Peter Longerich - Goebbels: A Biography

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.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE 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 .

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, 18971945. 2. NazisBiography. 3. Germany

History19181933. 4. GermanyHistory19331945. 5. World War, 19391945

Germany. 6. National socialism. I. Title.

DD247.G6L6513 2014

943.086092dc23 [B] 2014004828

eBook ISBN9780812996883

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

On April 30, 1945, a few hours after becoming Reich chancellor following Hitlers 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 Hitlers 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 Dnitz 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 attach 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.

Goebbels now decided to inform Dnitz of Hitlers death and the Fhrers 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. 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 Hitlers personal physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger.

By April 28, Magda and Joseph Goebbels had already written farewell letters to Harald Quandt, Magdas 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.

Hitlers adjutant, Gnther Schwgermann, 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 Schwgermanns 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 Fhrer that stood on his desk. Schwgermann 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, Schwgermann found the couples motionless bodiesboth seemed to have taken poison

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 Hitlers 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 Gring and Albert Speer surrendered to the Allies. Goebbels was the only member of Hitlers innermost circle to hold out in the bunker and ultimately follow him in committing suicideand 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 lifes 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 Hitlers 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 lifes course into a lifes work that seemed to be utterly consistent and marked by unqualified devotion. At the same time, this last propaganda performance also revealed Goebbelss great psychological dependence on Hitler. With the Fhrers 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 Hitlers death was unthinkable, since they regarded their family as Hitlers 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 Reichs public sphere, in the fanfares with which the mediacontrolled by himselfgreeted his speeches, and in their appreciative comments on them. He regularly noted such successes in his diary.