Goebbels: A Biography (81 page)

However, as far as propaganda was concerned another avenue seemed to him more promising: to continue and expand the anti-Semitic propaganda campaign initiated in connection with the Katyn incident. On May 12 he carefully studied the propaganda work
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and was pleased to discover that he
could make excellent use of it. “If the Zionist protocols aren’t genuine, then they have been invented by a brilliant contemporary critic.” During his midday visit to the Reich Chancellery he spoke to Hitler about the topic. The latter, he noted, did not share his cautious view about their authenticity at all. Hitler considered that the protocols could “claim absolute authenticity. […] No one could describe so brilliantly the pursuit of world domination by the Jews as they have done themselves.”

In any case Goebbels was convinced that he had a trump in his hands with this topic: “As after Stalingrad anti-Bolshevik propaganda, now after Tunis anti-Jewish propaganda forms the core of all our journalism.”
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In the middle of May Berndt presented him with a memorandum with the title “For Boosting Anti-Jewish Propaganda.” Goebbels approved it and gave instructions to republish the “standard anti-Semitic literature” that had become somewhat forgotten.
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He wanted “a few anti-Semitic novels to be written and by respected writers. […] I’m thinking here of [Hans] Fallada, Norbert Jacques, and others.”
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He was aiming to make “anti-Semitism once again the standard topic of our whole propaganda.”

And that is what happened. The German press faithfully implemented the instructions of the Propaganda Ministry, which continually fed it with relevant material.
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From the beginning of May until the beginning of June, in some papers there was at least one anti-Semitic article in almost every issue, in others about half that number.
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At the end of May Goebbels regarded the dissolution of the Comintern as an important victory and as the opportunity for a “new stage in the anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish campaign.”
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He carefully noted any signs of an increase in anti-Semitism among the enemy.
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The topic of Katyn was now used less and less in propaganda,
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being replaced by other anti-Semitic diatribes.

Thus the Propaganda Ministry announced that the bombing of the Möhne and Eder dams on the night of May 16–17 had been prompted by a Jewish scientist;
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the North African territories conquered by the Allies were now being subjected to a Jewish “regime of terror”; the American intention of establishing a World Food Bank was portrayed as a “plan for the Jewish exploitation of the world.”
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Moreover, the German press seized on reports of Allied postwar plans and attacked them as proof of the—Jewish-inspired—intention to “destroy”
Germany; in view of this threat the annihilation of the Jews was nothing more than an act of self-defense.
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However, the effect of the anti-Semitic campaign on the population was highly ambivalent, as is clear from the surviving reports on the public mood. Apart from positive reactions it also produced irritation and opposition. On the one hand, there was astonishment and unease about the fact that, in view of the widely known atrocities that it had itself committed, the Nazi regime should now attack the enemy’s conduct of the war as inhumane; on the other, there was concern for the prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, while the idea that in the event of defeat they would themselves become victims of the methods of the Soviet secret police that were being given so much publicity induced a sense of horror.
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Also, the propaganda assertion that the Allied air attacks were the work of Jewish instigators proved at least partly counterproductive, because among some sections of the population it led to undesirable discussions about Jewish persecution and its consequences for people’s own fates. Moreover, in many cases the population rejected the propaganda assertion that “the Jews” were entirely responsible for the war. Goebbels’s anti-Jewish propaganda campaign, in which he threatened that in the event of defeat they would be faced with “Jewish reprisals,” did not, therefore, produce the expected mobilization of the last reserves but rather encouraged skepticism about official policy and a sense of fatalism, as people believed that in view of enemy superiority they would be defenseless in the face of the threatened annihilation. The deep depression among the population that Goebbels detected at the end of May had to a significant extent been caused by the excessive use of anti-Semitism.

On May 18, while he was fully occupied with dealing with the crisis and with anti-Semitic propaganda, Goebbels met his favorite poet, Knut Hamsun, who had arrived in Germany on a visit. The Norwegian poet visited him together with his wife at home in the Göringstrasse.
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Goebbels was “deeply moved,” indeed “shaken” by this meeting with the eighty-four-year-old. Conversation with Hamsun proved extremely difficult because of his deafness; Frau Hamsun “has to translate what I said into Norwegian and then shout it into the ears” of the elderly poet. According to Goebbels, however, Hamsun’s brief comments “radiated the experience of old age and of a
rich, varied, and combative life.” Above all Goebbels liked the fact that his “faith in a German victory [was] completely unshaken.”

Five weeks later he received a letter from Hamsun honoring him with his Nobel Prize medal and certificate. Goebbels, “deeply moved by this extraordinarily fine gesture,” wrote Hamsun a thank-you letter in which he described the gift “as an expression of your support for our struggle for a new Europe and a happier humanity.” In this situation he was happy to ignore the fact that ever since it had been awarded to Carl von Ossietzky the Nobel Prize was frowned upon in Germany.
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However, the elderly poet’s visit to the Führer a few weeks later became something of a fiasco, as Goebbels learned from a handful of informants. For “egged on by Norwegian journalists,” as Goebbels assumed, Hamsun dared to pose serious questions about the political future of Norway and to criticize the policies of Reich Commissioner Josef Terboven. It was reported to Goebbels that Hitler had responded impatiently and broken off the conversation. “In future it will be more difficult to introduce ‘lyric and epic poets,’ as he puts it, to the Führer.”
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On June 5 Goebbels gave a “major political speech” in the Sportpalast in order to improve what was generally considered to be a bad mood in the country. Originally it had been envisaged that Göring would carry out this task, but the Reich marshal balked at the last minute. Since Hitler’s public speeches were becoming increasingly infrequent—at that point he had only spoken once in 1943, namely for the Heroes Memorial Day on March 21
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—Goebbels increasingly had to assume the role of chief orator for the regime.
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Hitler, however, censored the speech himself; to Goebbels’s great regret, a section dealing with Tunis fell victim to this revision as well as a passage in which Goebbels had wanted to make a few points about a future Europe under German leadership.
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Speer spoke first at the mass rally about German success in armaments production. In his speech Goebbels, on the other hand, declaring himself the “son of my West German homeland,” concentrated on the situation in the areas affected by the air war and on the fact
that the winter crisis had been overcome.
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Unlike his Sportpalast speech in February, this time he focused not on winning massive applause but on being “realistic,”
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above all as far as the regions affected by the air war were concerned, where people “certainly have no sympathy for the fact that people in Berlin are applauding while in the West the population has to bear the brunt of the bombing.”

The speech concluded with a section on the “Jewish question,” which in terms of “realism” could hardly have been surpassed: “The total exclusion of Jewry from Europe is not a question of morality but a question of the security of states. […] Just as the potato beetle destroys potato fields, indeed has to destroy them, so the Jews destroy states and nations. For that there is only one remedy: radical removal of the threat.”

Goebbels considered his speech to have once again had a marvelous effect; the “psychological crisis of recent weeks” had been completely overcome.
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Abroad too the effect had been “incredibly great,” even in London, where they were “deeply impressed.”
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He paid no attention to the fact that, according to SD reports, at home the speech had also provoked negative responses, for example criticism as to why he had not mentioned “retaliation.”
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Goebbels’s tactics were transparent. After his speech German propaganda began a wave of praise designed to obscure the negative aspects of the popular mood. Thus Goebbels believed that if his speech were to have any negative repercussions they would be very different, namely he feared that the population’s optimism might go too far. But after only a week the mood deteriorated once again, which Goebbels attributed to the declining impact of his speech.
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The entries in Goebbels’s diary show once again how selective he was in his interpretation of the reports on the effects of his propaganda. This applies particularly to his anti-Semitic campaign, which reached its zenith with his diatribe of June 5; he had indeed gone too far. In view of the increasing skepticism that was spreading among the population because of the excessive exploitation of anti-Semitism, the campaign had been gradually toned down from the end of May onward. The negative repercussions were so serious that Goebbels even felt obliged to counter criticism of the campaign from within the Party. In a circular of June 12, 1943, sent to the Gauleiters
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he wrote that after the conclusion of the “Katyn campaign […] various Gaus had referred to the lack of understanding shown by non-Party
circles for the breadth and frequency of the coverage given it in the press and on the radio.” Goebbels defended himself by claiming that the frequent repetition of a topic had been “a method proved and tested in the time of struggle”; this was “the only way of drumming it in to large numbers of people.” And he emphasized: “The struggle against Bolshevism and Jewry is at the forefront of our propaganda. It must be carried out on the broadest possible basis.”
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He did not, however, refer to this evident failure of his propaganda in his diaries.

The raid on the dams in the middle of May was followed at the end of the month by the next major attack by the RAF. The raid on Wuppertal on the night of May 29–30, carried out by over seven hundred bombers, resulted, as Goebbels noted, in “a real catastrophe”; around three thousand people died, up until that point the highest number of casualties of any British air raid.
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Barely two weeks later, on the night of June 11–12, the RAF attacked Düsseldorf, once more with more than seven hundred bombers, and over 1,200 people died; on the following night it was Bochum’s turn.
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Responding to the raids on the Rhine-Ruhr district, Goebbels had increasingly begun to focus on the question of evacuating the areas affected by the air war. He drafted an evacuation program, which he got Hitler to approve in the middle of June. He informed the Gauleiters of the details in a circular while inviting them to Berlin on short notice. In this way he initiated a significant increase in his responsibilities in the sphere of civil defense, as had already been suggested to him by Field Marshal Milch in April.
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The Gauleiter meeting in Berlin was entirely devoted to the problems arising from the air war. Speer’s lecture, in which he pointed out that in practice Ruhr production could not be transferred elsewhere, had a sobering effect. They might possibly have to resort to a partial compulsory evacuation, which Goebbels, however, doubted, since he did “not believe that people would leave the area without being forced to do so.”
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The audience was disappointed to learn from Milch that they would have to wait a bit longer for the expected retaliation raids to be launched.

In the evening Goebbels invited the Gauleiters and ministers to his home. He concluded his diary entry by noting that “if I had the authority to play at least a coordinating role in other spheres of domestic policy as I do in the issues arising from the air war, then the general situation of the Reich would be better than is unfortunately the case at the moment. We are suffering from a chronic lack of demarcation of responsibilities. If only the Führer would make some decisions over this! But they affect questions of personnel to such an extent that he finds it difficult to make up his mind to act. But I fear that in the long run he won’t be able to avoid doing so.” But Goebbels knew only too well that to achieve the desired domestic political reforms and to secure the central role that he was seeking would require a further and more far-reaching overall crisis of the regime, which (as was clear from the continuing setbacks) would not be long in coming.

At the beginning of July Goebbels felt compelled to play down the topic of “retaliation” in German propaganda: “I’m afraid that if this slogan is used too often it will gradually lose its potency, particularly since we shall have to wait a few more months before we can reply to the English terror raids on a large scale.”
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The reports on the nation’s mood during the following days were to show that his assessment was correct.
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As chairman of the Air Raid Damage Committee he was now increasingly obliged to deal with evacuation issues and other consequences of the air raids.
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Naturally he was not shy in promoting his role in this through propaganda, as an editorial in
Das Reich
of July 4 makes clear: “There is not a single event in the areas affected by the air war of which we are unaware; where there is the slightest possibility of providing help, we move heaven and earth to protect and provide support for the hard-pressed and tormented victims of enemy terror.”
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On July 8 he flew to Cologne in order to observe the consequences of the air raid that had taken place a few days earlier. As far as the “bearing” of the population of Cologne was concerned he reached a more positive assessment than in the case of Düsseldorf, which he had visited a few weeks earlier. Using his local knowledge as a Rhinelander, he put it down to the fact that “the Düsseldorf population is more saturated with intellectualism than the Cologne one is, whereas the people of Cologne have more humor and optimism.” Nevertheless,
he found the overall picture of the city depressing: The center was “a scene of general destruction. All this destruction could make one cry.”
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Goebbels’s engagement in civil defense matters, made much of by propaganda, inevitably resulted, through a kind of reflex, in the propaganda apparatus subordinate to him reporting an increase in his popularity. At the end of June Goebbels was delighted to note that the Party’s Reich propaganda offices were unanimously reporting that “my reputation among the German people has increased enormously.” His work was “being regarded by the public with the greatest respect and admiration” and “in many cases [was being] contrasted in drastic fashion with the work or rather the lack of work by other prominent figures [!], who as the domestic crisis continues and gets worse are increasingly disappearing from public view.”
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This dig referred in particular to Göring, whose air defenses, despite boastful announcements by the Reich marshal, had failed, and also to Interior Minister Frick, whom Goebbels had for a long time considered totally inactive.