Authors: Heinrich Fraenkel,Roger Manvell
Last night there was a rather delicate incident at Lanke, the Minister's country residence. For the last two days Goebbels has been living in a little block-house in the middle of the forest, about half a mile from the main house. He wishes to rest alone and see no one. No one is allowed to disturb him. Only the telephone connects him to the outside world. A servant brings his meals in a car and returns immediately to the house. Frau Goebbels is staying at the White Hart in Dresden taking the cure, and the children are at home on Schwanenwerder.
Generally visitors are notified beforehand to the sentries so that they may pass the barrier without difficulty. Yesterday, about 11 o'clock in the evening, the sentry noticed a strange woman cyclist on one of the paths within the property. It was a young and beautiful girl. The sentry stopped her. She refused to give her name or her reason for being on Goebbels' property. The sentry, evidently a perfect ladies' man, therefore escorted her through the darkness of the forest. He intended to take her to the guard or to the adjutant.
After he had gone a few steps he noticed about twenty yards ahead, between the pine trees, another dark figure. The sentry, his automatic ready in his hand, challenged this suspicious figure and ordered him to halt. The next moment he was horrified to recognise, from the oaths and abuse which the strange figure flung at him, that it was none other than Goebbels himself. The case of the woman cyclist was cleared up at once. From the rather confused excuses which Goebbels offered to the young woman, the sentry realised that Goebbels himself had been waiting for her. The sentry was quickly dismissed and the couple made their way no less quickly towards the block-house close by.
Goebbels had made an evening rendezvous with the young film actress. To avoid all gossip, his scandal-loving household and even his confidential staff were supposed to know nothing of the visit. That was why she had not been brought by car but had come by a forest path, known only to trusted visitors, and the only one not barred by an iron gate.
43
Parallel with Goebbels' campaign of personal popularisation were his constant feuds with the other leaders, in particular with Ribbentrop, whose inept handling of the Foreign Ministry appalled him, and Goring, with whom, as we have seen, he tried for a while to come to terms in order to use his influence to help defeat the clique led by Bormann which surrounded Hitler. On 31st March 1943, Heroes' Day, he was very angry about “his low place in the seats allotted to the members of the Government”. By April his plans to form a radical group to defeat this clique were sufficiently advanced to be explained at a conference with Naumann, who passed the information on to the others in the Ministry, including Semmler. The scheme did not succeed, at least in the sense that it won no increase in power for Goebbels and eventually he found it necessary to come to terms with Bormann, the “primitive Ogpu type” as he called him.
44
By the end of the year, when Berlin was about to experience the full weight of the bombing, he had become deeply depressed, nervous, and even, according to Semmler, defeatist.
The last few weeks he has struck me as falling into a mood of real defeatism. How else can one explain what he said today in front of his wife: “If all our efforts, work and struggle should lead nowhere, then I would not find it hard to die. For in a world where there was no room for my ideals there would be no room for me either.”
45
On another occasion, when dining with his former Under-Secretary of State, Leopold Gutterer, he went so far as to admit that he considered it unlikely for the Reich to be maintained even within its pre-war frontiers.
46
Again Semmler noticed Goebbels' need for perpetual activity.
This bundle of nerves cannot live without worries, excitement and a quickened pulse. The prospect of the next day's work with its deadly certainty of more disappointments and vexations does not worry him. On the contrary, he says how pleased he will be to have things happening round him again: conferences, telegrams, visitors, telephone conversations, papers, instructions, quick results, and then back to anxiety and worries.
Sometimes there seems to me something sinister about his perpetual restlessness.
47
When the raids came, Goebbels behaved with exemplary courage. On the night of 21st November, when the first raid on Berlin took place, Goebbels was speaking in a suburb when the bombers arrived. In the height of the raid he and Semmler drove back to Berlin's Air-Raid Centre in the Wilhelmplatz. There Goebbels stood chainsmoking, watching the reports come in until “he nearly loses control of himself” at the magnitude of the damage.
Goebbels considered himself personally responsible for maintaining a high level of morale in Berlin during these terrible nights and days. The Luftwaffe did nothing to help him. By Christmas his nerves were in pieces. He quarrelled bitterly with Magda and the household staff at Lanke on Christmas Eve merely because a Christmas tree had been put up in front of the cinema-screen on which he wanted to have an American film projected. He lost all control of himself, ordered his car and withdrew to spend Christmas entirely alone reading Schopenhauer at Schwanenwerder. Magda was left to explain his absence to the children as best she could. He was working, of course. By January Goebbels was fuming again because the authorities of the devastated city of Berlin had come to him for advice about what they ought to give Göring for his birthday; the previous year he had extorted from them a quarter of a million marks for a Van Dyck. Goebbels did not recover from this all day!
Semmler also provides a gloss on certain events in which Goebbels was involved, in particular his part in frustrating the July Plot. For example, he reveals that Bormann attempted to prevent Hitler from receiving a forty-page memorandum Goebbels had drawn up in April in which he urged that victory was no longer possible on both the Eastern and the Western Fronts, and that peace negotiations should be initiated with Stalin since it seemed impossible to expect any success in attempting to discuss peace with Churchill and Roosevelt. The memorandum went into considerable detail as to the kind of terms that might be achieved with Stalin, and then ended with a broad hint that, since Ribbentrop had failed so signally at the Foreign Office, he would himself be prepared to take over that Ministry and with it the burden of the negotiations. Bormann utterly opposed the plan, and left the memorandum on his desk without passing it to Hitler. It was almost three weeks before Goebbels, in an agony of suspense, found this out, and at the same time discovered afresh how strong was Bormann's influence with Hitler. The memorandum was filed without further mention by Hitler, and Goebbels had to wait until after 20th July to get from the Führer certain of the powers he sought. He continued to associate himself with men such as Speer, Funk and Ley, all of whom acknowledged his authority and accepted his radical plans to reform Germany's war policy under Hitler. They met regularly on Wednesday evenings at Goebbels' house for discussion. Goebbels' personal attitude to the Führer at this time is described as follows by Semmler:
Whenever Goebbels goes to headquarters he starts off full of distrust of the Führer's genius, full of irritation, criticism and hard words. Each time he is determined to tell Hitler just what he thinks. What happens in their talks I don't know, but every time that Goebbels returns from these visits he is full of admiration for the Führer and exudes an optimism which infects us all.
48
On 5th June, the eve of D-Day, Semmler and Naumann were with Goebbels who had been summoned by Hitler to meet him in Berchtes- gaden. Goebbels had had hopes that Hitler would want to discuss the memorandum on Russia, but they were in conference about other matters until the small hours of 6th June. It was Semmler who had to wake Goebbels with the news of the Allied landings in Normandy.
At five minutes past four I suddenly receive the first reports of Allied landing operations on the Channel coast. There is no doubt the invasion has begun. I at once ring Goebbels and tell him the sensational news in a few headlines. I can almost see him, through the telephone, jumping out of bed; then after a few seconds the voice comes over: “Thank God, at last. This is the final round.”
49
On the way back to Berlin Goebbels told Semmler that the Führer was still very optimistic about ultimate victory. Three nights later the Minister gave a party and seemed unusually excited. “Goebbels finds it very hard to keep a secret,” writes Semmler. He told them that Hitler's secret weapon was about to be used against Britain, so fulfilling at long last Goebbels' propaganda promises to the German people. It was he who chose the term V-i for this weapon of Vengeance
(Vergel-tung)
because the numeral would suggest that there were other, more crushing weapons of this new kind in active preparation. The first flying-bomb was launched against London on 15th June. Goebbels was very angry that this was done quite arbitrarily by the military authorities without notifying him in advance so that he could have given this tremendous event the full propaganda treatment.
Five weeks later, on 20th July, Goebbels was in Berlin when Hitler held a staff conference in a wooden guest-house at Rastenburg, his headquarters in East Prussia.
50
The meeting would normally have been held in the concrete bunker, had it not been under repair. This simple change of place altered the history of the war, by permitting Hitler to survive and so prolong the fighting for a further nine months.
Count von Stauffenberg, a colonel and Chief of Staff in the Home Forces, flew from Berlin to join the conference and carried with him a time-bomb in a brief-case which he left carefully placed under the wooden conference table before excusing himself to put through an urgent phone call to Berlin. He waited for a minute or two at some distance from the guest-house and heard the explosion; in the panic that followed he managed to leave Rastenburg by plane for Berlin. Before he left, he put a priority call through to the War Office with the news of Hitler's death. This set into motion the network of conspiracy which had long been planned and organised by a number of dissident generals, whose aim was to assume government of Germany in the name of the Army. In Berlin it was at once assumed that another associate in the plot in Rastenburg, General Fellgiebel, would have carried out his assignment which was to destroy the means of communication at Hitler's headquarters. Accordingly, the conspirators gave the order for the next stage in their plan, the occupation of Berlin. As part of the fulfilment of this, Major Remer was ordered to bring in the Berlin Guards Battalion to occupy the area of the Government offices, including the Ministry of Propaganda. Among the instructions given to Major Remer was responsibility for the arrest of Goebbels.
But Hitler was not dead, nor were his means of communication with Berlin destroyed. He had staggered out from the shattered guesthouse dazed, shocked and bruised, his trousers torn, his eardrums pierced, his right arm partially paralysed. He thought there had been an air-raid. He was calm, and momentarily worried about his trousers, which were new. But while Stauffenberg was carrying the news of his certain death to Berlin, Hitler, still suffering from shock, was excitedly explaining to Mussolini, who had arrived at Rastenburg on a visit, just what it was thought had happened. He did not hesitate to point out the miraculous nature of his escape. This he took to be one more sign from Providence that he was intended to succeed in his plan to control Europe. Mussolini agreed it was a sign from Heaven itself. They then retired to have tea; then Hitler's nerves gave way and he raged uncontrollably for half an hour, shouting for vengeance on all those who opposed him as a man of destiny protected by Providence. Meanwhile throughout the afternoon the undestroyed telephones at Rastenburg had been busily connected to Berlin countering all rumours of Hitler's death and cancelling any orders which were not authorised by either Keitel or Himmler, who was in charge of security on the home front. The conspirators learned too late that their plot was abortive.
Meanwhile Major Remer's men, among others, were taking up the positions allotted to them in Berlin. The story of what happened then has been told in some detail by Rudolf Semmler.
Semmler had noticed how abnormally pale and nervous Goebbels had been at lunch, which was served as usual at two o'clock in his official house in the Hermann Göring Strasse. At that time, as he revealed later, Goebbels had news only of the explosion, followed after an agonising period by the bare fact that Hitler had narrowly escaped death. With this on his mind, Goebbels waited anxiously at home for further details. Semmler had gone off duty after lunch, catching his train home without difficulty since he avoided by an hour or so the arrival of Major Remer and the Guards to seal off the Government area.
Lieutenant Hagen, a convinced National Socialist and a junior officer attached to the Berlin Guards Regiment, first heard the rumour of Hitler's death around four o'clock together with the fact that the Guards Regiment was to occupy the Government quarter. He was ultimately the man responsible for warning Goebbels that suspicious activities were taking place. Although a lieutenant in the Army, he was also a scholar and a music critic serving on Goebbels' own journal,
Das Reich
. He was on friendly terms with Goebbels and also with Major Remer, and he was a keen Nazi. At first he accepted the preparation of the conspirators at the Ministry of War in good faith. The code-word for the operation was Valkyrie, and as far as the junior officers were concerned its purpose was to mobilise against a threatened rebellion by the million foreign slave-workers stationed in the district of Berlin. Both Remer and Hagen found these preparations unaccountable because the slave-labour appeared quite docile. Their suspicions were finally roused when they saw, on the morning of 20th July, Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, who was supposed to be living in retirement after being dismissed by Hitler, drive to the War Office in full uniform. Hagen now admits that he had
ein ungutes Gefühl,
a queer feeling, and when later in the day the order came through for Valkyrie to be put in operation, Remer ordered him to go to Goebbels and make official inquiries, since he was the only senior minister present in Berlin that afternoon as well as being Gauleiter and Plenipotentiary for Total War. The order they had received indicated that an attempt had been made on Hitler's life, and the result of the attempt was still in doubt. The Army, the order went on, had to assume full powers, and the Wach Regiment was to occupy the Government district and immobilise everyone, including ministers and generals.