Branch: Government
Born: 29 October 1897 in Rheydt, Prussia, Germany.
Died: 1 May 1945 in Berlin, Germany.
Appointment's:
Decorations:
Other: Personnel
Articles:
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister
of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of
Adolf Hitler's
closest associates and most devout followers, he was known
for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism. He played a hand
in the Kristallnacht attack on the German Jews, which many
historians consider to be the beginning of the Final Solution,
leading to the Holocaust.
Goebbels earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1921,
writing his doctoral thesis on 19th century romantic drama
he then went on to work as a journalist and later a bank clerk
and caller on the stock exchange. He also wrote novels and
plays, but they were rejected by publishers. Goebbels came
into contact with the National Socialist Party in 1923 during
the French occupation of the Ruhr and became a member in 1924.
He was appointed Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Berlin.
In this position, he put his propaganda skills to full use,
combating the local socialist and communist parties with the
help of Nazi papers and the paramilitary Stormtroopers, aka,
Brownshirts, SA. By 1928, he had risen in the party ranks
to become one of its most prominent members.
Goebbels rose to power in 1933 along with
Adolf
Hitler and the National Socialist Party and he was appointed
Propaganda Minister. One of his first acts was the burning
of books rejected by the Nazis. He exerted totalitarian control
over the media, arts and information in Germany.
From the beginning of his tenure, Goebbels organized attacks
on German Jews, commencing with the one-day boycott of Jewish
businessmen, doctors, and lawyers on 1 April 1933. His attacks
on the Jewish population culminated in the Kristallnacht
assault of 1938, an open and unrestrained program unleashed
by the Nazis all across Germany, in which scores of synagogues
were burned and hundreds of Jews were assaulted and murdered.
Further, he produced a series of anti-Semitic films (most
notably Jud Süß). Goebbels used modern propaganda
techniques to psychologically prepare the German people
for aggressive warfare.
During World War II, Goebbels increased his power and influence
through shifting alliances with other Nazi leaders. By late
1943, the tide of the war was turning against the Axis powers,
but this only spurred Goebbels to intensify the propaganda
by urging the Germans to accept the idea of total war and
mobilization. Goebbels remained with
Adolf
Hitler in Berlin to the end just hours after
Adolf
Hitler's suicide, Goebbels and his wife Magda killed
their six young children and then committed suicide.
Early life
Goebbels was born in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach
on the edge of the Ruhr district. His family were Catholics
his father was a factory clerk, his mother originally a farmhand.
Goebbels had four siblings: Hans 1893 to 1947, Konrad 1895
to 1949, Elisabeth 1901 to 1915 and Maria born 1910, later
married to the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich. He was educated
at a Christian Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur (university
entrance examination) in 1916. He had a deformed right leg,
the result either of club foot or osteomyelitis. William L.
Shirer, who worked in Berlin as a journalist in the 1930s
and was acquainted with Goebbels, wrote in The Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich 1960 that the deformity was from a childhood
attack of osteomyelitis and a failed operation to correct
it. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of
his shortened leg, but nevertheless walked with a limp. He
was rejected for military service in World War I, which he
bitterly resented. He later sometimes misrepresented himself
as a war veteran and his disability as a war wound. He did
act as an office soldier from June to October 1917 in Rheydt's
Patriotic Help Unit.
Goebbels attended the boarding school of German Franciscan
brothers in Bleijerheide, Kerkrade in the Netherlands. Gradually
losing his Catholic faith he studied literature and philosophy
at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg and
Heidelberg, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on a minor
19th century romantic dramatist Wilhelm von Schütz.
His two most influential teachers, Friedrich Gundolf and
his doctoral supervisor at Heidelberg, Max Freiherr von
Waldberg, were Jews. His intelligence and political astuteness
were generally acknowledged even by his enemies.
After completing his doctorate in 1921, Goebbels worked
as a journalist and tried for several years to become a
published author. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel,
Michael, two verse plays, and quantities of romantic poetry.
In these works, he revealed the psychological damage his
physical limitations (having a clubbed foot, and, in a lesser
sense being so far from the Aryan ideal, he had brown eyes
and dark brown hair and stood at just 5'5) had caused. The
very name of the hero, Michael, to whom he gave many autobiographical
features, suggests the way his self-identification was pointing:
a figure of light, radiant, tall, unconquerable, and above
all 'To be a soldier! To stand sentinel! One ought always
to be a soldier,' wrote Michael-Goebbels. Goebbels found
another form of compensation in the pursuit of women, a
lifelong compulsion he indulged with extraordinary vigor
and a surprising degree of success. His diaries reveal a
long succession of affairs, before and after his marriage
before a Protestant pastor in 1931 to Magda Quandt, with
whom he had six children.
Goebbels was embittered by the frustration of his literary
career his novel did not find a publisher until 1929 and his
plays were never staged. He found an outlet for his desire
to write in his diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued
for the rest of his life. He later worked as a bank clerk
and a caller on the stock exchange. During this period, he
read avidly and formed his political views. Major influences
were Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler and, most importantly,
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born German writer
who was one of the founders of scientific anti-Semitism, and
whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century 1899
was one of the standard works of the extreme right in Germany.
Goebbels spent the winter of 1919 to 1920 in Munich, where
he witnessed and admired the violent nationalist reaction
against the attempted communist revolution in Bavaria. His
first political hero was Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, the
man who assassinated the Bavarian prime minister
Kurt
Eisner.
Adolf
Hitler was in Munich at the same time and entered politics
as a result of similar experiences.
The culture of the German extreme right was violent and
anti-intellectual, which posed a challenge to the physically
frail University graduate. Joachim Fest writes:
This was the source of his hatred of the intellect, which
was a form of self-hatred, his longing to degrade himself,
to submerge himself in the ranks of the masses, which ran
curiously parallel with his ambition and his tormenting
need to distinguish himself. He was incessantly tortured
by the fear of being regarded as a ‘bourgeois intellectual'…
It always seemed as if he were offering blind devotion (to
Nazism) to make up for his lack of all those characteristics
of the racial elite which nature had denied him.
Nazi activist
Like others who were later prominent in the Third Reich, Goebbels
came into contact with the National Socialist Party in 1923,
during the campaign of resistance to the French occupation
of the Ruhr.
Adolf
Hitler imprisonment following the failed November 1923
Beer Hall Putsch left the party temporarily leaderless, and
when the 27-year-old Goebbels joined the party in late 1924
the most important influence on his political development
was Gregor Strasser, who became Nazi organizer in northern
Germany in March 1924. Strasser (the most able of the leading
Nazis of this period) took the socialist component of National
Socialism far more seriously than did
Adolf
Hitler and other members of the Bavarian leadership of
the party.
National and socialist! What goes first, and what comes afterwards?
Goebbels asked rhetorically in a debate with Theodor Vahlen,
Gauleiter (regional party head) of Pomerania, in the Rhineland
party newspaper National-sozialistische Briefe (National-Socialist
Letters), of which he was editor, in mid-1925. With us in
the west, there can be no doubt. First socialist redemption,
then comes national liberation like a whirlwind.
Adolf
Hitler stands between both opinions, but he is on his
way to coming over to us completely. Goebbels, with his journalistic
skills, thus soon became a key ally of Strasser in his struggle
with the Bavarians over the party program. The conflict was
not, so they thought, with
Adolf
Hitler, but with his lieutenants, Rudolf Hess, Julius
Streicher and Hermann Esser, who, they said, were mismanaging
the party in
Adolf
Hitler 's absence. In 1925, Goebbels published an
open letter to my friends of the left, urging unity between
socialists and Nazis against the capitalists. You and I, he
wrote, we are fighting one another although we are not really
enemies.
In February 1926,
Adolf
Hitler, having finished working on Mein Kampf, made a
sudden return to party affairs and soon disabused the northerners
of any illusions about where he stood. He summoned about 60
gauleiters and other activists, including Goebbels, to a meeting
at Bamberg, in Streicher's Gau of Franconia, where he
gave a two-hour speech repudiating the political program of
the socialist wing of the party. For
Adolf
Hitler, the real enemy of the German people was always
the Jews, not the capitalists. Goebbels was bitterly disillusioned.
I feel devastated, he wrote. What sort of
Adolf
Hitler ? A reactionary? He was horrified by
Adolf
Hitler's characterization of socialism as a Jewish creation,
his declaration that the Soviet Union must be destroyed, and
his assertion that private property would not be expropriated
by a National Socialist government. I no longer fully believe in
Adolf
Hitler. That's the terrible thing: my inner support
has been taken away.
Adolf Hitler,
however, recognized Goebbels' talents. In April, he brought
Goebbels to Munich, sending his own car to meet him at the
railway station, and gave him a long private audience.
Adolf
Hitler berated Goebbels over his support for the socialist
line, but offered to wipe the slate clean if Goebbels would
now accept his leadership. Goebbels capitulated completely,
offering
Adolf
Hitler his total loyalty a pledge that was clearly sincere,
and that he adhered to until the end of his life. I love him
... He has thought through everything, Goebbels wrote. Such
a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one,
the political genius. Later he wrote:
Adolf
Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple
at the same time. What one calls a genius. Fest writes:
From this point on he submitted himself, his whole existence,
to his attachment to the person of the Führer, consciously
eliminating all inhibitions springing from intellect, free
will and self-respect. Since this submission was an act
less of faith than of insight, it stood firm through all
vicissitudes to the end. ‘He who forsakes the Führer
withers away, he would later write.
Propagandist in Berlin
In October 1926,
Adolf
Hitler rewarded Goebbels for his new loyalty by making
him the party Gauleiter for the Berlin section of the National
Socialists. Goebbels was then able to use the new position
to indulge his literary aspirations in the German capital,
which he perceived to be a stronghold of the socialists and
communists. Here, Goebbels discovered his talent as a propagandist,
writing such tracts as 1926's The Second Revolution and Lenin
or
Adolf Hitler.
Here, he was also able to indulge his heretofore latent taste
for violence, if only vicariously through the actions of the
street fighters under his command. History, he said, is made
in the street, and he was determined to challenge the dominant
parties of the left the Social Democrats and Communists in
the streets of Berlin. Working with the local S.A. (stormtrooper)
leaders, he deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street
brawls, frequently involving firearms. Beware, you dogs, he
wrote to his former friends of the left: When the Devil is
loose in me you will not curb him again. When the inevitable
deaths occurred, he exploited them for the maximum effect,
turning the street fighter Horst Wessel, who was killed at
his home by enemy political activists, into a martyr and hero.
In Berlin, Goebbels was able to give full expression to
his genius for propaganda, as editor of the Berlin Nazi
newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) and as the author of
a steady stream of Nazi posters and handbills. He rose within
a few months to be the city's most feared agitator.
His propaganda techniques were totally cynical: That propaganda
is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails
to achieve the desired result, he wrote. It is not propaganda's
task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.
Among his favorite targets were socialist leaders such as
Hermann Müller and Carl Severing, and the Jewish Berlin
Police President, Bernhard Weiß 1880 to 1951, whom he
subjected to a relentless campaign of Jew-baiting in the hope
of provoking a crackdown he could then exploit. The Social
Democrat city government obliged in 1927 with an eight-month
ban on the party, which Goebbels exploited to the limit. When
a friend criticized him for denigrating Weiss, a man with
an exemplary military record, he explained cynically that
he wasn't in the least interested in Weiss, only in the
propaganda effect.
Goebbels also discovered a talent for oratory, and was soon
second in the Nazi movement only to
Adolf
Hitler as a public speaker. Where
Adolf
Hitler's style was hoarse and passionate, Goebbels'
was cool, sarcastic and often humorous: he was a master of
biting invective and insinuation, although he could whip himself
into a rhetorical frenzy if the occasion demanded. Unlike
Adolf Hitler,
however, he retained a cynical detachment from his own rhetoric.
He openly acknowledged that he was exploiting the lowest instincts
of the German people racism, xenophobia, class envy and insecurity.
He could, he said, play the popular will like a piano, leading
the masses wherever he wanted them to go. He drove his listeners
into ecstasy, making them stand up, sing songs, raise their
arms, repeat oaths and he did it, not through the passionate
inspiration of the moment, but as the result of sober psychological
calculation
Goebbels' words and actions made little impact on the political
loyalties of Berlin. At the 1928 Reichstag elections, the
Nazis polled less than 2% of the vote in Berlin compared with
33% for the Social Democrats and 25% for the Communists. At
this election Goebbels was one of the 10 Nazis elected to
the Reichstag, which brought him a salary of 750 Reichsmarks
a month and immunity from prosecution. Even when the impact
of the Great Depression led to an enormous surge in support
for the Nazis across Germany, Berlin resisted the party's
appeal more than any other part of Germany: at its peak in
1932, the National Socialist Party polled 28% in Berlin to
the combined left's 55%. But his outstanding talents,
and the obvious fact that he stood high in
Adolf
Hitler's regard, earned Goebbels the grudging respect
of the anti-intellectual brawlers of the Nazi movement, who
called him our little doctor with a mixture of affection and
amusement. By 1928, still aged only 31, he was acknowledged
to be one of the inner circle of Nazi leaders. The S.A. would
have let itself be hacked to bits for him, wrote Horst Wessel
in 1929.
The Great Depression led to a new resurgence of left sentiment
in some sections of the National Socialist Party, led by Gregor Strasser's
brother Otto, who argued that the party ought to be competing
with the Communists for the loyalties of the unemployed
and the industrial workers by promising to expropriate the
capitalists.
Adolf
Hitler, whose dislike of working class militancy reflected
his social origins in the small-town lower middle class,
was thoroughly opposed to this line. He recognized that
the growth in Nazi support at the 1930 elections had mainly
come from the middle class and from farmers, and he was
now busy building bridges to the upper middle classes and
to German business. In April 1930, he fired Strasser as
head of the National Socialist Party national propaganda apparatus and
appointed Goebbels to replace him, giving him control of
the party's national newspaper, the Völkischer
Beobachter (People's Observer), as well as other Nazi
papers across the country. Goebbels, although he continued
to show leftish tendencies in some of his actions (such
as co-operating with the Communists in supporting the Berlin
transport workers' strike in November 1932), was totally
loyal to
Adolf
Hitler in his struggle with the Strassers, which culminated
in Otto's expulsion from the party in July 1930.
Despite his revolutionary rhetoric, Goebbels' most important
contribution to the Nazi cause between 1930 and 1933 was as
the organizer of successive election campaigns: The Reichstag
elections of September 1930, July and November 1932 and March
1933, and
Adolf
Hitler presidential campaign of March to April 1932. He
proved to be an organizer of genius, choreographing
Adolf
Hitler's dramatic airplane tours of Germany and pioneering
the use of radio and cinema for electoral campaigning. The
National Socialist Party's use of torchlight parades, brass bands,
massed choirs, and similar techniques caught the imagination
of many voters, particularly young people. His propaganda
headquarters in Munich sent out a constant stream of directives
to local and regional party sections, often providing fresh
slogans and fresh material for the campaign. Although the
spectacular rise in the Nazi vote in 1930 and July 1932 was
caused mainly by the effects of the Depression, Goebbels as
party campaign manager was naturally given much of the credit.
Propaganda Minister
When
Adolf
Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor of Germany on 30
January 1933, Goebbels was initially given no office: the
coalition cabinet
Adolf
Hitler headed contained only a minority of Nazis as part
of the deal he had negotiated with President Paul von Hindenburg
and the conservative parties. However, as the propaganda head
of the ruling party, a party with no great respect for the
law, he immediately behaved as though he were in power. He
commandeered the state radio to produce a live broadcast of
the torchlight parade that celebrated
Adolf
Hitler's assumption of office. On 13 March, Goebbels had
his reward for his part in bringing the Nazis to power by
being appointed Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and
Propaganda (Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), with a seat
in the Cabinet.
The role of the new ministry, which took over palatial accommodation
in the 18th-century Leopold Palace on Wilhelmstrasse, just
across from
Adolf
Hitler's offices in the Reich Chancellery, was to centralize
Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual
life, particularly the press, radio and the visual and performing
arts. On 1 May, Goebbels organised the massive demonstrations
and parades to mark the Day of National Labor, which preceded
the Nazi takeover and destruction of the German trade union
movement. By 3 May, he was able to boast in his diary: We
are the masters of Germany. On 10 May, he supervised an even
more symbolic event in the establishment of Nazi cultural
power: the burning of up to 20,000 books by Jewish or anti-Nazi
authors in the Opernplatz next to the university.
The hegemonic ambitions of the Propaganda Ministry were shown
by the divisions Goebbels soon established: Press, radio,
film, theater, music, literature, and publishing. In each
of these, a Reichskammer (Reich Chamber) was established,
co-opting leading figures from the field (usually not known
Nazis) to head each Chamber, and requiring them to supervise
the purge of Jews, socialists and liberals, as well as practitioners
of degenerate art forms such as abstract art and atonal music.
The respected composer Richard Strauss, for example, became
head of the Reich Music Chamber. Goebbels' orders were
backed by the threat of force. The many prominent Jews in
the arts and the mass media emigrated in large numbers rather
than risk the fists of the SA and the gates of the concentration
camp, as did many socialists and liberals. Some non-Jewish
anti-Nazis with good connections or international reputations
survived until the mid-1930s, but most were forced out sooner
or later.
Control of the arts and media was not just a matter of
personnel. Soon the content of every newspaper, book, novel,
play, film, broadcast and concert, from the level of nationally-known
publishers and orchestras to local newspapers and village
choirs, was subject to supervision by the Propaganda Ministry,
although a process of self-censorship was soon effectively
operating in all these fields, leaving the Ministry in Berlin
free to concentrate on the most politically sensitive areas
such as major newspapers and the state radio. In his 1933
speech, Radio as the Eighth Great Power he said:
We .. intend a principled transformation in the worldview
of our entire society, a revolution of the greatest possible
extent that will leave nothing out, changing the life of our
nation in every regard ... It would not have been possible
for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without
the radio and the airplane. It is no exaggeration to say that
the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would
have been impossible without the airplane and the radio.
No author could publish, no painter could exhibit, no singer
could broadcast, no critic could criticize, unless they were
a member of the appropriate Reich Chamber, and membership
was conditional on good behavior. Goebbels could bribe as
well as threaten: he secured a large budget for his Ministry,
with which he was able to offer generous salaries and subsidies
to those in the arts who co-operated with him. Most artists,
theaters, and orchestras after struggling to survive the Depression
found these inducements hard to refuse.
As one of the most highly educated members of the Nazi
leadership, and the one with the most authentic pretensions
to high culture, Goebbels was sensitive to charges that
he was dragging German culture down to the level of mere
propaganda. He responded by saying that the purpose of both
art and propaganda was to bring about a spiritual mobilization
of the German people.
Goebbels insisted that German high culture must be allowed
to carry on, both for reasons of international prestige
and to win the loyalty of the upper middle classes, who
valued art forms such as opera and the symphony. He thus
became to some extent the protector of the arts as well
as their regulator. In this, he had the support of
Adolf
Hitler, a passionate devotee of Richard Wagner. But
Goebbels always had to bow to
Adolf
Hitler's views.
Adolf
Hitler loathed modernism of all kinds, and Goebbels
(whose own tastes were sympathetic to modernism) was forced
to acquiesce in imposing very traditionalist forms on the
artistic and musical worlds. The music of Paul Hindemith,
for example, was banned simply because
Adolf
Hitler did not like it.
Goebbels also resisted the complete Nazification of the arts
because he knew that the masses must be allowed some respite
from slogans and propaganda. He ensured that film studios
such as UFA at Babelsberg near Berlin continued to produce
a stream of comedies and light romances, which drew mass audiences
to the cinema where they would also watch propaganda newsreels
and Nazi epics. His abuse of his position as Propaganda Minister
and the reputation that built up around his use of the casting
couch was well known. Many actresses wrote later of how Goebbels
had tried to lure them to his home. He acquired the nickname
Bock von Babelsberg lit: Babelsberg Stud. He resisted considerable
pressure to ban all foreign films helped by the fact that
Adolf Hitler
sometimes watched foreign films. For the same reason, Goebbels
worked to bring culture to the masses promoting the sale of
cheap radios, organizing free concerts in factories, staging
art exhibitions in small towns and establishing mobile cinemas
to bring the movies to every village. All of this served short-term
propaganda ends, but also served to reconcile the German people,
particularly the working class, to the regime.
In October 1941 Goebbels organized the Weimarer Dichtertreffen
(Weimar Convention of Poets) inviting collaborating writers
from all of Europe. Under Goebbels auspices the participating
members (e.g. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Robert Brasillach)
founded the Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung (European
Writers' League), officially in March 1942. Hans Carossa
was president, Giovanni Papini vice president.
Goebbels and the Jews
Despite the enormous power of the Propaganda Ministry over
German cultural life, Goebbels' status began to decline
once the National Socialist Regime was firmly established in power.
This was because the real business of the National Socialist Regime was
preparation for war, and although propaganda was a part of
this, it was not the primary objective.
By the mid-1930s,
Adolf
Hitler's most powerful subordinates were
Hermann
Göring, as head of the Four Year Plan for crash rearmament,
and
Heinrich
Himmler , head of the SS and police apparatus. Once the
internal enemies of the National Socialist Party were destroyed, as they
effectively were by 1935, Goebbels' propaganda efforts
began to lose their point, and without an enemy to fight,
his rhetoric began to sound hollow and unconvincing.
As a man of education and culture, Goebbels had once mocked
the primitive anti-Semitism of Nazis such as Julius Streicher.
But as Joachim Fest observes: Goebbels found in the increasingly
unrestrained practice of anti-Semitism by the state new
possibilities into which he threw himself with all the zeal
of an ambitious man worried by a constant diminution of
his power. Fest also suggests a psychological motive: A
man who conformed so little to the National Socialist image
of the elite ... may have had his reason, in the struggles
for power at
Adolf
Hitler's court, for offering keen anti-Semitism as a
counterweight to his failure to conform to a type. Whatever
his motives, Goebbels took every opportunity to attack the
Jews. From 1933 onwards, he was bracketed with Streicher
among the regime's most virulent anti-Semites. Some
people think, he told a Berlin rally in June 1935, that
we haven't noticed how the Jews are trying once again
to spread themselves over all our streets. The Jews ought
to please observe the laws of hospitality and not behave
as if they were the same as us.
The sarcastic humor of Goebbels' speeches did not conceal
the reality of his threat to the Jews. In his capacity as
Gauleiter of Berlin, and thus as de facto ruler of the capital
(although there was still officially an Oberbürgermeister
and city council), Goebbels maintained constant pressure on
the city's large Jewish community, forcing them out of
business and professional life and placing obstacles in the
way of their being able to live normal lives, such as banning
them from public transport and city facilities. There was
some respite during 1936, while Berlin hosted the Olympic
Games, but from 1937 the intensity of his anti-Semitic words
and actions began to increase again. The Jews must get out
of Germany, indeed out of Europe altogether, he wrote in his
diary in November 1937. That will take some time, but it must
and will happen. By mid-1938 Goebbels was investigating the
possibility of requiring all Jews to wear an identifying mark
and of confining them to a ghetto, but these were ideas whose
time had not yet come. Aim drive the Jews out of Berlin, he
wrote in his diary in June 1938, and without any sentimentality.
In November 1938, Goebbels got the chance to take decisive
action against the Jews for which he had been waiting when
a Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan, shot a German diplomat
in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, in revenge for the deportation
of his family to Poland and the persecution of German Jews
generally. On 9 November, the evening vom Rath died of his
wounds, Goebbels was at the Bürgerbräu Keller
in Munich with
Adolf
Hitler, celebrating the anniversary of the 1923 Beer
Hall Putsch with a large crowd of veteran Nazis. Goebbels
told
Adolf
Hitler that spontaneous anti-Jewish violence had already
broken out in German cities, although in fact this was not
true: this was a clear case of Goebbels manipulating
Adolf
Hitler for his own ends. When
Adolf
Hitler said he approved of what was happening, Goebbels
took this as authorization to organize a massive, nationwide
pogrom against the Jews. He wrote in his diary:
Adolf Hitler
decides: demonstrations should be allowed to continue. The
police should be withdrawn. For once the Jews should get
the feel of popular anger ... I immediately gave the necessary
instructions to the police and the Party. Then I briefly
spoke in that vein to the Party leadership. Stormy applause.
All are instantly at the phones. Now people will act.
The result of Goebbels' incitement was Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass, during which the S.A. and Nazi
Party went on a rampage of anti-Jewish violence and destruction,
killing at least 90 and maybe as many as 200 people, destroying
over a thousand synagogues and hundreds of Jewish businesses
and homes, and dragging some 30,000 Jews off to concentration
camps, where at least another thousand died before the remainder
were released after several months of brutal treatment.
The longer-term effect was to drive 80,000 Jews to emigrate,
most leaving behind all their property in their desperation
to escape. Foreign opinion reacted with horror, bringing
to a sudden end the climate of appeasement of Nazi Germany
in the western democracies. Goebbels' pogrom thus moved
Germany significantly closer to war, at a time when rearmament
was still far from complete.
Hermann
Göring and some other Nazi leaders were furious
at Goebbels' actions, about which they had not been
consulted. Goebbels, however, was delighted. As was to be
expected, the entire nation is in uproar, he wrote. This
is one dead man who is costing the Jews dear. Our darling
Jews will think twice in future before gunning down German
diplomats. In 1942 Goebbels was involved in the deportation
of Berlin's Jews.
Man of power
These events were well-timed from the point of view of Goebbels'
relations with
Adolf
Hitler. In 1937, he had begun an intense affair with the
Czech actress Lída Baarová, causing the break-up
of her marriage. When Magda Goebbels learned of this affair
in October 1938, she complained to
Adolf
Hitler, a conservative in sexual matters who was fond
of Magda and the Goebbels' young children. He ordered Goebbels
to break off his affair, whereupon Goebbels offered his resignation,
which
Adolf
Hitler refused. On 15 October, Goebbels attempted suicide.
A furious
Adolf
Hitler then ordered
Heinrich
Himmler to remove Baarová from Germany, and she
was deported to Czechoslovakia, from where she later left
for Italy. These events damaged Goebbels' standing with
Adolf Hitler
, and his zeal in furthering
Adolf
Hitler's anti-Semitic agenda was in part an effort to
restore his reputation. The Baarová affair, however,
did nothing to dampen Goebbels' enthusiasm for womanizing.
As late as 1943, the
Adolf
Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann was ingratiating himself
with Goebbels by procuring young women for him.
Goebbels, like all the Nazi leaders, could not afford to defy
Adolf Hitler's
will in matters of this kind. By 1938, they had all become
wealthy men, but their wealth was dependent on
Adolf
Hitler's continuing goodwill and willingness to turn a
blind eye to their corruption. Until the Nazis came to power,
Goebbels had been a relatively poor man, and his main income
was the salary of 750 Reichsmarks a month he had gained by
election to the Reichstag in 1928. By 1936, although he was
not nearly as corrupt as some other senior Nazis, such as
Hermann
Göring and Robert Ley, Goebbels was earning 300,000
Reichsmarks a year in fees for writing in his own newspaper,
Der Angriff (The Attack), as well as his ministerial salary
and many other sources of income. These payments were in effect
bribes from the papers' publisher Max Amann. He owned
a villa on Schwanenwerder island and another at Bogensee near
Wandlitz in Brandenburg, which he spent 2.3 million Reichsmarks
refurbishing. The tax office, as it did for all the Nazi leaders,
gave him generous exemptions.
Whatever the loss of real power suffered by Goebbels during
the middle years of the National Socialist Regime, he remained one of
Adolf Hitler's
intimates. Since his offices were close to the Chancellery,
he was a frequent guest for lunch, during which he became
adept at listening to
Adolf
Hitler's monologues and agreeing with his opinions.
In the months leading up to the war, his influence began
to increase again. He ranked along with
Joachim
von Ribbentrop,
Hermann
Göring,
Heinrich
Himmler, and
Martin
Bormann as the senior Nazi with the most access to
Adolf
Hitler , which in an autocratic regime meant access
to power. The fact that
Adolf
Hitler was fond of Magda Goebbels and the children also
gave Goebbels entrée to
Adolf
Hitler's inner circle. The Goebbels family regularly
visited
Adolf
Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat, the Berghof. But
he was not kept directly informed of military and diplomatic
developments, relying on second-hand accounts to hear what
Adolf Hitler
was doing
Goebbels at warIn the years 1936 to 1939,
Adolf
Hitler, while professing his desire for peace, led Germany
firmly and deliberately towards a confrontation. Goebbels
was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of aggressively
pursuing Germany's territorial claims sooner rather than
later, along with
Heinrich
Himmler and Foreign Minister
Joachim
von Ribbentrop. He saw it as his job to make the German
people accept this and if possible welcome it. At the time
of the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, Goebbels was well aware
that the great majority of Germans did not want a war, and
used every propaganda resource at his disposal to overcome
what he called this war psychosis, by whipping up sympathy
for the Sudeten Germans and hatred of the Czechs. After
the western powers acceded to
Adolf
Hitler's demands concerning Czechoslovakia in 1938,
Goebbels soon redirected his propaganda machine against
Poland. From May onwards, he orchestrated a hate campaign
against Poland, fabricating stories about atrocities against
ethnic Germans in Danzig and other cities. Even so, he was
unable to persuade the majority of Germans to welcome the
prospect of war.
Once war began in September 1939, Goebbels began a steady
process of extending his influence over domestic policy.
After 1940,
Adolf
Hitler made few public appearances, and even his broadcasts
became less frequent, so Goebbels increasingly became the
face and the voice of the National Socialist Regime for the German people.
With
Adolf
Hitler preoccupied with the war,
Heinrich
Himmler focusing on the final solution to the Jewish
question in eastern Europe, and with
Hermann
Göring's position declining with the failure
of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe), Goebbels sensed a power
vacuum in domestic policy and moved to fill it. Since civilian
morale was his responsibility, he increasingly concerned
himself with matters such as wages, rationing and housing,
which affected morale and therefore productivity. He came
to see the lethargic and demoralized
Hermann
Göring, still Germany's economic supremo as
head of the Four Year Plan Ministry, as his main enemy.
To undermine
Hermann
Göring, he forged an alliance with
Heinrich
Himmler, although the SS chief remained wary of him.
A more useful ally was
Albert
Speer, a
Adolf
Hitler favorite who was appointed Armaments Minister
in February 1942. Goebbels and
Albert
Speer worked through 1942 to persuade
Adolf
Hitler to dismiss
Hermann
Göring as economic head and allow the domestic
economy to be run by a revived Cabinet headed by themselves.
However, in February 1943, the crushing German defeat at
the Battle of Stalingrad produced a crisis in the regime.
Goebbels was forced to ally himself with
Hermann
Göring to thwart a bid for power by
Martin
Bormann, head of the National Socialist Party Chancellery and Secretary
to the Führer.
Martin
Bormann exploited the disaster at Stalingrad, and his
daily access to
Adolf
Hitler, to persuade him to create a three-man junta
representing the State, the Army, and the Party, represented
respectively by
Hans
Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, Field
Marshal
Wilhelm
Keitel, chief of the OKW (armed forces high command),
and
Martin
Bormann, who controlled the Party and access to the
Führer. This Committee of Three would exercise dictatorial
powers over the home front. Goebbels,
Albert
Speer,
Hermann
Göring and
Heinrich
Himmler all saw this proposal as a power grab by
Martin
Bormann and a threat to their power, and combined to
block it.
However, their alliance was shaky at best. This was mainly
because during this period
Heinrich
Himmler was still cooperating with
Martin
Bormann to gain more power at the expense of
Hermann
Göring and most of the traditional Reich administration
Hermann
Göring's loss of power had resulted in an
overindulgence in the trappings of power and his strained
relations with Goebbels made it difficult for a unified
coalition to be formed, despite the attempts of
Albert
Speer and
Hermann
Göring's Luftwaffe deputy Field Marshal
Erhard
Milch, to reconcile the two Party comrades.
Goebbels instead tried to persuade
Adolf
Hitler to appoint
Hermann
Göring as head of the government. His proposal had
a certain logic, as
Hermann
Göring despite the failures of the Luftwaffe and
his own corruption was still very popular among the German
people, whose morale was waning since
Adolf
Hitler barely appeared in public since the defeat at Stalingrad.
However, this proposal was increasingly unworkable given
Hermann
Göring's increasing incapacity and, more importantly,
Adolf Hitler's
increasing contempt for him due to his blaming of
Hermann
Göring for Germany's defeats. This was a measure
by
Adolf Hitler
designed to deflect criticism from himself.
The result was that nothing was done the Committee of Three
declined into irrelevance due to the loss of power by
Wilhelm
Keitel and
Hans
Heinrich Lammers and the ascension of
Martin
Bormann and the situation continued to drift, with administrative
chaos increasingly undermining the war effort. The ultimate
responsibility for this lay with
Adolf
Hitler, as Goebbels well knew, referring in his diary
to a crisis of leadership, but Goebbels was too much under
Adolf Hitler's
spell ever to challenge his power.
Goebbels launched a new offensive to place himself at the
center of policy-making. On 18 February, he delivered a passionate
Total War Speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin. Goebbels
demanded from his audience a commitment to total war, the
complete mobilization of the German economy and German society
for the war effort. To motivate the German people to continue
the struggle, he cited three theses as the basis of this argument:
1.If the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) were not in a
position to break the danger from the Eastern front, then
Nazi Germany would fall to Bolshevism, and all of Europe
would fall shortly afterward
2.The German Armed Forces, the German people, and the Axis
Powers alone had the strength to save Europe from this threat
3.Danger was a motivating force. Germany had to act quickly
and decisively, or it would be too late.
Goebbels concluded that Two thousand years of Western history
are in danger, and he blamed Germany's failures on the Jews.
Goebbels hoped in this way to persuade
Adolf
Hitler to give him and his ally
Albert
Speer control of domestic policy for a program of total
commitment to arms production and full labor conscription,
including women. But
Adolf
Hitler, supported by
Hermann
Göring, resisted these demands, which he feared
would weaken civilian morale and lead to a repetition of
the debacle of 1918, when the German army had been undermined
(in
Adolf
Hitler's view) by a collapse of the home front. Nor
was
Adolf
Hitler willing to allow Goebbels or anyone else to usurp
his own power as the ultimate source of all decisions. Goebbels
privately lamented a complete lack of direction in German
domestic policy, but of course he could not directly criticize
Adolf Hitler
or go against his wishes.
Goebbels and the Holocaust
Heinrich
Himmler , one of the main architects of the Holocaust,
preferred that the matter not be discussed in public. Despite
this, in an editorial in his newspaper Das Reich in November
1941 Goebbels quoted
Adolf
Hitler's 1939 prophecy that the Jews would be the loser
in the coming world war. Now, he said,
Adolf
Hitler's prophecy was coming true: Jewry, he said, is
now suffering the gradual process of annihilation which it
intended for us ... It now perishes according to its own precept
of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'!
In 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag,
Adolf
Hitler had said:
If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe should
succeed in thrusting the nations once again into a world
war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the
earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the destruction
of the Jewish race in Europe.
The view of most historians is that the decision to proceed
with the extermination of the Jews was taken at some point
in late 1941, and Goebbels' comments make it clear
that he knew in general terms, if not in detail, what was
planned. original research?
The decision in principle to deport the German and Austrian
Jews to unspecified destinations in the east was made in
September. Goebbels immediately pressed for the Berlin Jews
to be deported first. He traveled to
Adolf
Hitler's headquarters on the eastern front, meeting
both
Adolf
Hitler and
Reinhard
Heydrich to lobby for his demands. He got the assurances
he wanted: The Führer is of the opinion, he wrote,
that the Jews eventually have to be removed from the whole
of Germany. The first cities to be made Jew-free are Berlin,
Vienna and Prague. Berlin is first in the queue, and I have
the hope that we'll succeed in the course of this year.
Deportations of Berlin Jews to the Lódz ghetto began
in October, but transport and other difficulties made the
process much slower than Goebbels desired. His November
article in Das Reich was part of his campaign to have the
pace of deportation accelerated.
In December, he was present when
Adolf
Hitler addressed a meeting of Gauleiters and other senior
Nazis, discussing among other things the Jewish question.
He wrote in his diary afterward:
With regard to the Jewish Question, the Führer is
determined to make a clean sweep of it. He prophesied that,
if they brought about another world war, they would experience
their annihilation. That was no empty talk. The world war
is here this was the week Germany declared war on the United
States. The annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary
consequence. The question is to be viewed without any sentimentality.
We're not there to have sympathy with the Jews, but
only sympathy with our own German people. If the German
people has again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the
eastern campaign, the originators of this bloody conflict
will have to pay for it with their lives.
During 1942, Goebbels continued to press for the final
solution to the Jewish question to be carried forward as
quickly as possible now that Germany had occupied a huge
swathe of Soviet territory into which all the Jews of German-controlled
Europe could be deported. There they could be worked into
extinction in accordance with the plan agreed on at the
Wannsee Conference convened by
Reinhard
Heydrich in January. It was a constant annoyance to
Goebbels that, at a time when Germany was fighting for its
life on the eastern front, there were still 40,000 Jews
in Berlin. They should be carted off to Russia, he wrote
in his diary. It would be best to kill them altogether.
Although the Propaganda Ministry was not invited to the
Wannsee Conference, Goebbels knew by March what had been
decided there. He wrote: Template:Antisemitism
sidebar
The Jews are now being deported to the east. A fairly barbaric
procedure, not to be described in any greater detail, is
being used here, and not much more remains of the Jews themselves.
In general, it can probably be established that 60 percent
of them must be liquidated, while only 40 percent can be
put to work A judgment is being carried out on the Jews
which is barbaric, but fully deserved.
Plenipotentiary for total war
Goebbels struggled in 1943 and 1944 to rally the German people
behind a regime that faced increasingly obvious military defeat.
The German people's faith in
Adolf
Hitler was shaken by the disaster at Stalingrad, and never
fully recovered. During 1943,
as the Soviet armies advanced towards the borders of the Reich,
the western Allies developed the ability to launch devastating
air raids on most German cities, including Berlin. At the
same time, there were increasingly critical shortages of food,
raw materials, fuel and housing. Goebbels and
Albert
Speer were among the few Nazi leaders who were under no
illusions about Germany's dire situation. Their solution
was to seize control of the home front from the indecisive
Adolf Hitler
and the incompetent
Hermann
Göring. This was the agenda of Goebbels's total
war speech of February 1943. But they were thwarted by their
inability to challenge
Adolf
Hitler, who could neither make decisions himself nor trust
anyone else to do so.
After Stalingrad,
Adolf
Hitler increasingly withdrew from public view, almost
never appearing in public and rarely even broadcasting. By
July, Goebbels was lamenting that
Adolf
Hitler had cut himself off from the people it was noted,
for example, that he never visited the bomb-ravaged cities
of the Ruhr. One can't neglect the people too long, he
wrote. They are the heart of our war effort. Goebbels himself
became the public voice of the National Socialist Regime, both in his regular
broadcasts and his weekly editorials in Das Reich. As Joachim
Fest notes, Goebbels seemed to take a grim pleasure in the
destruction of Germany's cities by the Allied bombing
offensive: It was, as one of his colleagues confirmed, almost
a happy day for him when famous buildings were destroyed,
because at such time he put into his speeches that ecstatic
hatred which aroused the fanaticism of the tiring workers
and spurred them to fresh efforts.
In public, Goebbels remained confident of German victory:
We live at the most critical period in the history of the
Occident, he wrote in Das Reich in February 1943. Any weakening
of the spiritual and military defensive strength of our
continent in its struggle with eastern Bolshevism brings
with it the danger of a rapidly nearing decline in its will
to resist ... Our soldiers in the East will do their part.
They will stop the storm from the steppes, and ultimately
break it. They fight under unimaginable conditions. But
they are fighting a good fight. They are fighting not only
for our own security, but also for Europe's future.
In private, he was discouraged by the failure of his and
Albert
Speer's campaign to gain control of the home front.
In 1944 he made a now infamous list with irreplaceable artists
called the Gottbegnadeten list with people such as Arno
Breker, Richard Strauss and Johannes Heesters.
Goebbels remained preoccupied with the annihilation of
the Jews, which was now reaching its climax in the extermination
camps of eastern Poland. As in 1942, he was more outspoken
about what was happening than
Heinrich
Himmler would have liked: Our state's security
requires that we take whatever measures seem necessary to
protect the German community from the Jewish threat, he wrote in May. That leads to some difficult
decisions, but they are unavoidable if we are to deal with
the threat… None of the Führer's prophetic words
has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry
succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would
be not the destruction of the Aryan race, but rather the
wiping out of the Jewish race. This process is of vast importance.
Following the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of
Benito Mussolini in September, he and
Joachim
von Ribbentrop raised with
Adolf
Hitler the possibility of secretly approaching Joseph
Stalin and negotiating a separate peace behind the backs
of the western Allies.
Adolf
Hitler, surprisingly, did not reject the idea of a separate
peace with either side, but he told Goebbels that he should
not negotiate from a position of weakness. A great German
victory must occur before any negotiations should be undertaken,
he reasoned. The German defeat
at Kursk in July had, however, ended any possibility of
this.
As Germany's military and economic situation grew
steadily worse during 1944, Goebbels renewed his push, in
alliance with
Albert
Speer, to wrest control of the home front away from
Hermann
Göring . In July, following the Allied landings
in France and the huge Soviet advances in Belarus,
Adolf
Hitler finally agreed to grant both of them increased
powers.
Albert
Speer took control of all economic and production matters
away from
Hermann
Göring, and Goebbels took the title Reich Plenipotentiary
for Total War (Reichsbevollmächtigter für den
totalen Kriegseinsatz an der Heimatfront). At the same time,
Heinrich
Himmler took over the Interior Ministry.
This trio Goebbels,
Heinrich
Himmler and
Albert
Speer became the real center of German government in the
last year of the war, although
Martin
Bormann used his privileged access to
Adolf
Hitler to thwart them when he could. In this
Martin
Bormann was very successful, as the party gauleiters gained
more and more powers, becoming Reich Defense Commissars (Reichsverteidigungskommissare)
in their respective districts and overseeing all civilian
administration. The fact that
Heinrich
Himmler was Interior Minister only increased the power
of
Martin
Bormann, as the Gauleiters feared that
Heinrich
Himmler, who was General Plenipotentiary for the Administration
of the Reich, would curb their power and set up his higher
SS and police leaders as their replacement.
Goebbels saw
Heinrich
Himmler as a potential ally against
Martin
Bormann and in 1944 is supposed to have voiced the opinion
that if the Reichsführer SS was granted control over
the Wehrmacht and he, Goebbels, granted control over the
domestic politics, the war would soon be ended in a victorious
manner. However, the inability of
Heinrich
Himmler to persuade
Adolf
Hitler to cease his support of
Martin
Bormann, the defection of SS generals such as Obergruppenführer
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt
and his powerful subordinate Gruppenführer Heinrich
Müller, the head of the Gestapo, to
Martin
Bormann, soon persuaded Goebbels to align himself with
the Secretary to the Führer at the end of 1944, thus
accepting his subordinate position.
When elements of the army leadership tried to assassinate
Adolf Hitler
in the July 20 plot shortly thereafter, it was this trio
that rallied the resistance to the plotters. It was Goebbels,
besieged in his Berlin flat with
Albert
Speer and secretary Wilfred von Oven beside him but
with his phone lines intact, who brought Otto Ernst Remer,
the wavering commander of the Berlin garrison, to the phone
to speak to
Adolf
Hitler in East Prussia, thus demonstrating that the
Führer was alive and that the garrison should oppose
the attempted coup.
Goebbels promised
Adolf
Hitler that he could raise a million new soldiers by
means of a reorganisation of the Army, transferring personnel
from the Navy and Luftwaffe, and purging the bloated Reich
Ministries, which satraps like
Hermann
Göring had hitherto protected. As it turned out,
the inertia of the state bureaucracy was too great even
for the energetic Goebbels to overcome.
Martin
Bormann and his puppet
Hans
Heinrich Lammers, keen to retain their control over
the Party and State administrations respectively, placed
endless obstacles in Goebbels's way. Another problem
was that although
Albert
Speer and Goebbels were allies, their agendas in fact
conflicted:
Albert
Speer wanted absolute priority in the allocation of
labor to be given to arms production, while Goebbels sought
to press every able-bodied male into the army.
Albert
Speer, allied with Fritz Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary
for the Employment of Labour from 1942, generally won these
battles.
By July 1944, it was in any case too late for Goebbels
and
Albert
Speer's internal coup to make any real difference
to the outcome of the war. The combined economic and military
power of the western Allies and the Soviet Union, now fully
mobilized, was simply too great for Germany to overcome.
A crucial economic indicator, the ratio of steel output,
was running at 4.5:1 against Germany. The final blow was
the loss of the Romanian oil fields as the Soviet Army advanced
through the Balkans in September. This, combined with the
U.S. air campaign against Germany's synthetic oil production,
finally broke the back of the German economy and thus its
capacity for further resistance. By this time, the best
Goebbels could do to reassure the German people that victory
was still possible was to make vague promises that miracle
weapons such as the
Me
262 jet airplane, the
Type
XXI U-boat, and the
V-2
rocket could somehow retrieve the military situation.
Defeat and death
In the last months of the war, Goebbels' speeches and
articles took on an increasingly apocalyptic tone:
Rarely in history has a brave people struggling for its
life faced such terrible tests as the German people have
in this war, he wrote towards the end. The misery that results
for us all, the never ending chain of sorrows, fears, and
spiritual torture does not need to be described in detail.
We are bearing a heavy fate because we are fighting for
a good cause, and are called to bravely endure the battle
to achieve greatness.
By the beginning of 1945, with the Soviets on the Oder and
the Western Allies preparing to cross the Rhine, Goebbels
could no longer disguise the fact that defeat was inevitable.
He knew what that would mean for himself: For us, he had
written in 1943, we have burnt our bridges. We cannot go
back, but neither do we want to go back. We are forced to
extremes and therefore resolved to proceed to extremes.
In his diaries, he expressed the belief that German diplomacy
should find a way to exploit the emerging tensions between
Stalin and the West, but he proclaimed foreign minister
Joachim
von Ribbentrop, whom
Adolf
Hitler would not abandon, incapable of such a feat.
When other Nazi leaders urged
Adolf
Hitler to leave Berlin and establish a new center of
resistance in the National Redoubt in Bavaria, Goebbels
opposed this, arguing for a last stand in the ruins of the
Reich capital.
By this time, Goebbels had gained the position he had wanted
so long at the side of
Adolf
Hitler , albeit only because of his subservience to
Martin
Bormann, who was the Führer's de facto deputy.
Hermann
Göring was utterly discredited, though
Adolf
Hitler refused to dismiss him until 25 April.
Heinrich
Himmler, whose appointment as commander of Heeresgruppe
Weichsel had led to disaster on the Oder, was also in disgrace,
and
Adolf Hitler
rightly suspected that he was secretly trying to negotiate
with the western Allies. Only Goebbels and
Martin
Bormann remained totally loyal to
Adolf
Hitler. Goebbels knew how to play on
Adolf
Hitler's fantasies, encouraging him to see the hand of
providence in the death of United States President Franklin
D. Roosevelt on 12 April. On 22 April, largely as a result
of Goebbels' influence,
Adolf
Hitler announced that he would not leave Berlin, but would
stay and fight, and if necessary die, in defence of the capital.
On 23 April, Goebbels made the following proclamation to
the people of Berlin:
I call on you to fight for your city. Fight with everything
you have got, for the sake of your wives and your children,
your mothers and your parents. Your arms are defending everything
we have ever held dear, and all the generations that will
come after us. Be proud and courageous! Be inventive and
cunning! Your Gauleiter is amongst you. He and his colleagues
will remain in your midst. His wife and children are here
as well. He, who once captured the city with 200 men, will
now use every means to galvanize the defense of the capital.
The battle for Berlin must become the signal for the whole
nation to rise up in battle.
Unlike many other leading Nazis at this juncture, Goebbels
proved to have strong convictions, moving himself and his
family into the Vorbunker, that was connected to the lower
Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery gardens in
central Berlin. He told Vice-Admiral
Hans-Erich
Voss that he would not entertain the idea of either
surrender or escape: I was the Reich Minister of Propaganda
and led the fiercest activity against the Soviet Union,
for which they would never pardon me,
Hans-Erich
Voss quoted him as saying. He couldn't escape also because
he was Berlin's Defence Commissioner and he considered it
would be disgraceful for him to abandon his post,
Hans-Erich
Voss added.
After midnight on 29 April ,
with the Soviets advancing ever closer to the bunker complex,
Adolf Hitler
dictated his last will and testament. Goebbels was one of
four witnesses. In the mid-afternoon of 30 April,
Adolf
Hitler shot himself. Of
Adolf
Hitler's death, Goebbels commented: The heart of Germany
has ceased to beat. The Führer is dead.
In his last will and testament,
Adolf
Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of
the National Socialist Party. Instead,
Adolf
Hitler appointed Goebbels Reich Chancellor Grand Admiral
Karl
Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border,
Reich President and
Martin
Bormann,
Adolf
Hitler's long-time chief of staff, Party Minister. Goebbels
knew that this was an empty title. Even if he was willing
and able to escape Berlin and reach the north, it was unlikely
that
Karl
Dönitz, whose only concern was to negotiate a settlement
with the western Allies that would save Germany from Soviet
occupation, would want such a notorious figure as Goebbels
heading his government.
As it was, Goebbels had no intention of trying to escape.
Hans-Erich
Voss later recounted: When Goebbels learned that
Adolf
Hitler had committed suicide, he was very depressed
and said: 'It is a great pity that such a man is not with
us any longer. But there is nothing to be done. For us,
everything is lost now and the only way left for us is the
one which
Adolf
Hitler chose. I shall follow his example'.
On 1 May, Goebbels completed his sole official act as Chancellor
of Germany (Reichskanzler). He dictated a letter and ordered
German General Hans Krebs, under a white flag, to meet with
General Vasily Chuikov and to deliver his letter. Chuikov,
as commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, commanded the
Soviet forces in central Berlin. Goebbels' letter informed
Chuikov of
Adolf
Hitler's death and requested a ceasefire, hinting that
the establishment of a National Socialist government hostile
to Western plutocracy would be beneficial to the Soviet
Union, as the betrayal of
Heinrich
Himmler and
Hermann
Göring indicated that otherwise anti-Soviet National
Socialist elements might align themselves with the West.
When this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts
were futile. Shortly afterward he dictated a postscript
to
Adolf
Hitler's testament:
The Führer has given orders for me, in case of a breakdown
of defense of the Capital of the Reich, to leave Berlin
and to participate as a leading member in a government appointed
by him. For the first time in my life, I must categorically
refuse to obey a command of the Führer. My wife and
my children agree with this refusal. In any other case,
I would feel myself ... a dishonorable renegade and vile
scoundrel for my entire further life, who would lose the
esteem of himself along with the esteem of his people, both
of which would have to form the requirement for further
duty of my person in designing the future of the German
Nation and the German Reich.
Later on 1 May, Vice-Admiral
Hans-Erich
Voss saw Goebbels for the last time Before the breakout
from the bunker began, about ten generals and officers,
including myself, went down individually to Goebbels's shelter
to say goodbye. While saying goodbye I asked Goebbels to
join us. But he replied: 'The captain must not leave his
sinking ship. I have thought about it all and decided to
stay here. I have nowhere to go because with little children
I will not be able to make it'
At 8 pm on the evening of 1 May, Goebbels arranged for an
SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to kill his six children by injecting
them with morphine and then, when they were unconscious, crushing
an ampule of cyanide in each of their mouths.
According to Kunz's testimony, he gave the children morphine
injections but it was Magda Goebbels and Stumpfegger,
Adolf
Hitler's personal doctor, who then administered the cyanide.
Shortly afterward, Goebbels
and his wife went up to the garden of the Chancellery, where
they killed themselves. The details of their suicides are
uncertain. After the war, Rear-Admiral Michael Musmanno, a
U.S. naval officer and judge, published an account apparently
based on eye-witness testimony: At about 8:15 pm, Goebbels
arose from the table, put on his hat, coat and gloves and,
taking his wife's arm, went upstairs to the garden. They were
followed by Goebbels's adjutant, SS-Hauptsturmführer
Günther Schwägermann. While Schwägermann was
preparing the petrol, he heard a shot. Goebbels had shot himself
and his wife took poison. Schwägermann ordered one of
the soldiers to shoot Goebbels again because he was unable
to do it himself. One SS officer later said they each took
cyanide and were shot by an SS trooper. According to another
account, Goebbels shot his wife and then himself. This version
is portrayed in the movie Downfall.
The bodies of Goebbels and his wife were then burned in
a shell crater, but owing to the lack of petrol the burning
was only partly effective, and their bodies were easily
identifiable. A few days later,
Hans-Erich
Voss was brought back to the bunker by the Soviets to
identify the partly burned bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels
and the bodies of their children. Vice-Admiral
Hans-Erich
Voss, being asked how he identified the people as Goebbels,
his wife and children, explained that he recognized the
burnt body of the man as former Reichsminister Goebbels
by the following signs: the shape of the head, the line
of the mouth, the metal brace that Goebbels had on his right
leg, his gold NSDAP badge and the burnt remains of his party
uniform. The remains of the Goebbels family were repeatedly
buried and exhumed, along with the remains of
Adolf
Hitler, Eva Braun, General Hans Krebs and
Adolf
Hitler's dogs. The last
burial had been at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg on 21
February 1946. In 1970, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised
an operation to destroy the remains. On 4 April 1970, a
Soviet KGB team with detailed burial charts secretly exhumed
five wooden boxes. The remains from the boxes were thoroughly
burned and crushed, after which the ashes were thrown into
the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.
Joachim Fest writes: What he seemed to fear more than anything
else was a death devoid of dramatic effects. To the end
he was what he had always been: the propagandist for himself.
Whatever he thought or did was always based on this one
agonizing wish for self-exaltation, and this same object
was served by the murder of his children ... They were the
last victims of an egomania extending beyond the grave.
However, this deed, too, failed to make him the figure of
tragic destiny he had hoped to become it merely gave his
end a touch of repulsive irony.
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