased with several productions set in the pre-1914 period.
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In December he wrote that he was going to deal “ruthlessly” with the tendency to avoid the tough conflicts of the present day by seeking escape in the Biedermeier period. He no longer wanted to view films that took place in a “blatantly luxurious milieu.”
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There were, however, exceptions among the run-of-the-mill films, for example, the color film
Münchhausen
, produced in 1943, which Goebbels described as “an extraordinarily colorful and lively fairy-tale picture.”
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Goebbels also enjoyed the films
Romanze in Moll
(Romance in a Minor Key, 1943) and
Unter den Brücken
(Under the Bridges, 1944), both directed by Helmut Käutner. Käutner was “the avant-gardist among German film directors.”
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Goebbels focused mainly on the films remaining in the production program, some of which were elaborate propaganda films. The majority of projects, however, were victims of the times and therefore were rejected by Goebbels before shooting started or else displeased him when they had been completed. He judged that the film
Besatzung Dora
(The Crew of the Dora, 1943) would have been better suited to “the second year rather than the fourth year of the war,” and the film was not shown in cinemas.
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He also blocked various other film projects dealing with military triumphs of the Wehrmacht from the past. Also, films of catastrophes, that had already been completed, such as
Titanic
, or
Panik
(in which animals break out of a zoo after an air raid), or the Käutner film
Grosse Freiheit Nummer 7
, which is set in a Hamburg that had not yet been bombed, no longer reflected the reality of the war and so were also not shown in German cinemas.
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He was impressed, however, by the film
Die Degenhardts
(The Degenhardts), completed in 1944, which deals with the topic of the air war by using the example of the destruction of Lübeck.
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He also liked the film
Junge Adler
(Young Eagles), directed by Alfred Weidenmann and based on the book by Herbert Reinecker, which was aimed at young people. This was the first production of the team that was to create a successful postwar television crime series. It was the story of a group of apprentices, who, with great enthusiasm, were helping in a factory building bombers. It was one of the few films of this period that showed swastika flags and Hitler Youth uniforms. The young
main characters were played by the successful postwar actors Hardy Krüger, Gunnar Möller, and Dietmar Schönherr.
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To Goebbels’s disappointment, however, the film was not popular with the public; he suspected the reason was that people “don’t want to watch any political films at the moment.”
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His favorite project was the history of the successful defense of the Prussian fortress of Kolberg by the Prussian army and the local militia against an overwhelmingly superior force of Napoleonic troops in 1807. The Kolberg project, he wrote in May 1943, will suit “to a tee the political and military situation that we shall probably be facing at the time when the film comes out.”
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He intervened frequently in the conception and production of this extraordinarily lavish film.
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He finally viewed the film in December 1944 on two occasions, one shortly after the other and, while recognizing that it was a “masterpiece of direction,” he demanded that its director, Veit Harlan, make some cuts.
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He was not, however, at all pleased with Harlan’s changes: “He has treated the scenes of destruction and despair in the city so crudely that I’m afraid that in the current situation large sections of the public will simply refuse to watch it.”
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The film, which had been altered once again, was shown in cinemas in January 1945, but only a few copies were made available. The audiences in the bombed-out cities could watch the gradual destruction of an East German small town in 1807 whose inhabitants defied Napoleon but at the same time naturally could not prevent the defeat of the Prussian state. Goebbels, however, was pleased that Hitler “has been very enthusiastic about the effect of the Kolberg film,” which, in particular, “made a huge impression when shown to the general staff.”
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When the real Kolberg had to be evacuated in March 1945 in the face of the Soviet advance, he did not want any reference to it in the OKW report. They “could do without” such reports “at the moment, in view of the powerful psychological implications for the Kolberg film.”
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Goebbels could not accept that reality had overtaken propaganda.

Typically, he blamed all the difficulties that arose for German film during these years on other people and withdrew into the stance of a disgusted spectator. Initially, the head of production at Ufa, Otto Heinz Jahn,
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acted as his scapegoat, until in April 1943 he was finally replaced by the director Wolfgang Liebeneiner.
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Fritz Hippier’s
reputation soon declined in Goebbels’s eyes, and on July 1, 1943, he was dismissed as Reich superintendent of film, although initially he was not replaced.
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In July 1943, having secured Hitler’s approval, Goebbels relaxed his control over film production. He ordered that production companies should in future provide only short content reports for each film being proposed: “I only want to get involved in the script and the casting in the case of particularly important projects.”
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Hans Hinkel was appointed as the new Reich superintendant of film in April 1944, and he also took over the ministry’s film department.
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Shortly afterward, Gutterer, who was leaving his position as state secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, was given the sinecure of chairman of the Ufa board, although he soon ran into criticism from the propaganda minister in this job as well.
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Hinkel’s “strict regime” soon brought him into conflict with Goebbels’s Reich commissioner for the film industry, Max Winkler, who was continually complaining about the constant interventions in the current production and with the individual production companies, interventions that were contrary to Goebbels’s instruction of July 1943. Goebbels supported Winkler, who, “apart from anything else ensures that the film industry operates along commercial lines.”
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This was a clear admission by Goebbels of the failure of his film policy. For a long time he had opposed the existence of an independent film industry working along commercial lines and instead had attempted to subordinate film production to the political control of his ministry. Now he had given this up, as well as his ideas about how to reform the content of German film.

As far as radio was concerned, during the second half of the war Goebbels continued to pursue his policy of a far-reaching “relaxation” of the program. In May 1943, for example, he complained to Karl Cerff, the head of the Main Cultural Office of the Hitler Youth leadership, that on the question of scheduling he was adopting “a rather too National Socialist standpoint.” It would not do for “radio music to be made exclusively with lurs.”
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Above all he pressed for a further reduction in the spoken word. With the exception of the first weeks after Stalingrad, in which the scheduling adopted a more serious tone, right up until the end of the war German radio broadcasts
were dominated by entertainment and the attempt to create a good mood.
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Apart from his assignment to take charge of the political and propaganda content of the radio schedule, in April 1944 Fritzsche was also made responsible for musical entertainment.
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He was supposed to achieve the right balance between “music” and “words.”
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Nevertheless, Goebbels kept intervening directly in the scheduling, attempting to achieve a balance between the modern entertainment music, which was so much in demand among the public, and the seriousness of the war situation. In August, for example, he objected to “a few excesses, particularly in the case of the dance and entertainment music.”
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As so often, it seemed to him that here too a middle way was required. They should “not have a mournful program or a program of marching bands” but “moderate entertainment.”
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Credit 26.1

During the war, personal contact with Hitler continued to remain critical for Goebbels’s position in the Third Reich. The dictator and his propaganda minister on the Obersalzberg, 1943.

At the end of February, as the first thaw set in, the Soviet winter offensive came to a halt and from the middle of March 1943 the situation on the Eastern Front had more or less stabilized; indeed, with its recapture of Kharkov the Wehrmacht had even achieved a prestige success.
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This development gradually had a positive effect on the nation’s mood; in March it increasingly appeared to have “stabilized,” and in April it continued to improve, at least according to the reports produced by the Party’s Reich propaganda offices and letters sent to
the ministry.
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However, these reports did not so much reflect an improvement in the population’s mood as the fact that Goebbels had been continuing to alter the criteria for the assessment of its mood. On April 11 he expatiated once more on his preferred distinction between “mood” and “bearing,” the latter allegedly playing “a decisive role […] in modern war.”
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In his view, however, the SD reports continued to be much more negative than those from his own area of responsibility.
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The SD reports, he noted in the middle of March, were recording “more grumbling” and “in general have recently been annoying me.” The reports recorded “too many details. The leadership of the Reich has no interest in knowing that somewhere in a small country town there is someone who is sounding off about something.” Thus he gave the head of the Ministry’s propaganda department, Berndt, the task of improving the harmonization of the reporting by the SD and by the Party’s Reich propaganda offices.
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However, this did not happen. Instead, the SD’s “Reich Reports” were stopped in June 1943 and replaced by the Reports on Domestic Issues, which were geared to recipients responsible for particular spheres of responsibility.
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However, even in their new version Goebbels found the reports “completely useless for practical work” for, as before, they continued to record “what some anonymous person in some town or village or other has thought fit to express as his opinion.”
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