Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 10
diary. ‘You Jews, and you French and Belgian gentlemen, don’t have much cause for
worry.’ He had evidently heard more positive word about the Nazis in Bavaria because
he added: ‘If only Hitler were free!’ The local folkish chieftain was the politician
Friedrich Wiegerhaus. He was worthy, obliging, and good-natured. ‘This notion
of a “folkish” Greater Germany isn’t bad,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘but we lack any capable,
hardworking, and high-minded leaders.’42 Germany, he concluded in a typical Goebbels
phrase, was crying out for a leader, like the thirst of parched summer earth for rain.
‘One man!!! Bismarck sta up! My brain and heart reel with despair for my fatherland.’
43
What were his politics at this time? His reading had vested him with some surprising
inspirations. The memoirs of August Bebel (1840-1913), the founder of the Social
Democratic party, had taught him not to lose heart.44 The real workers, Goebbels
concluded, were in fact nationalist to the core. The Jews, intellectually head and
shoulders above Bebel, had run rings around him. Goebbels for a time even described
himself as a German communist; but this was more for the Russian origins of
communism than for what it said as a creed. He read the diaries kept by Henri
Alexandre de Catt as private secretary to Frederick the Great and three times afterwards
quoted the great monarch’s dictum: ‘Life becomes a curse, and dying a duty.’
Reading more of Thomas Mann he felt that the great novelist had declined after
writing ‘Buddenbrooks.’ When he ploughed through Richard Wagner’s autobiography
he identified painfully with the maestro’s anguished struggle to survive in Paris,
and his physical suffering. He saw Wagner as a wage-slave enchained by the ‘filthy
Jew’ Schlesinger. ‘The philistine today,’ noted Goebbels, ‘will read that with the com-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 57
forting reflection that, yes, things were tough for Wagner. That’s the artist’s lot. “Thank
God it doesn’t go on nowadays”.’45
Looking around, he scowled at his smug, shallow-minded, pinstriped contemporaries,
their lives dominated by the pay packet, football, and sex, and he understood
why the communists hated the bourgeoisie.46 In July 1924 he began holding little
political meetings at his house (in his parents’ absence), and told them about the
great socialist experiment in Russia— ‘the glow from the east,’ he called it in Latin
in his diary: ex oriente lux. Only the Jewish nature of the Bolshevik leadership bothered
him. ‘Men of Russia!’ he wrote, ‘Chase the Jews to the devil and put out your
hand of friendship to Germany!’47
He was not however an international socialist. The great Germanic works inspired
him. He immersed himself in Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘St Matthew’s Passion,’ and
discovered Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger.’48 His antisemitism was reinforced by reading
the book ‘Prozesse’ (Trials) by Maximilian Harden—he recorded afterwards that
Harden was not a German at all but a Polish Jew, Isidor Witkowski.49 ‘What a hypocritical
Schweinehund this damn’ Jew is,’ he wrote; and then, broadening his aim:
‘Rogues, blackguards, traitors: they suck the blood out of our arteries. Vampires!’
Harden, he decided, was a dangerous man precisely because he gave his writing all
he had—pungency, a caustic wit, and satire. ‘Typical of how the Jews fight,’ assessed
Goebbels.50 From 1908 to 1915 Harden had been the most virulent warmonger;
then he had gone to the United States, from where had had reviled Germany. ‘Our
worst enemies in Germany,’ summarized Goebbels, ‘are the Jews.’51
Everywhere he detected their baneful influence. If he, Goebbels, were in power he
would pack them all into cattletrucks and ship them out of Germany: so he wrote on
July 2, 1924. However, reading the prison letters of Rosa Luxemburg52 he was surprised
at the idealism and warmth of this militant leftist’s letters. He sensed that
perhaps he was doing her an injustice. ‘You can’t change your nature,’ he realized
guiltily. ‘And my nature is now rather biased toward the antisemitic.’
THE rightwing parties announced a two-day rally to be held at Weimar in mid-August
1924 to agree upon strategy for the next elections, due on December 7.
58 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Weimar! What visions of Goethe and Schiller the name evoked. In the privacy of
his diary Goebbels sometimes seriously compared himself with one or the other,
particularly Schiller.53 So when his former schoolfriend Fritz Prang suggested going
to Weimar together he was delighted. It would be his first foray into the heart of
Germany. He was desperate to get out of ‘this miserable hovel’ in Dahlener Strasse.54
Prang seems to have become a type familiar in most political movements. ‘He comes
in,’ wrote Goebbels after one political soirée, ‘he curses the Jews a bit, smokes a few
cigarettes, draws up grotesque and totally impracticable organisation plans, thrusts a
pile of newspapers into my hands, and then goes again.’55
The Weimar meeting was a milestone in his career.56 He gained immediate inspiration
from the well-attended rally at the National Theatre and the shouts of Heil. He
saw for the first time the swastika—this curious four-elbowed symbol—and inked it
into his diary. He spotted his old lecturer Professor Kaerst from Würzburg there, at
the back, wearing a swastika and noted: ‘Et tu, Brute!’ ‘All these young people who
are fighting alongside me,’ he wrote. ‘It does my heart good.’ He saw them sporting
the same swastika emblem on their helmets—Hitler’s elite guard, the Highland League
(Bund Oberland)—as they paraded to hear an address by the war hero Erich
Ludendorff, patron of the folkish movement. Sizing up the others, he saw Albert von
Graefe, a tall gangling ex-major in a black frock coat, as a man of culture, and Gregor
Strasser as a warm human being. He also found here the Nuremberg Nazi, Julius
Streicher, who had founded his own Party for the Struggle against International Jewry:
this fanatic with the pinched lips was too intense for his liking, but he reflected that
every movement needed the occasional man who ran berserk as well.
With Hitler still in prison, the Weimar rally was ‘Hamlet’ without the Prince of
Denmark. Ludendorff was no Führer; he was not the messiah that Goebbels was
seeking. He spent that Sunday on a quiet pilgrimage through the homes of Goethe
and Schiller. Sitting in the former’s favourite chair he dashed off a few lines to Else
before strolling over to Schiller’s large yellow-ochre house. He gazed silently at the
chair where Schiller died, while the noise of rowdy processions drifted up from the
street. ‘Up here died your forefather, youngsters!’ he admonished in his diary. ‘There
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 59
are other avenues than the mailed fist.’ That afternoon, still an outsider, he watched
the flags and swastikas parading—some thirty thousand marching men in his estimate.
The tumultuous roars of Heil when Hitler’s name was mentioned made a lasting
impression. For a while he sat with Fritz Prang in a bar, ‘Chemnitius.’ Fritz wanted
&n
bsp; to relax but Goebbels was so keyed up that he talked only about politics, ignoring the
come-hither glances directed, he claimed in his diary, at him by the girls all around.
He had found a new passion. ‘I have begun to think völkisch,’ he wrote. ‘It is a
Weltanschauung, a philosphy of life.’
Pure chance had decreed that he emerge from his hibernation here on the far right,
and not the left. On August 21, 1924, nervous lest the Belgian authorities might
suddenly show up, he and Prang founded the local (Mönchengladbach) branch of
Graefe’s movement (the prefix ‘National Socialist’ was still forbidden.) Several friends
joined at once. He made a ninety-minute speech and saw how the eyes of one youngster
in front began to glow.57 These first meetings were held in Batze-Möhn’s historic
beerhall or at Caumann’s in Augustastrasse.58 At least once in 1924 the Belgian occupation
authorities did take him in for questioning. Shown the interrogation record
years later he would pride himself on his foresight: ‘It’s all just as I think today. Nearly
fifteen years ago, as a little agitator.’59
Shortly after, he moved from Rheydt to Elberfeld. He later put it about that the
occupation authorities had expelled him from their zone.60 He began, despite misgivings,
to work for Wiegershaus who had been subsidising a political weekly called
Völkische Freiheit (Folkish Freedom) since March 1924. Around this time Else returned
to his life, arousing God and the Devil in his Catholic loins. ‘Next to money,’
he defined, ‘Eros is what makes the world go round.’61 More usefully, a typewriter
also arrived, a machine whose intricacies seemed more easily mastered than women’s.
62 The first contributions signed by ‘DrÊ G’ appeared in issue No.24 dated September
13, 1924.63 One was an article examining the concepts of National and Socialist
(it concluded: ‘We are nothing. Germany is everything!’) It was followed a
week later by ‘The Führer Problem.’64 On October 4 his name appeared in the im-
60 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
print for the first time, as ‘Dr Paul J Goebbels’—an odd clue that he disliked the
taint of ‘Joseph’.
Hitler was still incarcerated in Landsberg prison. Meeting Gregor Strasser, Hitler’s
burly viceroy, at Elberfeld on September 13 Goebbels asked him whether Hitler
would soon be released. ‘We are all missing him,’ he confessed to his diary. In Hitler,
whom he had yet to meet, he saw the unifying concept of the movement—‘The
fixed pole around which all national socialist thinking orbits.’65
He was still flexing his muscles as a public speaker. He recognized in himself the
elements of a ‘ripe old demagogue’ and set about refining his delivery.66 When he
failed to inspire an audience of farmworkers at Wickrath he blamed it on the dullness
inculcated by the Occupation. A speech the next day however inspired some hardboiled
workers nearer home. Ruthlessly mixing metaphors, he recorded that the flames
would rage on and he would reap later what he was sowing now. Other workers
asked to hear the Little Doctor speak. A locomotive engineer brought his mates to
hear him in an ugly tavern in the Ruhr. ‘I have found a firm objective,’ Goebbels
wrote, ‘one to which my eyes unblinking turn. This objective is: Freedom for Germany!’
67
Over the next year he would deliver no less than 189 speeches, learning to cast off
all cant and phoney philosophizing, becoming preacher, apostle, and agitator alike.68
In his hands, he would write, he found that the soul of the German working man was
as soft as wax, and he could knead it and mould it as he desired.
He soon fell out with Wiegershaus. His proprietor wanted his little weekly to
emphasize German nationalism. Goebbels preferred to put the socialism first. Soon
three-quarters of the weekly was being written by Goebbels. By threatening to quit
he bluffed Wiegershaus into appointing him ‘managing editor’ as from October 2,
1924. It was another rung up the ladder. ‘Since yesterday,’ he wrote the next day, ‘I
am quite a different person. At home too’—and what measure of relief lies in these
words— ‘they look at me with quite different eyes.’ He had his own mouthpiece.
Upward to the stars, onward to freedom for Germany, God be at our side! These
were the thrilling phrases that he inscribed in his diary.69
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 61
Under Dr Paul J Goebbels the weekly became readable and hard hitting. He was
not happy with his writing style, but practice made perfect and his thoughts flowed
fast and free. He installed a sub-office in his parental home. As his twenty-seventh
birthday came and went his parents were astounded by the change. He still lounged
around unshaven, but he had a sense of purpose. He increased his literary intake still
more: he digested ten newspapers each day, and dealt with correspondence until
two or three A.M. He began a new article, ‘The Basic Problems of Jewry.’70 His parents
stopped nagging. His fame as orator and writer was noised across the Rhineland.
True, he was not being paid, but this fame was gratification enough.
1 German FO files, Feb 15, 1923, on the Ruhr occupation: Friedrich Ebert foundation
archives, Bonn: Carl Severing papers, file 95; execution of Schlageter, files 99ff.
2 Albert Krebs, Erinnerungen an die Frühzeit der Partei (Stuttgart, 1959), 158. Krebs, no
friend of JG’s, excused the ‘uniform’ and remark as a necessary propaganda tactic given the
hostile atmosphere of the times. The writer Franz Schauwecker exposed JG’s ‘military career’
later in an open letter.
Goebbels
3 A blue-carbon copy typescript of Goebbels’ much-revised...
Menschenschicksal in Tagebuchblättern,’ dedicated to the memory of Flisges, is in BA file
NL.118/127. In it, Michael’s mother sends to the mining apprentice Alexander Neumann a
copy of Zarathustra that had belonged to Michael; Neumann writes to Hertha Holk that he
has found one passage lined in red, reading: ‘Many die too late, and some too early. Never
forget the lesson: Die at the right time!’
4 NYT, May 4, 1945.
5 Karl Kaufmann to Otto Strasser, Jun 4, 1927 (BDC: Goebbels file; author’s microfilm
DI-81).
6 Müller (editor) to JG, Oct 13, 1922 (BA file NL.118/113).
7 JG, ‘Ausschnitte aus der deutschen Literatur der Gegenwart,’ Oct 30, 1922 (Genoud
papers; cit. Reuth, 58).
8 Kölner Tageblatt also published two articles by JG in the summer of 1923; a dozen early
newspaper articles by JG are preserved in BA file NL.118/113.
9 ‘Heinrich Kämpfert, Ein Drama in drei Aufzügen’ (BA: NL.118/114); completed Feb
12, 1919.
10 ‘Die die Sonne lieben’, summer 1917 (BA: NL.118/117)
62 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
11 ‘Bin ein fahrender Schüler, ein wüster Gesell...’ A 32pp. novel handwritten in summer
1917 on squared paper, ‘Novelle aus dem Studentenleben von Joseph Goebbels,’ dedicated