by Hans Schwarz
von Berk
The source: Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich:
Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1941), a collection of Goebbels’ speeches and
writings from January 1939 to September 1941.
In the minister’s office there is a long map table in front of the window
facing the Wilhelmplatz. Some maps are of the sort on which General Staff
officers measure with their compasses and sketch their plans. There are others
that belong to a chapter of the war that is unequaled in the history of
warfare.
One map shows the radio transmitters that have been conquered in Europe.
Another shows on numerous pages the movements and locations of the propaganda
companies. A world map shows the zones reached by shortwave transmissions in
many languages. Still another shows the movements and performances of front
theater companies. Another compares the cities in England and Germany that have
been bombed. Whenever Dr. Goebbels meets with officers, war reporters, editors,
radio people, and artists around the table, the ways the war has mobilized the
spirit and the soul become evident.
Once or twice each week the room is empty, and Dr. Goebbels wanders around
the table. He dictates an article or a speech. This is in the middle of the day’s
work, and often happens so quickly that those in the waiting room are surprised
when the stenographer leaves after only fifteen minutes. There have been days
of such high tension and concentration that he has dictated a three column
article in twelve minutes. But that is not the rule. When Dr. Goebbels
polemicizes, he does so in a way few others can equal. He dictates sharp and
pointed phrases, as well as ones that are elegant and powerful. He needs no
long preparation. As a revolutionary, he is at ease with all forms of political
eloquence. As a result, most of these articles read as if they had just been
spoken. His essays that treat the great problems of the day or have a
particular foreign policy aim, are different. Such pieces are written with the
requisite thoroughness. Files and evidence are gathered, quotations checked
against the original, quotations from Eden or Roosevelt or Pitman or Ickes are
double-checked. When a manuscript has been worked over numerous times it may be
set aside for a week or longer, after which every word is once more weighed. A
war cannot be won by temperament alone, even temperament as great as Dr.
Goebbels has. Few know that he follows a stringent daily plan. He begins each
day with the diary he has kept since 1920, and ends late in the night with a
preview of the footage for the next newsreel, 3,000 copies of which will go out
to all the world.
The precise daily routine was harder and harder to follow as the first
signs of a real danger of war in Europe began to appear. That was a few months
after the Munich Conference, December/January of 1938/39. England was arming,
the United States opened its press and diplomacy to incitement, France was
drawn in, Poland was driven down the path to insanity. It became essential to be
propagandistically alert and to show our own people as well as those of the
world what was happening. The ministry needed to prepare the radio, the press,
film, and the party for whatever might come. German propaganda was preparing
for its baptism by fire.
Dr. Goebbels held to his daily routine. The trivial was shoved aside.
Visitors had to be more concise. The documents and proposals that reached his
desk became even briefer. But more time was given to reading the press and
confidential news, enemy leaflets and brochures, and the transcripts of foreign
radio stations. The minister’s work room became once more like his editorial
office in the years he was fighting for Berlin, but now he was no longer
leading a newspaper, but rather the entire news system, the radio, oral
propaganda, and brochures.
These changed circumstances once again testified to his journalistic
abilities. Everything that Dr. Goebbels heard or read was transformed into war
leadership. Most matters he passed on to others with a few brief instructions.
Much of his dictation appeared abroad, without betraying his name. The emphasis
was always on timeliness. Lengthy pamphlets, thick tomes, deep academic
discussions of the sort one used during the World War were almost always
rejected. The important thing was to keep at the enemy’s heels. There could be
no trench warfare in propaganda. Each of Churchill’s blunders, each of his
defeats and embarrassments, had to be responded to immediately. Dr. Goebbels
commented week after week on the state of things. His essays appeared in the Völkischer
Beobachter and in Das Reich.
Some ask why he does not direct the entire press. He obviously has the
ability. But Dr. Goebbels makes a clear distinction between what he does as
minister and what he does as a journalist. As a journalist he does his own
work. He wants people to see his articles as his personal opinion. He wants
them to have weight, to stand out, to speak to the readers. Political writing,
political arguments, and political persuasion stand alongside the news, the
dispatches from the army command, the propaganda company reports.
His personal writing and speeches come in the midst of his war work. So
much has happened in this “unique era “ since the critical year 1939 — the
achievements of our soldiers and the changes in the map brought about by our
campaigns are of such enormous scale that a speech or essay can be forgotten.
When however one considers the items collected in this book, which are only a
part of what he produced in these years, one is reminded of the scale of the
war. They show that we have approached this war as a political people and that
we see it as a political whole. We have never lacked something to say. We have
avoided high-flown boasting and careless words. There is no sign of a patriotic
bombast that conceals the real difficulties and challenges of the war. Dr.
Goebbels has also determined where the language should be pointed. He knows and
shares the collective and sensible mood of our people. He might speak with
biting irony about men like Churchill or Halifax, Eden or Roosevelt, but never
forgot the reality of the enemy’s strength. When he makes predictions — and now
and again in this book he does — they depend not on careless hopes for a happy
accident, the kind of thing Churchill does to conceal from the English the
seriousness of their defeats. Instead, he reveals the enemy’s secret intentions
and points out their responsibility. For example, what Dr. Goebbels wrote about
American warmongers in January 1939 has come true step by step.
In one of his essays on
Churchill, Dr. Goebbels characterized him as a gambler who each time hopes his
luck will improve, while all the while he is gambling away his whole empire.
The Führer and Mr. Churchill differ most clearly in their relationship to luck.
This theme appears regularly, always in the only way that corresponds to our
way of thinking. As Moltke put it, in the long run only those are lucky who
deserve to be. Miracles and luck will not decide this war. Victory will depend
on the achievements of our people, on our weapons and on the resoluteness of
our hearts, against which all the words of the enemy are in vain. In a language
that the educated and the uneducated can understand, Dr. Goebbels has expressed
the war doctrine of a young socialist people, a people that knows that
everything that happens follows a higher necessity. That is the essence of the
war. No hope or waiting, no renunciation or obligation is in vain. Nothing
unnecessary is asked of us, no drop of blood is shed for reasons of prestige.
Everything follows a secret plan in the hands of the Führer. This sum of these
essays and speeches makes clear the logic of the war. It depends on a
consciousness of German security and superiority. Our whole thinking in this
war is contained in this one sentence: “Germany has always been as strong as it
is today, but never knew it.”
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