Goebbels: A Biography (69 page)

Credit 23.1

The more Hitler withdrew from the public following the winter crisis of 1941–42, the more Goebbels acquired the role of the regime’s most important communicator. The propaganda minister speaks at Heldenplatz in Vienna on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Anschluss, March 13, 1942.

During his visit to the headquarters of the Army High Command in Mauerwald near the Führer’s headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair,” at which he met the commander-in-chief, Walter Brauchitsch, and the quartermaster general, Eduard Wagner, Goebbels made extensive inquiries about the reasons for the army’s failure in the east and was particularly impressed by an exhibition of the army’s winter clothing and equipment: “Everything has been thought of and nothing missed. If the enemy are pinning their hopes on General Winter and think
that our troops will freeze or starve to death, then they’re barking up the wrong tree.”
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Immediately after this visit Goebbels had his own experience of the Russian winter. Attempting to fly from East Prussia to Smolensk, he was held up in Vilnius because of poor weather.
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During an improvised sightseeing tour of the city, he also visited the ghetto: “There were frightful characters hanging around the streets, whom I wouldn’t want to come across in the dark. The Jews are lice that live on civilized humanity. They must somehow be exterminated, otherwise they will keep on tormenting and oppressing us.” On the following day it turned out that because his aircraft had iced up, it was impossible for him to fly back to East Prussia. He had a time-consuming journey by road in a convoy of cars through Lithuania and East Prussia, which made an impression on Goebbels: “It’s rather worrying seeing these piles of snow now even in East Prussia: What will it be like on the Eastern Front?!”
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Back in Berlin, as expected he had to deal with sinking morale: “As I anticipated, following Dr. Dietrich’s forecast, people have gotten the wrong idea about what’s going on and we are having to pay the price.”
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But two days later he considered that the mood had “stabilized.” Although there were “a lot of complaints everywhere about this or that shortage or this or that problem that hasn’t been solved,” what seemed vital to him was that “the German people are gradually getting used to the idea of the war going on for some time and are putting up with it with stoicism and dignity.”
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As this example shows, right from the start of the war in the east Goebbels was preoccupied with the fact that, as he could gather from the relevant reports, the mood of the population was fluctuating greatly. The reports on morale were largely intended to capture the immediate response of the population to military successes or to negative reports or the absence of reports from the front whereby the official propaganda line prevailing at the time provided the context within which the assessment was made. Inevitably he found the rapid “changes in mood” that regularly occurred extremely irritating when it came to planning a propaganda line.

Goebbels had repeatedly attempted to keep morale steady at a moderate level, in other words to avoid excessive swings as much as possible. And now that they were faced with a hard winter at war—
a war that was threatening to become a world war and that would continue for an incalculable length of time—he was forced to make increasing efforts to achieve this moderate level. Goebbels used various methods. First, he attempted to block optimistic reports, particularly those that were forecasting a rapid end to the war. If the propaganda was not too effusive but instead was more restrained, albeit still positive, then there would not be any euphoric reports. During the coming months, when dealing with this issue he kept returning to Dietrich’s October comments about the war in the east having been won, which in his view represented “the biggest psychological mistake of the whole war.”
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Second, Goebbels began to introduce different criteria for assessing morale. During the autumn he changed the propaganda emphasis from promises of victory to a lengthy and tough war in which the Reich’s very existence was at stake, with the home front having to bear greater burdens.

Third, comments that were too pessimistic and negative were removed from the reports. In the meantime, Goebbels had come to the conclusion that there were far too many reports on morale, most of them unreliable. The lower-level agencies “feel obliged to express their opinions in weekly or half-weekly reports on morale. If they haven’t got anything to say, then they invent something.” The reports that came about in this way tended to “provoke agitation in government offices” and thus had to be reduced.
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In particular the SD reports were in many cases unreliable and indulged in “hysterical and frightened descriptions of the situation.”
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In all these measures to control morale, it was not of course a question of finding out what people were really feeling; on the contrary, Goebbels used all the means at his disposal through his control of the propaganda apparatus and the information services to establish guidelines for an officially approved state of morale, a model according to which people were expected to orient their daily behavior.

Two editorials that appeared in
Das Reich
in November 1941 were responsible for setting out the guidelines for this change in approach. Goebbels had come to the conclusion that his
Reich
articles, which were regularly read on the radio and in some cases distributed by the Party in special editions,
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represented an indispensable “collection of arguments” for the ordinary Party member. They gave the “political
fighter” the down-to-earth examples and proofs with which he could confront grumblers and malcontents.
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The first article, for which Goebbels obtained Hitler’s approval before its publication on November 9,
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dealt with the tricky question of victory in the east, which kept being announced but now appeared to have been postponed to the distant future; he responded by asserting that it did not matter
when
the war came to an end, it mattered
how
it came to an end. In the case of the current war, according to Goebbels, it was a struggle for Germany’s existence. If the war was lost, then “our national life would be completely and totally” destroyed. Any further discussion of how long the war would last was unproductive and damaging; all effort had to concentrate on achieving victory: “Don’t ask when it’s going to come, let’s make sure that it comes.”
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That represented a clear ban on any further discussion about how long the war was going to last and a clear reprimand of Dietrich for his excessive optimism. On the day the article appeared, Hitler made a speech to the Reich Party leaders and Gauleiters on the occasion of the usual November celebrations in Munich in which he made the same point using virtually the identical words. Goebbels considered this “a marvelous confirmation of the propaganda line that I have been requesting for so long in vain.”
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Goebbels’s article was not only read aloud over the radio; its publication was also made compulsory for the press,
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and a million copies of it were distributed to the soldiers at the front in accordance with an instruction from Führer’s headquarters.
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It appeared widely in the press of Germany’s Axis allies,
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and Goebbels considered the fact that it was printed word for word by
The New York Times
a particular honor.
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He was convinced that within the Reich the majority of people would gradually get used to “the idea of a long war.”
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In the meantime Goebbels had written another major article, which appeared in
Das Reich
on November 16 with the title “The Jews Are to Blame!”
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In it Goebbels referred to Hitler’s prophecy of January 30, 1939: “We are now experiencing the realization of that prophecy and the Jews are experiencing a fate which, while hard, is more than deserved. Sympathy with them or regret about it are completely inappropriate.” “World Jewry,” Goebbels continued, was now suffering a “a gradual process of annihilation,” a phrase that left little doubt about the fate of those who had been deported.

The article ended with a true edict from on high: detailed instructions
for behavior toward the Jews remaining in Germany. This was not simply an appeal; the article represented the public announcement of the unpublished police regulation that had been issued in October on Goebbels’s initiative and that had threatened those who had contact with Jews with a stint in a concentration camp. This ban is contained in Goebbels’s article in the form of an ominous threat: “If someone is wearing the Jewish star, this means that he has been identified as an enemy of the people. Anyone who has private contact with him belongs with him and must be considered and treated as a Jew.”
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With his statement, which was spread widely by German propaganda, Goebbels was making it clear that the regime was not prepared to tolerate expressions of disapproval of its official “Jewish policy” or gestures of solidarity. There were now definite rules governing the population’s behavior toward Jews, rules that had to be obeyed. Moreover, Goebbels also used an intensive anti-Semitic propaganda campaign by the Party to ensure that these instructions for behavior toward Jews spread to the furthest corners of the Reich and were effectively carried out in everyday life.
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As had been arranged during his visit to the Army High Command in October, exhibitions of winter clothing and equipment for the army were hurriedly prepared for five major cities to win the population’s support for the winter war. The opening was, however, initially postponed; in the end they were canceled altogether.
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During November it became clear that further mention of the topic was inopportune: The troops had not yet received the winter clothing.

At the beginning of December the German offensive in Russia came to a halt. Under the most extreme climatic conditions without adequate winter clothing and equipment, the German troops had to suspend their attack on Moscow and, in particular, withdraw their front line in the south. At the beginning of December Goebbels learned that while winter clothing for the troops existed, due to transportation difficulties it could not be delivered to the troops until the end of January.
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He was compelled “in view of the military situation” to order “our propaganda agencies to exercise restraint.”
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On the other hand, Goebbels saw in these negative military developments confirmation of the line he had been taking for months on the need to follow a “tougher” domestic policy.
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Hence his recommendations
at the ministerial briefing that they should “tell it as it is and […] say: ‘We didn’t want this war; don’t talk so much and get used to it!’ ”
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On December 8 the developing crisis was overshadowed by an event that came as a complete surprise to the German government: the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbor and the resulting extension of the war to the Pacific.
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Goebbels considered that “a complete shift in the world situation had occurred.” The United States would “now hardly be in a position to transport significant amounts of matériel to England or the Soviet Union; during the following months they will have need of it themselves.” As far as domestic politics was concerned, here too he only saw advantages: “The whole nation breathes a sigh of relief. The psychological fear of a possible outbreak of war between the USA and Germany has gone.”
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On December 9 Goebbels had the opportunity to discuss the new situation with Hitler.
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Although Hitler had told him at least two weeks earlier that he believed that Japan would become actively involved in the war in the foreseeable future (Goebbels did not agree),
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now, he told Goebbels, he had been “completely surprised” by the outbreak of hostilities “and at first, like me, had not wanted to believe it.” On this occasion Hitler informed him that he wanted to use his Reichstag speech, planned for December 11, to announce Germany’s declaration of war on the United States.

Goebbels also attended this session of the Reichstag.
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When, during the course of his speech, Hitler reminded the “homeland” emphatically of its wartime duties, Goebbels was pleased to note that this fit in “very much with the line that I have been following in German propaganda for weeks, if not months.”
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On the afternoon of the following day Hitler then spoke to the Reich leaders and Gauleiters who had gathered in the Reich Chancellery. Goebbels’s diary entry covering this speech, for which there is no other source, is six pages long.
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Hitler began by speaking about the situation created by the war with the United States. Goebbels’s
report shows how on this occasion Hitler succeeded in putting a positive gloss on the extension of the war, which, in hindsight, appears to have been a decisive step on the path to his downfall: “Now the conflict in East Asia is a piece of luck for us. […] If we had declared war on the United States without the conflict in East Asia to compensate, the German people would have found it difficult to take. Now everyone takes this development for granted.”

Hitler dealt with the situation on the Eastern Front and, as he had done before with Goebbels, he tried to make light of it. The Wehrmacht was in the process of “carrying out a realignment of the front.” It was his “firm decision […] next year to finish off the Soviet Union at least as far as the Urals.” Finally, Hitler talked about the “Jewish question”: “As far as the Jewish question is concerned the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep of it. He had prophesied to the Jews that if they brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation. That was not empty talk. The world war has happened. The annihilation of Jewry must be the inevitable consequence. This question must be regarded without any sentimentality. It’s not our business to have sympathy with the Jews, but only sympathy with our German people. If the German people have once again sacrificed 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their own lives.” This clear statement by Hitler must have confirmed Goebbels in his conviction that his radical view of the “Jewish question” was very much in line with that of the Führer. Hitler had announced the “annihilation” of the Jews several times during the preceding months, and in his article “The Jews Are to Blame” of November 16, Goebbels had used the same phrase and significantly had referred to Hitler’s prophecy of January 30, 1939, just as Hitler himself had now done in front of the Reich leaders and Gauleiters.

The German declaration of war on the United States did not result in any fundamental change in the regime’s anti-U.S. propaganda. As before, it continued to concentrate on the American president and his “war guilt.” Above all, Goebbels assumed that by emphasizing the “Jewish question” he would make a big impact in the United States, since “all Americans are anti-Semites”—American anti-Semitism just needed to be organized. “The line must be: Roosevelt is to blame, and the Jews are to blame. Whenever the Americans have a defeat or a
setback, we must point out: You can thank Roosevelt and your Jews for that.”
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