Goebbels' Hero

The happiest man in the world when Tobruk fell was Germany's clubfooted Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels. For six months he had had the painful job of constructing alibis for 80,000,000 restive Germans and 150,000,000 enslaved candidates for the New Order. But last week Field Marshal Erwin Rommel gave Dr. Goebbels soothing, splendiferous relief.

Dr. Goebbels cabled Bengasi for all the eyewitnesses the traffic would bear. Soon a squadron of Messerschmitt 110s from Africa settled down on Berlin's Staaken Airfield, unloaded bags of stories, pictures and records made by field microphonists, for whose transmission the German radio canceled a whole day's program. From one Messerschmitt stepped German War Reporter Lutz Koch, his face still grimy with African sand, bearing a story which the newspapers titled Yesterday I Was With Rommel.

Dr. Goebbels ordered the Boersen-Zeitung to print the suggestion that the hero of Tobruk, after the fashion of ancient Rome's great Scipio, be dubbed "Rommel Africanus." Since the eleventh edition of Rommel's Infantry Attacks had all but disappeared from German bookshops, Dr. Goebbels commanded that Germany's paper-saving regulations be relaxed to permit a twelfth edition. Goebbels' biggest scoop was a German soldier-correspondent's interview with Rommel six hours after he had entered Tobruk. As if to answer Italian newspapers, which had crowed that the victory belonged to "Italian and German troops," Marshal Rommel remarked dryly: "What we did could have been done only by German troops."

But Dr. Goebbels relegated another remark of Marshal Rommel to the inside pages. The Marshal had also said: "We suffered extremely heavy losses."

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