B006OAL1QM EBOK (24 page)

Goebbels' instructions to his agents when Germany left the League of Nations with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger pose revealed the face behind the mask, and they were published in
Le Petit Parisien
after a copy had been smuggled out of Germany. Goebbels was revealed to be writing in this vein:

To the outside world all our propaganda must underline impressively that Germany does not wish for anything but a peaceful settlement of all pending problems…. In a skilful way all those who have refused to accede to Germany's rightful demands must be blamed for the failure of a peaceful understanding This must be done unobtrusively and in a constantly varying manner…. We must persuade at least part of public opinion abroad that Germany has no other way than to take what is absolutely coming to her.
⁴⁹

Under the guise of business-men, journalists, press agents and tourists, the emissaries of the Nazis were sent abroad with instructions to do their best to spread the right ideas about the Third Reich. In 1938 there were as many as eighty-three accredited German journalists in London alone.
⁵⁰
These agents acted as spies, sending in reports to their masters and making contact with elements which were thought to cause trouble in such countries as Egypt and Palestine. Reports which have come to light accuse the British of ruthless repression and atrocities in Palestine. German agents did all they could to aggravate the difficult situation in those countries before the war.

A large number of German international organisations, in addition to those associated with journalism, were created or adopted to help Nazism abroad. They included the Fichte League, the German Students' Foreign Service, the Anti-Jewish World League, the German Academy (for indoctrinating teachers and students going abroad), the People's League for Germanism Abroad, the League of German Business Employers, and so on. This miscellany of organisations was estimated by 1937 to be spending some £21 million a year on propaganda work outside Germany.
⁵¹
Every German authorised to travel abroad had a propaganda baton in his knapsack.

The following instructions issued to the representatives of the Fichte League, an organisation dedicated to pan-Germanism and originally founded in 1914, shows how concentrated and purposeful the German penetration abroad endeavoured to be:

Experience shows that it is effective for our leaflets to be left lying about in factories, schools, banks, trains and cafes, quite casually. Mouth-to-mouth propaganda is also important.

Make lists of all important people, note their political views and supply them regularly with our pamphlets. Never give them more than one at a time, for this decreases their interest. If possible supply the press with our pamphlets so that it can give publicity to our views. If some papers persist in an anti-German tone, answer this immediately with letters to the editors. Our leaflets are gratis.
⁵²

By 1935 Goebbels' Ministry as a whole was using up enormous sums of money. Its domestic budget was over 130 million marks, its overseas budget (including the lavish grants to the Transocean News Agency) was over 120 million. A further 40 million was set aside for work in film and theatre. In addition, Goebbels was said to have at his disposal a fund amounting to another 45 million marks a year.
⁵³
Ambassador Dodd reveals in his diary that Schacht was troubled at the amount of German currency that was circulating abroad illegally. His investigations during 1935 led him to mark some of the notes that were issued to Goebbels, and he soon discovered that certain of these were among the notes that were eventually to be found in circulation abroad. Schacht complained direct to Hitler, but his complaints only rebounded against himself.
⁵⁴

In spite of his efforts to bring all propaganda both at home and abroad under his single control, Goebbels did not finally have it entirely his own way. On his assumption of power he carefully acquired for his own ministry those departments in other ministries which had any concern with the press or with public relations in the broadest sense of the term. From the Ministry of the Interior he acquired control over the press and radio, the moral censorship of plays, books and films, and the regulation of public holidays. From the Ministry of Economics he took over supervision of State-controlled advertising and the promotion of industrial exhibitions and trade fairs. From the Post Office he acquired their tourist agencies for Lufthansa and the railways. Most important of all, he won the first round in the contest for German publicity and public relations abroad. This he acquired at the expense of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was initially under the control of a minister who was not a Nazi, Baron von Neurath, whom Hitler was eventually to dismiss to make room for Ribbentrop.
⁵⁵

So, in 1938, Ribbentrop became the first Nazi Foreign Minister. Ribbentrop was as bitterly ambitious and unscrupulous in his methods of acquiring power as Goebbels himself, and they were never anything else but rivals. Ribbentrop insisted, however, in setting up his own propaganda organisation and holding press conferences of his own at his ministry for the foreign correspondents. Otto Dietrich, Hitler's Reich Press Chief, tells the story of this battle for control:

One day at Hitler's headquarters Ribbentrop persuaded the Führer to commit to him in writing the conduct of all propaganda intended for foreign consumption. Propaganda Minister Goebbels knew nothing at all about this. The morning of the following day movers, sent by the Foreign Office, appeared at Goebbels' various offices in Berlin to remove all the physical apparatus used for foreign propaganda. Goebbels' men barricaded themselves in their rooms, and the Propaganda Minister himself promptly telephoned to Hitler for help. Hitler, who had actually signed the order to Ribbentrop, ordered Goebbels to come at once by plane. “When Goebbels arrived, he told him to sit down with Ribbentrop in a compartment of his special train and not to leave it until they had ironed out their dispute. Three hours later both men emerged red-faced and informed Hitler—as might have been expected—that they could not agree. Furious, Hitler withdrew and dictated a compromise which largely revoked his previous written order. In practice, however, Ribbentrop never adhered to this latter decision. Holding a facsimile of the first, rescinded order, down to the end of the war he continued to challenge the Propaganda Ministry's jurisdiction in all German missions abroad.
⁵⁶

So deep did the rift become that the two ministers set up their own rival press clubs to attract the foreign journalists on a social basis. Nor was the rivalry hidden, as a story told by Mackenzie shows.
⁵⁷
On the important occasion of the announcement of the Soviet-German pact, Boemer, Ribbentrop's spokesman to the press, said: “Only eight persons in the world knew about the completion of our negotiations with Moscow before public announcement was made. And one of them was not Dr. Goebbels !”
⁵⁸
What served to anger Goebbels in this rivalry merely amused the correspondents, who delighted in any of the jokes circulating round Berlin at Goebbels' or Ribbentrop's expense.

It was Goebbels' violent anti-Semitism which most seriously undermined his reputation in the eyes of the journalists. He was not content to publicise the decrees against the Jews initiated by others; he himself actively promoted the persecutions and pogroms. As we have seen, it was Goebbels who planned the blackmail of the Jews who had left Germany at the expense of those who remained, by ordering the closure of Jewish-owned shops in 1933. It was Goebbels who harried writers, artists and actors who had Jewish relations or connections, though he was prepared to endeavour to come to terms that seemed advantageous to the Nazis with certain Jews of exceptional talent, such as Fritz Lang.

But the most savage display of anti-Semitism in Germany before the war was the pogrom which followed the murder of von Rath, a member of the staff of the German Embassy in Paris, on 7th November 1938, a few weeks only after the completion of the Munich agreement which represented a further triumph for Hitler's policy of expansion. The assassin was a Polish Jew aged seventeen, Herschel Grynszpan, who may well have been the victim of a plot to provide the Nazis with an excuse to initiate a decisive campaign of persecution of the Jews which they could subsequently claim to be a spontaneous outburst by the German people. Grynszpan did not fall into Nazi hands until four years later, when Goebbels stopped the propaganda trial which had been planned and had the murderer executed. Now, however, his problem was the organisation of the pogrom.
⁵⁹
As we have seen, he assembled the foreign press on 10th November and claimed that nothing was happening to harm the Jews—
“den Juden ist kein Haar
gekrümmt worden
—not a hair of a Jewish head has been disturbed”, is what he is reported as saying by Lochner, who was present.
⁶⁰
Yet, as Sir Nevile Henderson describes it:

In revenge for the murder by a young unbalanced Jew of a German diplomatist in Paris, at the instigation of Dr. Goebbels' propaganda press, and with the connivance and actual participation of Himmler's secret police and extreme Nazis, squads of German hooligans reverted to the barbarism of the Middle Ages and indulged in an orgy of violent ill-treatment of the Jews such as even the Middle Ages could scarcely equal.
⁶¹

Goebbels himself wrote on 11th November:

If I had organised the demonstrations, there would have been not a mere few thousand but four hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand people in the streets, and the result would have been quite different and more thorough.
⁶²

Meanwhile throughout Germany Jewish shops were broken into and robbed, Jewish property was sacked and burnt, synagogues everywhere were desecrated and set alight. Jews themselves were seized and beaten up, arrested and thrust into concentration camps. Here the world could see on no small scale what was to happen in the next eight years when Germany gained control over whole populations of Jews and laid them waste in grave-pits and mass incinerators. The violent world reaction against this November purge led to President Roosevelt recalling the American Ambassador and to universal condemnation, not least in the British press, of what had happened. But already Hitler and Goebbels were convinced that Britain had become the centre of anti-German feeling as the result of Munich, and had started a counter-offensive in the German press which was to be fomented until the declaration of war made it obligatory.

There survive some verbatim notes of a Cabinet meeting held on 12th November at which Göring and Goebbels discussed the whole question of the segregation of the Jews in Germany. These notes reappeared at the Nuremberg Trials. Nothing could be more revealing than the casual inhumanity of these remarks, which were supposed at Nuremberg to whitewash Göring at Goebbels' expense.

Gotbbels:
… Furthermore, I consider it necessary to eliminate Jews completdy from appearing in public, particularly whenever such appearance might have a provocative effect. Do you realise that even today it is quite possible for a Jew to share a compartment in a sleeper with a German? I think the Reich Minister for Transport should issue an edict whereby there would have to be special compartments for Jews, stipulating further that when that particular compartment happens to be £illed up, no Jew would be entitled to claim any other seat; that Jews must not under any circumstances mix with the Germans in the train, in fact they should not have the right to be seated at all unless every German in the train has seating accommodation; and rather than have a Jew sitting in one compartment filled or half-filled by Germans, I would have him stand outside in the corridor.

Göring:
Wouldn't it be simpler and more reasonable just to give them compartments of their own?

Goebbels:
Maybe, but certainly not when the train is crowded.

Göring:
well, what of it? There would have to be just one Jewish coach in each train, and when that one is occupied other Jews will jolly well have to stay behind.

Goebbels:
Very well, but then suppose there aren't that many Jews who, shall we say, want to use the Berlin-Munich express? Suppose there are only two Jews in their coach or compartment, whereas all the other coaches and compartments are overcrowded? In that case those two Jews would be sort of specially privileged. Hence the ruling should be, Jews may only claim a seat when all Germans are properly seated.

Göring:
I don't think it is necessary to put all this into an edict. Suppose that sort of situation arose—a Jew or two seated in an empty compartment of an otherwise crowded train—well, what the hell! They would just be kicked out, wouldn't they, even if they had to sit in the lavatory for the rest of the journey. We don't need any legislation for that, do we?

Goebbels:
… There is another point that requires some consideration. Would it not be opportune to stop Jews altogether from entering German woods and forests. Nowadays Jews still run around the
Grunewald
in droves. I would say that that is provocative and incidents may, and indeed, do happen.