Short Stories

“NINETEEN FORTY-FOUR” (SHORT STORY)

In war-torn Berlin, a man sits alone, writing.

His hand trembles. His words scatter, dark and dangerous. This is Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda master, clinging to his lies as his world crumbles.

“Nineteen Forty-Four” is a historical short story about the ruin of absolute power.

What’s the price of trying to outrun the truth?

What’s the toll of years of deception?

3,000 words / 12 minutes of intense reading pleasure

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‘The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.’ Robert Capa

STEFANO BOSCUTTI

NINETEEN FORTY-FOUR

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.

Goebbels is writing in his diary once more. His hand shakes and his handwriting is becoming more difficult to read. He now has a team of transcribers who type all his musings on official Nazi letterhead which are then filmed on microfiche for posterity.

He repeats what he has just written. As a cataclysmic war rages through Germany, the only comfort he finds is in his words. They are his balm, his salve.

The past decade has seen Nazism catapult Germany into a world war of its own making after invading the minds of its own people, the lands and peoples of neighbouring countries.

In nineteen thirty-five, Adolph Hitler rejected military restrictions on Germany set forth by the Treaty of Versailles. Rearmament quickly began along with the reintroduction of conscription. Germany’s military expansion was swift and aggressive.

In nineteen thirty-eight, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass erupted across Germany and Austria. Nazi paramilitary thugs and non-Jewish citizens rampaged through cities, destroying Jewish-owned stores, torching centuries-old synagogues, deporting thousands of Jews and killing scores of innocents. This escalation and explosion of shocking state-sanctioned violence had been masterminded by Goebbels. Two days after Kristallnacht, Germany’s Jews were fined a billion Reichsmark for property damaged in the rioting. Goebbels thought this his masterstroke.

In nineteen thirty-nine, Germany invades Poland under false pretenses. Within days Britain, Canada, Australia and France declare war on Germany. Two years later Russia declares war on Germany. Then America joins the allied forces with all its might.

In nineteen forty bombs rain on Berlin day and night for six months in an air campaign to force Germany into surrender without the necessity of land operations. Carpet bombing by the British Air Force and the United States Air Force has destroyed much of German infrastructure and industrial capacity. The German people are shattered but they do not surrender.

In nineteen forty-three Goebbels called for Total War is his most famous speech, exhorting the German people to victory or death. To rise up and storm, break loose. The handpicked audience in full Nazi regalia roared approval for the radio broadcasts and newsreels.

By nineteen forty-four, German soil is drenched in blood. It is fighting a war it cannot possibly win. Civilian industries in America have been entirely retooled for war. General Motors is turning out tanks in record numbers. Pontiac is producing anti-aircraft guns. Oldsmobile is making artillery shells.

Ford is building a long-range bomber plane almost every hour. Goebbels has to laugh. After everything the Nazi regime did for the Ford Motor Company in Germany. After all the money the company made from the German people.

Before the war, Hitler worshipped Henry Ford, praised his violent anti-semitism. Hitler had read Ford’s “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” over and over. Hitler’s office had once featured a large portrait of the American mogul.

Ford had gladly accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honour for foreigners. Ford vehicles were crucial to the Nazi blitzkrieg. A third of the three hundred and fifty thousand trucks used by the German Army were made by Ford.

Labor shortages caused by the war - millions of men were at the front and Nazi ideology is violently opposed to women working - led the Reich to deport millions of people from occupied lands to Germany to work in factories. German companies were encouraged to bid for forced labourers to meet production quotas and increase profits.

Half of Ford’s workforce in Germany comprised foreign captives, including French, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belgians. In August a squad of SS men brought prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp to the Ford factory. They toiled for twelve hours a day with a fifteen-minute break. Given two hundred grams of bread and coffee for breakfast, no lunch and a dinner of spinach and three potatoes or soup made of turnip leaves.

German’s productivity is crippled by the war economy. Lack of supplies hinders any attempts to advance into Russia. Germany is becoming desperately short of fuel and food.

A failed coup and assassination attempt on Hitler at Wolf’s Lair earlier in the year had been a godsend to Goebbels. A divine moment in history. A public relations dream. Hitler became the living embodiment of God’s will.

God was with the German people, Goebbels railed. But let’s not rely on God alone. Let’s work so hard and fight so fiercely that God cannot refuse to hand victory to Germany.

Goebbels’ propaganda method is based upon seizing immediate advantage with complete disregard for the truth. British and American propaganda is slower, more thorough and designed to produce long-term confidence. In the end, it will prove decisive.

For all its bluster, German propaganda brought short-term impact at the cost of long-term credibility.

Hitler’s public invincibility is no match for his private fears. He is constantly surrounded by teams of bodyguards. He allows only his beloved German Shepherd, Blondi, by his side.

After the assassination attempt, the Gestapo arrested seven thousand people, executed almost five thousand. Some are viciously strangled and strung on meat hooks, their agonising deaths filmed for Hitler to watch.

Hitler had been spending more and more time in his underground Führerbunker deep below the Reich Chancellery gardens. He began extending the three-thousand square feet subterranean air raid shelter two years earlier. There are two levels of reinforced concrete and thick gas-proof steel doors. The warren of interconnected rooms and narrow hallways is constantly flooding. Water weeps down the concrete walls as giant diesel engines continuously rumble, generating electricity for the extraction pumps and ventilation. The light is damp, the air is hot and fetid.

Hitler continues to hold lengthy conferences with his generals day and night in his enormous study in the Reich Chancellery. Giant maps of Europe spread over huge tables, scrambling from one failed military campaign to the next as the bombs continue to fall on Berlin.

Hitler’s aides ensure he never sees the vast amount of damage to the Reich Chancellery. The last time Goebbels had seen him he was being escorted up from the Führerbunker and along the hallway carpeted in red and lined with dozens of Reichssicherheitsdienst guards standing post. Blond, handsome, perfumed, boots glistening, uniforms sharply-tailored. They look like Aryan toy soldiers.

Hitler was gripping his left arm behind him. His own pistol, a Walther PPK 7.65, in the pocket of his grey military trenchcoat. Dr. Morell tottering close by clutching his medical bag close to his chest.

What an odd lot Hitler’s inner circle makes. Goebbels with his dark skin, gaunt. His clubbed left foot. His receding black hair. His anxious, nervous energy. Göring with his penchant for fineries, for gold and diamonds. Like a fat bejewelled toad. Himmler with his constant stomach complaints and terrible eyesight. Martin Bormann without a spit of intelligence. The master race?

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Goebbels believed it with every cell of his being, every thought of his mind, every piece of his soul.

But whispers of catastrophic military failures are becoming louder. Goebbels has heard murmurs in the hallways of his enlarged Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Watching foreign films and listening to foreign broadcasts on radio is now illegal, punishable by fines, imprisonment, and even death.

Despite this, Anglo-American leaflets are now no longer carelessly thrown aside but carefully read. British broadcasts are finding a grateful audience.

The radio broadcasts are the handiwork of the British Political Warfare Executive, created by Winston Churchill to disseminate propaganda to damage German morale. There are now more than fifty clandestine pseudo-German radio stations using powerful American transmitters. Subversive messages are wafting into German homes. Printed postcards and leaflets are littering the streets.

Goebbels is intrigued by how effective allied propaganda is. How it idealises the people rather than the leaders, how it appeals to virtue rather than viciousness. Pathos rather than patriotism.

Goebbels had watched the Hollywood film “Mrs. Miniver” almost a dozen times to extract its secrets. The film portrays the struggle on the British home front and ends with a rousing sermon in a bombed-out church.

‘This is the people’s war. It is our war. We are the fighters. Fight it, then. Fight it with all that is in us, and may God defend the right.’

Churchill said the film did more for the war effort than a flotilla of battleships. United States President Franklin Roosevelt found the speech so inspiring he had it printed in multiple languages and airdropped over the European front. It was reprinted in Time and Life magazines.

Goebbels marvelled at how not a single angry word in the film is spoken against Germany. Nevertheless the anti-German sentiment is perfectly accomplished. A new era of psychological warfare. To top it off the film won a best picture Oscar.

Some of the younger operatives in Goebbels’ propaganda ministry had pushed for more innovative techniques, more creative campaigns. Positioning the slaughters of German soldiers on the front as hallowed ground for German martyrs, encouraging civilians to emulate their sacrifice. Promising wunderwaffen, wonder weapons, supposed secret weapons that would turn the tide of the war.

One campaign to lift morale copied Madison Avenue with full-page advertisements featuring fashion models under beach umbrellas smiling and sharing drinks among the rubble of a bombed-out Berlin.

Goebbels knows he has to start working on his annual Christmas Eve radio speech. He knows he has to talk of struggle, of pride and hope. Offer some form of comfort to the German people on the Sixth War Christmas. Heavy fate, deep faith, strong hearts.

A line about the brave German soldiers who died facing the enemy while firing their last bullet. A line about the great and beautiful fatherland where a river of faith and confidence flows.

A paragraph about the pride and dignity of the Führer. About his prime health, his great mental and spiritual force. His unshakable faith and determination.

How he is everything to us, our pride and our hope, the fulfilment of our longings and wishes. How he belongs to us as we belong to him, wholly, with body and soul.

Goebbels has been holed up in his ministry offices for almost two weeks. Some of the archives had been gutted and refitted to make way for his private apartment.

Goebbels is not sleeping well. He is assailed by nightmares where he and his wife Magda and their six young children are summoned to Hitler’s underground bunker.

Goebbels brings twenty clothbound diaries with him that he has taken from a bank vault. The children are excited to be seeing Uncle Adolph. Magda is trying not to cry. Bombs are shuddering outside the Reich Chancellery as they rush down the red-carpeted hallway to the Führerbunker entrance.

Paintings and tapestries have been stripped from the walls. A Reichssicherheitsdienst guard salutes as they hurry past. Goebbels smells the faint aroma of burnt almonds.

Outside the window he sees Hitler’s dog, Blondi, lying on her side in the Reich Chancellery gardens, dead. Beyond the garden walls he can see Russian tanks and ground troops swarming across the scorched earth, swarming over the ruins, swarming closer.

As the family scurries down the stairs, Goebbels hears a single pistol shot and a body thud to the ground. In the Führerbunker people are weeping, wailing. Scrambling through hallways and rooms. The diesel generators are deafening.

Russian tanks are rumbling, grinding overhead. Looted paintings from Europe’s great museums are stacked haphazardly against a grimy concrete wall. Hitler’s favourite painting, a period portrait of Prussian leader Frederick the Great still hangs on the wall. The glass protecting the canvas is smeared with soot from the diesel generators.

Impending doom clutches at Goebbels’ throat, making it impossible to breathe. There is a sickly stench of fuel and spilled champagne. It is unbearably hot in this horrifying underworld. Panic and shame ripple like aftershocks.

Firestorms are raging overhead. Bombs and grenades crater the earth. Gunfire rips through the air. Goebbels can no longer see his children, his wife.

A huge bomb whines and explodes in a blinding flash of white fire and he sees the brutal truth.

Everything is over now.

Everything is lost.

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Stefano Boscutti acknowledges the trademark owners of various products referenced in this work. The publication or use of these trademarks is not authorised or sponsored by the trademark owner.

This is a work of fiction. While many of the characters portrayed here have counterparts in the life and times of Joseph Goebbels and others, the characterisations and incidents presented are totally the products of the author’s slippery imagination. This work is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It should not be resold or given away. Thank you for your support. (Couldn’t do it without you.)

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STEFANO BOSCUTTI

NINETEEN FORTY-FOUR

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