Goebbels: A Biography Read Free Page A

an hour. About everything. He’s quite delighted with my explanations.”
    The next morning he breakfasted with the president of the organization for artists and professionals, Emilio Bodrero, and met several prominent Italian intellectuals. In the evening he was invited by Mussolini to a dinner in the Grand Hotel. “Great gala event. Mussolini leads Magda in. She performs wonderfully well. He looks magnificent. Charming to Magda.”
    Other visits followed the next day, including one to the L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE), the Italian propaganda organization, whose director he had met in April in Berlin, 126 as well as thehead office of the fascist leisure organization Dopolavoro, which impressed Goebbels very much: “We must do something like that. The people at leisure. Sport, recreation, hospitals, tourism.”
    The next day’s visits included the Fascist Revolution exhibition: “Fascism is modern and has close ties with the people. We should learn from it.” After a visit to the German Academy and a speech to the Roman section of the NSDAP Foreign Organization and German expatriates (“In great form. […] Rapturous success”), he left Rome the same day to head back north. 127
    Two points emerge from Goebbels’s report on this varied program of visits: first, how easily impressed he was by the Italians’ charm offensive. He was simply not capable of perceiving that all the carefully chosen visits and receptions, the many honors, presents, and gestures of political goodwill were not about Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the brilliant propaganda expert and hero of the Nazi revolution, but part of the Italian regime’s efforts to improve its relations with Germany. A second important point is that the significance of the role played by the German propaganda minister in shaping Italo-German relations stood in inverse proportion to the amount of ceremony surrounding Goebbels’s reception in Rome—something that becomes clear from reading Goebbels’s diary, where he indulges freely in self-satisfied reflections on his pompous welcome in Italy.
    The fact is that while he was in Italy—behind his back—the German and Italian regimes were making decisive progress toward political agreement. The agreement in question was the Four-Power Pact, a project pursued by Mussolini since 1931, and to which he returned in March 1933. According to the pact, the four leading West European countries—Britain, France, Germany, and Italy—were to take the lead in ensuring the security of Europe and revise the Versailles Treaty. After many months of negotiation, however, the original draft had been reduced to a collection of declaratory compromise formulae that in no way reconciled the political interests of the participating nations. On the German side, Göring had conducted the concluding negotiations during his Rome visit on May 19 and 20. The decision to join the pact was made at the end of May, while Goebbels was in Italy. It was made in Berlin after intense consultations involving Hitler, Neurath, Göring, and Werner von Blomberg, and the treaty was finally signed on June 7 in Rome. Goebbels wasnot informed by Hitler until the day before—although he had been in the dictator’s company almost without interruption since his return from Italy. Goebbels noted the news laconically in his diary, but it cannot have escaped his attention that his Italian visit had been first and foremost what would nowadays be called a public relations event. 128

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

1939–1945
WAR—TOTAL WAR—TOTAL DEFEAT

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

“A Great, a Wonderful Time, in Which a New Reich Will Be Born”
    The Attack on the Soviet Union
    Credit 22.1
    Goebbels and Hitler at the Berghof around 1941. Every few weeks during the war, Goebbels had lengthy conversations with Hitler in which the latter conveyed the impression that Goebbels