The End of the Road
[In the following review, Jacobson considers the historical value of Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels.]
Not even the publishers of Final Entries 1945 claim that the diaries which Joseph Goebbels kept during the last two months of his life, and which have belatedly been made available by the East German government, contain new historical facts of any importance. How could they? By the time these entries begin, the Nazis were in effect defeated; nothing that Adolf Hitler's Minister of Propaganda could say—and little enough that his master could do—would make much difference to what was happening outside the German capital, or even inside it. The Russian and Anglo-American armies would continue to advance; German troops would continue to retreat or to surrender in large numbers; the entire edifice of the Third Reich, and all its systems of command and information, would continue to disinte-grate rapidly. The sole interest of the diaries, therefore, lies precisely in their revelation of what a man like Goebbels tells himself at such a time: when he sees slipping away from him, minute by minute, the power which he and his fellow-gangsters had enjoyed almost unchecked for more than a decade.
That the diaries are unspeakably depressing to read goes without saying. Given the nature of the regime Goebbels had both served and helped to inspire, it could not be otherwise. What may come as more of a surprise, however, is their childishness. This does not make one feel any better about them. On the contrary.
Consider the situation. The war which had devastated Europe was drawing to its end. Horror upon horror was being uncovered by the Allied armies, as each concentration camp and death factory was overrun. Large parts of Germany itself were in ruins. These were the achievements of the regime of which this man had been the chief agitator and spokesman. Now the hour of—no, not retribution, for no retribution was possible, or even imaginable—but the hour of defeat had arrived. Nevertheless, until about two weeks before his suicide he went on dictating to his secretaries, as he had done for years, a daily record both of the position on the various war fronts, as transmitted to him by the military command, and of his own reactions to these developments, as man, minister, Gauleiter of Berlin, and confidant of the Fuehrer. Of what do these reactions speak? Remorse? None. Self-analysis? None. Political retrospection? None. Impotent rage, irrelevant and inexhaustible blaming of others, fantasies of revenge, expressions of slavish adoration toward the father-figure of his leader, boasts about his own mythical achievements in stemming the crisis, detailed plans for a future which could not under any conceivable circumstances be realized—of these, and of combinations of these, no end.
Let me give some examples. The Allied armies, as I have said, are astride Germany and are advancing steadily, and the Allied air forces have total mastery of the German skies. But—"The workers' strikes now flaring up both in England and the USA, however, are more important." "The situation in the enemy-occupied regions is becoming increasingly menacing. Here is a great opportunity for us." "Our sole great hope at present lies in the U-boat war. Our Western enemies are very worried abut it." "On the enemy side, time presses as never before." "The political crisis in the enemy camp is growing to considerable magnitude." Over and over again, it is true, the writer will admit that none of these factors seems in itself sufficient to change the fundamental drift of events; but one soon realizes that there is something curious about these admissions. They are not made in order genuinely to qualify or to question the assertions they accompany; rather, they are demonstrations by Goebbels to himself that he is in fact being realistic, he is not merely indulging in daydreams. In other words, they are there to reinforce the fantasy, not to destroy it. "I am convinced that this political crisis [among the Allies] could quickly be made to flare up, if it was not continually being pushed into the background by the enemy's military victories."
Who is to blame for these enemy victories? According to the diaries, one man chiefly: Hermann Goering. The general staff are cowards, the mayors and Gauleiters of the devastated German cities are not showing the resolution that could be expected of them, Himmler lacks "the divine spark," there are looters and deserters everywhere. But what has brought these moral failings to the surface is above all else the bombing of the German cities; and for that Goering is responsible. If only he could be shown the door, the position might soon be restored. "Bemedalled idiots and vain perfumed coxcombs have no place in our war leadership." "I rage inwardly when I think that despite all the good reasons and arguments, it is not possible to persuade the Fuehrer to make a change here." "It is simply ridiculous to show any sympathy now for a man who has brought the Reich into such mortal crisis." "All those present at the fire [after an air raid] voiced only scorn and hatred for Goering.… I beg the Fuehrer yet again to take action, because things cannot go on like this."
That is as near as he ever comes to criticism of his Fuehrer. For the rest, Hitler's wisdom, strength, and moral and intellectual capacities are beyond all questioning. Full of a habitual, self-vaunting callousness and cruelty though these diaries are, they speak of Hitler in tones of fainting, sentimental veneration. "The Fuehrer gives me a very stalwart impression once more.… His steadfastness is admirable. If anyone can master this crisis, he can. Throughout the length and breadth of the land there is no one who can hold a candle to him." But no single quotation or group of quotations can convey the tone of soggy, dog-like worship which informs the pages upon pages of the diary devoted to accounts of his face-to-face meetings with Hitler, or the unction with which he reports Hitler's compliments to him, or the sycophantic glee with which he describes his renewed closeness to Hitler, brought about by the crisis. "The Fuehrer no longer holds back anything from me." "The Fuehrer had high praise for the simplicity and purity of my family life."
In any event, the Fuehrer's praise can always be supplemented by his own praise for himself. "I set out yet again in a calm, totally assured and lofty vein the arguments capable of giving the German people hope of victory." Sometimes he will go even farther, and impute to his audiences, without any supporting evidence, the praise he feels they must be giving to him. The effect of this can be unconsciously comic, on occasion. "The broadcast makes an extraordinarily strong impression, for it radiates a strong fighting spirit." "I give these men [some troops just behind the front-line] watchwords for the present situation, reinforcing them with a series of historical examples which carry much conviction, particularly in this area. One can imagine the effect of such a speech on an assembly such as this."
As for the Jews: "Anyone in a position to do so should kill off these Jews like rats. In Germany, thank God, we have already done a fairly complete job." Other groups, large and small, German and non-German, are unfortunately out of his reach; but he promises himself that their turn will come. Or rather, that his turn will come again. Then they will be made to suffer. In the meantime, he tries to bring that day nearer by magical curses and incantations—some of the kind quoted a few paragraphs above, others more specific in nature. Thus on March 6, 1945 he reports: "There is definite fear of the Rhine [among the Allied commanders]. The British and Americans naturally realize that in the middle of Ger-many they cannot carry out an amphibious operation like that of last summer. There are far too many obstacles for that." Two days later: "This evening alarming news comes … that the Americans have succeeded in forming a small bridgehead on the right-hand bank of the Rhine. I cannot confirm the accuracy of this information, since communications to the west are not working. I regard it as more or less out of the question however." So much for that. "The reports both of Dr. Ley and Speer are extremely alarming. I assume, however, that they are much influenced by what they have seen in the west and cannot look at these matters from the necessary distance.… I refuse to be deterred by reports of so-called eye-witnesses." So much for them.
One could go on and on, accumulating such grotesqueries and absurdities. But enough. The psychological processes at work are sufficiently plain and familiar; childish they indeed are. But if that word is to be given the force it should have, there are two important points to be added here. Inevitably both are cheerless. First: among the variety of psychic mechanisms which enabled Goebbels to keep going until the very end, the one which was not childish in any way was his impregnable, even crazed, moral self-righteousness. Roosevelt, declares Hitler's propagandist-in-chief, is "megalomaniac" and "reckless"; Churchill "rides roughshod over all criticism"; the allies are full of "victory hysteria" and "victory psychosis," and need (again and again) "to be sobered up"; the foreign workers in Germany "will undoubtedly be our best propagandists after the war"; the behavior of the Allies, who show no respect for Germany's cultural monuments, "literally brings blushes to the cheeks"; the world as a whole is a place "of contradiction, mendacity, and hypocrisy inconceivable in one's wildest dreams." This kind of self-exaltation, this capacity for seeing oneself as the very embodiment of precious moral and cultural values, is quite beyond the reach of any child. For that you need to have had the experience of a protracted literary and religious education, years of embittered failure and struggle, a hatefilled ideology that eventually brings you success, the support of a dictatorial party and state, the hysterical adulation of mass meetings and of hired or terrorized media, the admiration and caresses of kept women, the applause of flunkeys and foreign potentates.
The second point is that to speak of a political leader as "childish" is not in the least to say anything dismissive about him. Far from it. Unimpeded and unashamed access to the crudest emotions and mental processes of early childhood of the kind which Goebbels evidently had, can in fact be a source of immeasurable strength in public life. Hence his power as a propagandist in compelling the world to conform to his own fantasies; hence the tenacity with which he could cling to those fantasies when the world had at last grown recalcitrant. If it be objected that these diaries show him in extremis, or virtually so, and that they can therefore offer no guide to his "real" self, I can only reply that they seem to me perfectly continuous with what was revealed in the earlier diaries (1942-43), published about thirty years ago, or the extracts from his execrable, post-adolescent novel, Michael, which appear in the biography by Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel. Of course there are differences too. The circumstances were different. But the man remains the same; so does the deformed, vindictive child within him; and so does the relationship between the two.
It is entirely appropriate that he should have taken his own life, once Hitler was dead. That he should have taken with him his wife and six children is also fitting.
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Propagandist as Propagandee