Goebbels Worries about Germans Who Don’t Want to Fight to the End

Today I add the penultimate of Joseph Goebbels’s weekly articles for Das Reich.  It was mid-April, and despite constant calls to fight to the end, Germans in the West were all too eager to surrender to the advancing British and American forces.  The worst came on 1 March 1945, when the citizens of Goebbels’s hometown of Rheydt easily accepted American troops.  This article is titled “Risking One’s Own Life.” Goebbels argues that only a few spineless Germans accept enemy occupation, while the good ones fight to the end.

Neues Deutschland after the Wende

Just after the fall of East Germany I wrote a paper about Neues Deutschland’s transition from the subservient organ of the East German state to a newspaper that was a trying to adjust to dramatically new conditions.  It was one of the few things I’ve written that I could not find a home for and it has been sitting in my files for twenty years.  It is by now decidedly dated, but for those interested in the period it may have some interest.

The essay is titled “Neues Deutschland after the Wende.”