B006OAL1QM EBOK (31 page)

Goebbels then began the process of the plausible breakdown of Hess's reputation. In conversation he joked about Hess's inability to overcome his impotence, and how he and his wife had had to resort to astrology and magic potions before a child was somehow or other conceived. When every
Gau
in Germany was required to send a parcel of earth to be spread symbolically under the child's cradle, Goebbels as Gauleiter of Berlin—an office he never relinquished—thought better of sending a paving-stone and despatched some manure from the garden instead.
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Though the exercise of his skill as a propagandist satisfied Goebbels deeply, he felt throughout the war that his knowledge of affairs and his abilities were alike neglected by Hitler. For him the practice of propaganda implied an active participation in shaping policy. For Hitler the war meant military strategy alone, and the advanced ideas which Goebbels imagined the Führer had learned in the magic days of the election campaigns that they had shared together only ten years previously seemed forgotten. Occasionally he was allowed to use his old tricks; in June 1941 it was arranged that he should seem to be in trouble for revealing in an article that Germany was soon to invade England. The article appeared in the
Völkischer Beobachter
and the edition was withdrawn as soon as the foreign correspondents had noted the article which it was hoped would distract attention from preparations for the invasion of Russia. Goebbels was put into artificial disgrace, and was delighted at his cleverness.
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But Hitler was shut away with his military maps, absorbed in the statistics of armies and weapons, embattled with his recalcitrant generals. Goebbels' world of words seemed specialised and remote, though Hitler admitted him on occasion to a conference, and listened to his tireless but vain attempts to be brought into a closer partnership on the level where policy was being devised. But the policy, he found, was that there was no policy but barefaced conquest in the East, and he had no friends to support him among Hitler's new entourage, in which Martin Bormann was the rising star. Goebbels was left to languish in the illusion of his own self-importance which he fed with his ceaseless round of activities. Yet while Hitler's sense of perspective diminished under the weight and worry of the Russian campaign, Goebbels' grasp of the essentials of the situation grew. It was he who realised that there should be an imaginative propaganda policy for Russia with the German armies represented as liberators bringing self-government to territories such as the Ukraine where there was a genuine desire for freedom from Communism. It was Goebbels who realised that what Germany herself needed was organisation for total war, and not false statements implying that the campaign was all but over as the winter set in. Had Goebbels managed at this stage to regain his lost influence with Hitler, he would undoubtedly have done anything he could to save the Führer from the catastrophe which was inevitable once the blind ambition possessed him to spread his armies over the face of Russia.

So Goebbels agitated on the touch-line, trying to intervene in the game. As soon as it was clear at the end of the summer of 1941 that, though deeply penetrated, the Eastern territories were by no means conquered, Goebbels prepared a memorandum to Hitler on the political handling of Russia. He despaired when he saw the Baltic German Alfred Rosenberg—a failure at every previous administrative job he had been given—appointed Minister for the East. The memorandum advocated the proclamation by Germany of a plan which would excite the active participation of the Russians and lead to widespread desertions from the Red Army. The memorandum was sent to Hitler and pigeon-holed. Rosenberg merely complained at Goebbels' interference, and the Russians learned from direct and bitter experience what Nazi liberation meant. Had Hitler adopted Goebbels' plan a form of victory might have been achieved in place of the holocaust of Stalingrad and the mass retreat of 1943.

To hear Goebbels talking at home, however, you might have been excused for thinking you were in the presence of the second man in Germany. He opened the heart of his ambitions to Semmler and to those in his circle of friends whom he trusted in what must have been conversations which unconsciously compensated for his neglect by Hitler. Goebbels saw himself first of all as the future historian of Germany; no other Nazi leader kept a diary, and Semmler soon noted down the facts after his appointment to the household.

For twenty years Goebbels has regularly and painstakingly kept a diary. Every day he spends an hour on this task. So far he has written twenty-three thick volumes in minute handwriting. Goebbels believes that one day this diary, read with the official archives, will provide one of the richest sources for the history of the National Socialist Party and for Hitler's years of power. He keeps this diary strictly secret and, so far as I know, no one is allowed to see it. The volumes are kept locked up in a steel cupboard, the key of which he always carries with him.
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Semmler confirms that Goebbels refused the Eher Verlag's offer of three million marks for the future publication rights of the diary; Goebbels preferred to regard these volumes as a legacy for his children and their descendants. He believed them to be historical documents of the first importance. Although the diaries were handwritten at this stage, they were soon to be dictated and specially typed by his confidential secretary Otte.

Goebbels often used to say how he dreamed of the time he could retire from politics, become a private citizen free to roam about, and dedicate his working life to his books. He could use his diaries, he said, as source material for a monumental life of Hitler, of which two volumes already existed in privately printed copies, but had “met with the Führer's disapproval”. Then he planned to write a history of Germany from 1900 to the present day, a book on Christianity “of real political importance”, and a treatise on films which would become a standard work for the cinema equal in importance to Lessing's book on the art and theory of the drama. In the book on Christianity “he would dispose of old-fashioned theories of Christianity, and lead from this criticism to an ethical system for the twentieth-century man”.
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He also hoped to launch now and then from some forest retreat the occasional scathing article on contemporary personalities and affairs in case anyone should think that the old dog had lost his bite. On another occasion he told Semmler that he would do all he could to keep his son Helmuth out of the “despicable occupation” of politics.

“Politics,” he said to his young adjutant, “ruin the character; they develop the worst and meanest qualities by forcing into the front of men's minds their ambition, their vanity, their competitive spirit and their passion for influence and cheap popularity. The cause they are serving is pushed into the background. To many of them politics are only a means to eliminate competitors, to conduct vulgar intrigues and to attain personal power.”
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Semmler also heard him declare his passionate love of political life. But there it was; he often noted how Goebbels contradicted himself, and liked to use his skill to build up an argument one day which he would as carefully destroy the next.

Yet he was proud of what he held to be his great contribution to the political life of Germany. Though he enjoyed the day-dreaming of himself as the great German historian writing his monographs and memories in the leisure of an honoured retirement, he claimed that without him National Socialism in Germany would have had a totally different character. One evening in December 1941 Goebbels told Semmler exactly what he thought this personal contribution of his had been. In four decisive ways, he said, he had vitally strengthened the movement:

1. National Socialism in South Germany had been a purely middle-class affair. The Socialist element had been at first entirely absent. As leader of the Rhineland National Socialists he had been the first to bring the Socialist ideas of the workers of the Rhine-Westphalia districts into the Munich programme. At first the Munich line had been very unpopular in the Rhineland, because it was little different from that of the German Nationalist Party and held no special appeal for the working class. He claimed he was the first to make the movement into a Socialist working-class party.

2. He had won Berlin and thereby prepared the way for seizing power in the Reich. Without control of Berlin the Party would have remained a provincial movement.

3. He had worked out the style and technique of the Party's public ceremonies. The ceremonial of the mass demonstrations, the marches with standards, and the ritual of the great Party occasions were the results of his experiments and of his achievements in Berlin. Anyone could see the difference he had made by comparing the beer-cellar gatherings in Munich with one of the giant demonstrations in the Berlin Sports Palace. The annual gatherings in Munich on 8th November, with their beer-drinking and waitresses moving up and down the room, always reminded him of skittle club meetings.

4. His fourth contribution had been his creation of the Führer myth. Hitler had been given the halo of infallibility, with the result that many people who looked askance at the Party after 1933 had complete confidence in Hitler. That was why even now millions of Germans drew a distinction between the Führer and the Party, refusing to support the latter while believing in Hitler.
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Of these four points the last, perhaps, is the most interesting of all, though the boastfulness of the first claim is very much in character when one knows the facts. It will always be debated how far Hitler was a man whose stature was great even though his nature was evil, and no one can say how much he owed to the genius of Goebbels in helping him achieve public acceptance as Führer. The debt was obviously great; it might easily have been decisive. However that might be, once Hitler had achieved political and military power over Germany he had, or thought he had, less immediate need of Goebbels.

Goebbels had his own conception of his task at this present juncture of the war; he told Semmler: “I can play a political role as spiritual physician to the nation.”
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He felt responsible for morale not merely among the civilian population but among the armed forces as well. Yet his own morale suffered because he was left so much to his own devices. He was for most of the time cut off from Hitler, the only source of his inspiration, and he was avoided by the rest of those who were already in positions of influence with the Führer or in process of arriving there. This was particularly true in the case of Bormann.

In what time he had left over for domestic life, Goebbels made a study of his children. Again it is Semmler who depicts this particular domestic relationship with a revealing observation: Goebbels' children only seemed to be attractive to him on his own terms.

The more I see of this man from close to, the more puzzling (but also fascinating) I find him. For example, does he love his children? Certainly not in the way that most fathers love their children. I have never noticed on his part the least sign of affectionate behaviour towards one of the children. Yet they are very attached to him, but they mostly only see him at the week-end and then generally to get chocolate.

He will only find it interesting to give attention to his children when their minds begin to react to his intellectual ways. He never gets down on the floor, like any ordinary father, to play trains with Helmuth, but he already conducts with his daughters Helga and Hilde, eight and six and a half years old, conversations which must test their brains severely. With these two, who are in fact precociously intelligent, he likes to play intellectually. The other children will only hold his attention when they come to the same stage.
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In January 1942 this particular source of information about Goebbels ceases; Semmler was sent as a war reporter to gain experience at the fighting front. He ended up, as we have seen, in Stalingrad itself, though he was to return the following December to resume his previous work with Goebbels. However, substantial sections of Goebbels' own diaries are available from 21st January 1942 and extend to the end of the succeeding year, when Germany's fortunes had begun seriously to decline. The lengthy fragments of these diaries cover in all some eight months only of the two-year period. Their character is totally different from that of the private diary of 1925-26, which was highly personal, or the diary edited for publication by Goebbels as the book
Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanszlei
(English translation entitled
My Part in Germany's Fight)
. This diary was Goebbels' own day-to-day record of events as he experienced them in his official capacity. It is private only in so far as he expresses his thoughts, judgments and prejudices on life in Germany, on the way the war was going and on the personalities with whom he came in contact including, of course, Hitler himself. Nothing appears in this later diary that he could not quite properly dictate to his confidential secretaries, the chief of whom was Otte, reputed the fastest shorthand-writer in Germany, and at present Chief of the Shorthand Bureau in the Bonn Parliament. Goebbels poured out his thoughts and reactions for an hour a day writing in long-hand. As soon as he discovered Otte, however, and the incredible speed at which he could record Goebbels' most rapid speech, he took to dictating the diaries.

Otte, appointed by Goebbels a Regierungsrat, a senior grade of civil servant, could take down 350 syllables a minute, and so the diary could become much fuller and longer than was possible when Goebbels had to write it by hand. He would ring up Otte at all hours of the night to complete the last twenty-four hours' stint, dictating to him at a running pace over the telephone until both of them were exhausted. Otte would sit up in bed with blankets wrapped round him against the bitter cold of winter writing away until Goebbels had talked himself out.
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