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| Diario de Goebbels, 27-3-1942. |
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Ya en el año 2009 nos planteábamos aquí si los Diarios de Goebbels y las Memorias de Eichmann no eran suficientes para acreditar la existencia del Holocausto de manera incontrovertible. La entrada del 27 de marzo de 1942 dejaba poco margen a las dudas:
Empezando por Lublin, los judíos del Gobierno General están siendo evacuados hacia el Este. El procedimiento es un poco bárbaro y no es preciso describirlo detalladamente aquí. No quedarán muchos judíos. En conjunto puede decirse que el 60 por 100 tendrán que ser liquidados. / Quedan únicamente un 40 por 100 para ser utilizados en trabajos forzados.
Este pasaje se encuentra en la p. 144 de mi ejemplar de los Diarios de Joseph Goebbels (Barcelona, Plaza&Janés, 1967). Por supuesto, he verificado la cita en el original alemán que puede encontraerse on line, pp. 1776-1777.
Faltaba sólo comprobar que no se tratara de una falsificación, gestión que sólo he podido realizar diez años después. Fue nada menos que el propio David Irving quien nos sacó de dudas con un artículo titulado Revelations from Goebbels' Diary, cuyo texto en inglés, dada su importancia, reproducimos íntegramente al final del presente post. De dicho artículo cabe destacar los siguientes pasajes, donde se menciona expresamente la entrada de 27 de marzo de 1942:
More chilling is another diary entry a few weeks later. On
March 27, 1942, Goebbels dictates a lengthy passage about another SS
document that had been submitted to him, and which appears to have been
much uglier in its content. “Beginning with Lublin,” he states, “the
Jews are now being deported eastward from the General Government
[occupied Poland]. The procedure is pretty barbaric and one that beggars
description, and there’s not much left of the Jews. Broadly speaking
one can probably say that 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated,
while only 40 percent can be put to work.” / It’s a very
ugly passage, and it’s easy to link this diary passage with everything
we’ve seen in the movies and on television since then. He’s describing
“Schindler’s List” here – or is he? I don’t know. All he’s actually
saying here is that the Jews are having a pretty rigorous time. They’re
being deported, it’s happening in a systematic way, and not many of them
are going to survive it. / When I visited the Hoover
Institution library in Stanford, California, to see the portion of the
original Goebbels diary that they have there, this was the first page I
asked to see. And when I was in the Moscow archives to examine the glass
plate copy of the diary, this was also the first plate I searched for. I
knew that if the diary had actually been copied by the Nazis in Berlin,
and the glass plate version in Moscow matches the text in the Hoover
library, there’s no way anyone could have faked it. And there it is on
the glass plate in Moscow, identical.
Me parece que, después de esto, pocas dudas pueden quedar ya sobre la "existencia real" del Holocausto. Otra cosa serán sus dimensiones y los métodos utilizados, pero aunque el empleo de cámaras de gas haya sido "exagerado" (D. J. Goldhagen) y las cifras de víctimas no se correspondan con los famosos seis millones, tanto la tesis negacionista como la revisionista, a saber, que no existió un plan estatal alemán de exterminio de los judíos, se derrumba. La entrada del 27 de marzo de 1942 afecta así mismo a la tesis funcionalista, la cual acepta que hubo exterminio pero no una orden de Hitler: es imposible que el Führer ignorara aquéllo que el propio Goebbels le atribuye:
También en este punto el Führer es el campeón incansable de una solución radical que exigen las circunstancias y que ha de ser inexorable. Afortunadamente, la guerra nos ofrece una larga serie de posibilidades que no tendríamos en tiempo de paz. Tenemos que aprovecharlas (op. cit., ibidem).
Por tanto, a menos que alguien pueda demostrar la falsedad de esta entrada del Diario de Goebbels, Hitler ordenó el Holocausto. A despecho de lo que se haya dicho (por ejemplo en el opúsculo "Dos pasajes conflictivos de los Diarios de Goebbels"), no existe ninguna entrada posterior del Diario de Goebbels que permita concluir el carácter puramente especulativo de la entrada de 27 de marzo de 1942. Goebbels habla de unos hechos que están sucediendo en tiempo real y de unos métodos singulares (y "bárbaros") de exterminio que han sido puestos ya en práctica. No expresa la idea de lo que se debería hacer o se hará en el futuro, sino que informa de un factum, de un proceso real cuya consumación será la liquidación física del 60% de los judíos:
El anterior gauleiter de Viena, que está llevando a la práctica estas medidas, cumple sus instrucciones con una considerable circunspección y en forma que no llama demasiado la atención. Sobre los judíos cae una sentencia que, aún siendo bárbara, la merecen por entero. (op. cit., ibidem).
Las entradas anteriores y posteriores del Diario donde se habla del traslado de los judíos a Madagascar, Siberia, África central, etc., no son contradictorias, como se ha pretrendido, con el sentido de la entrada del 27 de marzo de 1942, porque ésta aclara que se espera exterminar al 60% de los judíos, no a todos ellos hasta el último, con lo cual sobreviviría un 40% que podría ser ulteriormente objeto de una postrera deportación.
Por si fuera poco ---aunque de esta cuestión nos ocuparemos en otro post--- los Diarios de Goebbels autentifican, por decirlo así, el relato de las Memorias de Eichmann. En efecto, una vez aceptada la existencia de un plan de exterminio de los judíos ordenado por Adolf Hitler, ¿qué motivos quedan ya para cuestionar a priori la veracidad del testimonio de Eichmann? Ninguno. Es el final del revisionismo, es decir, la demostración de que el Holocausto no fue un mero invento de la propaganda aliada, sino que ---aunque exagerado y manipulado con fines políticos obvios--- realmente existió.
Esto será así a menos que alguien me presente una contra-prueba que cuestione la autenticidad de los Diarios de Goebbels. Queda abierta, pues, esta posibilidad, pero no me consta que los revisionistas, desde la fecha en que se publicó el artículo de Irving ---febrero de 1995---, hayan demostrado que el documento-fuente (the private
diary of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, microfilmed
on eighteen hundred glass plates) sea una falsificación.
Jaume Farrerons
Doctor en Filosofía y Ciencias de la Educación
La Marca Hispánica, 24 de octubre de 2019
(Continuará).
DOCUMENTACIÓN ANEXA
Revelations from Goebbels’ Diary
Bringing to Light Secrets of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister
David Irving
Fuente:
At the last IHR Conference, in October 1992, I spoke about my visit
to the secret Soviet state archives in Moscow, where I found the private
diary of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, microfilmed
on eighteen hundred glass plates. [See: D. Irving, “The Suppressed
Eichmann and Goebbels Papers,” March–April 1993 Journal, pp. 14–25.]
I can’t tell you just who tipped me off about this, as it would
breach confidentiality, but there are certain German historians who are
friendly to me, and one of them tipped me that the material was just
waiting to be found by someone. I went to Moscow and got this material –
to the unbounded rage of rival historians around the world, who
couldn’t believe that I, the “incorrigible,” “neo-Nazi,” “Fascist-scum”
historian, had got the stuff for which they had been looking for 50
years.
If you’re a historian dealing with the Third Reich, you know that
Goebbels’ diary must contain all the dirt from that era. And yet, all
the vital episodes of Third Reich history, the events we’re really
curious about – such as the June 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” when
Hitler ditched SA Brown Shirt leader Ernst Röhm, or the “Crystal Night”
in November 1938, or the Reichstag fire mystery, or the inside story of
the rise of the Nazi Party – are missing from the published Goebbels
diary, the portion that has been in the public domain for the last 40
years or so.
One way and another, portions have trickled out. First of all there
was the original typed Goebbels diary for parts of the years 1942 and
1943, which is now in the Hoover Institution library in Stanford,
California. [Edited by Louis Lochner, it was published in 1948.] The
National Archives in Washington acquired a sheaf of diary pages from
August 1941. The French somehow got April 1943, and the Hoover library
obtained six diary pages from July 1944.
Most importantly, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich
managed to get hold of further portions of the diary through
negotiations with the East German Communist authorities. [See, for
example, Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels. New York:
1978.]
But vital passages were missing even from these, among them the year
1944 – the year of D-Day, the Stauffenberg bomb plot, and the Battle of
the Bulge. And there were years for which only a couple of notebooks
have hitherto been available. One begins to suspect that somebody knew
they were sitting on a real treasure, and they weren’t going to release
it. By holding back the good stuff, they were acting in an almost
capitalistic manner.
In the end, I didn’t pay one bent nickel for this material. Visiting
Moscow in June 1992, I simply reminded the head of the Soviet state
archives that over the years three or four of my books had been
published in the former Soviet Union, and he just let me have the
material, assuming, I suppose, that I was therefore kosher.
It was a different situation when I returned for the second time in
July 1992 to complete the work. As the week progressed, I found it
getting stickier and stickier. They suddenly weren’t able to find the
boxes and files I’d seen the time before. I had to fight and plead and
holler, and they still weren’t turning up the stuff I really wanted. On
the last day, the secretary of the director came out to me and said:
“Mr. Irving, I’ve got a very embarrassing question to ask of you. Have
you been stealing any material from our archives?”
Now, this is something that a historian just doesn’t do. When you
work in the archives, you’re working on trust. You’ve an obligation to
posterity. You do not permanently remove stuff. I did, however, have an
arrangement with the director, who permitted me to remove certain glass
plates from the archives for copying because they didn’t have the
requisite facilities there. They didn’t even have a microfiche reader.
He allowed me to remove these glass plates on my honor, and bring them
back after having made the necessary photographic prints.
In an effort to stop me from gaining access, it turned out that
somebody had told the archives that I was stealing material. To resolve
the situation I signed a declaration stating that everything I had seen
in the archives was still there, and that nothing was missing. That was,
in fact, the truth.
The archives director was very pleased to have this declaration, and
the secretary added the pregnant words: “The information came from
Munich.” Once again my traditional enemies around the world were trying
to trip me up. It didn’t work because by that time I’d obtained 99
percent of the material I had on my “shopping list”: diary portions
dealing with the Kristallnacht, the “Night of the Long Knives,” the
Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor, all of 1944, the whole of the months
leading up to the outbreak of World War Two – everything. I’d gotten the
lot.
It was difficult, because, as I said, the Russians didn’t have a
microfiche reader. I suspected in advance that I might need one, because
in preparation for my trip to Moscow in the 1970s I had brought with me
toilet paper and a bath plug because I knew I wouldn’t find them in my
Moscow hotel. On this occasion I had thought to myself, “Suppose – it’s
incredible, I mean this is a state archives – but just suppose they
don’t have a microfiche reader. I’d better take something with me.” So I
went to Selfridge’s and asked for the most powerful magnifying glass
they had. What I didn’t know was that the more powerful the
magnification, the smaller the lens is. I wound up buying a 12x
magnifier that was about as big as my little fingernail. So during the
first week I was there, I had to hold it up like this to read those
glass plates. But if you don’t mind straining your eyesight, it works.
It’s quite an unusual feeling looking at the original Nazi microfiche
glass plates in the original Agfa boxes – there are eighteen hundred
plates, each with 25 or 40 images on them – a total of 70 or 80 thousand
pages of paper. And you know you are the first person to read them
since Goebbels, in 1944 and 1945, ordered the stuff to be preserved in
case of damage to the originals. No one knows now where his original
notebooks are, or what happened to them. They’re probably gone forever.
But fortunately they were preserved on glass plates, and I was the first
person to study them.
The Reichstag Fire
For example, I read for the first time Goebbels’ hand-written entry
about the Reichstag fire. As he described it, he was at his home with
Hitler on that evening of February 27, 1933, when the phone rang at nine
o’clock. It was the prankster “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, saying: “The
Reichstag’s on fire.” Goebbels remembered that he’d been had twice by
Hanfstaengl already that week, and he thought this was another prank, so
he just put the phone down. Hanfstaengl phoned again and said, “You’d
better listen to what I’m saying, The Reichstag’s on fire.” Goebbels
realized this could be serious after all, so he made a phone call to the
police station at the Brandenburg Gate, which confirmed that the
Reichstag was on fire. Thereupon he and Hitler jumped into a car and
drove straight to the Reichstag where they found their worst fears
confirmed. This is in the hand-written diary, it is obviously genuine,
and it confirms what we know from other sources.
Early Entries
Goebbels’ diary didn’t start in 1933 when the Nazis come to power; it
started when he was a student at Heidelberg University, and carries on
all the way until a few days before he commits suicide in 1945 with his
family in Hitler’s bunker. Never has there been such a contiguous source
of information for historians to use, but never has there been a source
more fraught with danger. Nobody’s diary is genuine, because everybody
lies to his diary. Okay, “lie” is a bit sharp. Everyone is a hero in his
own diary. So what do you believe? That’s the way it is with diaries.
You’ve got to know how to evaluate them. What Goebbels writes in his
diary about Goebbels, you treat with suspicion. What Goebbels writes in
his diary about a fight between Rosenberg and Koch is probably more
accurate, although he’s got his sympathies there, too. You have to learn
to be very careful.
I’m saying this for a reason, because when we come to look at what
the diary says about the Crystal Night, it’s not what you expect it to
say, and you can only really straighten things out when you accept that
Goebbels has his reasons for writing things in a certain way. I’m
something of an expert with diaries, because I’ve been looking at
people’s diaries as an historian for the last 30 or 40 years, and I know
the things to look for.
It always amuses me the way people write in their diaries certain
euphemisms for relations with the opposite sex. I won’t describe to you
which words I use in my diary, but – okay, I will. I might write, “Lucy
came ’round, and was amiable.” It seems pretty harmless, but it’s code.
This becomes obvious if you slip up and write, “Lucy came round and was
amiable twice.”
I had the private diary of Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who
had the habit of putting a little X on the line between two days in his
diary. Some days, however, there were two Xs, and on one occasion,
during the battle of Stalingrad when he was in Berlin, there were three
Xs followed by the initials “E.H.,” all done into a kind of monogram or
logo: “XXX E.H.” I happened to know that “E.H.” was Edith Hesselbarth,
his private secretary. When I tracked her down at her home on Lake
Constance, she was most indignant about this imputation, until I told
her that Milch had written it in his diary, whereupon she confessed.
In the case of Dr. Goebbels, everybody knows that he has gone into
history as the arch-Casanova of the Third Reich. He was the one with the
string of amours, and no film starlet could make headway in the German
film industry, so legend has it, without using the Minister’s casting
couch. And yet, it turns out, unless I’m grievously wrong, he was age 33
when he first had a sexual experience with a woman. If you read his
diary you could be misled. Very early on in his diary, he’s talking
about how Else came ’round, and she was all his: “She was all over me.”
It’s an imprecise phrase, but you’re willing to believe, given his
reputation, that this could only mean one thing.
In another passage, Anka Stalherm, the great heroine of his life,
comes to see him and there’s an episode on the meadow in Freiburg: “the
first kiss.” It’s only when you start reading through the diary, and the
letters that pass between her and Goebbels over the next ten years,
that you realize that that first kiss was, in fact, a kiss on the cheek.
That’s as far as he got with her.
I subsequently found Anka Stalherm’s daughter. Because I thought it
would be a bit embarrassing to ask her how far her mother had gone with
the Nazi Propaganda Minister, I planned on making this my last question
before I beat a retreat. As I walked in through the door, though, she
said: “Mr. Irving, before you even begin this interview, I want you to
know what my mother told me about Goebbels, which is that she never,
ever, did it with him. She found him intellectually fascinating, a man
of enormous presence, but physically repulsive.” Goebbels was 5′4″, just
over 100 pounds, a club foot with one leg two inches shorter than the
other – a bit of a freak, in other words. He never got anywhere with
Anka Stalherm, although if you read his diary you would imagine that she
was the great love of his life.
How do we know he was 33 when it first happened? The answer is that
he started going out with Olga, the girlfriend of Mr. Arnolt Bronner.
(He had a predilection for dating other men’s girlfriends; a dangerous
habit if you’re only 5′4″.) He went out with this woman, and she comes
’round, so to speak. Obviously something happened because that night he
writes in his diary all the words of euphoria followed with the figures
in parenthesis: “(1, 2).” This might, by itself, mean nothing at all,
were it not for an entry a few days later, with Olga coming ’round
again, and new figures in brackets: “(3, 4, 5).” Well this is rather
like being “twice amiable,” isn’t it? It’s a bit of a give-away, and
given what we know about the kiss on the cheek, which was all he’d
gotten in previous years, you can be pretty certain what this denotes.
This happened in December 1930, and he was born in October 1897.
She is only one step ahead, so to speak, of Magda Quandt, who later
became Magda Goebbels – the divorced, blonde, well-to-do wife of a
German industrialist, who fell for him. In mid-February 1931 – after
many, many weeks of working for him in the archives and so on – she
comes ’round to his apartment, and you get the same brackets treatment.
It’s “(1)”, and then “(2)”, “(3)”, and then, on March 1931, “(4)” and
“(5)”. Five episodes spread over six weeks. There again, you’ve got a
certain amount of support for the belief that he wasn’t as active as he
made out in later years. If there was anything he was good at, it was
propaganda. So we’re demolishing a bit of a propaganda legend in
connection with Dr. Goebbels here. Amusing as this is, it helps to teach
us to be very cautious when dealing with someone’s diary as a source of
information.
Growing Anti-Semitism
I’ve gone through the diary with a special interest in the Jewish
issue, and particularly the “final solution.” There’s no question that
whatever tragedy befell the Jews in Germany during the Third Reich, Dr.
Goebbels himself was the prime moving force behind it. He wasn’t just
the person who created the atmosphere of hatred, he was also the one who
pulled the levers and started the trains in motion. What happened at
the other end is still a matter of debate, and this issue is one of the
moving causes of revisionism at this moment.
Goebbels didn’t start out anti-Semitic. His very early diary pages,
back in 1923, contain no references to the Jews, or any anti-Semitism at
all, in fact. We do know that in his home town of Rheydt, a close
neighbor with whom his parents maintained very close relations was Dr.
Josef Joseph, a Jewish lawyer. There was a long-standing friendship
between him and Goebbels’ parents, who often sent their son ’round to
spend the day with Dr. Joseph. (Goebbels’ father, Fritz Goebbels, was
bookkeeper at a local textile factory.) I’m inclined to believe that the
fact that Dr. Joseph was such a close friend of Mr. and Mrs. Goebbels,
and not just the boy’s Catholic upbringing and the fact that his
godfather was also called Joseph, may have been the reason for Goebbels’
second name: Paul Joseph Goebbels.
Goebbels met Anka Stalherm at Heidelberg University, where she was
one of the few women students. She was fabulously rich, had
shoulder-length blonde hair, and was a typically care-free, affluent
female student. Goebbels could hardly believe his luck when, of all the
young men at the university, she picked him. There was undoubtedly a
very close friendship between them, and all their letters have survived.
(I was able to read them in the German archives until the German
government, in an act of incredible spitefulness, on July 1, 1993,
ordered me banned from the archives, “to protect the interests of the
German people”.)
In one letter to him, Anka made a mildly anti-Semitic remark, typical
of those that were common in the social circles in which she moved.
Indignantly he wrote back to his new girlfriend, putting her in her
place. In this letter, dated February 17, 1919, Goebbels responded: “As
you know, I can’t stand this exaggerated anti-Semitism. My view is you
don’t get rid of them by huffing and puffing, let alone by pogroms, and
even if you could do so, that would be both highly ignoble and
unworthy.”
Furthermore, Goebbels’ favorite professor at Heidelberg was Friedrich
Gundolf, who was Jewish. This didn’t matter to Goebbels at all. When
Gundolf said that he wouldn’t have time to work with Goebbels on his
doctoral dissertation, he passed him on to another professor of
literature, Max von Waldberg, who was also Jewish. To the end of his
life, Goebbels spoke very highly of these two professors. It was typical
of Goebbels that he was able to put Jews into two categories, regarding
individual Jews with respect and admiration, while at the same time
holding the Jewish people in contempt.
Just a few years later, though, on October 30, 1922, he delivered a
lecture in Rheydt in which he commented approvingly on Oswald Spengler’s
criticism of the Jewish people. So you can see that a certain trend had
begun to set in. I often wonder: Was this due to something innate or
was it his surroundings? We are not able to pin down just what caused
Goebbels to become anti-Semitic around 1922. Certainly by the time he
arrived in Berlin, in 1926, as Gauleiter (district party leader), his
anti-Semitism was in full flood, and, as we shall see, what he saw there
completed the picture for him.
His formative experiences came in the aftermath of World War One, I
think. Because of his club foot, the army had refused to accept him as a
soldier, which was humiliating. In 1923 he worked in a bank in Cologne,
where he was shocked by Jewish banking methods. He saw Jews ruining
ordinary Germans, he saw speculation, and he saw inflation wiping out
people’s savings. His colleagues at the bank undoubtedly drew his
attention to the Jewish role in all of it, as the private banks in
Germany were almost entirely in Jewish hands.
Another factor played a role. When he left the university Goebbels
was an aspiring writer of poetry, plays and newspaper articles. He
wanted to write for the great national newspapers and magazines, which
were largely controlled by the Ullstein and Mosse families, both of
which were Jewish. His approaches to these two publishing companies,
with articles submitted for publication, and subsequently seeking
employment, were rudely rebuffed. The Berliner Tageblatt alone returned
to him nearly 50 articles he had submitted.
No surprise, if you look at the private papers of Theodor Wolff,
chief editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, which was published by the Mosse
company. In these papers, which are filed in the German Federal
archives, you can see that Wolff was corresponding almost entirely only
with Jews.
It’s what today we would call networking; if you’re outside the loop,
you can’t break in. One knows this when one is mature, but when you are
a young student fresh out of university, full of great idealism and
belief in your own superior talents, the first realization that you
can’t break into the loop – that the network is there to keep people
like you out – makes a great impression, as it probably did on the young
Dr. Goebbels. And this undoubtedly had an effect on his anti-Semitism,
even though he still wasn’t hostile toward individual Jews.
After Anka Stalherm left and married another young man, Goebbels
started a long affair with a young woman named Else Janke. One day,
while he’s commenting to her on his physical debilities, telling her he
realizes he must be quite unattractive because of his club foot and all
the rest of it, she says, “You think you’ve got problems? I’m half
Jewish.” This was a great shock to Goebbels at that time. Her
half-Jewishness, which he described as her mixed blood, grew more and
more important in the relationship until it finally led to their
break-up. He was actually happy when he was named Gauleiter of Berlin,
where the Nazi Party was in disarray, because this gave him a chance to
leave Else Janke gracefully. In Berlin he had his eyes on another girl
by the name of Josephine von Behr.
At this time he also makes friends with Julius Streicher, Gauleiter
of Nuremberg and publisher of the notorious anti-Semitic weekly, Der
Stürmer. His views on Streicher vary widely throughout his diary.
Sometimes he’s full of praise for him, rather the way we grudgingly
admire a person who is a bit bullheaded and plows ahead regardless of
the damage he does. He liked Streicher as a human being, he liked him
for his courage. But then again, he strongly deprecated his brand of
anti-Semitism, regarding it as needlessly vulgar. This comes out again
and again in the diary. It’s a dichotomy that is never satisfactorily
resolved until we come to one of the last items in the archives: a
February 1945 letter from Goebbels to Streicher, congratulating him on
his birthday and sending him a valuable oil painting. Goebbels stayed in
touch with Streicher even after he fell out of favor with Hitler.
‘Isidor’ Weiss
When Goebbels arrived in Berlin as Gauleiter in 1926, he was
confronted by a city with 179,000 Jews, one third of all Jews in
Germany, and he made use of this fact. The Berlin population already was
seething because of the presence of these Jews. In the coming years,
Goebbels repeatedly explained to foreign diplomats that the problem
there was the usual one, in which the Jewish population
disproportionately controlled all the lucrative professions. This
rankled with Berlin’s non-Jewish population, of course, and Goebbels,
whether deliberately or by instinct, zeroed in on this as a wound that
he could work on to promote the Nazi cause.
He was aided in this endeavor by the fact that his chief opponent
there, Berlin’s Deputy Police Chief (who acted as though he was Police
Chief; even the real Police Chief referred to him as being the Chief)
was Dr. Bernhard Weiss, a Jew. Weiss looked so much like a Jewish
caricature that his photographs didn’t need to be re-touched by the
Nazis. He was stereotypically Semitic in feature: short, with rounded
ears and hook nose, and wearing spectacles.
In London I located Weiss’ daughter, Hilda Baban-Weiss, and I pleaded
with her for a more attractive photograph of her father, pointing out
that the ones I have are not very flattering. I got total silence from
the daughter, so I abandoned my quest. Unfortunately, when my biography
of Dr. Goebbels comes out we’re going to have to use these rather
unattractive pictures.
Dr. Goebbels promptly dubbed Weiss “Isidor,” to such a degree of
success that within two or three years there was hardly a Berliner who
didn’t believe that “Isidor” was his real first name.
The fight between Dr. Bernhard Weiss and Dr. Joseph Goebbels, is, I
think, one of the most hilarious, improbable stories to come out of this
era. Twenty-eight times Weiss sued Goebbels for calling him a Jew.
Twenty-eight times the judges pointed out to Weiss that he was in fact
Jewish, and therefore it was no libel. On one occasion, Dr. Goebbels’
newspaper Der Angriff published a cartoon showing a donkey with the head
of Dr. Weiss, with all of its legs splayed on an ice pond, and a
caption reading: “Isidor on thin ice.” Isidor Weiss (you see, even I’m
calling him Isidor now), immediately sued for libel. Goebbels pointed
out it was just a cartoon, but the judge said it was quite obvious that
the donkey had the face of Dr. Weiss. Whereupon a headline in the next
issue of Der Angriff declared: “Judge Confirms Donkey Has Face of Dr.
Weiss.”
A German scholar recently published a 600-page book purely devoted to
the fight between Dr. Goebbels and Dr. Weiss. It would be worth having
this book in English, except that the problems between the two men are
almost untranslatable.
As Goebbels orchestrated the rise of the Nazi party in Berlin, part
of the problem for the democrats there was that much of what he said was
true. The Jewish community not only dominated the legal and medical
professions in Berlin, they also dominated the crime scene. In my
biography I’ve quoted Interpol figures of the percentage of Jews among
those arrested for drug dealing and narcotics. Moreover, three-quarters
of the pickpockets in Berlin were Jewish. It was quite easy for Goebbels
to draw attention to such facts, and to embellish them in a propaganda
campaign. This came to him as second nature. In every new scandal in
Berlin, it seemed, Jews were at the base of it – ripping off the banks,
ripping off the taxpayers, and ripping off the government. And again and
again, they seemed to be getting off scot-free.
At Syracuse University I found the private papers of Heinrich
Brüning, who was Hitler’s predecessor as Chancellor (1930–1932). In this
collection is a manuscript in which he describes his problems as
Chancellor. Brüning recounts that at one time, he ordered an
investigation of Jewish banks in Berlin and their methods, and in his
manuscript he writes: “The results were so horrifying that I ordered
this document to be kept secret, because if it had been allowed to
become public knowledge, it would have resulted in anti-Jewish riots.”
Of course, even though much of what Goebbels said was true, this just
doesn’t justify what he did later on. We must, in all fairness, keep
emphasizing this point.
During the 1920s Goebbels wrote a play called Michael, and it’s
interesting to compare the various drafts of it, which are available.
When he first wrote it back in 1923 or 1924, it was a straightforward
kind of morality play. But Goebbels would change things. After Anka
Stalherm annoyed him, he changed the leading female character. And as he
became more and more annoyed with the Jews, he wrote more anti-Semitism
into the play. In the drafts you can see him becoming progressively
more anti-Jewish.
After seeing his first Hollywood movie, he wrote in his diary (on
Dec. 3, 1928): “Sheer hell. Jewish kitsch. Virtually all you saw were
Hebrews.” A few months later, on February 15, 1929, he wrote: “The
Jewish question is the questions of all questions.”
There is a curious passage in his private diary that shows how
increasingly obsessed he had become. It was after three years in Berlin
as Gauleiter, fighting this increasingly desperate battle, almost with
one hand tied behind his back, being repeatedly banned on orders of Dr.
Weiss, having repeatedly nearly been sent to prison himself. One night
he has a dream, which he then records in his diary (December 17, 1929).
In this dream he’s back at school, running madly through the corridors
with pillars flashing past him, and he’s being chased by Jews screaming
at him, “Hate, hate, hate.” He’s always able to keep a few limping
strides ahead of his pursuers, occasionally turning round and flinging
back at them the same taunt: “Hate, hate, hate!” What an odd thing for a
man to write in his own diary. One doesn’t often write down one’s own
dreams in a diary. The mere fact that he had dreams like that shows that
he was becoming obsessed with these Jews, the enemy.
More and more episodes occurred to give him reasons to dislike Jews.
After Horst Wessel, a young Nazi stormtrooper who composed the hymn that
subsequently became the second national anthem of Nazi Germany, was
murdered in early 1930 by a communist in Berlin, it was a Jew who gave
refuge to the murderers when they fled. This kind of thing will have
undoubtedly had an effect of Goebbels. He would have chalked it up on
his list of grudges.
Even worse, after he began going out with Magda Quandt (whose
stepfather, Friedländer, he knew had been Jewish), it happened that for
days at a time she didn’t come to see him. After a while, she doesn’t
answer the phone or keep dates, and eventually Goebbels finds out he has
a rival: a Jew named Victor Arlosoroff, who is also enraged to find out
that she’s two-timing him with the Nazi Gauleiter of Berlin. Arlosoroff
is so enraged, in fact, that during one meeting he pulls out a
revolver, and in a jealous, dramatic scene, fires at her, deliberately
missing. The bullet buries itself in the wall near her. She gets him out
of her life, although he keeps returning and pleading to be taken back.
This man is none other than Victor Chaim Arlosoroff, who subsequently
became an important Zionist figure. After Hitler came to power, he was
the Zionist representative in the negotiations with the new Nazi
government that resulted in the Haavara (“Transfer”) agreement, whereby
German Jews could emigrate to Palestine with their property. In June
1933 Arlosoroff was murdered in Tel Aviv, Palestine, by members of the
Jabotinsky faction of the Zionist movement. The fact that the love of
his life was two-timing him with an ardent Zionist may also have
contributed to Goebbels’ growing dislike of Jews.
Goebbels was besotted with Magda, there’s no question, and once again
he couldn’t believe his own luck. They were married in December 1931.
In fact, though, she was rather ambivalent about him, and it appears
that the only reason she started dating him was, as they say, to be near
the fascinating Mr. Hitler. There was even a rumor that her son,
Helmut, was fathered by Hitler. When you look at photographs of little
Helmut, though, you can be pretty certain that this is not true, because
he looks just like Dr. Goebbels.
Boycotts
A month after the Nazis came to power in January 1933, Goebbels was
really able to flex his muscles. He wasn’t appointed Propaganda Minister
immediately because Hitler needed Goebbels to direct his party’s
propaganda campaign in one final election battle, and, as Hitler pointed
out to him, it wouldn’t be right for the Reich Propaganda Minister, a
government official, simultaneously to direct the Nazi party’s
propaganda election campaign.
We must not overlook the fact that the world’s Jewish community lost
no time in striking at Nazi Germany. We all too readily talk about the
book-burning and about the Nazi boycott against the Jews as if those
things happened in vacuum. They didn’t. The Nazi boycott against the
Jews on April 1, 1933, was a foolish reprisal by the Nazis in
retaliation for the Jewish boycott against Germany.
As soon as the Nazis came to power the world Jewish community
announced an international boycott campaign against Germany. Jews would
not buy any German products. They would not accept any more German
films, for example, and would see that others would not accept them.
Jewish restaurateurs in England announced they would no longer serve
German customers. If you read the newspapers of the day, such as the
London Daily Express, you’ll find all the details of this anti-German
Jewish boycott, which is now all too readily forgotten. Today all we
hear about is the Nazi boycott against the Jews, which lasted for a
single day – Saturday, April 1, 1933. Brown shirt SA men stood outside
Jewish businesses and shops, and admonished customers against entering.
As a warning to Jews abroad to go easy on Nazi Germany, the boycott
failed, of course. It just enraged the international Jewish community
even more. At the time, and ever since, the Nazis were effectively
rapped on the knuckles for that boycott. It was Goebbels who organized
that boycott, even though, if you read his diary, you can get the
impression that Hitler authorized it, sanctioned it, and possibly even
suggested it. But there’s no doubt at all in my mind that this is
another case of Goebbels having an idea, of putting it into effect, and
then playing a trick by writing in his diary that he’d gotten Hitler’s
approval in advance. He had already done something like this in 1932,
when he railroaded Hitler into an unsuccessful election campaign for
Reich President against Paul von Hindenburg. In his diary he rather
implies that Hitler asked him to go ahead with it and sanctioned it in
advance. We see exactly the same phenomenon in November 1938: the “Night
of Broken Glass.”
Yet even in 1932–1933, he was still somewhat ambivalent in his
feelings about the Jews. He could still split his sides with laughter,
as he writes in his diary on May 16, 1933, at a nightclub listening to
Jewish comedian Otto Wallburg. This same Otto Wallburg later died in
Auschwitz. So there you have the whole of the tragedy of Jews and the
Third Reich encapsulated in one man’s fate. (You notice I used the word
“died.” I didn’t say he was gassed or was killed or murdered at
Auschwitz. He died. We don’t know how he died – it’s tragic enough that
he did.)
The Nazi campaign against the Jews included Goebbels’ systematic
campaign to remove them from the theater, art and music. He argued that
the Jews tried to dominate, and that this was not for the general good
of the community. There was an outcry from the artists themselves, of
course. For example, the internationally renowned conductor of the
Berlin Philharmonic, Wilhelm Furtwängler, bravely defended fellow
conductor Otto Klemperer and other Jewish artists. In a letter to
Furtwängler (which was published in The New York Times, April 16, 1933),
Goebbels wrote: “Those of Jewish blood who have real ability should be
free to exercise their art, but they must not rule.”
Jews began a campaign of assassination against Nazis in February
1936, when David Frankfurter shot Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of the Nazi
party in Switzerland. Then, in November 1938, another Jew, Herschel
Grynszpan, assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a young diplomat at the German
embassy in Paris. These incidents further contributed to Goebbels’
perception of the international Jewish community, namely, that Jews
would stop at nothing to get back at the Nazis. All his previous Jewish
enemies, such as Dr. Weiss, expecting short shrift from the Nazis, had
emigrated from Germany. Some went to Prague, some to Paris, some to
London, and others to the United States – from where they campaigned
against Nazi Germany.
Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’
On April 11, 1938, the diary records a very interesting conversation
in which Hitler reveals to him for the first time that his “Final
Solution” of the Jewish problem is to deport the world’s Jews,
particularly those in Germany and in Europe, to some faraway country,
possibly Madagascar. Hitler swore by the Madagascar solution. Even in
July 1942, two months after the island country had been occupied by the
British, Hitler is still saying that Madagascar is the ideal solution.
In June 1938, two months later, Goebbels begins an anti-Jewish
campaign of his own. Six months before “Crystal Night,” Goebbels and
Berlin’s police chief, Count von Helldorff, decided between them to
start a campaign of systematic harassment of the city’s Jews. Even after
the Nazis came to power, the number of Jews continued to increase in
Berlin, which didn’t please Goebbels at all. Berlin was his city, and
yet the Jews still had considerable presence and economic clout. The
only way to reverse the trend, he told the police chief, is to start
hounding and harassing them.
In the University of Princeton library there’s a file called the
Adolf Hitler papers, which consists of documents relieved in 1945 by an
American soldier from Hitler’s apartment in Munich. It contains a June
1938 letter from Goebbels to Hitler, reporting on this campaign of
harassment. All the Jews in Berlin had their motor cars called in for
inspection: most of them were found to be unroadworthy, and they were
ordered off the roads. They also had their telephones cut off. Berlin’s
Jews were subjected to all sorts of petty police harassment such as
this. It’s very similar to what is happening now in Germany to
revisionists – harassing people within the law, rather the way your
[United States] government suddenly inflicts a tax audit on someone who
is politically incorrect.
‘Crystal Night’
The key event in this whole story was, of course, the “Crystal Night”
(“Kristallnacht”), or “Night of Broken Glass” in 1938. Here the
Goebbels diary must be treated with the utmost caution. It began on
November 7, 1938, with the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris
by a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. News of the shooting triggered a
number of small scale anti-Jewish outbreaks all over Germany, which
Goebbels noted in his diary without at first paying any special
attention to them. However, when news reached him of the young
diplomat’s death, two days later, it truly outraged him. It came while
he was with Hitler at a meeting in Munich, commemorating the annual Nazi
party anniversary of the failed “Beer Hall Putsch” of November 9, 1923.
After Hitler had left the meeting, Goebbels came to the podium to
announce the death of the German diplomat. He also reported to the
assembled Gauleiters on the anti-Jewish incidents that had already
broken out, describing them as manifestations of a “spontaneous” public
outrage. Goebbels said, in effect: “A Jew has fired a shot. A German has
died. Obviously our people will be outraged about this. This is not the
time to rein in that outrage.” We have two or three independent sources
for what he said that evening, including the report by the British
consul in Munich, who very quickly learned of the speech and reported it
to London. This report is now in the British archives.
Describing the evening’s events, Goebbels writes in his diary that,
after his brief speech: “Everyone makes a beeline for the telephones.”
He adds: “Now the public will take action.” An interesting turn of
phrase, he creates an image of men in brown uniforms and swastika arm
bands reaching out to telephones to relay orders all over Germany.
The orders were that the Aktion (operation) was to be carried out by
SA men in plain clothes, and the police were not to intervene. There was
to be no bloodshed and no harm done to anyone unless, of course, Jews
offered armed resistance, in which case they should expect short shrift.
“There is to be no looting,” stormtroopers in Kiel were told. “Nobody
is to be roughed up. Foreign Jews are not to be touched. Meet any
resistance with firearms. The Aktion is to be carried out in plain
clothes and must be finished by five a.m.”
The result was the Night of Broken Glass, one of Germany’s darkest
nights. Hundreds if not thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed. About
150 synagogues were burned to the ground, including six or seven in
Berlin. The following morning the news was that 38 Jews had been
murdered. On Hitler’s orders, 20,000 Jews were rounded up and
temporarily held in concentration camps.
After the overnight reports had come in, Goebbels sums up the object
of the exercise in a heartless, unrepentant diary entry: “As was to be
expected, the entire nation is in uproar. This is one dead man who is
costing the Jews dear. Our darling Jews will think twice in future
before simply gunning down German diplomats.”
In the archives I found a document dated the next day, November 10,
which shows quite clearly that some kind of order had actually been
issued. That morning Goebbels sent the following message to all 42 Nazi
party propaganda officials (Gaupropagandaleiter) at the provincial
level: “The anti-Jewish Aktionen [operations] must now be called off
with the same rapidity with which they were launched. They have served
their desired and anticipated purpose.” These are the key lines in this
document, I think, because they do imply that an order had been issued
the day before. We don’t have that earlier document, but references to
it were made during the postwar interrogation of one or two of the
Gauleiters, and there’s also a hint in his diary that he had given
certain orders the previous day.
Goebbels had to issue this second order calling off the Aktionen
because, as we now know (a member of Hitler’s private staff confirmed it
to me), Hitler was furious when he heard, during the night, about the
anti-Jewish outbreaks. Throughout the night, telephone calls came in
reporting synagogues blazing across Germany. Hitler sent for Himmler and
asked: “What the hell is going on here, Reichsführer?” Himmler replied:
“Send for Goebbels, he knows.” Hitler summoned Goebbels and raked him
over the coals. The following morning Goebbels wrote in his diary: “I
went to see the Führer at 11 o’clock, and we discussed what to do next.”
You can just imagine what kind of conversation took place between
Hitler and Goebbels. Of course, Goebbels isn’t going to write in his
diary “the Führer called me a bloody idiot for having started what I did
last night” – that’s not the kind of diary he kept. Instead, he wrote a
one-line entry to remind himself that he did have to go to see the
Führer. What he did next was to issue the November 10 order calling for
an immediate stop to all the anti-Jewish Aktionen.
Here, I’m afraid, I have to disagree with our colleague Ingrid
Weckert; but if a revisionist can’t revise another revisionist, I don’t
know what a revisionist is. Weckert rather exonerates Dr. Goebbels from
any blame for the “Crystal Night.” [See Weckert’s book, Flashpoint,
published by the IHR, and her article, “‘Crystal Night’ 1938,” in the
Summer 1985 Journal.]
However, there is no doubt in my mind that on that night, having
gotten the news that the German diplomat died, Goebbels – incautiously,
imprudently, and out of a sheer sense of mischief – ordered the
Gauleiters to go out and start raising hell against the Jews. And, of
course, it got out of hand.
Even then, Goebbels didn’t realize the extent to which the world’s
press would seize on this incident. Few of the top Nazis had ever
travelled outside of Germany. They didn’t realize what the foreign press
was like. They didn’t realize that outside Germany, then as now, there
are societies that look on German actions with a certain degree of
wonderment and bafflement. The foreign press seized on this
extraordinary incident, which in the over-heated political climate of
1938 Germany might have seemed little more than an extension of a street
fight. But in peaceful democracies this kind of thing just didn’t go
on. From Berlin, reporters sent back horrific accounts to England, to
the United States and to the other free countries.
Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, was one of those most
scandalized by what Goebbels had done. Himmler was furious. Göring went
to Hitler and demanded that Goebbels be dismissed for this outrage.
Goebbels had an appalling time trying to repair the damage that he had
done. It is baffling why Hitler tolerated what Goebbels had done. Hitler
told Ribbentrop, “I need this man because I have other things in mind,
and I am going to need a propaganda minister of the caliber of Dr.
Goebbels.” This can be the only explanation why he turned a blind eye to
Goebbels’ blooper, and it doesn’t speak very highly of Hitler.
Years later, in July 1944, when he was pleading to be put in charge
of Germany’s “total war” mobilization effort, Goebbels wrote this mea
culpa to Hitler: “I know that I’ve caused you many a private worry in
the 20 years I’ve been with you, particularly in 1938 and 1939.”
Although Hitler does appoint him commissioner of total war, this is a
very important admission. Obviously between Hitler and Goebbels at that
time there was colossal personal strain. It wasn’t just because of his
affair in 1936–1938 with Lida Baarova, the Czech actress. (She is now 80
years old, still a lady of great beauty, and living in Salzburg. I went
to interview her a few months ago.) Rather, it was undoubtedly the
grief that Goebbels had caused Hitler by Kristallnacht.
Changes After the Outbreak of War
When war broke out in 1939, Jewish leader Chaim Weizmann, president
of both the World Zionist Organization and the “Jewish Agency,” made the
tactical mistake of declaring war on Germany in the name of the entire
Jewish people around the world. This was a crucial error because – as
Professor Ernst Nolte and some other historians have argued – it
somewhat justified what the Nazis then did to the Jews: the Jews
declared war on Germany and Germany declared war on the Jews. [The text
of Weizmann’s declaration, along with an interview with Prof. Nolte, and
a review of his recent book, are in the Jan.–Feb. 1994 Journal, pp.
15–22, 37–41.]
During a visit to Poland in June 1934, Goebbels had visited the
Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. He recorded his impression in his diary:
“Stinking and filthy. The Ostjuden. There they are.” Five years later,
after the defeat of Poland in 1939, he visited another Jewish ghetto in
that country, this time the one in Lodz. He was just as shocked by what
he saw, writing in his diary: “Our task isn’t a humanitarian one, but a
surgical one. Otherwise one day Europe will succumb to the Jewish
pestilence.”
After once again setting eyes on these Jewish “specimens,” the idea
came to him to begin making anti-Jewish films. The result was the three
infamous anti-Jewish films made by the Nazis. Interesting, isn’t it? Of
the approximately one thousand motion pictures made by the Nazis during
their entire twelve years in power, just three were anti-Jewish: “The
Rothschilds,” “The Eternal Jew” and “Jud Süss” (“The Jew Suess”). These
three films – the last two going down in propaganda history – were very
much part of Goebbels’ broad-front attack on the Jews. And yet, how many
anti-German films has Hollywood made in revenge? It doesn’t bear
counting.
“Jud Süss,” which starred some of the Third Reich’s best movie
actors, told the story of Joseph Süss-Oppenheimer, an 18th century
“Court Jew” financier who was able to rob the Duchy of Württemberg on a
Robert Maxwellian scale, and who ends up being publicly hanged – to the
general plaudits of the citizens.
To my mind, “The Eternal Jew” is the most insidious of the three
because, as a documentary, it purported to show Jews as they were. On
Goebbels’ orders Jews were filmed in the ghettos of Poland, at their
most profane and their most contemptible. He wanted yards and yards of
footage showing Jews as caricatures. With this he mingled footage of
rats invading bags of wheat and grain. Concluding the film, in one of
its two versions, was an appalling, stomach-churning scene, filmed in
close-up, of Jewish ritual slaughter of cattle. This was appended to the
end of the film in what I think was a rather crude and vulgar tactic.
So two versions of “The Eternal Jew” were made – one, with the ritual
slaughter scene, for adults, and a second, cleaned up version, for
children and others with weaker stomachs. But even the knowledge that
there was a stronger version had a propaganda effect on people.
Germany Must Perish
In March 1941, Goebbels visited the “Warthegau,” a portion of Poland
that was incorporated into the German Reich. After a meeting there with
the local Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, Goebbels recorded in his diary:
“There has been all manner of liquidating going on here, particularly of
the Jewish garbage. That’s got to be.”
A crucial episode in the “Final Solution,” as far as Goebbels is
concerned – and this has been very little highlighted – came in 1941
with the publication in the United States of a strange little book, Germany Must Perish!,
by an American named Theodore N. Kaufman. In it, Kaufman – who was,
presumably, a Jew – recommends the castration of the entire German
people, so that the Germans would literally perish within one
generation. “Germany must perish forever!,” wrote Kaufman. “In fact –
not in fancy.” Published at a time when the United States was still
officially not at war against Germany, this book was given respectful,
even laudatory attention by Time magazine, The Washington Post, and
other periodicals.
Goebbels seized with delight on this nasty propaganda diatribe
against the German people, with all its Freudian undertones. “This Jew
[Kaufman] has done a disservice to the enemy,” Goebbels commented. “If
he had composed the book at my behest he couldn’t have done a better
job.”
Goebbels looked into the feasibility of having a million copies of a
German translation printed up and distributed to German soldiers. He
shelved the project because his lawyers pointed out that the project
would violate US copyrights. You may laugh but, as he wrote in his
diary, the reasoning was that if Germany violated American copyrights,
America might feel justified in violating Germany’s very valuable
copyrights. He had to wait another few months until certain historical
events in Hawaii resulted in American copyrights not being so valuable
after all.
Kaufman’s book figures in Goebbels’ diary as being the turning point
that justified, in his mind, adopting a much more radical solution to
the Jewish problem.
In August 1941, he went to show Hitler Germany Must Perish in
translation, and persuaded him to agree to a plan by which every German
Jew would be fitted out with a yellow Star of David badge with the word
Jude. Goebbels argued that the Jews had to be tagged, and Hitler agreed.
It’s interesting to note – and this can’t be emphasized enough – that
again and again it’s Goebbels who goes to Hitler with radical plans, and
Hitler agrees. It’s never Hitler initiating these plans. This is true
even when the diary appears to indicate otherwise, as in the case of
Kristallnacht and other episodes when, for reasons of politics and
posterity, Goebbels felt it necessary to write: “The Führer fully
endorsed what I had done.”
I have to point out that we are reading the diary of a Propaganda
Minister, a master dissembler whose diary has frequently been found to
be untrustworthy on earlier occasions. And when dealing with what he
writes about a man such as Hitler, who is dead and can’t defend himself,
you have to be extra careful. It may stick in the craw of other
historians when I say this, but it doesn’t matter if the man is Hitler
or Roosevelt or Stalin: If he’s not here to defend himself you have to
be ten times more careful when trying to write the truth. That’s why
I’ve been additionally careful in evaluating the diary of Dr. Goebbels.
During a visit to the Eastern front in November 1941, Goebbels toured
the German-occupied Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. On
this occasion as well, he viewed the ghettos. In Lithuania he spent a
whole afternoon touring the Jewish ghetto in Kaunas (Kovno), and wrote
disapproving passages in his diary about what he found there. As he
records, Goebbels was also told that the Jews in the Baltic states had
been massacred on a colossal scale, not by the Germans but by the
Lithuanians and Latvians themselves, even as the German troops arrived,
in revenge for what the Jews had done to them during the year of
Bolshevik terror following the Soviet Russian takeover in June 1940.
When German troops arrived in the Baltic states, they found that the
local Jews had largely fled or been evacuated. The Germans then decided
to evacuate the German Jews to these Baltic territories. I don’t know
why they hit on this mad solution, because if the Baltic peoples
themselves didn’t like their own Jews, these territories certainly
weren’t going to be very safe for foreign Jews. But the Germans didn’t
really care.
Goebbels and Speer
It may surprise you to learn that the prime mover behind the
evacuation of Berlin’s Jews was less Dr. Goebbels than that great hero
of the postwar media, Albert Speer. If you read Speer’s genuine diary,
not the sanitized one he gave to the German Federal Archives, but his
genuine diary, you’ll find that from early 1941, when he was chief of
construction for Berlin, he makes repeated references to the “Main
Resettlement Department” (“Hauptabteilung Umsiedlung”), which he
controlled.
You see, Speer – who was a close friend of Goebbels and his wife –
had been given the task of rebuilding Berlin – a fine and appropriate
task for an ambitious young architect with great vision, and, it has to
be said, also great ability. In order to rebuild Berlin, though, he had
first to clear slums, and this required that he house the slum-dwellers
elsewhere. So, wanting to clear the Jewish areas of west Berlin, he
persuaded Goebbels to start a campaign to drive the Jews out of the
city, and thus empty their apartments. Speer had his eye on something
like 24,000 Jewish houses and apartments in Berlin.
In early 1941, Speer and Goebbels, each for reasons of his own,
together started this campaign to drive the Jews from the city.
Goebbels, who was Gauleiter of Berlin, wanted to have his city “free of
Jews,” and Speer wanted to clear out those 24,000 apartments so that he
could rebuild Berlin.
So, trainload by trainload, Jews were shipped out of Berlin to
anywhere – nobody really cared. The chiefs of police, Kurt Daluege and
Helldorff joined in because they were pals of Goebbels. Only
occasionally did Goebbels have to get approval from Hitler, in broad
general terms, for yet another operation against the Jews. We know how
many Jews were in those trains – there were about 130 trainloads
altogether – because in almost every case we know exactly how many Jews
were loaded onto each train.
We know the exact route and destination of those trains because, by
some quirk of historical fate, the actual rail records have survived.
They show that there were around a thousand Jews per trainload –
sometimes as few as about 650 passengers, sometimes as many as 1030. The
first of these trainloads left Berlin on October 18, 1941 – to the
plaudits of Speer and Goebbels. These rail deportations were irregular
because this was a low priority program. At a time when German troops
were fighting a desperate battle outside Moscow, rail rolling stock and
rail networks were needed, above all, for munitions, supplies, troop
reinforcements, wounded soldiers, hospital trains, and all the rest. But
whenever they could, Goebbels and Speer would deport another trainload
of Jews.
Single Jews with no families were the first to be rounded up and
deported. If the family had a “privileged” member – for example, a Jew
who had married a non-Jew, or a Jewish man who was working in a
munitions factory – that one member saved the entire family. Jews who
weren’t privileged in some way were liable to be picked up without
warning, allowed only 40 kilograms of baggage, put on a train and
shipped out.
In one particular case, we know that a trainload of 1030 Jews left
Berlin on November 27, 1941, destined for Riga, Latvia. It’s recorded in
the Speer diary and in the Goebbels diary. It arrived at a place called
Skiatowa, eight kilometers outside Riga, on the morning of November 30,
1941, in the midst of a mass extermination. So these newly-arrived Jews
were taken along with local Riga Jews, lined up along pits, and shot.
That very day, Heinrich Himmler went to see Hitler at his
headquarters. In my book Hitler’s War [in the 1991 Focal Point edition,
between pages 506–507], you’ll find a facsimile of Himmler’s own
handwritten notes of his telephone conversations on that day, when he
made a couple of phone calls from Hitler’s headquarters. One note
records a call at 1:30 p.m., Nov. 30, 1941, to Gestapo chief Reinhard
Heydrich. It reads: “Jew transport from Berlin. No liquidation.”
Until I found these bundles of telephone notes, not one historian in
the world had bothered to read them or quote them. They were written in
old-fashioned handwriting, you see, and the German historians rather
like to have the documents they consult printed, especially in the
Nuremberg bound volumes, and even better, with illustrations. They don’t
like reading old German handwriting.
What’s the explanation for Himmler’s words here? My theory is that he
may have said to Hitler: “Mein Führer, I’ve got a bit of a problem
housing these Jews we’re shipping out of Berlin. Why don’t we just bump
them off?,” and Hitler probably answered: “Out of the question.” So
Himmler sends a frantic message to Heydrich, saying they’re not to be
liquidated. But it’s too late, they’re already dead – the whole
trainload. We know this because we have the timetable of what happened
that day.
On March 5, 1942, Goebbels received a report from Heydrich about
guerilla warfare in the occupied east. Blaming the Jews for this as
well, he comments:
It is therefore understandable that many of them must pay with their
lives for this. Anyway, in my view the more Jews who are liquidated the
more consolidated the situation in Europe will be after the war. Let
there be no phony sentimentalism about it. The Jews are Europe’s
misfortune. They must somehow be eliminated otherwise we are in danger
of being eliminated by them.
Here I want to mention something that I’m always very adamant about.
Although we revisionists say that gas chambers didn’t exist, and that
the “factories of death” didn’t exist, there is no doubt in my mind that
on the Eastern front large numbers of Jews were massacred, by criminals
with guns – SS men, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, whatever – to get rid of
them. They were made to line up next to pits or ditches, and then shot.
The eyewitness accounts I’ve seen of this are genuine and reliable.
Wannsee Conference
In late 1941 Heydrich sent a message to all the relevant ministers
and state secretaries calling them to a high-level conference on the
Jewish question. This is the famous Wannsee Conference, which took place
on January 20, 1942, at a villa in suburban Berlin. There the officials
discussed how to deal with all the administrative problems of
large-scale transportations of Jews. There’s no reference to killing
Jews, not even an indication, anywhere in the Conference record.
Goebbels was not present at that meeting because the invitation that
was sent to the Propaganda Ministry was addressed to Leopold Gutterer,
the Ministry State Secretary and Goebbels’ number two man. Gutterer is
still alive, age 92. I went to interview him two or three times before I
was banned from Germany (on November 9, 1993). He told me he never got
the Wannsee meeting invitation, that it was probably intercepted by
Werner Naumann, who was his rival on Goebbels staff.
Although Goebbels did not hear in advance of the meeting, you’ll find
in Goebbels’ diary – in his entry of March 7, 1942 – that a copy of the
well-known Wannsee Conference protocol was sent to him. Nobody else has
spotted this.
There were still eleven million Jews in Europe, Goebbels dictated on
that day, accurately summarizing the document. “For the time being they
are to be concentrated in the east [until] later; possibly an island
like Madagascar can be assigned to them after the war.” It all raised a
host of “delicate questions,” he added. “Undoubtedly there will be a
multitude of personal tragedies,” he wrote airily, “But this is
unavoidable. The situation now is ripe for a final settlement of the
Jewish question.”
More chilling is another diary entry a few weeks later. On March 27,
1942, Goebbels dictates a lengthy passage about another SS document that
had been submitted to him, and which appears to have been much uglier
in its content. “Beginning with Lublin,” he states, “the Jews are now
being deported eastward from the General Government [occupied Poland].
The procedure is pretty barbaric and one that beggars description, and
there’s not much left of the Jews. Broadly speaking one can probably say
that 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40
percent can be put to work.”
It’s a very ugly passage, and it’s easy to link this diary passage
with everything we’ve seen in the movies and on television since then.
He’s describing “Schindler’s List” here – or is he? I don’t know. All
he’s actually saying here is that the Jews are having a pretty rigorous
time. They’re being deported, it’s happening in a systematic way, and
not many of them are going to survive it.
When I visited the Hoover Institution library in Stanford,
California, to see the portion of the original Goebbels diary that they
have there, this was the first page I asked to see. And when I was in
the Moscow archives to examine the glass plate copy of the diary, this
was also the first plate I searched for. I knew that if the diary had
actually been copied by the Nazis in Berlin, and the glass plate version
in Moscow matches the text in the Hoover library, there’s no way anyone
could have faked it. And there it is on the glass plate in Moscow,
identical. As a final clincher, this portion was also microfilmed in
1947 in New York from the text that is held by the Hoover library. So
there are three different indications that this is a genuine quotation
from a genuine Goebbels document.
The conclusion I draw therefore is that, between them, Speer and
Goebbels started a ruthless campaign in 1941 to drive out and deport the
Jews from Berlin – Goebbels for political reasons, and out of sheer
visceral hatred of the Jews, and Speer for the more mundane reasons of
real estate and ambition. They didn’t really care what happened to the
Jews.
Even so, we must put all this in the context of the brutal war being
fought on the Eastern front at the time, in which neither side was
giving the other any quarter. By this time (March 1942) we British had
just begun bombing German towns on a ruthless scale. The devastating
aerial bombardment of Lübeck, for example, came just two days after this
diary entry. It’s not difficult to imagine Dr. Goebbels’ attitude: “So
what if Jews are being machine-gunned into pits? They had it coming to
them. They declared war on us, and this is no time for sympathy and
sentiment.” That’s the way he may well have looked at it.
By this time, ugly rumors were already circulating abroad, fuelled by
British propaganda. The London Daily Telegraph quoted Polish claims
that seven thousand of Warsaw’s Jews were being killed each day, often
in what it called “gas chambers.” One of Goebbels’ worried civil
servants responded by telexing a request for information to Hans Frank’s
press office in Krakow and to the propaganda field office in Warsaw.
The reassuring reply spoke of the Jews being used to construct defences
and roads. Be that as it may, in Goebbels’ files the original press
report, which had merely summarized the British newspaper item, was
rubber-stamped Geheime Reichssache, “Secret Reich Matter.”
How much did Goebbels know? Among his surviving files are papers
suggesting a broad general knowledge of atrocities. One is from a large
collection of original Goebbels’ papers on file at the Jewish Yivo
institute in New York.
Reporting to Goebbels on November 11, 1942, his legal expert, Dr Hans
Schmidt-Leonhardt, whom he had sent to inspect conditions in Hans
Frank’s Polish dominions, noted that the Warsaw police had deemed it too
dangerous to visit the ghetto there; in the Krakow ghetto he had found
all the Jews put to work; in Lublin the ghetto had already been cleared
away, and there were now bloody disturbances. “As a Geheime
Reichssache,” reported the legal specialist, “Frank related to us the
following characteristic recent instance: ...” But whatever this was we
cannot know, because a shocked member of Goebbels’ staff cut off the
rest of the page.
This is something that you have to look for, this “top secret”
endorsement. By contrast, the Auschwitz documents found in the Moscow
archives by French researcher Jean-Claude Pressac have no “secret”
classification whatsoever. But this document, with its missing half
page, tells me that Goebbels knew damn well that something ugly was
probably happening on the Eastern front, and that he didn’t want members
of his staff asking awkward questions, so he had part of the page torn
off and locked away in his safe.
I sometimes wonder what his stenographer, Richard Otte, must have
thought about the man whose words he transcribed day by day for this
diary.
So there are the facts about Dr. Goebbels and the “final solution.”
If we’re looking for a culprit, if we’re looking for a criminal behind
the “final solution” or the “Holocaust,” whatever it was, for the man
who started it in motion, then it was undoubtedly Dr. Goebbels first and
foremost. Not Julius Streicher, not Adolf Hitler, nor any of the other
Nazis. Goebbels was the moving force, and the brain behind it in every
sense of the word. We still don’t know if he knew what exactly happened
at the other end, but then this isn’t surprising, because we ourselves
don’t know either.
Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 1, p. 2.
Published with permission, courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR).
For the current IHR catalog, with a complete listing of books and audio and video tapes, send one dollar to:
Jaume Farrerons
Este artículo prosigue la polémica iniciada aquí.
Si Marx y Nietzsche son incompatibles; si mezclar (¿?) a Nietzsche con Marx es disparatado y un síntoma de chifladura, entonces Georges Sorel, el ideólogo prefascista por excelencia, era un perturbado mental, pero también lo habría sido el fundador del fascismo, Benito Mussolini. El fascismo surgió de la lectura nietzscheana de Marx. El fascismo es una herejía marxista. Para el Dr. Petardo, esto es imposible: en su cabeza el concepto mismo de la dinámica espiritual no existe, los filósofos son cajas cerradas y si uno se abona al filósofo A no puede abonarse a filósofo B. O Nietzsche o Marx, hay que elegir. Un marxismo nietzscheano ---como el de Sorel--- sería cosa de asnos filosóficos. Pero entre el asno Sorel y el "Dr." Petardo me quedo con el asno (¿?) Sorel. Y ocurre que en Sorel se gesta el fascismo, modelo ideológico y político del nacionalsocialismo que vendrá después. Pero el "Dr." Petardo insiste en que Nietzsche es incoherente con Marx e insulta ---y censura--- a quienes discrepan de sus rebuznos.
Este tipo de afirmaciones sólo ponen en evidencia la inepcia de quien las propala, alguien que desconoce, precisamente, las cosas básicas y para empezar en qué consiste el trabajo de investigación en todas las universidades del mundo. Estamos ante un problema elemental de analfabetismo filosófico muy común entre personajes autodidactas carentes de estudios reglados. La licenciatura (hoy grado) eran antes cinco años (hoy cuatro). Después venía la especialización y la tesina (dos años más). Y, finalmente, el doctorado (cinco años más). En total 8-12 años superando exámenes y pruebas. El "Dr." Petardo se ha ahorrado todo eso. El petardo "se peta", evacua su amadísima "opinión" suya ---como un zurullo--- y difama e injuria a los discrepantes, suprimiendo además sus posts o comentarios y bloqueándolos para que ni siquiera puedan argumentar. ¡¡¡Hete aquí la honestidad intelectual del neonazi evoliano!!!
Mi doctorado, para más inri, consiste en una fundamentación de la ideología fascista (entendiendo "fascismo" en sentido genérico, no específicamente italiano) en la filosofía de Martin Heidegger, el filósofo más importante del siglo XX (y militante nacionalsocialista). El "Dr." Petardo es absolutamente incapaz de concebir siquiera las implicaciones de semejante factum en orden a sus cómicas pretensiones de examinarme y valorar mis opiniones en la materia.
Conste que no le pido al petardo el certificado de suficiencia investigadora que te conceden después de cursar dos años el DEA (Diploma de Estudios Avanzados) y que habilita para presentar la tesis doctoral. ¡No soy tan exigente! Me conformo con una simple licenciatura en filosofía (o grado). Yo no osaría opinar sobre física sin haber cursado antes unos estudios reglados, y menos contra un físico.
Ya no hablo de los insultos y todo lo demás, propio de un auténtico maniático chiflado. El "Dr." Petardo sí es capaz de hacerlo porque carece de sentido del ridículo. La decencia ético-intelectual más embrionaria le resulta desconocida. El "Dr." Petardo, en definitiva, no tiene sobre filosofía ni idea de nada, pero nada es nada, hablo de lo básico, de las meras normas ortográficas, semánticas, sintácticas, lógicas, metodológicas..., y de los rudimentos de historia de la filosofía que se aprenden en el bachillerato. Por lo demás, los asnos que le siguen aspiran con fruición el aroma de sus petardos pseudo filosóficos confundiéndole con un filósofo, un experto en fascismo o un ideólogo. Por eso, debatir con toda esa pandilla de skin-heads equivale a perder el tiempo.
Pero la lección que se puede obtener del debate con dicho energúmeno y sus chimpancés abonados a la miseria vale para la inmensa mayoría de los neonazis, quienes ignoran que el nacionalsocialismo es una Weltanschauung, una cosmovisión, una visión del mundo, una ideología y no un mero programa político.
Todavía es peor, empero, cuando los neonazis creen saberlo aunque desconozcan las implicaciones de este hecho, a saber, que una Weltanschauung sólo se puede fundamentar racionalmente ante el tribunal de la filosofía. Y que para fundamentar de forma mínimamente rigurosa, seria, competente, el nacionalsocialismo/fascismo, hay que estudiar aquella materia, especialidad o campo del saber. Pero estudiar filosofía no significa leerse a Nietzsche en casa y fundar un grupito de Facebook donde uno ejerce de maestro para gentes más ignorantes incluso que él mismo ---y ante las cuales, ciegas, puede el tuerto pasar por sabio---, sino cursar los estudios académicos correspondientes, obtener al menos una "licencia" (de ahí procede el título de licenciatura) antes de empezar a lanzar opiniones dignas de consideración sobre un filósofo cualquiera. Si Nietzsche, conviene subrayarlo, es un filósofo y el nacionalsocialismo una Weltanschauung, entonces el "Dr." Petardo está más guapo callado.
Seguimos aquí la conocida línea interpretativa de ---nada menos--- Ernst Nolte, ampliada y confirmada por el clásico por excelencia de los orígenes ideológicos del fascismo, a saber, Zeev Sternhell en la celebérrima obra del mismo título.
Por lo que a Nolte se refiere, hay que comenzar empapándose bien de la siguiente afirmación:
¿Estará chiflado Nolte?
Para un inepto que desconoce la dinámica de la historia del pensamiento occidental, "Nietzsche" y "Marx" son como dos substancias químicas que no se pueden mezclar. Sin embargo, el pensamiento consiste también en eso, vale decir, en leer a un autor A desde otro autor B y desarrollar aspectos de A que se iluminan a partir de la lectura de B. El supuesto es la unidad de la verdad, que no puede permanecer de iure compartimentada en una colección de opiniones estancas. El neonazi podría compensar su ignorancia supina con una esforzada lectura de la bibliografía, pero ni siquiera eso parece capaz de hacer. Si hubiera leído a otros investigadores, por ejemplo a Nolte y Sternhell, nunca se le habría ocurrido sostener que Marx y Nietzsche son incompatibles, mucho menos en el marco de una discusión sobre la ideología fascista o nacionalsocialista.
Jaume Farrerons
La Marca Hispànica, 4 de noviembre de 2019
(Continuará)