Goebbels: A Biography (96 page)

The preparation of the German people for war during the years 1938–39 and the war itself placed heavy demands on Goebbels’s system. People’s behavior and the regime’s public image had to be repeatedly adjusted to fit in with the changing conditions.

In 1938 Goebbels carried out a propaganda campaign over a period of several months, which for the first time was devoted to foreign policy and aimed at wearing down Czechoslovakia and mobilizing the German population against Prague. But Goebbels neither wanted nor was he in a position to allow the mood of crisis that had been created with the help of this propaganda to turn into enthusiasm for war. During the previous years German propaganda had emphasized the theme of peace to such an extent that it was impossible to change course suddenly, and in any case neither Goebbels nor the majority of the population was prepared for war. In short, the Goebbels system did not deliver the required results.

Goebbels’s involvement in the launching of the November pogrom can, therefore, be seen as having an additional function. By claiming the pogrom carried out by Party activists was a manifestation of “popular anger,” he was attempting to publicly demonstrate the radical commitment of the “national community,” which a few weeks earlier had been so little in evidence at the height of the Sudeten crisis.

It was not by chance that immediately after the pogrom Hitler ordered German propaganda to switch to preparing for war. Goebbels implemented this change in his speeches and articles from the beginning of 1939 and became a leading advocate for war. But while the propaganda that was now preparing the German population for a confrontation with Poland justified the use of military means, it also led to this war, which allegedly had been forced on Germany, being seen as an exceptional situation. The result was that after its rapid conclusion the vast majority of the population wanted to return to peacetime conditions.

Thus in September 1939 there was little evidence of enthusiasm for war in Germany. Goebbels, who himself responded to the outbreak of war without much enthusiasm and for weeks afterward was hoping for a rapid end to it, nevertheless during its initial phase succeeded by various means in creating a mood appropriate to the requirements of war. According to the Propaganda Ministry, by calmly performing its wartime duties the population was demonstrating its support for the regime’s policies.

From the start of the war until the late summer of 1941, Goebbels’s propaganda was entirely focused on celebrating Germany’s military successes. Every victory aroused people’s hopes that the war would soon be over, and Goebbels found it relatively easy to convert this longing for peace into euphoric celebrations of victory. The war against the Soviet Union, for which propaganda had not prepared the public, and the targeted release of information during its initial phase upset the public, although this agitation could be soothed relatively quickly by reports of victories.

While the regime suspended its program of systematically murdering patients in institutions for the mentally ill in August 1941, not least in order not to damage its relationship with the churches any further, it responded harshly to a certain amount of criticism of its decision to introduce badges for Jews in September. Goebbels himself took on the task of advocating and enforcing the exclusion of the Jews who had been singled out in this way, and his public comments on the deportations, which began in October 1941, made it clear that the program involved extermination. The open advocacy of a radical “final solution” of the Jewish question thus became an integral part of the regime’s war policy. In the course of the expansion of the war the Jews were declared to be internal enemies who had to be annihilated.

The situation changed radically in the autumn of 1941, when the German advance into the Soviet Union stalled. Now Goebbels set about trying to adapt the “national mood” to the seriousness of the situation: In the future, propaganda was to avoid excessive euphoria, and the population had to get used to the idea of the war lasting a long time and involving considerable personal hardships while at the same time avoiding too much negativity. The collection of winter clothing, which had begun during the Christmas holidays, gave him the chance to mobilize the population in a major campaign and adapt the public image of the Third Reich to the existing wartime conditions. The collection acted as occupational therapy, providing a distraction from the military situation in the east and demonstrating the solidarity of the “national community.” The campaign appeared to him a suitable means of requiring the home front to get more involved in the war effort. At the same time he reprogrammed the mass media of film and radio to provide more relaxation and entertainment.

However, Goebbels’s further attempts to demand more “toughness” from the home front even after the end of the winter crisis by, among other things, making a big fuss about the fight against the black market and the introduction of female labor conscription proved counterproductive. Indeed, it became clear that his attempt during spring 1942 to reinforce the Führer myth, which had been undermined by the reverses on the Eastern Front, had more or less proved to be a failure.

At the end of March 1942 the series of major night air raids on German cities began, and Goebbels recognized at once that in the medium term they represented the biggest threat to popular support for the regime. By immediately offering to coordinate the initial measures taken to aid the affected cities, a role that, as part of his duties as inspector of war damage, he then expanded to include preventive measures, he was attempting to acquire control over the public image of the areas under air attack. The Party became involved in these aid measures, thereby taking on the leading role in dealing with the issues that posed a particular threat to popular morale. Goebbels used every available means to try to demonstrate that morale in the areas that had been bombed had not been affected by the air raids.

His attempts to introduce “total war,” which he began in 1943 in response to the impending defeat at Stalingrad, were also largely determined
by his conviction of the need to gear people’s everyday behavior to the seriousness of the war situation. The continuing commitment of the whole nation to “total war” was designed to distract people from their concerns about the war situation and make expressions of discontent appear defeatist. Total mobilization increased the regime’s authority and created new possibilities for social control. At the same time, with his spectacular announcements of “total war,” Goebbels was filling a vacuum that had been created by Hitler’s failure to appear in public at the height of the crisis. As far as propaganda was concerned, right up until the end of the war Goebbels was faced with the problem that the public demonstration of the permanent support of the majority of the population for the policies of the Führer, which was constitutive for the Führer state and which until then he had been able to guarantee through his control over the public sphere, now began to lose its impact.

After a few months he ceased his active support for the work of the Committee of Three (which was supposed to coordinate the measures for carrying out “total war”) after he had reached the conclusion that Hitler was not sufficiently committed to this project and that he, Joseph Goebbels, as its original guiding spirit, could be made to bear the responsibility for the inadequate way in which “total war” was being implemented. Thus, in the final analysis, his attempt, in view of Hitler’s absence, to deputize for him in this sphere had failed.

As an alternative, in spring 1943 Goebbels found a new topic with which he could commit the population to unconditional support for the regime. The discovery of the mass graves of the Polish officers who had been shot by the Soviet Union’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) near Katyn provided him with the opportunity to exploit the theme of the threat of Jewish-Bolshevik atrocities in the event of a German defeat in the starkest form. His propaganda now went so far as to state publicly that the murder of the Jews (who had, it was stated, hatched a plan to exterminate the Germans) was now a German war aim. However, this campaign soon had to be stopped because the Germans realized that its aim was to make them accessories to the murder of the Jews, which resulted in negative comment.

Up until the end of the war Goebbels tried to sustain the resistance of the German people with two new propaganda topics. From 1943 onward, as a result of the increasingly devastating Allied air raids on
German cities, propaganda made cautious references to impending retaliatory attacks on Great Britain. These would produce a major change in the war, so people must keep going until then. But the longer they were delayed, the trickier the issue of retaliation became from the point of view of sustaining morale. In dealing with this topic, Goebbels wavered between banning discussion of it and giving the public hints that the attacks were soon to occur. When the V weapons were actually deployed, from the summer of 1944 onward, it soon became clear that they were not going to bring about the change that had been anticipated, and the resultant frustration on the part of the public was correspondingly great.

Goebbels used another topic to try to mobilize the German people’s last reserves of energy: the atrocities the Red Army had been committing since its first incursion into the Reich in October 1944. However, he was unable to achieve his aim of turning this into a systematic campaign to arouse fear during 1945.

Thus in the course of 1944 he endeavored once again to make total war a central theme of propaganda, indeed to use it to transform the whole domestic governance of the Third Reich. However, it was only after the Allied landings in Normandy, after the major Soviet summer offensive, and under the immediate impression created by the assassination attempt of July 20 that Goebbels, together with Speer, Himmler, and Bormann, succeeded in playing a key role in the mobilization of the last reserves. Hitler appointed him Reich Plenipotentiary for total war mobilization.

During the following months Goebbels was fully preoccupied with trying to shift hundreds of thousands of people from economic sectors not vital to the war effort into the armaments industry and armaments workers who had hitherto been exempt from the Wehrmacht into the armed forces, and to deploy more men within the Wehrmacht to front-line duty. It is highly questionable whether Goebbels’s efforts amounted to much more than playing with numbers, for neither the armaments industry nor the Wehrmacht could within a short time absorb large numbers of untrained or poorly trained people. Goebbels was in fact primarily concerned with the psychological effects of these measures. All efforts on the home front were to be devoted to the overriding aim of mobilization for total war, which was to determine the public image of the Third Reich
during the last months of the war. Thus discussion and complaints were taboo. In addition, the dissolution of established bureaucratic structures strengthened the influence of the Party still further and not least the position of the Plenipotentiary for total war mobilization, who vigorously used his new responsibilities to close down the offices of his main competitors and opponents.

Even after a careful perusal of his extensive writings, the reader remains unclear as to what Joseph Goebbels’s political agenda was and what political maxims he was advocating.

Certainly nationalism, which had been considerably strengthened by his experience of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland following the First World War, played a significant role in his thinking, as did a preference for an authoritarian system with a strong leader figure at its head. In addition, there was his lifelong anti-Semitism. Since 1923 and his temporary employment as an employee of a Cologne bank he appears to have become increasingly hostile toward the Jews. In the spring of 1924 he gave public expression to his hatred of everything having to do with the Jews. His anti-Semitism did not, however, form a fixed part of a fully formed racist “world view,” as was the case with other members of the
völkisch
movement, and he did not systematically pursue any kind of anti-Semitic “program.” The origins of his hostility toward “the Jews” were very simple: He was looking for a scapegoat for the serious economic, political, and cultural crises of the times. Anti-Semitism provided him with a convenient substitute for a social analysis of which he was incapable. The Jews represented for him the opposite of his idea of what was “German,” which remained indistinct and idealistic. His hatred of the Jews expressed much of the resentment he felt toward the bourgeois intellectual establishment, which during the 1920s had in his view blocked his richly deserved rise in the world. In later years the negative image of the Jew could be deployed almost in any way he liked. “The Jews” were not only responsible for the crisis of the Weimar Republic but also represented for him a synonym for all the cultural trends that annoyed him during the first years of the Third Reich:
They were behind the international criticism of the Nazi regime; they were to blame for the poor mood in the Reich; finally, they were behind the enemy coalition. Goebbels repeatedly seized the initiative to play a pioneering role in Nazi “Jewish policy”: in 1933 at the time of the Jewish “boycott,” in 1935 with the Kurfürstendamm riots, in 1938 when in the summer he tried to unleash a pogrom and a few months later when he played an active role in the November pogrom, and finally during the war with his continuing efforts to make Berlin “free of Jews.”

By the beginning of the 1930s Goebbels had abandoned his “Socialist” ideas of the 1920s, which in any case consisted largely of antibourgeois sentiments, in favor of a rhetoric of “national community.” His diaries and the hundreds of articles he wrote provide the reader with no clue as to what form of economic or social order Joseph Goebbels was trying to achieve for the Third Reich.

The same was true of foreign policy. After Goebbels gave up his idea of an alliance with a future “nationalist” Russia at the end of the 1920s, it is extremely difficult to discern any further independent foreign policy ideas of his. In 1933, as his main proposal for his trip to the League of Nations assembly, Goebbels recommended to Hitler an agreement with France, immediately before the latter left the League of Nations, initially leading Germany into a further period of diplomatic isolation. Goebbels’s later contributions to the foreign policy of the Third Reich were restricted to following each of Hitler’s next steps with admiration, indeed wonder.