The redrafting was harder than he had anticipated.30 In its final form it comprised
twenty-four basic demands: they were militantly anti-bourgeois. The Party would
respect private property, but nationalise all heavy industry and the great land estates.
Meanwhile he set about literary projects of his own including a portrait gallery of
political personalities, and a collection of his own political letters, ‘The Second Revolution.’
31
To his discomfiture, when Goebbels arrived for the Hanover meeting on January
24, 1926 he found that Hitler had sent Gottfried Feder to attend. The debate on
Goebbels’ ‘Elberfeld Guidelines’ lasted all next day. There was criticism of his lenient
attitude on Russia and the communists.32 He went outside, smoked a cigarette,
spoke for an hour, then saw the programme adopted. According to Kaufmann,
Goebbels had not spared his criticism of Hitler and Munich. According to Otto
Strasser, Goebbels even climbed on a chair and proposed that the ‘petit-bourgeois’
Hitler be expelled from the Party.33 According to Rosenberg, Goebbels shrieked:
‘Hitler has betrayed socialism!’34 Afterwards Strasser pumped his hand—and Feder
left to report to Hitler.
Concerned about this ugly trend, Hitler sent for Strasser; Strasser phoned Goebbels
afterwards, saying that ‘Wolf’—Hitler’s soubriquet—was ‘coming round to their
point of view,’ but was going to call a conclave of all Germany’s gauleiters at Bamberg,
on his own home ground. Totally misreading the situation, Goebbels was delighted:
‘In Bamberg,’ he decided, ‘we shall act the coy beauty, and seduce Hitler into our
camp.’ ‘Nobody,’ Goebbels continued in his diary, ‘has any faith left in Munich.
Elberfeld is to become the Mecca of German socialism.’ ‘In every city blood is flowing
for our idea,’ he argued. ‘We cannot fail.’35
82 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
At Bamberg on the appointed day, Sunday February 14, he met Gregor Strasser
early and they agreed their plan of action before walking over to the meeting. Hitler
drove grandly past—he halted his chauffeur and offered Goebbels his hand, which
evoked a mental Ho-ho in the young man. But the laugh was on him. Hitler had
packed the audience with loyal local officials: he spoke for four hours about high
politics and diplomacy, and Goebbels thought it prudent, on balance, to keep his
mouth shut. He heard Hitler oppose all thought of dispossessing the princes and
landed aristocracy (they were of course prominent among his backers). ‘For us,’
ruled Hitler, ‘there are no “princes,” only Germans.’ He forbade all further discussion
of the Party programme: it had been sanctified by the blood of the Party’s first
martyrs. It was sacrosanct.
I am quite stunned [wrote Goebbels the next day]. What kind of Hitler is this?
A reactionary? Astonishingly clumsy and unsure of himself. The Russian question
—he misses the point entirely. Italy and England ‘are our natural allies.’ Awful!
‘Our mission is to smash bolshevism. Bolshevism is a Jewish sham! We are to
inherit Russia!’ 180 millions of them!!!
He recorded that Feder, Ley, Streicher, and Esser all nodded approval. Strasser lost
his nerve and spoke only haltingly—‘Good old honest Strasser, ach Gott, we are no
match at all for these swine down here!’36 Goebbels returned to Elberfeld full of
doubts, both in himself and in Adolf Hitler. Strasser in fact panicked: he circularized
all the gauleiters asking them to return to him every single copy of the Goebbels
guidelines for destruction. Goebbels now had the image of a slippery intriguer, an
opportunist. People called the ‘chap with the tiny, cold, monkey’s paws.’37 Behind his
back at Bamberg Streicher called him ‘dangerous.’38 Learning of this from Fobke,
Goebbels fired off a furious handwritten letter to Streicher: ‘I am informed that you
said … that nobody knew where I come from or what I am really up to in the movement.’
What right, he challenged, had Streicher ‘of all people’ to cast aspersions on
him.39 He even wrote to Hitler complaining about Streicher’s calumny.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 83
Bamberg brought a parting of the ways for Goebbels. He was shifting his loyalty
from Strasser to Hitler, though unconsciously and imperceptibly at first. In the next
issue of Letters he emulated Hitler’s condemnation of the demand by other nationalist
organisations for a boycott of Italy for her oppression of the German community in
the South Tyrol.40 After reading a brochure by Hitler on ‘The South Tyrol Issue and
the German Alliance Problem,’ Goebbels enthused: ‘He’s quite a guy… our chief!
He’s dispelled my doubts again!’
He still sat in on the north-western groups’ plotting. They met in Hanover.41 Meanwhile
he resumed his public speaking, reaching out for the first time to East Prussia;
crossing the Polish corridor by train he decided that the Germans were a Scheissvolk
to put up with such madness. Sightseeing in Königsberg he hung fresh ornaments
onto the fabric of his brain—the cathedral where Immanuel Kant was buried, and
the glorious architecture of the Teutonic Order.42
When he returned to Essen, grimy capital of the Ruhr, it was decked out in swastika
flags for the Party really on March 6. Four thousand members filled the concert
hall.43 The delegates in Essen agreed to the triumvirate’s proposal that there should
be one large Ruhr gau, amalgamating the smaller Rhineland and Westphalian gaue,
with Pfeffer, Kaufmann, and Goebbels jointly in command.44 Goebbels bulks larger
in his own diary version of this meeting than in the official minutes. The only brief
mention was when he read out a bland telegram from Hitler: ‘The bad,’ said Hitler,
‘must not be allowed to enslave the good.’45 This was a precept that both men were to
overlook in the years ahead.
A few days later Hitler flattered Kaufmann, Goebbels, and Lutze with an invitation
to speak in Munich. He pressed lavish treatment on the three: the motor car, that
shibboleth of Nazi Germany, played an important part in this softening up process.
They found Hitler’s magnificent Mercedes waiting to drive them to their hotel. According
to Otto Strasser the wealth and power that this vehicle represented clinched
it for Goebbels. Hitler loaned it to them with a chauffeur to drive them down to
Lake Starnberg for an afternoon. His men had put up posters advertising Goebbels’
speech (on ‘National Socialism or Communism’) at the famous Bürgerbräu beerhall.
84 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Hitler embraced him before the audience, amidst cheers and tumult, and Goebbels
noticed tears in his eyes.46
Over dinner he took in the unfamiliar faces around him—Hitler’s “decent, calm,
friendly, clever, reserved” private secretary Rudolf Hess; his meticulous treasurer
Franz Xaver Schwarz; his diminutive general manager Philipp Bouhler. Hitler showed
them over the new Party HQ at No.50 Schelling Strasse, and again talked of Italy and
Britain as future allies and warned of the danger from Russia. On social policies he
offered perspectives which had not occurred to Goebbels before, so he claimed. ‘He<
br />
has thought everything through… A hothead like this might just become my Führer.
I bow to my superior, to this political genius!’ On April 9 Hitler signed an Ausweis
(certificate) for the three to run the Ruhr gau until further notice.47
Goebbels took flowers round to Hitler the next morning and they talked again
about foreign policy. ‘His case is compelling. But I think he has still not quite sized up
the problem of Russia.’ Nonetheless, the two men were finding eachother. ‘I strongly
urge you,’ Goebbels wrote to Gregor Strasser on April 19, ‘to arrange to talk things
over with Hitler as soon as possible.’ That day he and Hitler drove up to Stuttgart to
speak at two meetings and again Hitler flung his arms around him. ‘Adolf Hitler,’ the
young man wrote mushily in his diary back at Elberfeld, ‘I love you: because you are
great and simple at the same time—what we call a genius.’48
He returned to Munich for the Party’s annual general meeting at the Bürgerbräu
on May 21. The minutes show that 657 Party members were present. Goebbels recorded
that he was greeted with a ‘storm of joy and enthusiasm.’ The minutes were
less lyrical. They show that Hitler mentioned him only once in his two-hour statement:
I am glad to say that this year has seen several first class speakers come to the
fore, with our friend Goebbels from Elberfeld out in front (applause).49
Goebbels put it more vividly: ‘He publicly lauded me to the skies,’ he recorded.
THE regional headquarters had moved into a suite of five rooms at No.8 Auerschule
Strasse in Elberfeld.50 Goebbels was not happy with his own position in the gau how-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 85
ever. On June 6 the local party officials (Bezirk leaders) staged a meeting to resolve
which of the three should be actual gauleiter. The choice fell on Kaufmann. Lutze
hinted to Goebbels that Kaufmann had rigged the vote with the help of Koch and
Joseph Terboven.51 Disappointed, Goebbels decided to leave the Ruhr. He travelled
to Berlin two days later, ostensibly to speak at Spandau and Neukölln, in fact to talk
things over with Gauleiter Schlange. Several of Schlange’s men asked Goebbels to
take over. For the time being he declined, unable to decide between Munich and
Berlin.
FOR the time being he is still preoccupied with the opposite sex. They are a welcome
distraction from work, a habit rather like the cigarette smoking which he now finds
impossible to give up. On June 10, 1926 he receives a letter from Else Janke, the first
of several Dear-John letters from her. He asks his diary callously, ‘Has the right moment
now come?’52 Dumping this half-Jewess will make way for other less compromising
females and for his own possible transfer to Munich away from the political
intrigues in Elberfeld.
His roving eye appraises every handsome woman regardless of social or marital
standing. He finds Lutze’s wife Paula ‘bewitching,’ and decides that he is somewhat in
love with her.53 He ogles anonymous women on seaside vacations and indeed why
not? He is young and eligible. ‘Opposite me,’ he writes one July day in a Berchtesgaden
hotel, ‘sits a beautiful, beautiful woman.’ He spends three days stalking this gorgeous
brunette— ‘she stays demure, and I am a silly ass. I am running after her like a
schoolboy.’54
That same day, as he is visiting the Obersalzberg for the first time, his carriage
blocks the narrow mountain lane, immobilized by a broken axle. A blonde country
wench is unable to get past until he stands in front of the horses. ‘Oh what a beauty
you are,’ he remarks in his diary. ‘She laughs out loud and waves to me long after. We
write her a little note—the coachman’s lad takes it back to her—asking her to make
a signal on the morrow.’55 That is the last he hears of her.
86 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
He gamely accepts defeat, aware of his cruel handicap. ‘My foot bothers me a lot,’
he writes. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it.’ ‘Every woman,’ he writes helplessly that
same day, ‘goes straight to my blood. I chase around like a starving wolf. But I am
bashful as a child.’56
HE had all but found his way to Hitler.
Hitler had come north for the first time spending the third week of June 1926 in
the Ruhr and Rhineland where he addressed private audiences at Elberfeld, Bochum,
and Essen. At Essen he spoke to two thousand, and met Director Arnold, their local
backer. Goebbels studied him closely, seeing him alternately as a likeable human
being, as a towering intellect, and as a wayward, wilful character. He studied his
talents for gesture, mimicry, and oratory. ‘A born agitator,’ he concluded. ‘One could
conquer the world with that man.’57 In Essen on the eighteenth Hitler faced Ruhr
industralists for the first time and lectured them on his economic and social policies.
‘Fabulous,’ recorded Goebbels, echoing the frankly admiring language of the local
Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung. ‘He can turn his hand to literally anything.’58 Before
leaving the Ruhr the next day Hitler finally ruled that Kaufmann should be the sole
gauleiter. Goebbels could ill conceal his chagrin.59
It encouraged him therefore that at the Party’s first annual rally for three years,
held at Weimar on July 3–4, 1926, the contingent from Berlin liked him (the capital
had sent four companies of S.A. stormtroopers); it provided an added impetus that
one of the Berliners, Josephine von Behr, an affectionate girl who had plied him with
chocolates in Berlin in February, was there too.60 His own prepared talk on propaganda
had Hitler in stitches.61 Hitler himself talked on politics, ideologies, and organisation.
‘Profound and mystical,’ summarized Goebbels. ‘Almost like a Gospel.’
The photographs show him limping at Hitler’s side through Weimar’s cobbled streets,
wearing a jacket buttoned just beneath his tieknot. He claimed that fifteen thousand
men were in the march past; the Party’s history would speak of ten thousand. The
pictures suggest a smaller turn out. One shows him and Lutze heading a thin column
of men clutching flags with rather scrawny swastikas, marching past knots of curious
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 87
onlookers; a group photograph of Lutze’s Elberfeld contingent shows Goebbels with
twenty-two men.
He willingly accepted Hitler’s invitation to the Obersalzberg a few days after Weimar.
Emil Maurice, Hitler’s chauffeur, drove them out to the idyllic Lake Königssee; Hess
and his girlfriend Ilse came too. Up at his still modest mountain villa Hitler dilated
on Germany’s social and racial questions; Goebbels fell in love with him all over
again and decided that here was the creator of the Third Reich: ‘Catlike—crafty,
clever, skilful, compassionate; but like a lion too, roaring and larger than life.’62 One
afternoon Hitler lectured his guests about the point of revolutions. Goebbels had
already entertained similar thoughts himself. Infected by this prolonged exposure to
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 14
