Joseph Goebbels

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This is an interesting and unusual biography of Joseph Goebbels for several reasons.

First, the author, Curt Riess, was a Jewish German who was forced into exile in 1933 and only able to return to Germany with the defeat of the Nazi's in 1945. Second, this book was written in 1948, soon after the collapse of National Socialism. Third, Riess bases his book on interviews with family, friends and associates of Goebbels, when their memories were still fresh in their minds. Riess often has to mask the identities of his informants in order to protect them from reprisals. These facts make Riess's biography an extremely valuable resource into the period.

What surprised me most about Riess's book was how even-handed it was to Goebbels. Goebbels gets treated as a human being, rather than a caricature of evil. There is no doubt that Goebbels was evil and that Riess understands him to be evil, but he was also a human being, who had some virtues – had-work, rhetorical skills, even friends. Riess manages to wring sympathy for Goebbels out of his murder of his children and his wife and his suicide. In reading that section, I was horrified at various moments, such as the children calmly asking if it was time to die, and revolted by the murder of six young lives who could have been rescued, but were not because of Goebbel's pathological need to deny himself in the form of his children to his enemies. And, yet, the murder of the Goebbels' children is tragic; they were innocent, they didn't deserve to die. If we can't respond to that decent human feeling, then we are missing something.
To me, it seemed like a distinct departure from the “history as polemics and moralizing” school. As an exiled Jewish German, Riess could not have had any feeling for Goebbels apart from hatred and revulsion, but he was writing this at a time when Goebbels was a real person known to real people. Riess explains that he spoke to Goebbels' Mother. Here is a passage describing information Riess obtained from Goebbel's mother:

“Now, on the evening of 19 April, he sent her away. The old woman had spent the last days with him. She was willing to stay for she was very old, suffering from a heart disease, and there was nothing life could offer her. Through all the years when he was basking in fame and success she asked nothing from her son. She was always a little disturbed over the luxury which he surrounded himself; always a little frightened among the great events in which he was a central figure; always a little distressed over the evils the Nazis committed,of which, being a strict Catholic she could not approve.” (p. 339.)

Honestly, that sounds like the kind of self-serving statement that a mother dealing with the mess her son has left behind would say. Were these statements true? That isn't so clear to me. Perhaps it was the case that her concerns really became realized after Germany was in ashes. Nonetheless, even Goebbels had a mother, and that fact might tend to limit the creation of the Other as an object lesson for the ages, which we see in more recent books.

Here is another example. Riess shares several jokes about Goebbels. For example:

“Or another story, in Berlin there was a victory parade, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin on a grandstand reviewing their victorious troops.Suddenly a manhole opened in front of the stand, Goebbels' head bobbed up, and he said, “But we won the war all the same!” Or: Hitler, Goering and Goebbels were standing at the window of the Reich Chancellery watching the Allied troops marching into Berlin. Goebbels noted with satisfaction: “and now comes the retaliation!” The others looked at him as though he had lost his reason,but Goebbels explained, ‘After all, where are they going to live?'” (p. 295)

I can more than imagine modern writers sniffing at the inappropriateness of telling jokes about mass murderers. I say this because a recent moralizing book that attempts to pin the Holocaust on an American bishop opens with a similar joke being told between Pope Pius XII and the bishop, and then goes on to use this incident as an example of Catholic indifference to the Holocaust. Nonetheless, in history, people were amazingly human, and actually told jokes that satirized their enemies.

Another interesting feature is that the Holocaust plays no role in this book. Riess acknowledges that Goebbels was an anti-semite and was responsible for the one-day boycott of Jewish businesses. Goebbels used the Jews as a constant device to pin any blame for Nazi failures on, until their were no Jews left in Germany to blame, after which blaming Jews strained the credulity of even credulous Germans. Riess notes that Goebbels wanted to remove Jews from Germany and instituted various anti-semitic regulations, such as wearing the Star of David, and yet Riess shares this:

“”When it was pointed out that this type of ‘subversive activity' had been eliminated by the introduction of the Star of David – at Goebbels own suggestion – he replied grimly: ‘Now the Moses and the Levysohns are sitting at home and no longer show themselves in the streets. Instead, they are sending old mamma and old daddy to the stores, counting on the compassion of the Berliners who with their sheep-like, good natured temperament, promptly fall for this trick. How often do I receive reports telling me hat such an old Jewish mamma turns up in the subway and that two or three people immediately jump up to offer her a seat.”

What incensed Goebbels beyond anything else was the same experience he had had in 1938, when many Germans did not follow his commands but, on the contrary, found ways and means of expressing their sympathis to the Jews. (p. 212.)

Riess also writes concerning Krystalnacht:

“everywhere in Germany people were horrified t the outrageous treatment of the Jews. Strangers would approach them, shake hands with them and tell them they were ashamed to be Germans. In the trolleys, in the subways, people got up and demonstratively offered their seats to Jews. In the stores, they stepped back to wait until the Jews were served. And numerous so-called Aryans risked their heads to hide Jews.” (p. 170-171.)

Apparently, instilling uniform racial hatred in the German people was hard work.

On the one hand, this kind of information tends to undermine the modern claim that seeks to make Germans inherently anti-semitic as a matter of culture or religion. On the other hand, I wonder how accurate this information is. As a skeptically inclined person, I have to think that in the aftermath of German defeat, there would have been a lot of Germans who couldn't wait to explain that they were not like those Nazis.

Riess's book seems to distance Goebbels from the actual mechanics of the Holocaust. Obviously, “holocaust” was a term that did not come into use until the 1970s, but I wonder if the absence of a term like “genocide” prevented Riess from spending more time on the subject of the mass murder of his fellow Jews. Riess spends more time talking about the Katyn Massacre of Polish officers by Stalin than he spends on Nazi death camps. A reason for this may be that Goebbels was involved in the propaganda spin of the Katyn massacre. Concerning Nazi death camps, this is what Riess writes:

“In the winter of 1941, the first Jews were deported to Poland. Goebbels' associates, among them Fritsche, asked whether there was any truth in the rumours that they would be gassed. Goebbels declared that he would have the matter checked. The next day he told Fritzsche that there was not a word of truth in the story: no Jew would be gassed or killed in any other way.” (p. 212.)

Presumably, this came from Fritzsche and others implicated with Goebbels, and so the informants would have an interest in denying knowledge of the death camps. However, the fact that they acknowledged rumors in the winter of 1941 is interesting.

Riess doesn't directly explain how Goebbels became Goebbels. Goebbels started out as a leftist, in fact a socialist with sympathies to Russia after the war. (p. 38.) He was a protégé of Strasser's left wing nationalism and was initially a Hitler opponent, until he came under the spell of Hitler's charisma. Riess believes that submission and identification with Hitler saved Goebbels from his lifelong nihilism, which ultimately expressed itself in his immolation of his family. (p. 29.) In this regard, Riess anticipates Peter Longerich's 2015 biography of Goebbels, which goes further in defining Goebbels as losing his own identity in that of Hitler. Riess's biography, however, seems to make Goebbels more of an actor in Nazi policy than Longerich. Longerich gave me the impression that Hitler used Goebbels as a pawn with respect to the League of Nations, for example, and that Goebbels was surprised at Hitler's decision to withdraw from the League, rather than an instigator of that withdrawal.

My interest in Goebbels largely grows out of Christopher Hitchens slur that Goebbels was “excommunicated for marrying a Protestant.” I have found no evidence that Goebbels was excommunicated, but my research has indicated that Goebbels effectively self-excommunicated himself for marrying a divorced woman, which in Catholic theology and canon law is tantamount to bigamy. I have often suspected that Goebbels' marriage did not take place in a Catholic church because the Catholic Church does not marry divorced people without an annulment of the first marriage.

Riess nicely confirmed my intuition. He writes:

“They were married towards the end of 1931. The ceremony took place on an estate in Mecklenburg owned by Guenther Quandt. Hitler was Goebbels' best man. Goebbels' mother asked that he be married in the Catholic Church. This was somewhat difficult as Magda was a divorced woman. Goebbels wrote to the Bishop of Berlin asking for a special dispensation, but the offensive tone of his letter made the granting of this request almost impossible. Three days later, when he had received no reply, Goebbels informed the Bishop tat he would marry without the blessing of the Church, as, indeed he had lived all his life.” (p. 88.)

So, in short, as I suspected, after years of looking for confirmation of my intuition, there was no truth in Hitchens' Catholic-baiting slur, and all it took was a book from 1948 whose author interviewed Goebbels' mother.

Likewise, it is not apparent that Goebbels was excommunicated, at all. He was quite able to use his lapsed membership in the Catholic Church for political purposes:

“The drive against Catholics was characterized by unprecedented violence and its moral level could not have been lower. Every day the press published accounts filled with the basest accusations – stories of a type which no self-respecting newspaper would have printed before. On 30 April 1937, this resulted in the arrest of several thousand Catholic monks who were charged with homosexual offences. Further articles against the Catholic Church followed, all of them slanted to show that the guilt of the defendants had already been established. Suddenly, Goebbels remembered that he was a Roman Catholic; suddenly he remembered his four children,and eloquently he described the tortured imagination of a Catholic father who could not but recoil when he heard of the sexual abominations committed in Catholic seminaries.” (p. 146.)

Anybody familiar with the media's approach to so-called priest pedophilia can see an eerie similarity. Undoubtedly, there were some real offenders among German priests in 1937, as there are among Catholic priests today, but the drumbeat of media attention is designed to create the impression that the entire Church is infected. Similarly, the political agenda is present – the German Catholic Church opposed Nazi social values, just as the modern Catholic Church opposes social values like abortion and gay marriage. Finally, it seems that the people most horrified and concerned about the safety of Catholic children are people who hate the Catholic Church for other reasons, a fact indicated by the comparative lack of concern with public school children who are at a far greater risk of molestation by teachers.

The point here, though, is that Goebbels was playing the “I'm a Catholic” card in 1937, after his marriage in 1931, when, according to Hitchens, he had been excommunicated for marrying a Protestant.

In conclusion, I recommend this book as a primary source for information about Goebbels and for an insight into the attitudes and knowledge of people in the period immediately after World War II.