Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

Goebbels


GoebbelsGOEBBELSGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 1David IrvingGoebbels.Mastermind of the Third Reich“David Irving is in the first rank of Britain’shistorical chroniclers”—THE TIMES© Parforce Ltd, London, 1996A Note on the Internet Edition.Ê Ê This biography went through half a dozen drafts between thehandwritten original and the printed book. The final typescript was completed on September 7,1994, and submitted to St Martins Press (SMP) that winter. That is the full-length text reproducedhere.After the contract was signed, the biography went through the normal editing processes, beingappraised, according to SMP’s editor John Douglas, by seven different editors.At SMP’s suggestion the earlier chapters were substantially cut back in editing. In February 1996the “Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith,” a New York based Jewish body, began agitatingagainst SMP and Doubleday Inc., who had announced this work as their History Book Club selectionfor May 1996. The publishers initially announced that they would not surrender to the ADL intimidation,but on April 6, 1996 they did just that. The book never appeared in the United States. [For moredetail: http://www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/SMPIndex.html].This Internet edition is the gift of the author and his publishing imprint Focal Point to the academicand student world. We ask only that the intellectual and copyrights be respected.2 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHCopyright © 1996, Parforce (UK) Ltd.Copyright Website edition © Focal Point Publications 1999All rights reserved.No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be madewithout written permission. Copies may be downloaded from our websitefor research purposes only. No part of this publication may be commerciallyreproduced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission inaccordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.This edition first published 1996 by FOCAL POINT PUBLICATIONS,81 Duke Street, London W1M 5DJBritish Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 1 872197 13 2Paper edition printed and bound in Great Britain byButler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London; and by Biddles Ltd, Guildford,SurreyIN MEMORY OFMICHAEL SHEPPARDWHO CLIMBED TOO FARGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 3ContentsAcknowledgements ......................................................................................... 5Prologue: The Mark of Cain ................................................................. 14I: The Hater of Mankind1: Eros Awakes ............................................................................... 232: Prodigal Son .............................................................................. 413: ‘A Wandering Scholar, I’ ................................................................ 484: The Little Agitator ....................................................................... 645: God Disposes Otherwise ............................................................... 76II: The Gauleiter of Berlin6: The Opium Den .......................................................................... 907: Fighting the Ugly Dragon ............................................................. 1138: Anka is to Blame........................................................................ 1299: Conjuring up Spirits ................................................................... 13910: A Rather Obstinate Gentleman .................................................... 15411: The Nightmare ........................................................................ 16512: Hold the Flag High ................................................................... 17513: His Week in Court ................................................................... 19214: A Blonde in the Archives ............................................................ 20615: Maria Magdalena Quandt ........................................................... 21616: The Stranger and the Shadow....................................................... 23517: The Man of Tomorrow ............................................................... 25318: Follow that Man ...................................................................... 26819: ‘It’s all Fixed!’ ......................................................................... 284III: The Reich Minister20: The Big Lie ............................................................................. 29021: Bonfire of the Books ................................................................. 30422: Twilight of the Gods and Tally-ho .................................................. 32223: Inkpot Hero ........................................................................... 34324: While Crowds Exult below.......................................................... 36125: A Man of Property ................................................................... 38526: Femme Fatale ......................................................................... 3944 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH27: The Round Table ...................................................................... 40828: Something about March ............................................................. 42729: The Gambler .......................................................................... 44730: Duty put on Hold .................................................................... 46531: The Real Chum ....................................................................... 47732: Broken Glass .......................................................................... 48833: On the Verge .......................................................................... 50934: Put Poland on Page Two ............................................................. 527IV: The Propaganda Warrior35: Pact with the Devil ................................................................... 54536: War ...................................................................................... 56137: Propaganda Means Repetition...................................................... 58138: Knocking out Front Teeth ........................................................... 59039: Breaking Even ......................................................................... 60640: A Few Choice Drops of Poison ..................................................... 62241: The Malodorous Thing ............................................................... 64042: No Room for Two of Us ............................................................. 65143: Exodus ................................................................................. 67144: A Fate which Beggars all Description ............................................. 68845: At any Price ........................................................................... 70546: The Road to Stalingrad .............................................................. 71747: Things have not Panned out ......................................................... 73348: Sin Will Pluck on Sin ................................................................. 75049: The Katyn Massacre .................................................................. 76650: The First Battle of Berlin ............................................................ 78051: The White Suit Bespattered ........................................................ 79452: When the Going gets Tough ......................................................... 80853: The Long-Awaited Day .............................................................. 82554: Valkyrie ................................................................................. 83955: Total War ............................................................................... 853V: The Loyal Henchman56: The Spectre of the Hangman........................................................ 86957: Kill off the Prisoners ................................................................. 88358: Death of Another Empress .......................................................... 89659: The Man of the Century ............................................................. 905Epilogue: ‘Ever at your Side’ ............................................................. 927GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 5AcknowledgementsWRITING THIS BIOGRAPHY, I have lived in the evil shadow of Dr Joseph Goebbels forover six years.Four years into the ordeal, I had the immense good fortune to become the first—and so far only—person to open the complete microfiche record, made by the Nazisin 1944/1945, of Goebbels’ entire private diaries and papers from 1923 to 1945;the Red Army had placed these in the secret Soviet state archives in Moscow. Therethey languished until the ninety or so original Agfa boxes containing the 1,600 glassplates, on which Goebbels had had the diaries filmed for safety, were discovered bythe Goebbels Diaries expert Dr Elke Fröhlich in March 1992. (On behalf of all historiansof the period I place on record here our gratitude for the work she has doneon the diaries.) I was able to use them myself in June and July of the same year,probably the first person to have untied the string on those boxes since 1945. Withthe support of Dr VÊ P Tarasov, chief of the Russian federation’s archives, and Dr V NBondarev, chief of the former Soviet secret state archives, I was able to retrieve orcopy some five hundred pages of the most important missing passages of the diary,including Goebbels’ first diary, begun in 1923, the 1933 Reichstag fire, the 1934Röhm Putsch, the 1938 Kristallnacht, the months before the outbreak of war in1939 and many other historically significant episodes. The conditions in these archivesin Moscow’s Viborg street were, it must be said, challenging: Soviet archiveswere designed for keeping things secret, and the very notion of a public researchroom was alien to them. This one had no microfilm or microfiche reader. After strugglingto read the 1,600 fragile glass microfiches (some 80,000 pages) with a thumbnail-sized 12x magnifier on