Goebbels to Himself

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 486, 15 October 1948, Page 15

Goebbels to Himself

THE GOEBBELS DIARIES. Translated and Edited. by Louis P. Lochner. Hamish Hamilton, OST of us, when we heard that the diaries of Goebbels had been discovered, suspected fraud. Even when the . discovery had been translated into English and circulated it was difficult to believe anything so simple as that this astonishing record had been found among the junk' the Russians had left trampled underfoot in the courtyard of a Berlin ministry, But it is difficult to doubt the authenticity of the record once it thas been read. If these are not the comments of Goebbels they are a forgery of such fantastic thoroughness that their production so soon after the loss of the originals is more than the mind can take in, It is necessary

to accept them for what they purport to be-a fragment of a fragment of the. notes Goebbels wrote every day as one of the Nazi "big three." The editor’s task, once the translation had been completed, was to select enough printed material for 500 pages out of 7100 pages of MS. which did not always (or often) run on. : "No doubt," he says, "some of the missing pages went up in flames, for there is a smell of burnt paper about. the whole collection, and some pages are singed. It is also lik@ly that large sections of the diaries, indeed whole volumes, were destroyed in ignorance their content and importance." The Russians, he thinks, emptied papers on the floor and carried off the filing cabinets: In this case they went further, stripping off the metal binders that held the perforated pages together, and what was left was thousands of sheets of loose paper. How many disappeared alto gether will now perhaps never be known, but 750,000 words survive, and whatever else they are, they are history as it was happening day by day during two of the world’s maddest years. History, of course, means different things to different people, and Goebbels was neyer quite normal at any stage in his life. During this period he was so

far from normal that it is his abnormeli- | ties which chiefly interest us. The world he saw was not only not our world: it was not even his world, It was a place held before his eyes by the fanatic whom he worshipped and followed. While Stalin was just a monster to him, and Churchill, an told rogue, Hitler was always a super-man (if now and again a worrying superman who would not act when his disciple called). Goebbels is vain, ruthless, crooked, a fanatic, bi-t never a fool. He is bold when others lose their heads, and while words are seldom strong enough to express isis contempt for his enemies, it is always moral contempt and not military or material. He never under-estimates his enemies or over-estimates his allies, and although he shoots himself and his wife in the end and poisons his children-or has it done for him-that is not because his courage fails him but because in this as in everything else he will not surrender to Russia. The diary of course does not continue till his death: The details of that are given in a footnote to the last entry, which is dated December 9, 1943, It is a complaint, contemptuous and angry rather than querulous, of jealousy and incompetence among the Fuehrer’s closest followers-especially Rosenberg and Ribbentrop. It is impossible not to feel the pathos of these last surviving words: How badly we are doing our political job in the East can be seen from the fact that Rosenberg has still not carried out the Fuehrer’s order to transfer propaganda there to us. He is doing everything he can to sabotage and torpedo it. I don’t understand how the Fuehrer can leave such an obstreperous nincompodp in his job. If I were in his place, I would clear the boards in a hurry., ¢ sss. Lammers, at my request, reported. the situation about the Paris propaganda department to the Fuehrer and told him of Ribbentrop’s attempt to take it out of my hands via the O.K.W. The Fuehrer was enraged and turned against Ribbentrop, using very harsh and insulting’ expressions. The Fuehrer described the report given me by Ribbentrop through Minister Ritter as absolutely untrue and mendacious. ... If Ribbentrop is as clever in his foreign policy as he is towards his colleagues in matters of domestic politics, I can well understand why we achieve no notable successes in our

dealings with foreign nations.

O.

D.