Goebbels: A Biography (68 page)

The introduction of the “Yellow Star” was thus accompanied by a comprehensive program of propaganda. According to the general line, German Jews were part of a worldwide conspiracy for the destruction of the German people. By visibly identifying Jews living in Germany, this internal enemy would be marked. And, above all, it was intended that the population would express its acceptance of the anti-Jewish policy through its overtly reserved behavior toward this publicly identified minority.

While the badge decree was accompanied by a considerable amount of propaganda, at the end of August a new crisis of morale occurred, which was to last for two or three weeks.
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In Goebbels’s view it was once again caused mainly by a lack of news from the front. He endeavored to clarify this situation in an article with the title “About Silence in War” that was broadcast by all radio stations.
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During the following days he advocated a fundamental change in news policy. They had been “rather too boastful during the first weeks of the eastern campaign.” They should be more open in their news policy, he concluded, and “excessive secrecy” should be avoided.
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In fact the way in which the military situation was developing suggested that, despite all the military successes, the war was not going to end soon.
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Goebbels was already expressing the view that “we must now get the nation gradually used to the idea that the war will go on for some time.”
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Apart from the propaganda linked to the war in the east, Goebbels was continually compelled to deal with the situation in the occupied territories. For after the attack on the Soviet Union, resistance movements began increasingly to emerge everywhere in occupied Europe. Goebbels tried to use propaganda to get on top of this phenomenon. He attempted to take over a propaganda campaign in the occupied territories initiated by the British scheduled to start on July 20. Its aim was to display the V sign for “victory” (or “victoire”) everywhere. Goebbels, however, launched a countercampaign of “V for Victoria,” claiming success for his campaign from the fact that the
V
could be seen “on all Wehrmacht vehicles;
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it is in all the newspapers in the occupied territories; cinemas, cafés, and restaurants are being renamed ‘Viktoria’; huge banners carrying the V sign are already hanging from the Eiffel Tower; in short I hope that in a few days, through the massive adoption of this fateful letter, we shall succeed in completely crushing the enemy’s propaganda.”
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What Goebbels claimed as a great success was evidently distinctly counterproductive for domestic propaganda. Thus the deputy Gauleiter for Magdeburg-Anhalt reported that “at home the campaign
[must be] described as a complete failure.” Millions of people received information concerning it from acquaintances and colleagues in the occupied territories and would “lose faith in German propaganda’s truth and honesty.”
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Significantly, after July 1941 Goebbels never again referred to his V-propaganda.

In the occupied territories the regime did not limit itself to propaganda slogans. During the course of the summer attacks on German soldiers occurred in several countries under German occupation. From the very beginning Goebbels responded to these acts of resistance by advocating that the “enemy [be shown] the armored fist.”
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In response to reports that in the Netherlands the population was waving at British bombers, he threatened that the streets in question should be bombed by the German Luftwaffe.
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From August onward he pressed for assassinations in Paris to be countered with the shooting of hostages and above all advocated publishing the names of those who were liable to be shot beforehand.
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In fact, from September onward, the German authorities in France, Belgium, and Norway carried out shootings of hostages; this had already been going on in Serbia since July, which Goebbels considered exemplary.
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The tough measures immediately adopted by Heydrich after his appointment as deputy protector of the Reich in Prague naturally met with Goebbels’s full approval.
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By the end of November 1931 Heydrich had had 404 men and women shot on the basis of verdicts by drumhead courts martial.
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In addition, the Propaganda Ministry ruthlessly exploited the situation in the protectorate to take “almost all the cultural institutions into the hands of the Reich.” Prague film production was concentrated into a “Prague Film Company,” and the cinemas and bookshops were also taken over by the Reich.
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However, Goebbels was, as so often, flexible in his approach, if this reflected the views of the supreme leadership. In October in occupied France he advocated the shooting of hostages in the proportion announced by the occupation authorities of 50 to 1 and pressed the military authorities to actually carry out the executions they had announced.
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But when Hitler suspended the shooting of fifty hostages in Nantes, initially for a few days and then indefinitely, Goebbels supported the decision unreservedly.
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Even after the invasion of the Soviet Union Goebbels continued to spend a not inconsiderable amount of his time maintaining and trying to expand his responsibilities in the fields of propaganda and information, particularly in conflict with the Foreign Ministry.

In June 1941, shortly before the start of the war in the east, Goebbels made a new approach to the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, in order to try to clarify the vexed question of the responsibility for foreign propaganda. He failed, however, to gain the “Führer decision” he was seeking; instead, Lammers requested that Goebbels seek agreement with Ribbentrop through negotiation.
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The negotiations began in August; Goebbels had great hopes, since he believed that the Foreign Ministry had gone “weak at the knees” in the confrontation with his ministry.
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The core of the agreement reached on October 22 was the combination of all foreign broadcasting stations, including the Seehaus radio listening service established by the Foreign Ministry, into a holding company, the Interradio AG, as well as the establishment of other jointly controlled holding companies to direct publishing houses and marketing companies. Moreover, the Propaganda Ministry was to be permitted to send “experts” to German missions abroad. The agreement was a success for Goebbels insofar as the Foreign Ministry’s right to give instructions to the Propaganda Ministry in matters concerning foreign propaganda, contained in the Führer order of September 8, 1939, was not included. The particularly controversial issue of responsibility for foreign press policy was not, however, resolved.
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At the end of September Goebbels requested Hitler to restrict the right of the Party and state leadership to listen to foreign broadcasts. The foreign radio stations were after all, he argued, “the only source of news that is outside our official news service. The defeatist effect of this news source, he argued, then comes to predominate and in the long run can inflict serious damage.”
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In other words Goebbels wanted to prevent members of the Nazi leadership from being able to refer to other information than that controlled by the Propaganda Ministry; he wanted to establish a monopoly of information for his ministry. Hitler agreed to this proposal in principle.
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Lammers then drafted a “Führer instruction” restricting
the right to listen to foreign broadcasts to a few prominent ministers.
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These ministers were permitted to delegate this authority to individual members of their staff, but only with the express approval of the Propaganda Ministry. The Foreign Ministry, however, immediately raised an objection to this interference in its sphere of responsibility and finally, in January, got its way.
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Now Goebbels concentrated on substantially restricting the reports of the Seehaus service, of which hundreds of copies circulated in the ministries. Anyone who did not have permission to listen should also not have the right to read these reports.
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This action, which Goebbels specifically justified by referring to a “Führer command,”
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produced massive objections from the Reich agencies affected, some of which then tried to destroy the Seehaus service by withdrawing its funds or to set up their own listening service.
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Finally, in the middle of February a compromise was reached by which the information was subjected to greater filtering and the distribution list was shortened, although not as much as Goebbels had envisaged.
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In the second half of September German propaganda, which was able to announce the capture of Kiev,
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once more succeeded in raising morale. But Goebbels was not looking for a mood of triumphalism but rather “a calm middle position.”
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It was with this in mind that he organized the Party’s big annual winter aid campaign, which this time went under the relatively bland slogan “Germany’s Victory—Bread and Freedom for Our Nation and for Europe.”
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Toward the end of the month, however, “the national mood [was] far in excess of what was really feasible.” Goebbels observed that people were hoping that “the war will come to an end this winter,” but he would “have a lot to do in the next few weeks to prevent the mood from going to the other extreme and to bring it back to a normal level.”
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Hitler too, Goebbels noted, was “in an excellent mood” and very confident when he met him at headquarters on September 21. During this visit Goebbels learned of Hitler’s decision, in view of the successes in the east, to begin deporting the German Jews. Before the end of the year they were to be taken off to ghettos in east European
cities and the following spring transported to Soviet territory, which by then would be under German occupation, a project that Hitler had been contemplating since the start of the planning for Barbarossa.

During his visit to headquarters Goebbels met Heydrich, whom Hitler had just appointed deputy protector of the Reich in Prague, to “sort out” the rather unstable situation there.
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Heydrich assured Goebbels that he would soon begin deporting the Berlin Jews. They would be “transported […] to the camps established by the Soviets.” Hitler, whom Goebbels met later, confirmed this information: “The first cities that are going to be made Jew-free are Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. Berlin is going to be the first, and I’m hoping that in the course of this year we shall succeed in transporting a substantial number of Berlin Jews to the east.”
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Hitler’s motives for making this decision were complex. They can, however, be summed up in a main motive, namely to conduct the war, which was now expanding into a worldwide conflict, as a “war against the Jews,” a struggle against an alleged world conspiracy that embraced the Anglo-Saxon powers and the weakened but not yet defeated Soviet Union and that was also behind the resistance movements that were springing up all over the occupied territories. In this context the German Jews, as part of this conspiracy, were to be treated as enemies.

With the decision to begin the deportations, Goebbels’s policy of making the Jews visible in order to ban them from the public sphere was, as far as propaganda was concerned, redundant. For, as much as possible, the deportations were intended to be carried out without creating too much of a stir. In fact it turned out that the population’s response to the introduction of the badge was much less positive than Goebbels was expecting. Although morale was high because the war situation was perceived as positive, there was little enthusiasm for the introduction of the Jewish star.

According to the minutes of the propaganda briefing of September 25, the ministry had been informed that “the Jewish badge had produced expressions of sympathy from a section of the population, particularly from the better off,” an impression that is confirmed by other sources.
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Goebbels expressed his disappointment at the negative reactions in bourgeois circles to his staff: “The German educated classes are filthy swine.”
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The press was given appropriate instructions
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but in fact the “campaign to enlighten people about the Jews” initiated by the Propaganda Ministry did not happen.
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For the badge was evidently not a topic that lent itself to further intensive propaganda treatment; this was clear from the population’s negative reactions and, above all, from the fact that the deportations were not to be a subject for propaganda and thus it was not advisable to draw too much attention to the Jews who were being forced to wear a badge.

Goebbels, however, found another way to prevent unwanted contacts between Jews and non-Jews. On the basis of a suggestion that he made at the ministerial briefing on October 6,
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the Reich Security Main Office issued a police regulation in October ordering that persons who conducted “friendly relations with Jews in public” were to be taken into “protective custody” and sent to a concentration camp for up to three months.
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Following Goebbels’s suggestion, the decree was not, however, published as such; instead, the propaganda minister took it upon himself to refer to its contents in an editorial, which was effectively a public announcement and to which we shall return.

On October 2 the Wehrmacht began its autumn offensive on the Eastern Front.
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On October 3 Hitler arrived in Berlin and, “bubbling over with optimism,” told Goebbels that he was convinced that the Red Army would be “effectively destroyed within fourteen days,” provided that the weather cooperated. In the afternoon Hitler spoke at the opening of the Winter Aid program at the Sportpalast. It was his first public appearance since the beginning of the war in the east and had been longed for by Goebbels as a desperately needed appeal to the population.
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The speech, in which Hitler spoke above all about the military successes as well as about the continuing reports of the progress of the German offensive, produced a distinctly optimistic tone in the propaganda media and the usual positive reports about morale. Goebbels had difficulty in “dampening down somewhat the excessive optimism aroused in the broad mass of the population.” He saw himself in the role of “the German people’s general practitioner who is continually concerned to keep the nation at the normal temperature.”
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Reich Press Chief Dietrich, on the other hand, gave a further boost to the positive mood. At a press conference held on October 9 in
Berlin he announced in all seriousness that the war in the east had been won.
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Goebbels by contrast was skeptical, indeed alarmed. “The mood,” he noted on the following day, “had turned around and was almost illusionistic.” Goebbels now began cautiously to counteract this trend and instructed the press to adopt a somewhat more realistic course.
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But now something began happening that on no account ought to have been allowed to happen, namely “a certain divergence between the Führer’s view and the view that was being given to the press here.” Goebbels responded by requesting that General Alfred Jodl adapt the Wehrmacht report to the “mood that was developing in the Führer’s headquarters on the basis of indisputable facts.”
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But this then resulted in the Wehrmacht report of October 16 announcing that the first defense line in front of Moscow had been breached. But whatever the advantages of a uniform news policy, such a report went too far for Goebbels, for he suspected, not unreasonably, that “given the actual situation the mood is somewhat too optimistic.”
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In this critical situation the deportation of the Berlin Jews, which had been ordered by Hitler four weeks earlier, began on October 15. At the ministerial briefing on October 23 Goebbels ordered that, as far as the “deportation of the first 20,000 Jews” was concerned, “nothing [was] to be said on this topic.” The foreign correspondents should simply be told that “it is a matter of economic warfare that is not going to be reported. […] The Jews are not going to a camp, neither to a concentration camp nor to a prison. They will be treated as individuals. We cannot say where they are going for reasons of economic warfare.” By contrast, domestic propaganda “should not comment at all” on the issue of deportations.
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At the same time—that is, on October 24—Goebbels wrote about the deportations: “The Jews are writing anonymous letters to the foreign press appealing for help and in fact some news is leaking abroad. I forbid any further information about it being given to foreign correspondents. Nevertheless, it won’t be possible to prevent the topic being taken up during the following days. That can’t be helped. Even if at the moment it’s rather unpleasant to have this issue being discussed in front of an international public, we have to put up with it. The main thing is for the Reich capital to be made Jew-free.”

In the propaganda briefing of October 25, apart from the reporting of the foreign press, Goebbels dealt with the question of how they
could secure the complete isolation of the Jews from the German people: It was “impractical to issue a general regulation that Jews have to give up their seats in public transportation vehicles; it’s the Party’s task to educate individuals to exercise tact and to have empathy. In addition posters are to be put up in the subway and other transportation vehicles in which, without referring to the issue of seats, it will be stated: ‘The Jews are our misfortune. They wanted this war in order to destroy Germany. German national comrades, never forget that!’ This will create a basis for possible incidents which can be referred to if necessary.”

At the ministerial briefing on October 26 Goebbels ordered the intensification of anti-Jewish propaganda.
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In his diary entry of October 28, 1941, he also commented on the impending deportations. Unlike in the propaganda briefing, he made it clear that, according to the reports on morale, the population had relatively strong reservations about the deportations, which is confirmed by other sources.

Thus in October 1941 Goebbels the propagandist was confronted by an almost insoluble dilemma. On the one hand, the deportations were not to figure in German propaganda; on the other hand, the topic was discussed abroad to such an extent that the ministry had to respond. Moreover, knowledge of the deportations was widespread among the German population, produced generally negative reactions, and threatened to add to the difficulties of what in terms of general morale was an already critical situation.

Goebbels’s solution was to launch another anti-Semitic campaign at the end of October without referring to the deportations from Germany. This campaign once more targeted the alleged dominant influence of the Jews in the Soviet Union, in the United States, and in Great Britain and was intended to prove the existence of the Jewish world conspiracy.
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Another event, however, formed the prelude: A letter written by the Romanian head of state, Ion Antonescu, to Wilhelm Filderman, the leading Jewish representative in that country, in which he strongly rejected the latter’s complaints about the deportation of the Bessarabian Jews to Transnistria, was given widespread coverage in the press. The press was instructed to give this letter and the deportations from Bessarabia prominence and to recall Hitler’s prophecy of January 1939 in which he had predicted “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” in the event of a world war.
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The
Völkischer Beobachter
reported on October 27 under the headline
“They Dug Their Own Grave! Jewish Warmongers Sealed Jewry’s Fate.” As instructed by the propaganda minister, the article included the quotation from Hitler’s speech of January 30, 1939, in full and added: “What the Führer announced prophetically then has now become reality. The war of revenge against Germany stirred up by the Jews has now turned on the Jews themselves. The Jews must follow the path that they prepared for themselves.”
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While this campaign was running, however, Goebbels had to deal with another, even more important factor influencing morale: At the end of October 1941 the whole military situation altered fundamentally. The change in the weather made major operations impossible. The “major offensive that had been planned,” Goebbels noted on October 31, “has for the time being ground to a halt.”
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As a result Goebbels had to make a major change in the war propaganda. From the beginning of the war until late summer 1941 it had operated in the context of the Wehrmacht’s great military successes; the burdens imposed on the population had been limited by the short “Blitzkriegs.” But now it was clear that the planned march to victory against the Soviet Union was turning into a lengthy war. In consequence propaganda was forced to undergo a fundamental reorientation.