Reply #59: the press [View All]

[m berst]

Reading Goebbels' diary is an unpleasant task, I should mention, but I am very glad that I picked it up. There are so many surprises and so many things to learn from it.

I had assumed that the party had total control over the press, and I knew from reading diaries and other books by US correspondents in Germany at the time, that they were under a lot of pressure, so I assumed that it would be much more heavy-handed with German correspondents. It surprised me to see that Goebbels had no sense of having total control over the press - quite to the contrary - and also how light his hand was in many cases. Apparently many reporters were going about their business with no harassment, voluntarily writing things that brought no attention from the authorities. And there, as here, some correspondents had access to power, which was good for one's career, and some didn't, and few would break out of the herd and challenge the government.

There must have been a lot of voluntary compliance with the Nazi agenda - unwitting in many cases - in all sorts of ways, small and large. At the same time, apparently at the highest levels of the Nazi party and German government, in at least one case, there was very little understanding as to what was just over the horizon. Goebbels writes about conversations he has with Neurath, Goering, Shirach, Frank, Hess, and many other party and government officials. In all cases, they talk like over-worked bumbling bureaucrats caught up in petty feuds and buried in paperwork, and not as though they had any sense of being masters of anything. Several of them express to Goebbels, and he agrees with them, that excesses against the Jews, the Czechs and others need to be curtailed.

What emerges is a picture of leaders not being fully aware of where and how they were leading people. They should have known, we think, and so should have the German people. Yet the signs of what was coming were no less obvious than the signs we see here today. The German people were unwilling to put two and two together, but no more so than the American people are here today. That does not mean that everything is identical in the two situations, it means that there are some disturbing parallels.

Reading the diaries is very disturbing because we know the hatred that his propaganda stirred up and the consequences of that. We know what was to come. But did he have an inkling of what was being unleashed? I think not. In some ways, that is more frightening than it would be had he known and planned more specifically.