Goebbels: A Biography (80 page)

In spring 1943 Goebbels had to face the fact that, as a result of the “slowly recurring spring or summer illusions,” his ideas of “total war” were being further undermined by every conceivable agency. Hitler, in particular, was all too prone to respond positively to such initiatives. Goebbels noted that these included such widely varying things as the reappearance of entertainment magazines, the reopening of casinos, the inadequate enforcement of labor conscription for women, the suspension of travel restrictions, and other issues.
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This situation was also reflected in the fact that Hitler was not prepared to discipline leading members of the regime whose personal conduct was grossly at odds with the requirements of total warfare.

At the beginning of 1943 the Berlin criminal police uncovered a crime in which the Berlin food purveyor August Nöthling had delivered expensive foodstuffs to numerous prominent figures without the requisite ration coupons having been provided. Among those implicated were Reich Interior Minister Frick, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Minister of Education Rust, Agriculture Minister Darré, and others, in other words figures who did not necessarily enjoy the propaganda minister’s approval.
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In March, Goebbels, who had detailed information on the matter via the Berlin police chief, Helldorf, informed Hitler.
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He was “fairly shocked,” but did not want to make it a “matter of state.” Goebbels should contact the Reich minister of justice, Thierack, and get him to deal with the issue without too much fuss. “Sometimes the Führer is rather too generous in these decisions,” Goebbels commented.
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He discussed the matter with Thierack the following day
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and a few weeks later learned that Hitler had at least ordered that those involved should be interrogated by Thierack.
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However, most of them had responded to the latter’s questions insolently, as Goebbels soon discovered.
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Apart from that, the case against Nöthling was soon closed following his suicide while on remand. As far as the prominent figures involved were concerned, in July Hitler finally decided that they were not to be prosecuted, which Goebbels was not entirely happy with.
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Hitler, however, was prepared to sign an “Instruction Concerning the Exemplary Behavior of Persons in Leading Positions.” But Goebbels was not surprised that the head of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers, had watered down the instruction, as he too had been one of Nöthling’s customers.
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In the middle of April Goebbels’s idea of mobilizing Göring for his plans for making the war more total ended, for the time being in any case, in a fiasco. Goebbels’s health let him down in a decisive situation. His skin condition, a rapidly spreading eczema, had affected him so much that he had had to spend a few days at home convalescing.
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Then, on April 12, on the way to Berchtesgaden, where Göring had summoned a meeting intended to give a new impetus to the mobilization of labor resources, Goebbels suffered a “terrible pain in the kidneys” shortly before arriving. The pain was so “barbaric” that he was unable to leave his sleeping car.
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Later he learned that Sauckel had largely gotten his way at the meeting. He had succeeded in portraying the situation in relation to
labor deployment in such a way that neither Göring nor Speer nor Milch could put forward effective counterarguments in favor of further decisive measures for total war. For, according to Goebbels, they had naturally been depending entirely on his “knowledge and expertise” but had had to do without it because of his illness.
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After he had once again discussed the situation with Speer and Funk at the beginning of May, he came to the conclusion that at that point it was not possible to “persuade Göring to take over the domestic conduct of the war. At the moment he is rather weary and is on leave for four weeks.”
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Although Goebbels noted that the dictator was “unreservedly” in favor of the principle of total war,
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a conviction in which he was encouraged by Speer,
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the reality was rather different. On May 9, for example, Hitler told him categorically that “total war” must “not involve a war against women […] as soon as you interfere with their beauty treatment you become their enemy.” Casinos and betting on horses were also to remain in order to soak up consumer spending.
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A few days later he was told that Hitler was opposed to all plans to use the measures for rationalizing the administration, which were being undertaken as part of “total war,” for bringing in a “reform of the Reich” through the back door, in other words to carry out far-reaching alterations in the structure of the Reich and the states (Länder) while the war was going on.
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On the other hand, Goebbels felt duty bound: “The nation associates the notion and the conception of total war with me personally. I am, therefore, to a certain extent publicly responsible for carrying on total war.”
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Now the strategy he had adopted at the start of the year began to come home to roost. At the beginning of the year he, Goebbels, had attempted to fill the vacuum that had developed because of Hitler’s absence from the public sphere. He had announced “total war” in the latter’s name, and now, since he had been unsuccessful in pushing the responsibility on to Göring, he had to cope with the consequences of the unsuccessful mobilization measures. Goebbels’s solution to this dilemma was to play down the theme of “total war” somewhat during the following months. In the meantime he had discovered another topic, which he was to make the leitmotif of German propaganda during the coming weeks.

At the end of March and the beginning of April 1943 Goebbels had ordered an increase in the existing anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic propaganda,
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and so the discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers at Katyn at the beginning of April—they had been shot by the Soviet occupation forces in 1940—offered an unexpected opportunity to make these topics the overwhelmingly dominant theme of German propaganda.
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Having secured Hitler’s approval, on April 14 Goebbels noted that the discovery of the corpses would “now be exploited in a major way for anti-Bolshevik propaganda”; using the available material would enable them “to keep going for several weeks.”
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German propaganda crudely assumed that the murders were the work of Jewish communists. With Katyn the stereotypical image of Jewish Bolshevism had now acquired a human face. On April 16 Goebbels noted in his diary: “We shall stoke up anti-Semitic propaganda to such an extent that, as in the ‘time of struggle’ [i.e. pre-1933], the word ‘Jew’ will once again have the devastating impact that it should have.”

The start of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto on April 19 fit into the scenario of a threat from the Jews that propaganda had already been painting in broad strokes. Goebbels commented: “It’s high time that we removed the Jews from the General Government as quickly as possible.”
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The extent to which he coordinated the Katyn campaign with Hitler is clear from his diary entries during these days.
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By increasing anti-Jewish propaganda Goebbels was very much hoping to strengthen anti-Semitic sentiment in the enemy states, particularly in Britain.
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Moreover, the aim was to use the mass murders in Katyn to drive a wedge into the enemy coalition.

Urged on by the Propaganda Ministry,
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under the motto “Katyn” the German press carried out what was probably the most vigorous anti-Semitic campaign since the start of the regime. On April 14 the whole of the press gave coverage, often sensationalist, to the opening of the mass graves of Katyn under banner headlines. Within a few days the whole of the press had adopted the slogan of “Jewish mass murder”
(Der Angriff
of April 16). For weeks this remained the main topic.
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In Goebbels’s view the breach between the Polish government
in exile and the Soviet Union at the end of April represented the first success of his campaign.
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It is clear from the internal documents of the Propaganda Ministry, however, that it was by no means satisfied with the way in which the press was conducting the campaign. Thus Goebbels expressed his disappointment at the ministerial press briefing on April 30. There were some editors who were past it, who were only carrying out anti-Semitic propaganda “by the book” and who were not engendering “any fury or hatred” because they “did not share these feelings themselves.”
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Thus the ministerial spokesman complained at the press conference that the press was “much too reserved” on this issue. The “authorities” had the impression that the “Jewish topic was felt to be unpleasant.”
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The Katyn propaganda was now embodied in a key statement: The Jews must be destroyed in order not to be destroyed by them. This thesis can be found in numerous variations in the German press. Thus, referring to the Jews,
Der Angriff
of May 4, for example, states: “Their aim is the destruction of Germany”; the May 6 issue of the same paper stated that “the Jews” will continue the war “with all available means until either Germany is destroyed or they themselves lie shattered on the ground.”

Goebbels’s article “The War and the Jews,” which appeared on May 9, 1943, in the journal
Das Reich
, represented a high point in the propaganda campaign and summed up Germany’s lethal objectives by taking the line that “Jewry” was the real guilty party in this war and that the Jews represented the “cement that is holding the enemy coalition together.” Goebbels’s further statements leave little room for doubt concerning the regime’s intentions regarding this enemy. “It is thus necessary for the security of the state that we take the necessary measures within our own country that appear appropriate to protect the German national community at war from this threat. That may lead here and there to serious decisions having to be made, but that is unimportant compared with this threat. For this war is a racial war. It was begun by Jewry, and its purpose and the plan behind it are nothing less than the destruction and the extermination of our people.”

In the end, according to Goebbels, “the Führer’s prophecy will be fulfilled, the one that, when it was made in 1939, world Jewry simply laughed off. The Jews in Germany also laughed when we began opposing
them for the first time. But they’re certainly not laughing now. […] When they devised the plan for the total destruction of the German people, they were signing their own death warrant. Here too world history will be a world court.”

On May 7, two days before the appearance of this article, Goebbels joined the Reich leaders and Gauleiters whom Hitler had assembled in the Reich Chancellery in order to address them. Hitler argued that, as far as the “intellectual basis of our fight against the Soviet Union” is concerned, “anti-Semitism, as previously cultivated in and propagated by the Party, must once again be at the core of our intellectual confrontation.” Using the example of the Hungarian dictator, Miklós Horthy, who “with his family [has] very strong Jewish connections” and was refusing to support Germany’s persecution of the Jews, Hitler made it clear that in the future he would regard an uncompromising attitude on the “Jewish question” as an essential criterion in assessing the reliability of his allies. Horthy’s soft attitude had strengthened Hitler in his view that “the junk of small states which still exists in Europe must be liquidated as quickly as possible.” Hitler endeavored to drum into the Party leadership the central importance of his Jewish policy: “Given that eastern Bolshevism is nowadays largely led by Jews and the Jews are also prominent in western plutocracies, this must form the starting point for our anti-Semitic propaganda. The Jews must get out of Europe.”
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During these days Goebbels commented with some annoyance on news from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. On May 1 he noted: “The Jews have actually managed to mount a defense of the ghetto”; during the following days he was equally astonished by the fact that the uprising had “still” not been crushed.
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On May 13 the German and Italian forces in North Africa, which had been pushed back to Tunis, capitulated; over a quarter of a million men were captured by the British and the Americans. After the catastrophe of Stalingrad it was the second major defeat of the Wehrmacht within the space of only a few months. This was the turning point of the war.
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Newspaper reports of the “heroic struggle” in Tunisia,
of the “struggle to the bitter end” that had been fought there, had prepared German readers for the impending defeat.
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Goebbels tried to console himself with the thought that the German soldiers in Africa had taken part in “an epic struggle that will go down in the annals of German history.” Nevertheless, he had to admit that they were experiencing a “kind of second Stalingrad” in Africa.
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Goebbels prescribed the line to be taken by German propaganda by noting in an article in
Das Reich
that the losses in Tunis would not impair Germany’s chances of victory.
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His diaries, however, contain passages that cast doubt on such optimism: “Sometimes one has the feeling that we lack the necessary initiative in our conduct of the war. […] It is high time that we—as indeed can be expected—achieved a tangible result in the east.”
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What was above all embarrassing for German propaganda was the fact that, instead of the war hero Rommel going down with flying colors in Tunisia, for the previous few months he had been back in Germany. Goebbels and Hitler decided to inform the German public of this. The press published a two-month-old photograph of Rommel and Hitler, commenting that the field marshal had been recalled in March for health reasons and had been awarded the Knight’s Cross, with its oak leaves, swords, and diamonds, by the Führer. Now he was well again and awaiting new tasks.
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In the middle of May, on top of the military defeats, Germany was faced with a serious domestic political problem. The regime was compelled to announce a reduction in the meat ration. It had long been clear that this step would be necessary, but Hitler had resisted it, a stance that Goebbels had considered a “short-sighted policy,” indeed a “catastrophic policy.”
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On May 9 Goebbels spoke to Hitler about the now unavoidable cut. It was to be “somewhat sweetened” by an increase in the rations for fats, sugar, and bread.
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However, Goebbels was by no means happy with the way in which the press announced the cuts in the middle of the month. They had been “minimized” and as a result had appeared “provocative.”
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At the end of the month Goebbels noted that the Party’s Reich propaganda offices were reporting that the whole nation was “generally in a severe depression.” What was particularly alarming was his discovery that “not only a deterioration in mood but also a collapse in people’s firmness of purpose” was detectable. This was “mainly attributable
to the fact that at the moment the nation cannot see a way out of the dilemma. The war has become a great enigma.”
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At the beginning of June the bad mood continued.
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The system of carefully leading and controlling public opinion established by Goebbels was evidently coming up against its limits. The reports indicate that people were expressing their discontent and despair about the war situation in a way that contravened what was officially considered the appropriate “bearing” in public.

In Goebbels’s view the lack of domestic political leadership was one of the main factors contributing to the current crisis and mood of resignation in the Reich.
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At a small evening get-together with Speer, Ley, and Funk he discussed the urgent domestic political problems under the motto of the “Göring crisis.” “Göring is showing a certain lethargy in letting the whole situation pass by him, without trying to resist the decline in his prestige.”
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It was time, he continued, that “the Führer created order and stability here by making a decision of far-reaching importance affecting personnel. But such a decision is probably a long way off.” Joseph Goebbels, in any case, was ready to accept such a decision.

Goebbels tried to calm the serious concerns about the war situation that were emerging on a large scale through an article in
Das Reich
. He explained that the military conquests of recent years were entirely sufficient to “ensure us an absolutely secure position from which we can move with virtual certainty toward victory.” Without mentioning Stalingrad or Tunis directly he commented that it was in the “nature of such a wide-ranging conduct of the war that it is bound to be vulnerable at the margins, leading to signs of crisis from time to time, which cannot affect the core of our political and military position but produce certain problems, particularly of a psychological nature.”
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