his idol, Goebbels saw in the sky a white cloud shaped like a swastika; and a glittering
like that could only be a portent of his destiny. Hitler whiled away a whole rainy
Sunday with him, spoiling him like a child. He became the Great Architect, talking of
how he would set his mark upon Germany’s cities; then the Great Statesman, setting
out the new constitution he would impose on Germany. ‘Now,’ wrote Goebbels,
hypnotized, leaving him on July 25, ‘the last doubts in me have vanished. Germany
will live! Heil Hitler!’63
HIS brain awhirl with these impressions, he is still nursing Hitler’s farewell bouquet
of red roses as he boards the overnight train back to the Rhineland. A beautiful woman
shares his compartment. She talks engagingly with him, and they arrange to meet in
Düsseldorf on the morrow. He limps around the city for two hours searching for her,
but without luck.
‘God has disposed otherwise,’ he writes afterwards, finding the Divinity a useful
alibi for his own shortcomings.64
88 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
1 Diary, Sep 30; Oct 2, 1925.
2 Ibid., Oct 2, 1925.
3 Ibid., Jan 31, 1926.
4 NS Briefe No.8, Jan 15, 1926.
5 Diary, Oct 9; VB, Oct 22, 1925.
6 Diary, Oct 26, 1925; Jan 13, 1926. There are entries about payments of 1,500 and 800
marks by Arnold on Mar 21 and 27, 1926.
7 Ibid., Sep 30, 1925.
8 Ibid., Dec 5, 1925.
9 Ibid., Nov 10, 1925.
10 Krebs, 162.
11 Diary, Apr 30, 1926.
12 Ibid., Dec 16, 1925.
13 Ibid., Dec, 21, 1925.
14 Ibid., Oct 10, 1925.
15 Ibid., Apr 30; VB; Nov 25, 1925, May 5, 1926
16 Diary, Feb 27, 1926.
17 Ibid., Oct 2, 7, 1925.—Carl Severing (1875-1952), son of a cigar worker, trades unionist,
had been Prussia’s minister of the interior since Mar 29, 1920.
18 Ibid., Oct 26; VB, Oct 30, 1925. There were 49 injured.
19 In notes at the end of his 1927-28 diary JG jotted: ‘End of November ’25 Hitler. First
time Berlin’ (BA file NL.118/108).
20 Diary, Nov 6; cf.VB, Nov 6, 1925.
21 Ibid., Nov 23; VB, Nov 25, 1925; cf. diary, Nov 21, 1928.
22 Ibid., Nov 23, 1925.
23 Ibid., Jan 25, 1926.
24 Wilfred von Oven, Finale Furioso, (Tübingen, 1974), entry for ‘Jul 10, 1943,’ 39 .
25 Diary, Nov 14, 23; VB, Nov 29-30, 1925.
26 Diary, Dec 7; VB, Dec 13-14, 1925.
27 R. Wagner, Die Kunst des Dirigierens.—Diary, Jun 27, 1924.
28 Ibid., Dec 14, 1925.
29 Ibid., Dec 29, 1925.
30 Ibid., Dec 18, 23, 1925; Jan 6, 1926.
31 Ibid., Jan 8, 1926. The personality studies appeared later as part of JG’s Das Buch Isidor,
whigh had the sub-title, ‘Thirty of this republic’s characters.’—JG’s first published book Die
Zweite Revolution. Briefe an Zeitgenossen, appeared Feb 1926.
32 For his fascination with Russia, see e.g. Diary, Oct 21, 1925.
33 Otto Strasser, Hitler und Ich, 116; for several interrogation reports on Otto Strasser and
hundreds of postwar telephone- and letter intercepts, see NA: RG.319, IRR, file G8172121.
34 Rosenberg diary, Mar 3, 1939.
35 Diary, Feb 11, 1926.
36 Ibid., Feb 15; cf. VB, Feb 25, 1926.
37 Krebs, 161.
38 Diary, Feb 22, 1926.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 89
39 JG to Streicher, Feb 18, 1926 (BDC file, JG; author’s microfilm DI-81). Hitler did not
reply; Hess did (diary, Feb 24).
40 Diary, Mar 13, 1926; see JG’s article on the South Tyrol in NS Briefe No.12, Mar 15.
41 Ibid., Feb 22, 1926.
42 Ibid., Feb 22, 1926.
43 Ibid., Mar 7, 1926.
44 Thus in VB, Mar 17, 1926. Kaufmann was still regarded as primus inter pares, however,
with JG remaining gau manager (Geschäftsfuhrer). See the Rheinische Landeszeitung, Sep 1,
1935.
45 Report on convention of Rhein-Ruhr gau Mar 6-7, 1926 (NA film T581, roll 5; BA file
NS.26/136).
46 Diary, Apr 13; VB, Apr 10, 1926; cf JG’s police file.
47 It is in NSDAP Hauptarchiv, NA film T581, roll 54, now BA file NS.26/1290.
48 Diary, Apr 19, 1926. The Württemberg police later (Oct 13) reported to Berlin, ‘Goebbels
is a man of good education with an unusual talent for speaking. Not on such good terms with
Hitler now as earlier’ (Police file).
49 Minutes of NSDAP annual general meeting, May 22 (NA film T581, roll 52; BA file
NS.26/1224). VB, May 26; JG diary, May 24, 1926; police file.
50 Diary, Mar 13, Apr 1; VB, May 7, 1926.
51 Lutze was commander of the S.A. Gausturm; Erich Koch was Bezirksführer of the Ruhr’s
Bergisch Land region.
52 Diary Jun 12, 1926.
53 Ibid., Jun 28; and see Oct 18, 1926.
54 Ibid., Jul 12, 15, 23, 1926.
55 Ibid., Jul 23, 1926.
56 Ibid., Jul 15, 1926.
57 Ibid., Jun 16; similar on Jun 17.
58 Ibid., Jun 19, 1926.
59 Ibid., Jun 21, 1926.
60 Ibid., Feb 22, 1926; she had written him since then (Mar 13).
61 Ibid., Jul 6. He reprinted his speech in NS Briefe No.21, Aug 1; see VB, Jul 7, 1926.
62 Diary, Jul 23, 24, 1926.
63 Ibid., Jul 25, 1927. In his ‘notes on diary for Jun 9, 1925-Nov 8, 1926’ JG recapitulated:
‘Jul 23-26 Obersalzberg. Strasser, Hitler, Rust. Decision: Berlin! Jul 30: Pfeffer is to be S.A.
supreme commander, me Berlin’ (BA file NL.118/108).
64 Diary, Jul 31, Aug 1, 1926.
90 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels
6: The Opium Den
SHOULD he accept the job as the new gauleiter of Berlin? It was no sinecure. With
around ten thousand supporters the communist party was aggressively in the
ascendant. The N.S.D.A.P.’s Berlin gau had been founded in February 1925 and had
attracted only 137 votes in the municipal elections that October. The present gauleiter
had lost his stomach for the fight. He was however one of the joint backers of the
Strasser brothers’ Kampf Verlag publishing house, which had begun issuing a proletarian
newspaper, the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, in March 1926; this sold some three
thousand copies each week.1
Unable to contain the snarling militancy of the Berlin S.A. under Kurt Daluege,
Dr Schlange retired on June 20. Deputizing for him, Erich Schmiedicke called a
meeting of the district officers in Gregor Strasser’s presence and secured a unanimous
vote that they should invite Dr Goebbels to come from the Ruhr to take over.
The Berlin political police, who had agents planted in the Nazi party, recorded prematurely
on July 29 that he had been offered the gau but turned it down.2 Goebbels
wrote to Otto Strasser on August 3 that he was still undecided: ‘Should I, or should
I not? Probably not.’
The rumours of his probable defection from Strasser’s to Hitler’s camp led to
rumbles of discontent. Gregor Strasser, who had set the wheels in motion to lure
him to Berlin, later remarked ruefully in his Franconian dialect, ‘A saublöder Obernarr
bin i’ g’wesen!—What a bloody fool I’ve been.’ ‘Friend Gregor Strasser is pretty jealous
of me,’ observed Goebbels. Lying to his own diary, he denied a few days later that
he was selling out to Hitler. He blamed Karl Kaufmann’s men for starting the ‘leg-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 91
end,’ and the Strasser brothers for giving it wider currency. ‘I’ll teach the lot of
them!’ he added darkly.3
He had already acquired a taste for the rough and tumble of radical politics. He led
a raiding party on a theatre staging an award-winning but anti-German play by Carl
Zuckmayer. Goebbels’ Nazis hurled stink bombs into the audience and he was
disappointed that only five women swooned.4 In his final week of office in the Ruhr
he and Kaufmann would hijack a meeting that their Social Democrat opponents had
staged as the highlight of a recruiting week in Hattingen. When the meeting began
the S.A. filled two-thirds of the seats. Goebbels and Kaufmann made the only speeches,
and their followers responded with three Heils for Hitler. ‘A jolly good show,’ chuckled
Goebbels.5
In Berlin, the battles would be uglier. Here the ramshackle and impoverished local
Party was in crisis. On August 26 there was a rowdy gathering of its officials, around
120 people according to the police. Schmiedicke, standing in as gauleiter, was hooted
down by the S.A. The chief of the Berlin S.S.—the Schutzstaffel, an elite emerging
within the stormtroopers—shouted that he had just spoken by phone with Hitler in
person and been given full powers, which he promptly used to ‘dismiss’ Schmiedicke.6
The next day Munich formally asked Goebbels to take over in Berlin, but only as a
stop-gap.
He was still in two minds. Playing for time, he sent what he called a ‘semi-refusal’
to Hitler.7
HE spends a weekend at Bayreuth in September 1926. Here he falls briefly in love
with Winifred Wagner’s young and vivacious daughters, romps around in the hay
with the youngest of them (‘the sweetest little brat’) for an hour and then purples
with embarrassment before the others.8 ‘I often wish I had such a darling German
female around,’ he laments—then remembers young Josephine von Behr in Berlin.
The prospect of seeing her excites him, and he returns there in mid September.9
In Berlin he spends an evening alone with Dr Schlange and Schmiedicke. Both men
plead with him to take over.10 In two minds still, he visits the Party’s primitive HQ at
92 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
No.189 Potsdamer Strasse. It is housed in a gloomy downstairs room at the rear—a
windowless vault lit only by a naked bulb, he will later describe, in which Schmiedicke
sits hunched over his cash ledger struggling to make ends meet.11 A cloud of stale air
and tobacco smoke hits him as he goes in. Newspapers are stacked around the walls.
Out of work Party members are loitering around—there are 270,000 unemployed
in Berlin alone—chain smoking and tittle-tattling. They called it the ‘opium den.’
He is glad to get out to Potsdam with Josephine that evening. They reverently tread
the same sod as Frederick the Great and stroll around Sanssouci park where he spent
thirty-eight of his summers, soaking up the history of Prussia in the Garrison Church
where his bones lie surrounded by the sleeping flags of famous guards regiments.
Goebbels wants to hold Josephine’s hand, but lacks the courage to try.12
The affair with Else is over. They meet one Sunday in Cologne and trade insults,
and she writes him another farewell letter. Goebbels sends his sister Maria over to
fetch her on Monday morning for one final scene. With tear-streaked face, Else accompanies
him in the drizzle to the train. For some reasons Goebbels dramatizes
their final parting in his diary:
The train draws away. Else turns around and weeps. I close the window. Rain is
falling on the coach roof. I have gone out of her life. My heart is broken.13
AMPLIFYING Goebbels’ own unpublished diaries, the Nazi Party’s archives acquired a
file of vivid monthly resumés on the Berlin gau written by a young activist Reinhold
Muchow who had joined aged twenty in December 1925.14 These reports show the
methods to which the Party resorted, including a barrage of defamatory propaganda,
ceaseless rowdy demonstrations, mindless provocations, and violence for its own
sake. The Party already had three ‘martyrs’ in Berlin—Willi Dreyer killed in 1924,
Werner Doelle in 1925, and now on September 26, 1926 the forty-four year old
Harry Anderssen, murdered by a communist gang in Kreuzberg.15 It was a tragedy
for the Berlin gau, recorded Muchow in October 1926, that it had never had a real
leader. Dr Schlange had made no headway against the internal bickering. Schmiedicke
proved even less capable. The opposition—Kurt Daluege and the S.A.—had put
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 93
forward their own candidate as gauleiter, Oskar Hauenstein. Every top level meeting
ended with a row.16
Goebbels began feeling his way into Berlin. October 9 found him speaking at the
Party’s ‘Mark Brandenburg Freedom Rally,’ a torchlight parade just outside the city
in Potsdam. The police file shows that he called for the destruction of the present
state. The Berliners roared approval. ‘You yourself will have noticed,’ Schmiedicke
encouraged him in a letter, ‘how very keenly every member of the Party in Berlin
wants you as their leader.’17 His mind already made up, Goebbels told Schmiedicke
that the stumbling block was financial: if the terms were right he would accept the
job.18 When he returned to Berlin a week later—as much to see Josephine, ‘this
purest picture of a girl,’ as anything—a further flattering letter awaited him from
Schmiedicke. ‘Only a towering personality,’ he wrote, could take command here;
the Berlin gau would collapse if Goebbels did not take over on November 1 at the
latest. ‘Your financial desiderata for working in the Greater Berlin gau will be met as
from November 1, 1926.’
Berlin with its five million people packed into a relatively small area undoubtedly
offers the most fertile soil for the growth of our movement, and it is also my
deepest personal conviction that you are the appointed leader for Berlin.19
While Goebbels even now delayed announcing his decision, the infighting in Berlin
increased. Schmiedicke had to reassure officials that Goebbels’ salary would be
paid by Munich, not Berlin. There were ugly scenes. Hauenstein thumped Otto
Strasser. Strasser challenged somebody else to a duel. finally Goebbels took the milestone
decision to accept Berlin’s offer. Back in Elberfeld on October 17 he broke the
news to Lutze and Kaufmann, and noted in his diary, ‘Off to Berlin at last on November
1. Berlin is the focal point,’ he reasoned, ‘for us too.’20 The formal appointment
was dated October 26, and announced in the Völkischer Beobachter two days later.
On November 1 the N.S. Letters published his farewell to the Ruhr. ‘And now,’ he
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 15
