Rosenberg, its editor, invited Goebbels to submit occasional pieces from May.26 He
wrote by day and made speeches by night. He did not flinch from the ugly scenes that
often resulted. After he spoke at a flag dedication ceremony at Remscheid on June 5
there was a battle with communists in the railroad tunnel and the police arrested 150
of his opponents. ‘I was in the thick of it,’ he chortled. ‘The two factions went berserk
and waded into eachother. What a way to One Nation!’27
AS the summer of 1925 approached he fancied himself back at Freiburg with Anka.
‘Of those blissful times with all their glamour and romance,’ he sighed, recalling a
piano playing Edvard Grieg, the Castle park, his lips on her cheek, her silken blonde
hair and blue green eyes.28 While Else was away on vacation he made use of her best
friend Alma.29 In mid-August he received a promising postcard from Alma which he
described as the first sign after ‘that night.’ ‘This teasing, enchanting Alma,’ he added.
‘I rather like this creature.’ Such romantic interludes were a cheap opium against the
pangs of poverty: his landlord gave him notice to quit his lodgings at No.122 Gesundheit
Strasse (‘Health Street’) in Elberfeld.30 His parents had sent him 150 marks.31
‘Damn and blast!’ he let fly in his diary, and an unkind Fate, hearing him, responded
with a final tax demand for 150 marks.
Once he spoke at Recklinghausen, Anka’s home town, and he half hoped to see her
sitting there among his enraptured audience. Those audiences were getting larger.
The Völkischer Beobachter (VB) reported regularly on his speeches. Together with Viktor
Lutze, 34, the region’s S.A. commander, he spoke to three thousand packing the big
concert hall in Essen. A truckload of young rightwingers known as the Falcons drove
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 69
him home.32 Two days later on August 25 the French occupation troops finally pulled
out of the Rhineland.
The first volume of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ had just been published, and Goebbels
along with twenty thousand others was dipping into it.33 There was much that he
disagreed with. He learned that on July 12 his gauleiter Ripke had blackened his
name to Hitler as a ‘bolshevist’. Goebbels fought back, accusing Ripke of embezzling
Party funds; this was one offence the Party would not tolerate. On July 12 Hitler
called all the party’s gauleiters of northern Germany to Weimar, and it was in a
beerhall here that he and Goebbels first briefly met that day.34 ‘Ripke is finished,’ he
wrote as an internal hearing subsequently began, with Strasser presiding.35 Ripke
resigned leaving Kaufmann, Lutze, and Goebbels in charge.
For a while Goebbels and Kaufmann were inseparable. They spent Sunday evenings
together—in the theatre when they could afford it, or just laughing and drinking
when they could not. ‘I am very fond of him,’ Goebbels wrote. Sometimes he sat up
late with Kaufmann and the others at their headquarters in Elberfeld’s Holzer Strasse,
arguing by candlelight.
One day in mid summer Strasser came to see him. Strasser had earlier been gauleiter
of Lower Bavaria, and in the failed 1923 putsch his stormtroopers had held the Isar
bridges. With his rough-hewn features, he was the stereotype Bavarian; but he was
shrewd, ambitious, and one of the cleverest in the Nazi hierarchy. Probably he recognized
in Goebbels a useful lieutenant whose politics were similar to his own. He
certainly won Goebbels over. ‘He has a wonderful sense of humour,’ recorded the
latter after this meeting. ‘Related a lot of sorry things about Munich and about the
swine at Party HQ there. Hitler is surrounded by the wrong people; I think Hermann
Esser [Hitler’s propaganda chief] is his undoing.’36 Strasser revealed that he was planning
to consolidate the Party’s organisation in north western Germany, and he would
want Goebbels to edit a new journal as a weapon against Munich.
This was fighting talk, and Goebbels liked it. For a while he would be Strasser’s
man. ‘Strasser is a man of initiative—somebody you can work with and a splendid
70 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
character as well.’ Gregor Strasser would become his first real employer: then his
sworn rival: and ultimately his mortal enemy.
WHEN Strasser’s conclave took place, in the grimy Ruhr town of Hagen on September
10, Gregor himself could not attend as his mother was ill.37 But those who did were
the toughest men the Party had in northern Germany including many former Free
Corps officers. Dr Robert Ley, 35, a former aviator and now an industrial chemist,
had directed the South Rhineland gau (around Cologne) since mid July; Professor
Theodor Vahlen, 56, was gauleiter of Pomerania; Hinrich Lohse, a businessman, 28,
who headed the northernmost gau, Schleswig-Holstein; Franz von Pfeffer, 37, who
had been condemned to death by the French but escaped, gauleiter of Westphalia
since March; and Ludolf Haase, gauleiter of south Hanover, and his deputy Hermann
Fobke, who had spent some months in Landsberg with Hitler.
Fobke’s report is in Party files.38 He felt that the ‘sharp intellect’ of Goebbels,
whom he called the gau Führer of the north Rhineland, called for thorough analysis,
‘as he does not seem all that trustworthy at first sight.’ Goebbels however was delighted
at the outcome, telling his diary: ‘We pulled everything off.’ By that he meant
that the regions of north and west German would henceforth operate as a bloc under
Strasser’s centralized command, with his office at Elberfeld and ‘a centralized management
(moi).’ Only Ley had quibbled. Speaking that evening, Goebbels banged his
own drum, the need to put socialism before nationalism, particularly here in the
industrial basin. He felt sure Hitler would see things their way—‘Because he is young,
and knows all about making sacrifices.’
Seventeen days later, on September 27, two hundred men from the Ruhr’s local
groups met at Düsseldorf to decide who should replace Ripke.39 Goebbels hoped the
choice would fall on him. But Kaufmann was ‘unanimously elected’ as gauleiter, with
Goebbels merely manager as before.40 He consoled himself that the audience had
borne him out of the hall on their shoulders. He desperately wanted to be loved.41
FOR the next thirteen months he was Kaufmann’s roving agitator. Sometimes he felt
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 71
ill-used, and cast a jealous, almost womanly eye over all his rivals for the gauleiter’s
affection. But editing Gregor Strasser’s influential new fortnightly journal National
Socialist Letters more than compensated. It enabled his voice to be heard far from
Elberfeld. The journal’s masthead proclaimed it as the work of ‘leading members of
the movement.’42 He would edit the first thirty-nine issues. Its four, or sometimes
eight pages sometimes carried contributions by Heinrich Himmler, Franz von Pfeffer,
and Strasser’s bombastic younger brother Otto. But above all Goebbels used it as his
platform to argue his own socialist and antisemitic brand of politics. In the second
issue he published a letter to ‘my friend on the Left,’ arguing: ‘You and I, we fight one
another although we are not really enemies at all.’43 This was a trenchant theme in all
his writings, as was his somewhat ritualized affection for Russia: in the fourth issue
he addressed a letter to the same imaginary Russian, ‘Ivan Vienurovsky,’ as had figured
in ‘Michael.’ ‘We look to Russia,’ he wrote, ‘because Russia is our natural ally
against the fiendish contamination and corruption from the west… Because we can
see the commencement of our own national and socialist survival in an alliance with
a truly national and socialist Russia.’44 He reverted to this theme in the seventh issue.
‘I have reflected for a long time,’ he recorded after this was published, ‘on the issue
of foreign policy. You can’t ignore Russia.’45
When Gustav Stresemann signed the Locarno pact he was therefore appalled. An
ugly vision seized Goebbels—of Germany’s sons dying in the service of western
capitalism ‘possibly, even probably, in some “Holy War” against Moscow!’46 ‘We shall
be the mercenaries against Russia,’ he repeated gloomily a week later, ‘on the battlefields
of capitalism… We’re done for.’47
Sophisticated argument like this was anathema to Hitler’s potbellied men in Munich.
Rosenberg published one of Goebbels’ essays in the VB but only to tear it apart
for having failed to recognize the Jewish domination lying at the heart of Bolshevism.
The Letters were an undeniable success. Goebbels advertised them in other Party
publications, calling upon all National Socialists of west and north Germany to pay a
1.50 mark quarterly subscription. ‘Thus,’ he found, ‘we’ve got our hands on a unique
instrument of power.’ According to its accountant Paul Schmitz he received 150
72 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
marks a month as editor.48 The Letters gave the Party a sense of direction. In his sixth
issue he held forth on the Party’s need to radicalise socialism. He set this out at
greater length in a standard speech, ‘Lenin or Hitler,’ which he first delivered according
to Prussian police records in Hanover on September 17, 192549; he delivered
it scores of times afterwards, provoking violent clashes in the ‘Red’ cities like
Altona and Chemnitz, and fervent acclaim in Berlin, Dresden, Plauen, Zwickau and
elsewhere.50 It was heavy on the theory and history, but still seized the imagination of
his listeners, said Albert Krebs, a Party official in Hamburg.51 He began with a word
picture of the German national character Michel dozing behind the stove with his
cap tucked down snugly over his ears, surrounded by mocking enemies who pilfer
his last possessions; a friend tries to waken him. ‘When Michel is half awake, he rubs
his eyes, lurches grumbling to his feet—and thumps the man who has woken him!’
‘We Germans,’ continues Goebbels, ‘are the unluckiest people God’s sun shines upon.
Sixty millions of us, surrounded by enemies, bleeding from a thousand wounds, the
hardest working nation on earth, and we see our only political exercise as being to
tear ourselves limb from limb.’ Because their leaders had failed to win over the working
classes they had been thrown into the arms of the left; and here the ‘systematic
underminer of any true workers’ movement, the marxist Jew,’ had easily led them
astray. ‘We allowed ourselves to be humiliated at conference after conference,’ proclaimed
Goebbels, ‘in a way we wouldn’t have dared humiliate even a nigger nation,
and nobody came and thundered the word No! The Ruhr was occupied: the German
people hid its bourgeois cowardice behind passive resistance. The Ruhr was lost—
and Mr Gustav Stresemann espied a “silver lining” on the horizon… Stresemann’s fat
hand signed everything our grinning enemies laid before him.’ ‘Then,’ he shrieked,
‘came Locarno, and Gustav Stresemann trotted off to London and signed that too.’
For a mess of pottage Germany sold off all her sovereign rights—her coinminting
rights, her economic rights, her transport rights. We castrated ourselves…
Germany has become a colony of World Finance.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 73
He talked about the “public opinion factory” which had jollied Stresemann along.
“Germany,” he hooted, “disarmed to her last water-pistol, gives security guarantees
to her enemies who are armed to the teeth and lurking rapaciously on her frontiers.’
Locarno, he argued, meant not peace but war. He foresaw a gigantic armed struggle
against the Soviet Union using German blood. ‘And presiding over it all is the Jew,
both in the ranks of world capitalism and concealed in Soviet Bolshevism, egging on
the Russians and Germans against eachother … in one last orgy of hostilities.’ ‘The
next great world struggle is just ahead … and all in the name of freedom, civilisation,
and human rights.’
He introducing Lenin to his by now seething audiences in terms of surprising
warmth, as a man who had learned all about social deprivation the hard way. ‘Capitalism,’
he defined, ‘is the immoral distribution of capital.’ Nazism made a distinction
between creative State capital and a grasping international loan capital. ‘Germany
will become free,’ he promised, ‘at that moment when the thirty millions on
the left and the thirty millions on the right make common cause.’ ‘Only one movement
is capable of doing this: National Socialism, embodied in one Führer—Adolf
Hitler.’
1 Diary, Mar 18, 26; Apr 16, 1925.
2 Ibid., Apr 2, May 23, 1925.
3 Ibid., Aug 17, Sep 7, 1925.
4 Ibid., Mar 27, 1925.
5 Ibid., Aug 12, Oct 14, 15, 1925; Aug 17, 1925. JG’s original ‘Elberfeld diary’ (Aug 12,
1925—Oct 30, 1926) is in the Hoover Library, Stanford, California (Goebbels papers); on
microfiches in Moscow archives, Goebbels papers, box 2; published by Helmut Heiber (ed.),
Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels 1925/26 (Stuttgart, 1961); English translation on NA film
T84, roll 271, 1116–222
6 Diary, Apr 14, 1925.
7 Ibid., Feb 23, 1925.
74 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
8 Ibid., Mar 20, 1925.
9 Ibid., Jun 8, Sep 3, 1925. Else survived the war, though her Jewish blood must have
caused her problems. JG wrote cryptically (Diary, Jun 25, 1933) after visiting Rheydt: ‘I
arrange the Else problem with [Mother] alone.’
10 Ibid., Apr 18, 1925.
11 Ibid., Apr 22, 1925.
12 Kaufmann to Otto Strasser, Jun 4, 1927 (BDC file, JG).
13 Undated police report in Düsseldorf city archives, cit. Reuth, 87.
14 Diary, Mar 26, 1925.
15 JG handwritten letter, Apr 3, 1925, photocopy in NSDAP Hauptarchiv (NA film T581,
roll 5; BA file NS.26/136; IfZ film MA.735).
16 Rheinische Landeszeitung, Sep 1, 1935.
17 Diary, Mar 26, 28, 1925.
18 Ibid., Mar 18, 26, 30, Apr 7, 28, May 27.
19 Ibid., Apr 16, 1925.
20 Ibid., Mar 23, 1925.
21 Ibid., May 2, 6, 7, 11, 1925.
22 Ibid., May 12, 1925.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 12
