Abstract
The year before Germany plunged Europe into war in September 1939 was an intensely paradoxical time for Goebbels. This was the last period in which his plans for the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft could be freely developed; above all, his ambitions for a reordered cultural life. He was able to extend his control over the media and the arts to the areas now incorporated into the Greater German Reich, and to reshape significant cultural events like the Salzburg Festival in August 1938 and 1939. This was a time in which his propaganda slogans, like ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ (One People, one Empire, one Leader), and ‘Heim ins Reich’ (Home to the Reich) seemed to represent popular sentiment in Germany, and to reflect changing political realities. When he spoke in public, as he still did frequently, he was greeted with wild enthusiasm. At the same time, Goebbels was an increasingly isolated and melancholy figure, and the celebratory bombast of his speeches corresponded less and less with his inner feelings.
The news that England had declared war on 3rd September came like a bombshell to most people in Germany and Danzig. Everywhere there were bleak faces and a hushed atmosphere as in the presence of death … I listened day and night to the gunfire on the frontier only a few miles away, every minute imagining it was drawing nearer.
Sybil Bannister, an Englishwoman living in Danzig in 1939.1
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Notes
Sybil Bannister, I lived under Hitler: An Englishwoman’s Story (London: Rockliff, 1957), p. 79.
For a balanced account of the November pogrom see Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews 1933–1945 (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 135ff.
See, for a representative example, Richard Breitman, Himmler and the Final Solution: The Architect of Genocide (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 52.
See Herbert Levine, Hitler’s Free City: A History of the Nazi Party in Danzig, 1925–39 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
Cited in James Owen and Guy Walters (eds), Voices of War: The Second World War Told by Those Who Fought It (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 1. Here I differ in emphasis with Adam Tooze, who argues that Hitler ‘knew that an attack on Poland would most likely provoke a declaration of war by Britain and France’. See Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, p. 321.
See Janina Grabowska-Chałka, Stutthof Guide: Historical Information (Gdań´sk: Stutthof Museum, 2004), p. 17.
TBJG, 4 September 1939, TI, 7, pp. 91–2. The idea that Goebbels, after hearing of the British declaration, was ‘downcast and pensive, looking literally like the proverbial drenched poodle’, derives from the account by Paul Schmidt, a Foreign Office interpreter, but the reliability of this account has been challenged. See Reuth, Goebbels, p. 256; and Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000), p. 223, and n. 305 on p. 906.
See Richard Bessel, Nazism and War (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 1.
A more or less complete stenographic record of the ‘ministerial conferences’ from October 1939 until May 1941, and increasingly sparse groups of conference records up to April 1943 have been preserved, and are in BArch, R 55/20001. Excerpts have been published in Willi Boelcke (ed.), Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg? Die geheimen Goebbels-Konferenzen 1939–43 (Herrsching: Manfred Pawlak, 1989).
Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), p. 288.
TBJG, 25 October 1939. According to a recent study, most ‘prominent Poles’ had fled from Posen; 25 of those remaining were arrested as hostages. Across Poland SS units had instructions to arrest, and if necessary to murder members of the intelligentsia. See Alexander Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), pp. 15–16, and 132.
See Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill 1939–1941 (London: BCA, 1983), p. 192.
See John Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (New York and London: Norton, 1985), p. 200. Churchill gives more detail of his reaction to Hitler’s speech in his The Second World War (London: Cassell, 1949), Vol. II, Their Finest Hour, pp. 229–30.
See Denis Richards and Hilary Saunders, Royal Air Force 1939–1945 (London: HMSO, 1974), Vol. 1, pp. 230–2.
See Willem de Vries, Sonderstab Musik: Music Confiscations by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg under the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), pp. 23–5.
Ulrich von Hassell, Vom andern Deutschland. Aus den nachgelassenen Tagebüchern 1938–1944 von Ulrich von Hassell (Vienna: Humboldt, 1948), 23 November 1940, and 19 January 1941, p. 140, and p. 145.
See Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 209–19.
TBJG, 8 March 1941, TI, 9, p. 176. On Jud Süß and Ich klage an, see also Erwin Leiser, ‘Deutschland erwache!’ Propaganda im Film des Dritten Reiches (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), pp. 130–46.
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© 2009 Toby Thacker
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Thacker, T. (2009). ‘This People’s War Must Be Carried Through’. In: Joseph Goebbels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230274228_10
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