Goebbels: A Biography (91 page)

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Day trip to the front: Goebbels speaks to troops on March 7, 1945, in the marketplace in Lauban, Silesia, which had just been recaptured.

On September 7 the army had begun to launch the first V-2 rockets at enemy territory. To begin with they were launched at London and Paris; then at other cities in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain; and from October 12 exclusively at London and Antwerp, the most important Allied supply harbor.

The Wehrmacht did not report the deployment of the second “retaliation
weapon” until November 8. The way in which the report was phrased, namely that the new weapon had already been deployed for weeks, was sufficient to remove any remaining illusions people may have harbored that the wonder weapon would produce a rapid change in the war. Repeated German propaganda reports of the rockets’ allegedly devastating effects on the population of London could not disguise the fact that this weapon was not going to decide the outcome of the war.
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A few days before the launching of the rockets Goebbels had discussed the presumed effects of the new weapon with its designer, Wernher von Braun, and a fortnight after the deployment of the V-2 had begun Goebbels was briefed on the program by the man in charge of the operation, SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler.
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The news blackout that the British initially imposed on the effects of the new weapon prevented Goebbels from acquiring even a vague notion of the impact it was having. Thus he considered plausible reports that in London alone nine hundred thousand houses had been rendered uninhabitable, in other words that the city had been completely devastated; this was far from the truth. That the rockets were widely scattered and distributed over a long time meant that they were incapable of bringing such a vast city to a halt.
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When in November Churchill commented on the rockets publicly for the first time Goebbels gained the impression that the weapon had had a “fateful” effect. And he organized word-of-mouth propaganda to “pass this on to the German public.”
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At the beginning of October the Americans launched an attack on Aachen; by the 16th they had surrounded it, and on the 19th the old imperial city capitulated, the first large German city to surrender to the Allies.
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On October 10 the Soviet offensive on the Baltic cut Army Group North off from the rest of the German forces, pushing it back toward Latvian Courland, where it continued to defend its position until the German capitulation in May 1945.
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When in October 1944 Soviet forces advanced for the first time into East Prussian territory and German civilians in the village of Nemmersdorf were murdered in the most brutal fashion Goebbels decided to exploit this with a big propaganda campaign.
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But while on the one hand this atrocity propaganda met with disbelief, on the other hand people criticized that this strip of territory had not been evacuated.
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Thus a few days later Goebbels noted that at the moment
he was disinclined to “inform the public” of further “terrible atrocities” by the Bolsheviks of which he had learned “because I don’t anticipate it having the effect of spurring on our troops.”
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In the meantime, during the last months of 1944 and the beginning of 1945 Goebbels was continuing his tireless efforts to implement “total war.” However, the precipitate measures to draft labor into the Wehrmacht led to temporary unemployment, as the armaments industry was not in a position to employ a large number of unskilled workers as substitutes.
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Thus in October the Reich Plenipotentiary announced that those workers who had been earmarked for employment in jobs essential for “total war” and who “could not yet be assigned” to the armaments industry could also be employed in other spheres such as in workshops carrying out repairs or in the construction industry.
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As for those for whom there was no prospect of employment, in November the Reich Plenipotentiary announced euphemistically that they would provide the labor exchanges with a “labor reserve” that was “urgently required.”
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He was also forced to accept that a large number of the women liable to conscription could be employed only in part-time work.
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Moreover, in January he was complaining that the Wehrmacht’s preparations for processing the recruits remained inadequate, which “meant that the men who had been withdrawn from vital war work at home were sometimes sitting around in barracks for weeks on end with nothing to do.”
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It had become clear that to mobilize additional labor and soldiers was a highly complex task, one that was impossible to perform adequately with the kinds of impromptu initiatives carried out by Goebbels. He was also unsuccessful in gaining acceptance for his idea of a Military Auxiliaries Law subjecting all women under thirty to military conscription and thereby recruiting two hundred thousand women as “military auxiliaries.” It was blocked by Bormann and Himmler.
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Thus at the end of November he had the impression that “Bormann in particular is rather envious of the title I have been given as the person responsible for implementing total war measures,” and he was thus increasingly making difficulties for him.
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At the end of October Göring delegated to Goebbels the authority
to examine the whole of the Luftwaffe, starting with the Air Ministry itself, to facilitate mobilization for total war. Goebbels’s staff began the task at once. Goebbels bemoaned the ministry’s opaque bureaucratic structures, but he did not record what results, if any, were achieved by this investigation; his diary entries referring to it cease in November 1944.
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At the beginning of December he had a conversation with Göring at the latter’s country house, Karinhall, in which the Reich marshal sounded quite confident that “with a certain amount of difficulty and with a great deal of effort he would slowly succeed in recovering his position,” but in the New Year Goebbels was to give him up for good.
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At the beginning of November he appointed inspectors to the individual ministries to examine what measures each had hitherto undertaken to implement “total war.”
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In this way for the first time Goebbels gained an insight into the internal workings of other ministries and rapidly came to the conclusion that “at the start of the total mobilization” his colleagues had “pulled the wool over his eyes by promising the earth.”
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It was not surprising that pruning those ministries that were headed by his archenemies Rosenberg and Ribbentrop afforded him particular pleasure. Rosenberg, he noted, “is desperately hanging on to a ministerial organization that has completely lost any raison d’être.”
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Ribbentrop’s resistance was equally vigorous when Goebbels set about abolishing those departments in the Foreign Ministry that in his eyes were in competition with the Propaganda Ministry.
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That the investigation of the Foreign Ministry was still going on in April 1945 and that at the same time Rosenberg was still defending his phantom ministry (the eastern territories) shows that their delaying tactics had been quite successful.
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During the last months of the Third Reich Goebbels did everything he could to undermine Ribbentrop’s position. At the end of September, he prepared a memorandum for Hitler, based on information that he had received from Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, with the title “Defeatists and Turncoats,” which, according to Goebbels, the Führer read “with great interest” and which had awakened his “mistrust of German foreign policy.” Goebbels considered it his “national duty” to provoke this mistrust still further, as it was necessary “to remove” Ribbentrop and his “damaging influence on our foreign policy as quickly as possible.”
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He aimed to use the investigation of the Wehrmacht High Command,
which he had been authorized to carry out by Hitler at the end of the year (we shall return to this), in order to significantly reduce the size of the Wehrmacht’s propaganda department, transferring its responsibilities to the Propaganda Ministry; here too he was unsuccessful.
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The mobilization measures introduced by Goebbels had increased his differences with Speer, which had already emerged in August and also resulted in personal confrontations.
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As has already been mentioned, Goebbels had summed up the conflict by saying it was not a question of “weapons instead of soldiers” (as Speer maintained) but rather of “weapons and soldiers.”
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However, according to Goebbels, it gradually became apparent that “under constant attack from the Party” Speer had “become somewhat weak at the knees” and had started trying to repair fences with him.
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At the end of November they “sorted out their differences” during a long conversation because both had concluded that it “did not make sense for either of them to continue in this way.”
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On January 3 Speer and Goebbels put their differences concerning priorities for the deployment of manpower to Hitler, and after a long discussion he insisted on a compromise between the claims of the Wehrmacht and the armaments industry. On this occasion Hitler announced that, during the coming summer, thanks to the fifty divisions that he would form from the 1928 cohort of recruits, in other words a “totally committed group of young men,” he would secure “the crucial breakthrough in this war.”
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Goebbels’s figures outlining the success of the “combing through process,” to which the armaments industry and the state administration had been subjected and which he insisted had been completed by mid-January, were contradictory. He claimed that by the end of December 1944 “thanks to my efforts” around “700,000 men had been sent to barracks,” and a few days later he even gave a figure of 1.2 million, shortly afterward referring to a million men, who by the end of January had been transferred from the civilian sector to the Wehrmacht through the program of “total war.” Since the total number of those recruited into the Wehrmacht during 1944 was 1.308 million and Goebbels had only taken up his position as general plenipotentiary at the end of July 1944, his figures are obviously totally exaggerated. More realistically it can be assumed that through the work of the Gau commissions, which were at the heart of the
Reich Plenipotentiary’s efforts in the sphere of recruitment, by the end of March 1945 slightly more than four hundred thousand men had been recruited into the Wehrmacht.
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As Gauleiter of Berlin since September 1944 Goebbels had also been actively involved in the regime’s efforts to organize a last stand against the enemy. On September 26 Hitler signed the “Decree Concerning the Establishment of a German Volkssturm [Home Guard]” according to which all men aged between sixteen and sixty capable of bearing arms were required to become members of this new organization. The Gauleiters and Himmler shared the responsibility for organizing and running it.
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Goebbels was determined to “establish it on a grand scale in Berlin.” He was primarily interested in the propaganda aspects of mobilizing this last reserve and believed that it would have a particularly positive effect as far as “raising morale in the country” was concerned.
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On November 12, 1944, oath-taking ceremonies for the Volkssturm were held throughout the Reich. In Berlin the ceremony took place in ten squares simultaneously, on which around a hundred thousand Volkssturm men had gathered. Goebbels administered the oath from the balcony of the Propaganda Ministry, with his speech relayed to the other squares. He summoned up the “spirit of 1813,”
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but they would fight with the weapons of 1944. “The rally gives a decidedly combative impression,” he noted. “Wilhelmsplatz with its singed and burned ruins forms a background to this rally very much in keeping with the times.”
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