B006OAL1QM EBOK (39 page)

Hagen went to Goebbels' house forthwith; there he was detained for a few minutes by the officer on duty in Goebbels' ante-room, another friend of his, on account of there being a ‘Führerblitz’ on (that is, a top priority phone call to Hitler's headquarters). Finally he was taken straight in to the Minister. Goebbels seemed quite calm.

“Well, Dr. Hagen, what can I do for you?” he said.

Hagen explained the terms of the order for putting Valkyrie into operation.

Goebbels interrupted him at the point when the outcome of the attempt on Hitler's life was described as still uncertain.

“This is nonsense,” he said. “The Führer is alive. I was speaking to him only two minutes ago. There has been an attempt on his life, but by a miracle he escaped. The orders make no sense at all.”

Hagen looked out of the window and then turned back to Goebbels. “Herr Minister,” he said, “at this moment a section of my regiment is going into action. I suggest we send at once for my Commander.”

Goebbels remained calm, and sat at his desk making notes of their conversation. He then put a priority call through to the Commander of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, which was Hitler's own bodyguard stationed at Lichterfelde, a suburb a few miles from the Government district. In his capacity as Gauleiter he ordered the Commander to mobilise his men and stand by for orders coming only from himself personally. He invited Hagen to listen in to his conversation with the Commander through an extension to his telephone. When he had replaced the receiver, Goebbels turned to Hagen.

“As you have heard, I have mobilised the L.A.H.,” he said, “but not called them out. I want to avoid as far as possible any danger of the Army and the S.S. facing one another in arms. Now go and ask your Commander to come and see me.”

At the door he gripped Hagen by the arm.

“Is Remer a safe man?” he asked.

“Herr Minister, I could vouch for him with my life.”

“Very well, then,” continued Goebbels. “Go and fetch him and tell him if he is not here inside twenty minutes I'll put the L.A.H. into action, since I shall by then assume he is being held at the War Office by force.”

For the moment Goebbels did not know what immediate action to take. He was told that an officer and three men had come with orders to arrest him from the Commandant of the Berlin Garrison. He opened the drawer of his desk, took out a revolver that he kept there, and ordered their admission. At the same time he saw to it that the door of his room leading to the office of his adjutant was left open so that whatever was said could be overheard.
⁵¹

When the lieutenant arrived, he found Goebbels in a formidable mood. The Minister shouted at him that he was obeying the orders of traitors, and that the Führer was alive. The lieutenant, abashed at this news, withdrew. Hagen meanwhile had reported his conversation with Goebbels to Major Remer, who at once went himself to Goebbels' residence. He declared that he realised now his orders had come from traitors and that he unreservedly placed himself at Goebbels' disposal. He removed the cordon from the Government quarter and assembled his unit of five hundred men in the garden of Goebbels' house. Goebbels then went down and harangued them for ten minutes on the importance of loyalty at such a time as this until he was interrupted by a message that telephone communication had at last been restored with Rastenburg. Goebbels returned to the telephone, taking Remer with him. The Major then had the honour of speaking to the Führer in person. Hitler ordered him to take what action was necessary to maintain security, commended him for his loyalty and promoted him Colonel on the spot. Remer then left with his men to arrest the leaders of the conspiracy at the Ministry of War in the Bendlerstrasse and to secure the Radio Centre from their interference. Stauffenberg, incriminated initially by his priority phone call from Rastenburg to Berlin, was among those who were the first to be shot by the lights of an armoured car beamed across the Ministry courtyard.

Goebbels immediately took control. He turned his house into what Semmler described as “a prison, headquarters and court rolled into one”. He was joined about eight o'clock by Himmler, who was fresh from Rastenburg, and a commission of investigation was set up forthwith under the chairmanship of Goebbels. One by one, the generals and others (among them Fromm, Witzleben, Hase and the Berlin Police President, Count Helldorf) were cross-examined by Himmler and Goebbels throughout the night. As more was learnt, orders for further arrests were made and executed. It was apparent by now that the roots of the conspiracy were widespread throughout the country, involving men in both military and civilian life.

At about twenty minutes to one on the morning of 21st July Hitler broadcast to Germany. He did not take the advice of Goebbels before doing so, and the result was bad. He sounded shaken and nervous to the point of panic; his delivery was broken and ragged, his voice rough and frequently unclear. He fulminated against the traitors and demanded the loyalty of Germany. Once more he spoke of a high intervention. “I regard this,” he said, “as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence.”

Goebbels was alarmed. He felt such a speech by the Führer in such a manner at this time was disastrous. He himself did not broadcast until 26th July, when he gave a long and carefully contrived description of the plot and of the manner in which it had been quashed. He had spent the ensuing days at Rastenburg continuing his investigations and conferring with Hitler.

There, according to Semmler, who accompanied Goebbels to Rastenburg, he found Hitler “very unwell”, although he believed the mental effects upon him were worse than the physical. The Führer had mental black-outs; his hearing was impaired and he seemed to find difficulty in following a conversation. He had only one thought in mind, vengeance on the men who had betrayed him and their dependents. It was the Night of the Long Knives over again. All those who had in the smallest degree revealed a seed of revolt in their hearts waited for the arrival of the armed men to take them away. The number of victims who were either executed, imprisoned or sent to concentration camps during the following weeks and months is unknown. A list of some five thousand names of men executed was eventually drawn up, but thousands of others disappeared into confinement. Later Hitler was broken-hearted to find that even his favourite Rommel was involved in the Paris branch of the conspiracy; but, as we have seen, he was persuaded to commit suicide so that a propaganda funeral might be conferred upon him with the correct form of oration.

The leading generals involved were put to death by a process of slow strangulation. Goebbels arranged for the trial and executions to be filmed in relentless detail so that Hitler might be able to follow the gruesome events night by night on the screen. The generals were clothed in ill-fitting civilian suits with their trousers unbraced so that they experienced the greatest humiliation possible during their appearance in court. The endless lengths of film were, under Hitler's orders, edited to make a record several hours in length which Goebbels was finally persuaded not to show in public because its exhibition would have revealed only too clearly the Führer's pathological desire for a prolonged revenge. The condemned men were hanged alive on butchers' hooks and slowly strangled to death.

Meanwhile, in Rastenburg two days after the attempt, Goebbels took every advantage of Hitler's weakened condition. Now was his chance to urge the needs of total war and increased power for himself. A new army of a million men was necessary. He was prepared to take responsibility for raising this army and tightening the belt of Germany as well. Hitler agreed, and Goebbels returned in triumph to Berlin.

In his lengthy broadcast to the German people on 26th July giving an official account of the plot and combining this with the announcement of the measures for total war, Goebbels said:

Yesterday the Führer issued an order, published in the press today, that the whole apparatus of the State, including the Reich Railways and the Reich Post, all public institutions, organisations and concerns, are to be examined with a view to freeing the largest number of men for the armament industry and the Armed Forces through an even more rational employment of those serving in the aforementioned concerns, by cutting out or decreasing tasks which are less important to the war effort and by a simplification of organisation and procedure. Also, according to this order, the whole of public life must be adapted in every respect to the requirements of total war. All public activities are to conform with the objects of total war and in particular must not take anybody from the Armed Forces and the armament industry; in a word, total war thus becomes a practical reality. The comprehensive tasks connected with this gigantic reorganisation will be put into the hands of a Reich Trustee for Total War, who, so that he can carry out his task, will be entrusted by the Führer with comprehensive powers. At the request of the Reich Marshal, the Führer has entrusted this task to me and has appointed me Reich Trustee for Total War.
⁵²

In the train returning from Rastenburg to Berlin Goebbels said to Semmler:

If I had received these powers when I wanted them so badly, victory would be in our pockets today, and the war would probably be over. But it takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see reason.
⁵³

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Last Months

A
T THE BEGINNING
of the winter of 1944 France was lost to Germany, and in the West the Allied armies were at the German frontiers. In the South the Allies were pressing up towards Germany in the valley of the Po, while in the East the Russians had reached the Vistula. There seemed now to be an ominous pause on all fronts while the forces took breath for the final onslaught. This breathing space lasted longer than most people on either side thought possible.

Total war meant total mobilisation, and of this Goebbels had announced the details on 24th August. Women up to fifty were conscripted for labour to release more men fit for the Army. A sixty-hour week was introduced for the war industries. All men without disabilities between the ages of sixteen and sixty were ordered to serve in the
Volkssturm
or Home Guard under Himmler and Bormann. Children of fourteen were used to man the anti-aircraft guns. The untiring energy of Goebbels on the human front and Speer on the industrial front seemed to be giving Germany a completely new lease of life as the winds of autumn blew the leaves from the trees and the last fearful winter of the war began.

The restrictions that Goebbels was now at liberty to impose by decree on Germany were drastic. Travelling was virtually forbidden, theatres were closed, periodicals suspended, newspapers merged and simplified. Every action possible was taken to prevent the spread of despondency—even the organised beating-up of malcontents. All Germany was poised and ready to win the war.

The pause on all principal war-fronts lasted until December. Only in the Balkan area was there spectacular activity, with Rumania capitulating in August, Bulgaria in September, Greece and Yugoslavia in October. Hungary managed to hold out till the following year. Hitler, who had been confined to his bed during the autumn in a serious state of collapse, had meanwhile recovered sufficiently to plan an offensive in the West, which was intended to be a surprise attack in the Ardennes with the occupation of Antwerp as the ultimate objective. On this Hitler staked many of his new divisions. Effective when it was first launched in December, by January it had proved to be a failure. With his forces spread round the huge circle of Europe from the Baltic States to the North-Western Front, there was little hope of victory for Germany except in the deluded mind of Hitler and the aggressive propaganda of Goebbels, which began in the last remaining months to celebrate the self-destruction of Germany in the face of her enemies.

Hitler gave up his military headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, and moved back to his bomb-scarred Chancellery; it was here that the Bunker, the deep air-raid shelter below ground, which was to be Hitler's last place of residence, had been built in the garden. Several of those who attended on Hitler, from generals to secretaries, have testified to his state of mind and body at this time. His rages alternated with bouts of self-pity; he felt deserted and betrayed by the very men whose lives and welfare he had sacrificed on the battlefronts. He seemed half-paralysed and senile in his movements. His head quivered. His eyes, according to Gerhard Boldt, an officer who met him for the first time in February 1945, had “an indescribable flickering glow … creating a fearsome and wholly unnatural effect”. Nevertheless he retained his “queerly penetrating look”.
¹
No plea to withdraw and re-group his forces availed; no appeal to preserve Germany for the future welfare of her citizens. To Speer he said six weeks before the end: “If the war is to be lost, the nation also will perish.” He believed that Germany had failed and must go down before the invading hordes of Russia. He thought only of destruction—the scorching of the earth, the mining of factories, bridges and railways, the death of people too weak to deserve to live. He refused to hear the bad news from the battlefronts as his enemies closed in on Germany and the Russians drew nearer to Berlin. When Goebbels sent him an album of photographs showing air-raid damage, Bormann sent them back with a note saying “the Führer did not wish to be worried with such irrelevant matters”.
²

For Hitler, war had been an affair of maps and paper, away from the blood and turmoil. Rastenburg had been a setting of lawns, lakes and woods, a landscape, as Boldt puts it, that “had nothing in common with the horrors of the war”. He saw neither photographs nor films from the front line; nothing must interfere with “the decisive power of his genius”.
³

Mad and mentally isolated, Hitler shut himself in the Chancellery and finally in his Bunker listening to the advice of no one, poring over his maps and issuing impossible orders, often to non-existent divisions of the German Army. Had Hitler ever possessed a spark of human greatness to match his genius for power this could have been a tragic spectacle. As it was he struck terror into those who still tried to serve him or who were unable to bring themselves to break their oaths of loyalty. Among all the leaders in Hitler's hierarchy, only Goebbels and Bormann, the bitter rivals for his favour, kept their loyalty unimpaired to the end. Ribbentrop, though still Foreign Minister, had become a nonentity. For the rest, Göring and Himmler each wavered until it was too late in a common uncertainty as to whether they should displace Hitler and sue for peace, while Speer had the great courage to flout his master's orders for the destruction of Germany's industrial resources and keep what he could intact for the moment when capitulation would at last bring peace. He even planned to introduce poison gas into the ventilation system of the Bunker, but it proved impossible. But while Hitler lived no one replaced him, and the war went on. In January the Russians crossed Poland and reached the Oder and Silesia; in February they threatened Berlin and Vienna; in March the British and Americans crossed the Rhine; in April the Elbe was reached by both the Americans and the Russians and the war was all but over. In the same month the Russians overran East Prussia and captured Vienna. Berlin lay open before them.

Hitler had by now lost all control of events and scarcely knew what was happening. Maddened by the collapse of his destiny, he point-blank refused at a conference held on 20th April, his fifty-sixth birthday, to follow the rest of the administration in its evacuation south. Instead he set up his last headquarters in the Bunker and stayed there below ground until his death. On 22nd April he was joined by Goebbels, his wife and their six small children.

It is difficult to judge how far Goebbels retained an absolute belief in Hitler to the end. The evidence in his war-time diaries and in the observations of Semmler is in favour of his final disbelief in Hitler's miracles. But if love may admit of calculation, there can be little doubt that Goebbels loved Hitler, even while he made use of him to build up the final Nazi legend. Semmler always testifies to Goebbels' single-minded devotion to the Führer, even though he was often openly critical of the decisions Hitler took under the influence, as he thought, of men Goebbels despised and hated. And affection seemed to be characteristic of Hitler's own attitude to Goebbels towards the end. During a party at Lanke on Goebbels' birthday, 28th October, Hitler took the trouble to telephone to give him his personal greetings and then asked if he might speak to his wife. Frau Goebbels came back from the conversation with tears in her eyes; Hitler had promised her a great military victory for Christmas. He was, of course, referring to the offensive he was planning on the Western front. Semmler observed that the whole party took heart from this as they were convinced that Hitler had some great surprise up his sleeve.
⁴
Goebbels even allowed his mother to come to Berlin shortly before Christmas, largely because his sister, Maria Kimmich, who was also living in Berlin at the time, was expecting a baby in the New Year.
⁵

The last occasion on which Maria and her husband saw Goebbels was at Christmas, 1944. They remember it as a purely family gathering out at Lanke. Maria and Magda talked together a great deal. Magda told her sister-in-law that Joseph had seen certain new weapons so fantastic that they would certainly bring about the victory by miracle that Hitler had promised Germany through her husband's propaganda. Though Maria was never to see her brother again, she had further meetings with Magda after the birth of her child.

On the following 12th January a notable social event took place and was recorded as follows by Semmler:

Today Hitler was a guest in the Goebbels' house for the first time in five years. Frau Goebbels had invited him to tea. The children received him in the hall with bunches of flowers in their hands.

At 4.30 Hitler's car arrived. Goebbels stood to attention with his arm stretched out as far as it would go. The children made their little curtsies and Hitler said how surprised he was at the way they had grown. He presented Frau Goebbels with a modest bunch of lily-of-the-valley, and explained that it was the best that could be found, as Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death had closed all the flower shops in Berlin!

Then Goebbels introduced colleagues who happened to be there. For the first time I shook hands with Hitler. With the Führer were an adjutant, the servant, and six S.S. officers of the personal bodyguard.

The servant was carrying Hitler's brief-case, which bore a large white F on it. From the pocket of the case a thermos flask could be seen sticking out. I realised that Hitler had brought his own tea and cakes.

Tea lasted an hour and a half. We were not allowed to be present. Only the Goebbels family, Hitler, his adjutant and Dr. Naumann sat together in the central drawing-room. In the evening I heard from Frau Goebbels that Hitler had enjoyed the family atmosphere very much. He was glad to have left his monastic life for half an afternoon and promised to come again soon.

Half the conversation had been made by Hitler, who described his building plans for Berlin and memories of 1932.

At supper Goebbels and his wife were both very proud of the visit. “He wouldn't have gone to the Gorings,” said Frau Goebbels.
⁶

Naumann remembers this occasion well. There was a bustle of excitement after the telephone call had come through from the Chancellery to announce that the Führer was coming to tea. The notice was short, just like it used to be in older, happier days. Once he had arrived, Hitler was more serious and taciturn than had been his habit in the past on such occasions. The conversation at one point turned to Gerhart Hauptmann who at the age of eighty had been forced to leave his home in Silesia before the invading armies.

Goebbels worked ceaselessly during the last winter of the war, though he was subject to occasional fits of acute depression, when he shut himself away at Lanke. There he read history—he himself mentioned, in an article called ‘History as Teacher’, returning yet again for comfort to the letters and essays of Frederick the Great and to the account of the second Punic War in Mommsen's Roman History. He raged at any of his staff whose attitude implied defeat, and he constantly visited the battlefront to give talks to officers and propaganda workers on morale and the great future that awaited a victorious Germany. Yet as early as October 1944 he drew Winckler aside after lunch at Lanke on his birthday and took him for a walk on the estate during which he discussed the problem of how he could make suitable financial arrangements for his children in the event of his death. In November Ministry documents were already being systematically pulped to prevent them falling into enemy hands, but it was not until February that Goebbels finally decided to instruct his brother Hans, who was ill in a sanatorium in the Rhineland, to destroy all the family papers, including many of the original manuscripts and diaries of his youth. This Hans failed to do.
⁷

Goebbels revealed his moods of despair in remarks which, if they had been said in his presence by subordinates, would have led to the fiercest reprimands, as he reproved Semmler for reporting to him the bad morale of the people in South Germany: “The veins were swelling in his forehead and his nostrils were twitching.”
⁸
At one staff conference he said: “Let's make this perfectly clear. We have nothing left. There are no miracle weapons.”
⁹
On another occasion when he was receiving a report from an Army liaison officer on the Ardennes offensive, he suddenly said to him in front of members of his staff: “There you sit and prattle about all sorts of trifles while someone like myself is wondering whether the time has come to poison his wife and children.”
¹⁰
But to Semmler and Fritzsche he continued to talk about his day-dream of retiring from politics after the war and becoming a professional writer. To Fritzsche he once said: “After the war I'll go to America. There at least they will appreciate a propaganda genius, and will pay him accordingly!”
¹¹
Up to the very last he was working on the proofs of a book in which some of his more recent articles were collected.
¹²

Goebbels arranged for his official diaries to be microfilmed in case the original typescripts were destroyed, as indeed they almost entirely were. These microfilm records, which took many weeks to complete, both day and night shifts of technicians ceaselessly photographing the endless pages of script and type, were eventually stored by Naumann in a safe which he has every reason to believe came into the possession of the Russians. This means that there is some possibility that the millions of words written and dictated by Goebbels during the greater part of his career are in fact preserved.
¹³