Authors: Heinrich Fraenkel,Roger Manvell
B006OAL1QM EBOK
“Our broadcasts in English are, after all, very effective. However, an aggressive, superior, and insulting tone gets us nowhere. I have often said so to our various departments. You can only get anywhere with the English by talking to them in a friendly and modest way. The English speaker, Lord Haw-Haw, is especially good at biting criticism, but in my mind the time for spicy debate is past … during the third year of a war one must wage it quite differently from the first year … today they want nothing but facts. The more cleverly, therefore, the facts are put together, and the more psychologically and sensitively they are brought before the listening public, the stronger is the effect.”
Dr Joseph Goebbels
“The ‘little doctor’ was probably the most intelligent, from a purely brain point of view, of all the Nazi leaders. He never speechified; he always saw and stuck to the point; he was an able debater, and, in private conversation astonishingly fair-minded and reasonable.”
Sir Neville Henderson
British Ambassador to Germany, 1937-1939
Dr Joseph Goebbels, 1933
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Skyhorse edition: ISBN 978-1-61608-029-7
Frontline edition: ISBN 978-1-84832-588-3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manvell, Roger, 1909-1987.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death : his life and death / Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel.
p. cm.
Originally published: London, Heinemann, 1960.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61608-029-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Goebbels, Joseph, 1897-1945. 2. Nazis--Biography. 3. Propaganda, German--History--20th century. 4. Germany--Politics and government--1918-1933. 5. Germany--Politics and government--1933-1945. 6. Germany. Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda. I. Fraenkel, Heinrich, 1897-1986. II. Title. III. Title: Dr. Goebbels.
DD247.G6M33 2010
943.085092--dc22
[B]
2010001788
A CIP data record for this title is available from the British Library.
Printed in Canada
Contents
Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment
Appendix A: Chief Events in the Life of Goebbels
Acknowledgments
O
UR THANKS
are due to the Wiener Library in London and to the Institut fiir Zeitgeschichte in Munich for their unfailing and courteous assistance. We would also like to acknowledge the help we have received from the Verlag Ullstein Bilderdienst in Berlin, the Hulton Picture Library and the National Film Archive in London during the period we were compiling the illustrations that appear in this volume.
We also wish to acknowledge permission to quote from the following published works:
In the Shelter with Hitler,
by Gerhard Boldt, by permission of Messrs. Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd.;
Failure of a Mission,
by Sir Nevile Henderson, by permission of Mr. Raymond Savage, Literary Executor for the late Sir Nevile Henderson;
The Goebbels' Diaries,
translated by Louis P. Lochner, by permission of Hamish Hamilton Ltd;
My Part in Germany's Fight,
by Joseph Goebbels (1935), by permission of Hurst and Blackett;
The Hitler I Knew,
by Otto Dietrich, published by Methuen;
Hitler's Table Talk,
published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson;
Radio goes to War,
by Charles J. Rollo, published by Faber and Faber. Acknowledgment should also be made to Dr. Rudolf Semmler for permission to quote from his book,
Goebbels the Man next to Hitler,
to Professor H. R. Trevor-Roper and Messrs. Macmillan and Co. for their courtesy in permitting us to reproduce the sketch-plan of the Bunker from
The Last Days of Hitler,
and to M. Francois Genoud for permission to quote from Goebbels' private letters, from his 1925-26 Diary, from his
Michael
and
Kampf um Berlin,
from his Last Testament and from miscellaneous broadcasts, speeches and articles by Goebbels.
R
OGER MANVELL
H
EINRICH FRAENKEL
Illustrations
Goebbels at the Rheydt Gymnasium, 1916
Hitler with Nazi officials, 1926
Goebbels' office in Berlin, 1927
Mjolnir cartoons in
Der Angriff
Pogrom against Jewish-owned shops
With his bodyguard of Storm-Troopers, 1933
Addressing a rally of Storm-Troopers, 1934
INTRODUCTION
The Search for the Facts
J
OSEPH
G
OEBBELS
has many claims to be considered the most interesting member of the Nazi leadership apart from Hitler himself. But his place in the earlier history of the Nazi movement is frequently obscured by legends that he was himself responsible either for inventing or fostering, mainly for the purpose of making it appear that he joined the movement much earlier than in fact he did.
Neither Heinrich Fraenkel nor I fully realised the extraordinary character we should discover when we began the research that lies behind this story of Goebbels' personal character and his unique career as a professional agitator and propagandist. The self-portrait that Goebbels was in a most favourable position to create once he came to power has very largely come to be accepted by those who have written about him either in the form of individual studies or in studies of the Nazi movement as a whole.
Long before we planned to write this book together Heinrich Fraenkel had already collected sufficient facts, stories and unpublished testimonies to make him realise that Goebbels' life and character would repay much more detailed investigation. He himself escaped from Germany just in time to avoid being arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire, and he subsequently took part in the foundation of the Free German movement in Britain. He also assisted at the independent legal investigations into the causes of the fire which were conducted in Britain by Sir Stafford Cripps and other world-famous lawyers, and he has written a number of books and pamphlets on Germany under the Nazis.
After the war was over Heinrich Fraenkel visited the Nuremberg Trials, and was able to obtain first-hand information from many of those who had been directly associated with Hitler and Goebbels, including von Papen, Otto Strasser, Hans Fritzsche, Max Winckler, Hjalmar Schacht, Walther Funk and Karl Kaufmann. He was also familiar professionally with the German film world, and he has made a special study of the effect the Nazi régime had on the film industry and on those who remained in Germany and worked in film production under Goebbels' supervision.
Nevertheless a great deal remained to be explained about the character and career of Goebbels. It is true that he had been the subject of much popular journalism, of diaries and biographies written mainly under Nazi influence, and of incidental comment in innumerable books devoted to the history of the Third Reich and the enigmatic character of the Führer. In all this writing, good or bad, Goebbels seemed to be accepted mainly at face value, as a man interesting largely because of his proximity to Hitler. Only one biographer, Curt Riess, began in a book published ten years ago the fascinating task of uncovering what is the most important phase of Goebbels' life if one is to understand his nature and his actions once he rose to power. This phase is the difficult period of his youth up to the age of twenty-seven before he discovered the Nazis and they discovered him.
Here we were very fortunate. Heinrich Fraenkel went to Germany and with the help of Goebbels' sister, Maria Kimmich, obtained the necessary introductions which eventually enabled him to meet a number of people who had known Goebbels both as a boy and as a young man in Rheydt, his native town. There, among many others, he found one of Goebbels' school-teachers, Prelate Mollen, his closest school-friend, Fritz Prang (who subsequently introduced him to the Nazi Party) and Alma, who as a young school-teacher had known Goebbels well and had introduced him to Else, the girl to whom he was engaged for a number of years during the crucial period of his youth, 1922-26. Through Alma, Heinrich Fraenkel was introduced to Else herself, now a happily married woman living in Berlin. From all of these intimate friends and observers of Goebbels he obtained detailed information of him as a schoolboy, a student, a would-be writer and, finally, as an apprentice in political agitation. They have generously given us permission to quote from many of Goebbels' letters which throw a unique light on his mind and character at this time. In addition, the Albertus Magnus Society, the Catholic charitable organisation in Cologne which assisted him with his university education, opened its archives to us. These contained many important letters and reports written by Goebbels while he was a university student. All this information has been supplemented by Goebbels' sister, Maria.
We have also had the advantage of being able to study in detail the unpublished, hand-written diary kept by Goebbels during the years 1925 and 1926—the period of his service as a Nazi agent in the Rhine-land-Westphalia district and of his decision finally to work for Hitler's faction in the movement rather than for the Strassers, who were his first employers. This diary has never before been analysed in any detail, and we owe a great debt to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, California, from which we obtained the loan of a microfilm of the diary.
Once Goebbels came to power alongside Hitler, his personal story is closely bound up with the history of the Third Reich to which he devoted every hour of his working life. It is not, of course, our intention to re-tell the long and complex story of Hitler's rise to power and of Germany under his rule. That has been most ably done by others, notably by Dr. Alan Bullock in his detailed and scholarly life of Hitler. Our book is the portrait of one man only, Joseph Goebbels, who took a leading part in this most significant phase of our contemporary history, and of the propaganda methods he devised to assist Hitler achieve and maintain his power. Such account as we give of the history of the Nazi movement is sufficient only to make clear the reasons for Goebbels' opinions and actions.
In our study of Goebbels as Reichsminister we have also been fortunate in having the help of Karl Kaufmann, who became Nazi Gauleiter of Hamburg, and Werner Naumann, who became Goebbels' Under-Secretary of State at the Propaganda Ministry, and was with him in the Führerbunker at the time of his death. The personal accounts given us by these men and many others who worked with Goebbels in either senior or junior capacities have supplemented such important published evidence as can be found in the little-known diaries of his aides, Wilfred von Oven and Rudolf Semmler. The latter has also been of great assistance by adding his personal comments to what has been published. We are also deeply grateful to Frau Lida Baarova for her assistance in making it possible for the authentic story of her association with Goebbels to be published for the first time. The important research work done by Karl Lochner in editing certain other surviving fragments of Goebbels' later diaries puts every student of the man and the period in his debt. Goebbels never ceased throughout his whole career to comment almost daily on his experiences and to commit to paper at formidable length his views on contemporary events and persons, including the other Nazi leaders, most of whom he detested. There is evidence that the microfilmed record of these diaries which he ordered to be photographed during the last months of the war is now in Russian hands, but, apart from the fragments of typescript and manuscript held at Stanford, they remain unpublished. It is to be hoped these millions of words will one day be made available for study. Our efforts to obtain information concerning the survival of these documents in the Soviet Union have not yet been successful.
The full story of Goebbels as a man and a propagandist of genius is of the greatest psychological interest; both his public and his private life were beset with difficulties mainly of his own making through his pathological vanity. Goebbels has often been thought an unlikely person to be found among the strong-armed Nazi leadership, yet he was second only to Hitler in understanding the exploitation of power. Without him the movement might never have gained its ascendancy in Germany during the crucial years of 1932 and 1933. It could be argued that only Hitler and Goebbels prove to have had both the intuitive and the practical knowledge of how to establish this ascendancy in Germany. Goebbels had a fanatical capacity for hard work, for constant public speaking and agitation through the press and radio, and for attending to the details of organisation and administration. When the crisis came in 1944-45, he alone among the original group of Nazi leaders stood loyally by Hitler and the myth of racial power they had created. They died together in order to preserve this myth in the minds of the disintegrating German people whom they had mercilessly sacrificed in the fatal pursuit of total war. When Hitler was dead Goebbels himself became for the few hours of life left to him Reich Chancellor, head of a State contracted now to a few crumbling streets. Then he placed himself on the Nazi funeral pyre, taking his wife and their six children with him.
Goebbels' career is without any parallel in history. It would, in fact, have been an impossibility without the instruments of modern power-propaganda—the popular press, the radio, the film, the loud-speaker and all the complex machinery that lay behind the organisation, regimentation and the recording of mass demonstrations. If we are wiser now, which is doubtful, it is because Goebbels showed how it could be done by a master in the technique of such forms of propaganda. Both the radio and the sound film were in their infancy when he adopted them to help make people in Germany deluded enough or hysterical enough to give Hitler's régime the degree of power necessary to take the ultimate step and subject the German State to their will, and finally to lead them into the most destructive war the world has known. To understand how this was achieved in so few years it is necessary to understand not only Hitler himself but the curious, repellent, dangerous and yet fascinating character of Joseph Goebbels.
R
OGER
M
ANVELL