Goebbels: A Biography Read online

  Translation copyright © 2015 by Random House LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Germany by Siedler Verlag in 2010.

  Copyright © 2010 by Peter Longerich.

  Photo credits are located beginning on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Longerich, Peter.

  [Joseph Goebbels. English]

  Goebbels : a biography / Peter Longerich; translated by Alan Bance, Jeremy Noakes, and Lesley Sharpe.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6751-0

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9688-3

  1. Goebbels, Joseph, 1897–1945. 2. Nazis—Biography. 3. Germany—

  History—1918–1933. 4. Germany—History—1933–1945. 5. World War, 1939–1945—

  Germany. 6. National socialism. I. Title.

  DD247.G6L6513 2014

  943.086092—dc23 [B] 2014004828

  eBook ISBN 9780812996883

  www.atrandom.com

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Christopher M. Zucker

  Cover design: Daniel Rembert

  Cover photograph: Joseph Goebbels, speaking from the steps of the Altes Museum, Berlin (© Hugo Jaeger/Timepix/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  v4.1

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1897–1933: TO ADVANCE AT ANY PRICE

  CHAPTER 1:

  “Rings a Song Eternally / From Youth’s Happy Hours”: Goebbels on His Childhood and Youth

  CHAPTER 2:

  “Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child”: Goebbels’s Path to National Socialism

  CHAPTER 3:

  “Working with the Mind Is the Greatest Sacrifice”: Maneuvering in the Early NSDAP

  CHAPTER 4:

  “Faith Moves Mountains”: Political Beginnings in Berlin

  CHAPTER 5:

  “Struggle Is the Father of All Things”: The Gauleiter and the Capital of the Reich

  CHAPTER 6:

  “A Life Full of Work and Struggle”: Politics Between Berlin and Munich

  CHAPTER 7:

  “Dare to Live Dangerously!”: Goebbels’s Radicalism and Hitler’s Policy of “Legality”

  CHAPTER 8:

  “Now We Must Gain Power…One Way or Another!”: A Share of Government?

  CHAPTER 9:

  “I Have a Blind Faith in Victory”: On the Way to Power

  1933–1939: CONTROLLING THE PUBLIC SPHERE UNDER DICTATORSHIP

  CHAPTER 10:

  “We’re Here to Stay!”: Taking Power

  CHAPTER 11:

  “Only Those Who Deserve Victory Will Keep It!”: Consolidating the Regime

  CHAPTER 12:

  “Whatever the Führer Does, He Does Completely”: The Establishment of the Führer State

  CHAPTER 13:

  “Taking Firm Control of the Inner Discipline of a People”: Propaganda and Manipulation of the Public Sphere

  CHAPTER 14:

  “Never Tire!”: Foreign Policy Successes and Anti-Jewish Policies

  CHAPTER 15:

  “The Tougher the Better!”: The Olympic Year, 1936

  CHAPTER 16:

  “The Most Important Factors in Our Modern Cultural Life”: Consolidating Nazi Cultural Policies

  CHAPTER 17:

  “Don’t Look Around, Keep Marching On!”: The Firebrand as Peacemaker

  CHAPTER 18:

  “Maturity Is Only Achieved Through Suffering!”: Preparations for War—from the Munich Agreement to the Attack on Poland

  1939–1945: WAR—TOTAL WAR—TOTAL DEFEAT

  CHAPTER 19:

  “War Is the Father of All Things”: The First Months of the War

  CHAPTER 20:

  “There Is Only One Sin: Cowardice!”: The Expansion of the War

  CHAPTER 21:

  “Our Banners Lead Us On to Victory!”: Between the War in the West and the War in the East

  CHAPTER 22:

  “A Great, a Wonderful Time, in Which a New Reich Will Be Born”: The Attack on the Soviet Union

  CHAPTER 23:

  “Getting the Nation to Accept Tough Policies”: The Winter Crisis of 1941–42

  CHAPTER 24:

  “We Can See in Our Mind’s Eye a Happy People”: Offensives and Setbacks

  CHAPTER 25:

  “Do You Want Total War?”: The Second Winter Crisis

  CHAPTER 26:

  “The Masses Have Become Somewhat Skeptical or…Are in the Grip of a Permanent State of Hopelessness”: Crisis as a Permanent State

  CHAPTER 27:

  “I Have No Idea What the Führer’s Going to Do in the End”: The Search for a Way Out

  CHAPTER 28:

  “Virtually a Wartime Dictatorship on the Home Front”: Between an Apocalyptic Mood and Total War

  CHAPTER 29:

  “But When Will There Be Some Action?”: Downfall

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Credits

  By Peter Longerich

  About the Author

  About the Translators

  PROLOGUE

  On April 30, 1945, a few hours after becoming Reich chancellor following Hitler’s death, Dr. Joseph Goebbels made a final attempt to delay his suicide, announced so often in advance. Goebbels wrote to the “commander-in-chief of Soviet forces,” informing him of Hitler’s suicide and of the arrangements for his succession that were now in force. As well as promoting Goebbels to chancellor, the dictator had made Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz president of the Reich. Goebbels proposed a ceasefire and offered to negotiate peace terms with the Soviet commander.

  The chief of the general staff, General Hans Krebs, a fluent Russian speaker from his days as military attaché in Moscow, undertook to cross the front line, now only a few hundred yards from the Reich Chancellery. Early in the morning Krebs delivered the letter to Major General Vasily Chuikov, commander of the 8th Guards Army, who had set up his headquarters in Tempelhof. He contacted Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet Army attacking Berlin. Zhukov in turn informed the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. Moscow delivered its answer some hours later: There could be no question of a ceasefire. The Soviet leader expected the German forces to surrender.1 When Krebs passed this on to Goebbels on May 1, Goebbels held Krebs responsible for the Russians’ refusal to negotiate. Goebbels sent another delegation to Chuikov. But this too was rejected.2

  Goebbels now decided to inform Dönitz of Hitler’s death and the Führer’s arrangements regarding succession; he had wisely made his armistice overtures before the new head of state took office. In a discussion of the situation, Goebbels told the staff in the bunker that they were free to break out on their own initiative.3 He had repeatedly announced in public that if the Third Reich should fall he intended to end his own life and those of his family. In a radio address at the end of February he made it clear that he would regard life after the war as “not worth living, either for myself or for my children.”4 On April 15 he wrote a piece for the magazine Das Reich entitled “Staking Your Whole Life” in which he took his leave of readers by posing a rhetorical question: Could anyone “even conceive of continuing their existence in such conditions after an Allied victory?”5 No more than two weeks later, the end came for the
Goebbels family.

  Goebbels left his wife to make the arrangements for the long-planned murder of the children. The precise circumstances surrounding their death (and the question of individual responsibility for it) have never been satisfactorily established. After the war the dentist Helmut Kunz repeatedly stated that he gave the children morphine injections, after which Magda Goebbels crushed cyanide capsules in their mouths. Later he changed his statement, ascribing the latter action to Hitler’s personal physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger.6

  By April 28, Magda and Joseph Goebbels had already written farewell letters to Harald Quandt, Magda’s son from her first marriage, announcing their intention of killing themselves and their children. They entrusted the letters to the pilot Hanna Reitsch, who managed to fly out of the city that same day. Goebbels wrote that Germany would “recover from this terrible war, but only if presented with examples to give it fresh heart. We want to give such an example.”7 Magda maintained in her letter to Harald that both her husband and Hitler had urged her to leave Berlin. She had refused. She made no secret of her involvement in the plan to murder Harald’s half-sisters and brother: “The world after the Führer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, and that is why I have taken the children with me. They are too good for the life that will come after us, and a merciful God will understand my granting them release. […] We have only one aim: faithfulness to the Führer unto death.”8

  Hitler’s adjutant, Günther Schwägermann, stated after the war that, on the evening of May 1, Goebbels called him in to tell him that he and his wife intended to take their own lives. According to Schwägermann’s testimony, Goebbels asked that “a shot should be fired to make sure he was dead” and that the corpses should be burned. With the preparations made, Goebbels said goodbye to him and gave him the photograph of the Führer that stood on his desk. Schwägermann conveys the importance that Goebbels attached to maintaining the proprieties until the very last minute of his life: “Shortly afterward, at about 20:30 hours, the minister and his wife came out of the room. He went calmly to the coat rack, put on his hat and coat, and pulled on his gloves. He offered his wife his arm and without a word left the bunker by the garden exit.” Not long after this, Schwägermann found the couple’s motionless bodies—both seemed to have taken poison9—in the garden. “As agreed, my companion shot Dr. Goebbels once or twice. Neither body showed any sign of movement. The gasoline we had brought with us was then poured over them and ignited. The corpses were enveloped in flames immediately.”10

  Nearly all the leading officials of the Nazi regime fled the capital as the Soviet troops advanced, and even the top leadership looked to save their lives as the Third Reich collapsed. Heinrich Himmler, hoping to pass unnoticed among the millions of defeated Wehrmacht soldiers, was caught and identified. After Hitler’s death, Martin Bormann joined in an armed attempt to break out through the cordon of enemy troops around the Reich Chancellery and died in the act. Hermann Göring and Albert Speer surrendered to the Allies. Goebbels was the only member of Hitler’s innermost circle to hold out in the bunker and ultimately follow him in committing suicide—and he was the only one who dragged his whole family down with him to their deaths.

  This last step was deliberately staged for its effect on posterity. By merely ending his life along with his wife, he would simply have appeared to be drawing the logical conclusion from a hopeless situation. To his way of thinking, this would have been seen as an admission of the complete failure of his life’s project, as a miserable exit at the moment when his political work, the work of the previous twenty years, was about to end in a colossal disaster. What Goebbels wanted, however, was to create, with his wife, a dramatic grand finale, to leave posterity with an “example” of the “faithfulness unto death” his wife had invoked. He could no longer use the resources of conventional propaganda. But the extreme act of wiping out his entire family seemed to him a way of proving to the whole world that, to the bitter end, he was absolutely committed to Hitler; that he was the only member of Hitler’s clique prepared to set aside his most fundamental human obligations in the name of demonstrating his loyalty. He saw in this last step a chance to turn the total failure of his life’s course into a life’s work that seemed to be utterly consistent and marked by unqualified devotion. At the same time, this last propaganda performance also revealed Goebbels’s great psychological dependence on Hitler. With the Führer’s suicide, his own life, too, seemed to have lost all meaning. Indeed, for Goebbels and his wife the continuing existence of their own family after Hitler’s death was unthinkable, since they regarded their family as Hitler’s family, too. This absolute reliance on Hitler was to be made into a virtue by suicide: faithfulness unto death.

  Throughout his life Joseph Goebbels was driven by an exceptional craving for recognition by others. He was positively addicted to others’ admiration. It was fundamentally impossible for this addiction to be satisfied. It revealed itself, for example, in the delight he continued to take, after so many years in the business, as propaganda minister and overlord of the Third Reich’s public sphere, in the fanfares with which the media—controlled by himself—greeted his speeches, and in their appreciative comments on them. He regularly noted such “successes” in his diary.

  His character fulfilled all the essential criteria recognized in current psychoanalytic practice as defining a narcissistically disturbed personality.11 On the one hand, there was the yearning for recognition and the powerful urge to be seen as great and unique, already highly developed in his early years; the megalomaniac fantasies about his future role in the world; the pride and arrogance; the lack of empathy for others; and the tendency to exploit personal relationships with icy detachment for personal ends. On the other hand, there was his readiness to subordinate himself without reservation to some supposedly greater personality and not least the bouts of depression he suffered whenever the anticipated outstanding success failed to materialize. In order to appease this hunger, Goebbels—privately deeply insecure about his impact on others—needed constant praise and recognition from an idol to whom he completely subordinated himself. From 1924 onward, this idol was Adolf Hitler. By constantly confirming Goebbels’s exceptional brilliance, Hitler gave him the stability he needed to maintain control over his life, a stability otherwise lacking in this unbalanced personality.

  There is no doubt that a narcissistic craving for recognition was the main driving force behind Goebbels’s career. He clearly manifested the chief characteristics of this addiction: conceit; a restless obsession with work; unreserved self-subjugation to an idol; disdain for other human relationships; and a willingness to place himself beyond generally accepted moral norms in pursuit of his own ends.

  Goebbels’s aim in life was to prove that he, Joseph Goebbels, was able to unite the German people behind his own political idol and leader, Adolf Hitler. In seeking to fix this conviction in people’s minds, Goebbels produced and left behind a vast amount of material. There is the flood of printed matter, film footage, and audio recordings generated by the propaganda machine he directed; the enormous volume of contemporary reports on the public mood, indicating the success of this propaganda effort; and finally his diaries, edited between 1993 and 2008 by Elke Fröhlich of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History and comprising thirty-two volumes. The diary was above all intended to document his success.12

  He himself set forth the individual chapters of this success story in full: the rise of a not especially privileged man of the people to the position of spokesman for a “socialist” National Socialist Party in western Germany; the conqueror of “red Berlin” and creator of a “Führer” aura around the figure of Hitler by adroit use of propaganda between 1926 and 1933; the man who united the masses into a “national community” behind Hitler in the years after 1933; and finally the closest supporter of his leader, spurring the German people to a supreme effort in wartime. The core of this autobiographical narrative has survived to this day in various forms, al
beit in a negative context. Ever since Goebbels’s death, the material created by him and his colleagues has been put to multimedia use and has remained influential. No film, no schoolbook, no popular or academic treatment of the Third Reich can manage without this material. Everyone now knows what is meant by “Goebbels propaganda.” No one looking for an explanation for the obvious support the Nazi system enjoyed among the great majority of the German population can afford to overlook Joseph Goebbels.

  A particular challenge facing the propaganda minister’s biographer is that of questioning the self-portrait so effectively created by Goebbels and thoroughly revising his historical role. The biographer’s chief problem from the outset is, in fact, that the vast mass of material about the propaganda minister and Gauleiter of Berlin originates either with him or with his propaganda machine and was presented for the purpose of demonstrating the preeminence and unique historical success of Joseph Goebbels. However, closer analysis reveals that the large number of texts Goebbels wrote about himself and the wealth of material that his propaganda machine used to document his influence offer a surprising number of starting points for deconstructing the self-image Goebbels projected.

  As the author and chief propagandist of the Third Reich, Goebbels was concerned above all to hold up a mirror with which to admire a larger-than-life reflection of himself. Gazing into this mirror, he could give full vent to his narcissistic cravings. Lacking both inner balance and external confidence and profoundly mistrusting his effect on other people, he needed constant affirmation that the magnificent image in the mirror really did represent him, Joseph Goebbels. He derived this affirmation from the leader he had chosen, a leader sent from God, as he supposed, to whom he subordinated himself. The more completely he subjugated himself, the more weight he ascribed to the judgment of this idol.

  The mountains of evidence Goebbels left to posterity that demonstrate his self-affirmation and self-adulation in fact serve to bring out very clearly his insecurity, his dependence, and his overwhelming conceit. In this historical biography, first and foremost concerned with the question of the part played by Goebbels in the leadership of the Third Reich, insights gained into the deficiencies of his personality can help to develop wider perspectives. A particular purpose of this biography is to open the way to an analysis of the construction and modus operandi of the Nazi propaganda apparatus.