Goebbels: A Biography (75 page)

On September 30 Hitler spoke for the first time in more than five months, once again at a large public rally broadcast over the radio. Celebrating the opening of the Winter Aid program at the Sportpalast he praised the regime’s successes and appeared confident of victory without, however, referring in detail to the situation in Stalingrad, which was being watched with general concern. Goebbels noted with relief that Hitler had been prepared to take on the speech on short notice. During the summer rumors about his state of health had begun to spread because of his absence from the media.
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On the following day Goebbels took part in a meeting of Reich leaders and Gauleiters at which Hitler made a three-hour speech in order to convince this small group of elite functionaries of his own confidence in victory; the alternative to “total victory” was “total destruction.”
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The aims of this war, Hitler concluded, were very wide-ranging and would require many more sacrifices; however, these would be justified since the war “would make possible the lives of millions of German children.”
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In the middle of October Goebbels published an article in
Das Reich
in which, along the same lines as Hitler’s remarks, rather than focusing on ideological differences he commented in a relatively pragmatic way on the “war aims” for which this continuing conflict was being fought: “This time it’s not about throne and altar but about grain and oil, about space for our growing numbers, who cannot live and cannot be fed in the restricted territory in which they have had to stay up until now.”
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The relatively cautious tone of this article indicated that Goebbels was intending to introduce a reorientation affecting not only propaganda but the whole of domestic policy. Winter was coming, and Goebbels saw the opportunity to press once again for a tougher line to be taken in the civilian war effort, and he met
with a very positive response in his conversations with leading members of the Party and the Wehrmacht.
¹⁷

In October he determined to use the coming winter with its anticipated difficulties to move more and more toward “a total and radical way of conducting the war both domestically and abroad.”
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That the October reports on the public mood were now once again showing an awareness of the seriousness of the war situation—after a series of speeches by prominent figures earlier reports had temporarily revealed what he regarded as dangerous illusions
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—was considered by Goebbels to be “a remarkable success for the new form of propaganda that I introduced a year ago with my article ‘When or How?’ ”
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To set the scene for the campaign he was planning at the beginning of November, he published an editorial in
Das Reich
with the title “War as Social Revolution,” in which he emphasized how different the Germans were from “their plutocratic enemy,” which was fighting the war in the first instance “against our revolution and particularly against its socialist aspect.”
²¹

He was concerned that Hitler was becoming largely isolated in his headquarters as a result of his tense relations with his generals and so was becoming increasingly lonely.
²²
But the dictator’s physical condition was also giving cause for concern. When, on October 29, Goebbels received a personal letter from Hitler on the occasion of his birthday—the “first handwritten letter by the Führer for three years,” as Bormann assured him—he read that Hitler hoped that he could decipher his handwriting because his hands were “gradually beginning to shake.”
²³
Hitler’s increasing physical frailty was a growing problem in terms of the deployment of the Führer for propaganda purposes. Thus Goebbels was obliged to note that Hitler “is very unwilling to appear in the weekly newsreels” and kept removing clips in which he was shown, but the people did not understand this.
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In October 1942 there was a danger that the most important weapon in the propaganda minister’s arsenal was no longer going to be usable—this at a time when the regime was confronting its greatest military crisis yet.

In October 1942 the 6th Army continued to fight its way through the city of Stalingrad toward the banks of the Volga. Toward the end of the month, however, the German offensive began to lose momentum.
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More serious were the negative reports arriving simultaneously from North Africa. At the end of October the British army launched a counteroffensive against Rommel near El Alamein
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and on November 2 achieved a breakthrough. Some of Rommel’s forces were surrounded and destroyed; the majority had to retreat to the west.
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It was high time that Goebbels prepared the German population for another winter crisis. At the beginning of November he published an editorial in
Das Reich
in which he developed two central ideas. On the one hand, he came back to a notion that had already preoccupied him during 1941 and that he had used in an editorial written for January 30, 1942, and on other occasions.
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Once again he drew a parallel between the Party’s position in the months before the “seizure of power” on January 30, 1933, and the current situation. At that time, as now, they had also been involved in a struggle with the alliance between “plutocrats and communists.” Although the situation had sometimes seemed hopeless, they had kept their nerve and finally won.
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Goebbels kept returning to this line of thought during the future crises that the war had in store. He did so both in public statements
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and above all in conversations with Hitler,
³¹
whom he tried to encourage in this way, while at the same time reminding him that in those days he, Joseph Goebbels, had been loyal to his Führer.

The article contained a second idea that Goebbels, no doubt intentionally, preceded with a
ceterum censeo:
“Apart from that, we believe that in future our enemies should spend less time talking about our mood
[Stimmung]
and more about our bearing
[Haltung]
. Mood is usually a temporary phenomenon, whereas bearing is something that lasts.”

This distinction between “mood” and “bearing” introduced by Goebbels undoubtedly made sense semantically. In view of the harsh conditions of the war, “mood” had frivolous connotations; “bearing” seemed somehow more appropriate to the situation. By distinguishing between them, Goebbels was marking a change of course, which
he had been introducing in stages since the beginning of the war. Up until 1940, the year in which the regime achieved its greatest successes, he had pursued a policy that had helped to ensure that the population’s approval of the policies of Party and state had been expressed in numerous collective gestures that were publicly documented. However, the days in which the regime could mobilize millions of people in order to carry out pompous parades or to cheer triumphant entries by the Führer or the reception of friendly heads of state had been over for at least two years. Mass events now tended to be held indoors in halls; on the occasion of major Nazi public holidays there were no elaborate street decorations or calls for everyone to put out flags. The more the war penetrated everyday life, the more the regime avoided documenting the population’s support for the regime through grandiose gestures and behavior. Now it sufficed if the population went about its daily activities and performed its duties without grumbling or becoming apathetic. That showed a good bearing
(Haltung)
.

By distinguishing between mood and bearing Goebbels also possessed an instrument with which to counter increasingly annoying references to negative tendencies within the population. If bearing and not mood was the decisive criterion, then it could be considered defeatist to refer to mere fluctuations in mood in order to justify particular political measures. Phases in which, as was now frequently the case, the mood was described as “calm,” “composed,” “serious,” could be maintained over a lengthy period, whereas an excessively optimistic mood was not at all appropriate for the seriousness of the situation.

On November 8, as every year, the Nazi leadership met in Munich to commemorate the anniversary of the failed 1923 putsch. Their conversations were dominated by the dramatic developments on the Egyptian front, when suddenly an entirely new situation emerged: British and American forces had landed at various points on the Moroccan and Algerian coasts.
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Goebbels met Hitler, who three days earlier had been convinced after Montgomery’s breakthrough that Egypt would be regarded as the real “second front” and was now rather baffled.
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Would the Vichy government be in a position, or be willing, to get the French troops in their North African colonies to resist? Hitler was waiting for a reply from the Vichy government, to which he had offered a military alliance against the Allies.
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Goebbels
was already contemplating the prospects for an effective European propaganda initiative offered by such a step. He was dreaming of a “Charter for the Reordering of Europe,” although he conceded that such prospects were “too attractive” to be achieved in reality. Finally, Hitler stated that he was willing to dispense with a formal declaration of war by Vichy, provided the French troops offered military resistance. If they did not do this, then he would occupy the unoccupied part of France “in the shortest time.” In his speech that evening in the Löwenbräukeller, which was broadcast on the radio, he gave the “old fighters” from the Party the impression that he was confident of victory but made only a brief mention of the situation in North Africa.
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During the night of November 9–10—the usual celebrations of the 1923 putsch had taken place during the day—the French prime minister, Pierre Laval, arrived in Munich to discuss the new situation with the Nazi leadership; it was becoming clear that the French resistance in North Africa was at most symbolic.
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Hitler retaliated in the way that he had already announced. The German invasion of the hitherto unoccupied part of France began on November 11 and after three days was essentially concluded.
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While the German forces in the west of the African theater tried to build a new bridgehead
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and, as Goebbels dramatically put it, were in a race with the American army to Tunis,
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at the same time in the east Rommel was marching rapidly toward the Tunisian border; they had been forced to give up Tobruk on November 13.
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Goebbels learned from the SD report that the events in North Africa had “deeply shocked the German public.”
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In fact they were to initiate the turn in the war.

In the middle of November Goebbels once again made a trip to western areas affected by bombing. He inspected the damage in Duisburg, where he was informed about the situation by the local authorities and spoke to representatives of the Gau agencies and the state authorities. He then visited Elberfeld where, during his visit to the town hall, the “streets [were] packed with masses of people. […] A triumphal journey like in peacetime.” In his speech he thanked the people of Elberfeld, describing their damaged city as a “West wall of German fighting spirit.”
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Goebbels’s private arrangements for this trip were in marked contrast to this heroic spirit. He stayed in the Rheydt Schloss, which “has been made exceptionally comfortable for our stay.” He had invited “a
few old schoolfriends” for the evening, among them Beines and Grünewald, but also a senior teacher, Voss. “We sat together until late in the evening, telling stories and exchanging memories.” On the afternoon of the following day he gave theater fans in his hometown a special treat: “On my instructions,” as he noted, there was a guest performance in the city theater by the Berlin Schiller Theater with Heinrich George and other famous actors. In the evening he again invited some of the theater people and “various acquaintances and friends from my school days” to the Rheydt Schloss.
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Even after ten years as propaganda minister his need to show off on his home turf was still unsatisfied.

Back in Berlin, however, Goebbels soon adjusted to the seriousness of the situation. He was encouraged in his aim of supporting “a radicalization of our war efforts toward total war in all spheres” by the fact that in the middle of November, like all the Gauleiters, he had been appointed a Reich defense commissioner. This authorized him to give instructions to the authorities in all matters concerned with the civilian war effort.
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Understandably, the “general propaganda situation” was giving him cause for concern: “In general we are rather on the defensive. We have little to offer foreign countries, particularly as far as plans for the future of Europe are concerned.” At home they lacked “an overarching idea for war propaganda over the longer term,” a situation that had been caused by the “stupidities of subordinate agencies.”
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It was no surprise that this time his seasonal depression
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affected him very badly: “November is National Socialism’s unlucky month. The revolt
*
¹
broke out in November 1918; the putsch failed in November 1923; in November 1932 we lost 32 [Reichstag] seats; in November last year we had the Rostov catastrophe; in November this year we are experiencing North Africa and the Bolshevist success at Stalingrad.”
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In December 1942 a growing number of reports about the mass murder of Jews in German-occupied Europe began to appear in the international
media. On December 17 the Allies published a statement about the systematic murder of the Jews by the Nazi regime; accusations about this formed a central theme of Allied propaganda, albeit only for a relatively brief period.
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Goebbels followed this development with interest. On December 5, 1942, he took note in his diary of the worldwide protests against the “alleged atrocities committed by the German government against the European Jews.” In the following days Goebbels issued repeated instructions at his ministerial briefings to ignore the Allied accusations without, however, denying them to his staff.
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The statement that he gave to his subordinates on December 12 was disarmingly frank: “Since the enemy reports about the alleged German atrocities committed on Jews and Poles are becoming increasingly extensive and yet we have not much evidence with which to counter them,” he gave instructions “to start an atrocity propaganda campaign ourselves and report with the greatest possible emphasis on English atrocities in India, in the Near East, in Iran, Egypt etc., everywhere where the English are based.”
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Goebbels returned to the subject on December 14: “We can’t respond to these things. If the Jews say that we’ve shot 2.5 million Jews in Poland or deported them to the east, naturally we can’t say that it was actually only 2.3 million. So we’re not in a position to get involved in a dispute, at least not in front of world opinion.” At the same briefing Goebbels gave further instructions for the “exoneration campaign”: All reports about alleged atrocities by the enemy had to be “given big coverage”; every day “something new [must] be found.”
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There were in fact several articles in the press
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that reflected these instructions, but within a few days the campaign died down,
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to Goebbels’s annoyance.
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However, repeated admonishments, issued both in the internal ministerial briefings and to the press, show that this campaign never really got going, and in fact that German propaganda was on the defensive.
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German propaganda had no reply to the Allied accusations that they were murdering Jews.