The Goebbel's Diaries
by Louis P. Lockner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Louis P. LocknerEdition: Paperback
Published: 1978-12-01
ISBN: 0441295509
Number of pages: 640
Publisher: Ace Books
Book Reviews of The Goebbel's Diaries
Book Review: Holocaust Uniqueness (Not); Slav Genocide; Polish Guerilla Successes; Nazi anti-Christianity (1942-1943)
Summary: 4 Stars
In recent years, some (e. g., Yehuda Bauer, Steven T. Katz) have contended that the Jews were the only people in history to be targeted for COMPLETE extermination. Limiting oneself to the contents of this volume, consider this (December 14, 1942): "The Jewish race has prepared this war; it is the spiritual originator of the whole misfortune that has overtaken humanity. Jewry must pay for its crime just as our Fuehrer prophesied in his speech in the Reichstag: namely, by the wiping out of the Jewish race in Europe and possibly in the entire world." (pp. 243-244). The fact that the extermination of Jews would not necessarily have continued beyond Europe itself refutes the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
As late as March 7, 1942, Goebbels had still been entertaining a Final Solution that would send all European Jews to Madagascar (p. 116). In other entries, he was completely candid about the physical extermination of Jews (e. g., p. 86, 92; 243-244). However, Jews were not the only scapegoats; nor were they the only ones blamed for starting WWII. On April 17, 1943, Goebbels wrote: "... [Poles]...were the real instigators of this war...." (p. 332). After Mussolini's fall, Goebbels commented: "The plot hatched against us in Rome was backed by the monarchy, aristocracy, society, higher officers, Free Masons [Freemasons], Jews, industrialists, and clerics." (p. 445). Nor were Jews necessarily the only ones supposed to be overly powerful. On April 30, 1942, Goebbels entertained fantasies of Poles being behind the panic of the Germans of Rostock following the devastating RAF attack (p. 197).
There are veiled references to the planned extermination of Poles and other Slavs. Hitler is quoted as forbidding all sexual activity between German soldiers and Polish women (p. 95). On February 15, 1942, Goebbels commented: "...Slavs, he [Heydrich] emphasized, cannot be educated as one educates a Germanic people. One must either break them or humble them constantly." (p. 88). The first step in genocide is the denial of the humanity of those targeted. The well-known de-humanization of Jews extended to Slavs, as on January 27, 1942:"The incidents that Sepp Dietrich related to me about the Russian people in the occupied areas are simply hair-raising. They are not a people but a conglomeration of animals." (p. 52). Likewise, on March 20, 1942, Goebbels wrote: "But we, too, must realize that we shall have to fill with human beings such wide spaces in the East as we shall conquer. In geography, there can be no spaces without human beings..." (p. 139). The implication is obvious: Slavs are not human beings!
Goebbels repeatedly (p. 388, 396, 399, 456) mentions the growing successes of Polish guerilla actions (e. g., May 27, 1943: "Conditions in the General Government appear to be more than catastrophic. Every day there are attempts at assassination and acts of terror, without our authorities being able to do anything about it. The German population and our administrative officialdom seem to yield, not to say capitulate, to these conditions.")(pp. 399-400). Goebbels even probably alludes to the successful Polish Underground action in the Zamosc area (May 25, 1943): "Suddenly, however, he [Zoerner] received order for resettlement that had a very bad effect on morale. Some 50,000 Poles were to be evacuated to begin with. Our police were able to grab only 25,000; the other 25,000 joined the Partisans. It is not hard to imagine what consequences that had for the whole area. Now he was to evacuate about 190,000 more Poles. This he refused to do, and in my opinion he was right." (p. 396).
Goebbels repeatedly discusses the Katyn massacre (p. 318, 328, 336, 346, 354, 487); triumphantly claiming personal responsibility for the ensuing Soviet-Polish split (p. 346). Didn't Goebbels realize that, had Katyn never come to light, Stalin would've broken with the Polish government-in-exile on some other pretext? However, Goebbels does smell the developing sellout of Poland: (e. g., April 29, 1943: "The Poles are given a brush-off by the English and the Americans as though they were enemies.)" (p. 347). According to Lochner, the translator, Stalin had, already on February 23, 1942, claimed that the Soviets alone were doing all of the fighting (pp. 257-258). This became a mainstay of Communist propaganda and, more durably, an excuse for the west's sellout of Poland. However, the west's inability to restrain Stalin is refuted by the fact that, by this date, the US had already shipped 2,900,000 tons of material to the USSR (p. 258). As for threats of a separate peace, it went both ways. Ironically, Hitler himself had preferred a German-English separate peace over a German-Soviet one (p. 435).
Allied carpet bombing has often been second-guessed on moral and tactical grounds. In fact, the impracticality of selective targeting had been discovered early in the war. Hitler realized this (p. 190), and Goebbels added that the dislocations caused by area bombing reduce wartime productivity much more than the destruction of a munitions plant (p. 462).
The translator Lochner (p. ix), based on some of Goebbels's entries (p. 138, 142, 146, 375), contends that the Nazis intended to destroy Christianity after winning the war. Public crucifixes were removed (p. 141), and Hitler saw the Christian doctrine of redemption as insane (p. 375). Hitler also re-affirmed his support of vegetarianism (p. 188).
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