Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 13
23 Ibid., May 19, 1925.
24 Ibid., May 28, 1925.
25 Ibid., Jun 9, 1925.
26 Ibid., May 22, 27; VB, May 24, 1925.
27 Diary, Jun 8, 1925.
28 Ibid., Jun 9, 1925.
29 Ibid., Aug 12, 1925. I located the rest of the previously missing diary for Jun 9—Sep 10,
1925 in box 2 of the Goebbels microfiches in the Moscow archives.
30 Diary, Aug 31, Sep 7, 1925.
31 Ibid., Aug 14-16, 1925.
32 Ibid., Aug 24, 1925. Characteristically JG antedated this in his memory. Speaking at
Lutze’s state funeral (May 7, 1943), he said: ‘I saw him [Lutze] again in the gloomy basements
and backyards of Elberfeld, where we founded and built up together with Karl
Kaufmann the Party in the Ruhr gau between 1923 [sic] and 1926.Ê .Ê . I’ll never forget how
he escorted us every night when we drove off to the communist meetings in Hattingen,
Bochum, Düsseldorf, or Gelsenkirchen.’
33 Diary, Aug 29, 1925.
34 See too JG’s note in BA file NL.118/108: ‘Jul ’25, Hitler Weimar.’—Hinrich Lohse,
‘Der Fall Strasser’ (IfZ, ZS.265).
35 Diary, Aug 19, 1929.
36 Ibid., Aug 20, 1925.
37 Ibid., Sep 7, 9, 11, 1925.
38 Fobke, ‘Report on Founding of the Association of North- and West German gaus of the
NSDAP,’ Göttingen, Sep 11, 1925; publ. by Werner Jochmann, Nationalsozialismus und Revolution.
Ursprung und Geschichte der NSDAP in Hamburg 1922-33, vol.iii (Hamburg, 1963); NA
film T581/44.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 75
39 Diary, Sep 28, 1925.
40 The account in VB Oct 7, 1925, did not bear this out, stating that the meeting confirmed
Kaufmann, Lutze, and JG as equals in a triumvirate.
41 And cf diary, Jul 6, 1926: ‘Somehow, somebody carries me shoulder high into the hall.’
42 For samples see NSDAP Hauptarchiv (NA film T581, roll 52; BA file NS.26/1224)
43 NS Briefe, Oct 15, 1925.
44 Ibid., Nov 15, 1925.
45 Diary, Jan 20, 1926.
46 Ibid., Oct 16, 1925.
47 Ibid., Oct 23, 1925.
48 Letter of Schmitz, Jun 13, 1927 (BDC file, JG)
49 Hanover situation report, Oct 3, 1925 in JG’s police file on ‘Goebbels, Dr phil Paul
Josef,’ opened on Dec 9, 1925; later placed in the NSDAP Hauptarchiv (NA film T581, roll
52; BA file NS.26/1224) (cit. hereafter as ‘police file.’), on which see too NYT, Sep 29,
1945: with twenty convictions JG’s file was thicker than that of Hitler and Göring combined;
it was endorsed ‘closed’ on Feb 13, 1933.
50 JG, Lenin oder Hitler? Eine Rede gehalten am 19. Februar 1926 im Opernhaus in Königsberg i.Pr.
(Zwickau, 1926).
51 Krebs, 159. His diary and letters are in the archives of the Forschungsstelle für die
Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, Hamburg city archives.
76 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels
5: God Disposes Otherwise
FOR a while Karl Kaufmann was, after Else, the best friend he had. But Gregor
Strasser was the man he most admired—five years his senior, Strasser was
willing to adopt the radical programme that Goebbels espoused.1 He could use Strasser
as a battering ram against Munich. They were not of course fighting Hitler himself,
but the toadying parasites surrounding him in Munich and in particular the Party’s
propaganda chief Hermann Esser. Munich hinted that Goebbels might like to go
down there. The hints fell on deaf ears. Together with Strasser he intended to build
his power base between the Rhine and Ruhr.2
It is legitimate to ask whether his proletarian stance was mere posturing. His private
writings do show a marked sympathy with the working class. His contempt for
the ‘bourgeois scum’ in the Party, toasting their toes on his radicalism as he engagingly
put it, was genuine. ‘I find it appalling,’ he would write, ‘that we and the communists
are bashing each other’s heads in.’3 When Pfeffer stated in the Letters that
Germany needed a middle class, and avowed that he did not believe in the ‘power of
the proletariat,’4 Goebbels delivered this stinging rejoinder: ‘We’ll get nowhere if
we rely on the propertied and educated classes. I believe in socialism and in the
proletariat.’
He now drew audiences of two and three thousand with ease. Often there were as
many thugs outside, armed with firearms too. At Düsseldorf on October 8, 1925 the
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 77
communists for miles around packed in, but within minutes he had silenced them
and held them in his grip for two hours.5 He drafted in his own hand a cute pamphlet
entitled ‘The Little a.b.c. of National Socialism,’ as a catechism for the Party. He
completed it on October 26 and his friend Director Arnold, a wealthy Hattingen
industrialist, put up the capital for a first print of ten thousand.6
His personal affairs were in chaos. He was living a gypsy existence, changing trains
and lodgings with almost equal frequency.7 He was driving himself to the limit. His
diary entries often end with a motif that remains unchanged for years—of dropping
off exhausted to bed, for only a few hours’ sleep. He crisscrossed his tough industrial
domain, in painfully slow local trains, setting eyes also on Lübeck, Hamburg (‘redolent
of ocean and America’), the Ruhr cities smouldering in their infernal polluted
semi-darkness, and Hamburg again (‘German sweat and German enterprise, exploited
by the Jews.’)8
He wished he had hearth, home, and family to greet him at Elberfeld; but he found
permanent relations with women difficult to achieve.9 He placed these remote, cantankerous
creatures on a sort of pedestal. He was not averse to exploiting them
himself, but profoundly indignant when he saw Hamburg’s red-light district around
the Reeperbahn, with the half naked hookers standing in their doorways. A local
Party official later recalled that one keen young S.A. man asked, ‘Doktor, what’ll we
do with streets like this after the revolution?’, and Goebbels snarled in reply: ‘We
shall sweep them away like the garbage that they are!’ He went on to develop a
picture of a Germanic youth elite unexampled in purity and virtuousness since the
days of the crusades and monastic orders.10 ‘I could have wept!’ he noted afterwards
privately. ‘Can men do that? For money?’ He saw Germany’s blonde girls embracing
slit-eyed Chinamen in the street; the police just stood by grinning.11
He seldom took his women to his meetings, and no longer sent his writings to
them either. After Else wrote him a despairing letter shortly before Christmas he
lamented, ‘Why can’t women be like us? Can they be educated? Or are they by their
very nature inferior? Only in exceptional cases can women be heroines!’12 ‘There is
78 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
a curse cast over you and women,’ he told himself piteously five days later. ‘Woe
betide those who love you!’13
His diaries are still punctuated with wailing references to Anka. But these ululations
are surely no more than an affectation. Anka had joined the Undead. Sometimes he
journeyed through her town, Weimar, but he made no attempt to visit. Once he took
; pen and paper and wrote letters to them all. He hated himself as soon as he mailed
the letter to her. She did not reply.14 His diaries did not resist human nature’s tendency
to gild the lily: a riot at one meeting left one injured man, who died in hospital
(Goebbels’ diary speaks of two dead.) Two audiences estimated at fifteen hundred by
the VB became ‘three thousand’ in the diary.15 While the newspapers referred to one
shot being fired at an Essen meeting, the diary turned it into ‘shooting’.16 But he was
writing for effect. The early diaries were written in a lively vernacular, often difficult
to convey in translation. Most prevalent in their pages was his sense of loneliness, his
happiness when a cheering audience chaired him out onto the street. But one constant
in his life was so ever-present that he only rarely referred to it—the pain from
his crippled foot, which no doctor seemed able to dispel.
ON October 12 a letter came from Gregor Strasser reporting that Hitler mistrusted
Goebbels and had even cursed his name. Goebbels wondered if he should quit. He
planned to tackle Hitler about the Party’s programme when he came to Dortmund
on October 24. In preparation, he finished reading ‘Mein Kampf.’ ‘Who is this man?’
he exclaimed, strangely impressed: ‘Half plebeian, half God. Is he Jesus Christ himself
or just Saint John?’ But it was not easy arranging an appointment with a messiah;
Carl Severing, the Prussian minister of the interior17, forbade Hitler to speak anywhere
in Prussia, so the violent Dortmund meeting went ahead without him. Hitler
attempted to reach Hamm next day but Severing issued an arrest warrant and he
turned back. Strasser spoke instead.18
When Hitler came to Brunswick, which was outside Prussia, for a regional convention
in November, Goebbels saw him again—this was their second meeting.19 It
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 79
was November 4, 1925. With Bernhard Rust, he secured a six-thirty P.M. appointment
with Hitler.
He’s just having a meal [described Goebbels]. At once he jumps to his feet and
shakes my hand like an old friend. And those big blue eyes of his! Like stars! He’s
pleased to see me. I am in transports of delight. After ten minutes he withdraws.
Then he has his speech ready in outline.
Meanwhile I am driven over to the meeting, and speak for two hours. Huge
applause, and then shouts of Heil and applause: he is there. He shakes my hand.
He is still completely exhausted after his own great speech. Then he speaks here
for half an hour too. With wit, irony, humour, and sarcasm, with seriousness,
with fervour, with passion. This man’s got everything to be a king. The born popular
leader! The coming dictator.
Afterwards he waited outside Hitler’s door hoping to speak to him, but he was
fobbed off with a handshake.20 This fell some way short of the heart to heart talk he
had planned.
The communist violence at his own meetings was getting out of hand. The meetings
often ended with riots, with shattered beer mugs and splintered furniture. At
Chemnitz on November 18 he put his views on Lenin and Hitler to two thousand
communists, who listened in silence. Then a thousand beer glasses were smashed,
150 people were injured and one (or two) men killed.21 Two days later he met Hitler
again, in Saxony. Hitler invited him to speak first (‘How small I feel!’) then presented
him with his photograph inscribed with greetings to the Rhineland. The framed
portrait would remain on Goebbels’ desk until the very hour he died.22
ON Thursday November 26, 1925 he arrived in Berlin for the first time. His impressions
were overwhelming. The vast sea of houses and buildings, the polyglot population
—179,000 Jews lived here, about one-third of Germany’s Jews—the bustle, the
police with their helmets and truncheons; Berlin was a ‘sinful Babel’ of brick, stone,
and concrete. He addressed that night an audience of thousands—he did not note
80 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
how many or where. Everybody was there including both Strasser brothers (he found
Otto as ‘decent’ as Gregor). Gottfried Feder, the Party’s chief theoretician, and Dr.
Wilhelm Frick, the lawyer who had connived at Hitler’s 1923 putsch from within
Munich police HQ. The Nazi Party here in Berlin was weak, probably less than one
thousand names. Dr Ernst Schlange, a civil servant, was the local gauleiter. He had
lost an arm and half his face in the war. ‘They say he’s a pacifist,’ commented Goebbels
laconically.23 He later learned that the police once found a bottle of liquor and an
alarm clock in Schlange’s pockets—the ‘Judenpresse’ laughed that without the one
he could not live and without the other he could not wake out of his stupors.24
Visiting the Reichstag building he was repelled by the spectacle of these Parliamentarians
(‘Jews and their jackals’) in their natural habitat. He dismissed the politicians
in his diary with an obscenity and purported to feel such nausea that he had to flee.
Afterwards he paid a social visit to Helene Bechstein of the millionaire piano
manufacturing family. The Bechstein’s were among Hitler’s earliest backers. A few
days later the Prussian political police section Ia opened their first dossier on Goebbels.
The Albertus Magnus society revalued the ancient debt he owed them and on December
7, 1925 mailed a claim for repayment to his old lodgings in Cologne. It was
returned marked ‘gone away.’ It was not that he was lying low. On November 15 he
had stage-managed the homecoming of the remains of Ludwig Knickmann, a nationalist
shot by Belgian occupation troops at Sterkrade in June 1923; he spoke at the
funeral in Knickmann’s native town, Buer.25 Three weeks later he staged an even
bigger ceremony in Leo Schlageter’s honour.26 Not for nothing had he read Richard
Wagner’s ‘The Art of Directing’.27 Fifteen hundred (Goebbels wrote two thousand)
brownshirted S.A. men paraded out to the deserted, snowflecked heathland spot
where the French had put Schlageter to death. Then, to the throb of muffled drums
the entire force staged a parade in Düsseldorf’s most expensive boulevard, the
Königsallee.
The public acclaim was in sharp contrast to the frosty silence Goebbels met from
his parents. At Rheydt he found that his father had bought a radio set— ‘the modern
mind-narrowing device,’ scoffed his son. ‘Everything piped in! The philistine’s ideal!’28
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 81
But Goebbels had a new father figure on his horizon. That Christmas Hitler sent him
a leather-bound ‘Mein Kampf’ inscribed in recognition of the ‘exemplary manner’ of
his fight.29
At a Hanover conference of the north-western bloc on November 22 Gregor Strasser
agreed that Goebbels should draft a new programme. Goebbels spent most of December
on it, since it had to be ready for their next gauleiter’s conference in Hanover.