48 JG to Otto Strasser, Feb 8, 1927 (BDC file, JG; Heiber, 130ff).
49 O Strasser memoirs, Mein Kampf (loc. cit.) and statement, Nov 24, 1959 (IfZ).
50 Muchow report No.9, Feb 1927; and see Wilfried Bade’s account in Angriff Oct 30,
1936.
51 Albert Tonak (1905—1942 ) joined the NSDAP on Apr 9, 1926 (BDC file, Tonak).
52 VB, Mar 10. Detective Inspector Rühl (of Section Ia) reported on Mar 28 that the appeal
raised ‘big money’ for the Party: police file.—See Heiber, 117ff. The clinic was pictured in
the party’s Illustrated Beobachter, Mar 15, 1927.
53 Gau history; diary, Mar 16-18, 21, 1930.
54 NSDAP archives file on Maikowski (BA file NS.26/323).
55 Police file.
56 Muchow report No.9, Feb 1927; JG, Kampf um Berlin, 50. The gau’s other officials now
were: deputy gauleiter Daluege; manager, Dagobert Dürr; press spokesman, Karl Kern;
propaganda director: Werner Studentkowski.
57 Erich Koch, who had it from JG’s arch-foe Elsbeth Zander, wrote to Kampf Verlag about
this on Jun 13, 1927 (BDC file, JG)
58 Police report, Mar 21, 1927, in Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep.58, item 302, vol.iv.
59 Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep.58, item 302, vol.ii, 63.
60 Testimony of Erich Timme, a neutral witness, ibid., 195.
61 Police report in Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep.58, item 302, vol.i.
62 Muchow report No.11, Mar 1927, and his special report on this incident (both on NA
film T581, roll 5; BA file NS.26/133); also gau history. The Nazis rampaged down
Kurfürstendamm, burst into the Romanisches Cafe near the Remembrance church and
manhandled Jews; the Berliner Tageblatt used the word pogrom for the first time. For twelve
vols. of court documents arising from the Lichterfelde battle see Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep.58,
item 302.
63 Wessel MS, 1929.
64 ‘The result was,’ complained JG in a letter to Hindenburg and Grzesinski on May 6,
1927, ‘that our comrade [Kleemann] was besieged in his apartment for several days and had
to be liberated by a major police operation.’ (BA: Schumacher collection, 199a).
65 Rühl report, Mar 28 (police file); JG had to make a statement on Apr 25, 1927 (ibid.)
66 VB Mar 24, 1927.
67 Which Hitler denied: VB, Jun 25, 1927; for the ‘Jewish’ character of these newspapers,
see Bering, 116.
68 Otto Strasser, Mein Kampf. Eine politische Autobiographie (Frankfurt, 1969).
69 Police file.
70 JG to Dr Eugen Mündler, publ. in Die Zweite Revolution..
71 Hess to Ilse Pröhl, Apr 25, 1927; W R Hess, Rudolf Hess. Briefe 1908-1933 (Munich,
1988), 379f. Hitler spoke in the Krupp Saal on Apr 27 to mounting applause. Hess, 380;
Dokumente, 258.
72 With both of whom JG had been compared before: diary, Mar 26, 28, 1925.
112 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
73 Article in Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, Apr 23, 1927; andDer Nationalsozialist, No.17, 1927; in
general, JG to Hitler, Jun 5, 1927 and minutes of supreme party court (OPG) session of Jun
10, 1927 (BDC file, JG: author’s film DI-81).
74 Koch to JG, Apr 26, 1927 (BDC file, JG); Heiber, 120f.
75 For the history of Angriff see Hans Georg Rahm, Der Angriff 1927-1930. Der
nationalsozialistische Typ der Kampfzeitung (Berlin, 1939), based on his Ph D thesis; and Carin
Kessemeier, Der Leitartikler Goebbels in den NS-Organen ‘Der Angriff’ und ‘Das Reich’ (Münster,
1967), 51ff.
76 Hans Hinkel, US Seventh Army interrogation, SAIC/28, May 28, 1945 (NA file RG.165,
entry 79, box 756).
77 A police official C C Maslak had tipped him off that Weiss was waiting for the slightest
chance to ban the NSDAP. Report by Berlin police section Ia, Jun 20, 1928 on the previous
day’s hearing of the appeal by JG and Schulz (BDC file, JG; author’s film DI-81).
78 Placard in BA file NS.26/133.
79 Vossische Zeitung, May 5; Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung [DAZ], May 6, 1927; Borresholm,
69ff; police file; and police report of Jun 20, op.cit. He particularly singled out the coverage
in Germania and by ‘Karl Otto Grätz’ in Montag Morgen.
80 Testimony of four detectives, May 5, 1927, in Berlin public prosecutor’s files (ZStA
Potsdam, Rep.12B, vol.i, 107). JG was told that Kriegk, assigned to the Clou meeting, had
protested: ‘I’m not setting one foot in that monkeyhouse’ (Police report).
81 JG testified that he wanted the journalist to sue him, so as to ascertain his ‘real name’.
Ibid., 100.
82 Ibid., 107. Writing to Grzesinski on May 6, JG quoted it as: ‘Du bist mir auch der rechte
germanische Jüngling!’ (BA: Schumacher collection., 199a). Vossische Zeitung has it as ‘Sie
sehen mir gerade aus wie ein germanischer Jüngling!’
83 Germania and Berliner Börsen-Courier of May 5, 1927.
84 The weapons are listed in the public prosecutor’s files (ZStA Potsdam, Rep. 12B, Nr.2);
Bering, 97.
85 Pastor Stucke belonged to the Reform Church (after the Church of Nazareth had dismissed
him for alcohol problems); it is worth noting that he was prosecuted for blaspheming
the Protestant Church in the communist Rote Fahne two weeks earlier, Apr 23, 1927
(Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep. 58, item 378).
86 File on dissolution of the gau: BA, Schumacher collection, 199a.
87 Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep.58, items 27 and 385.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 113
Goebbels
7: Fighting the Ugly Dragon
THE ban would stay in force for eleven months. It was the work of the Social
Democratic politician Albert Grzesinski, the minister of the interior in Prussia.
The illegitimate son of a servant girl, Grzesinski was a year older than Dr Weiss and
a former metal worker and trade union leader.1 He had previously been Berlin’s
police chief himself. The communist Red Flag accused him of hating the revolutionary
working class; the conservative right wing feared that he would use his power to
consolidate the Social Democratic position; the Nazis would fight him tooth and
claw. Goebbels would claim that Grzesinski’s natural father was not the butcher’s
boy named in the files but one Ernst Cohn, a Jewish merchant in whose service his
mother had been employed. No matter that Cohn was only seventeen at the time in
question, the legend persisted resulting in one of the many libel actions that Goebbels
would soon face.
The ban signed by police chief Karl Zörgiebel on May 5, 1927 alleged a catalogue
of misdemeanours by the gau—assaults, criminal damage, and firearms offences—
since mid October. ‘In the “Ten Commandments” issued by Goebbels [to the S.A.],’
the document read, ‘the ninth reads: “Resistance to police and state authority today
is always stupid, because you will always come off worse… The state will take revenge
on you and on us with prison sentences and steep fines. So, if there is no other
way, comply with the state authority, but console yourself: we shall square accounts
later!”’ The ban also quoted from Goebbels’ pamphlet ‘Ways to the Third Reich’:
114 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Domination of the Street is the first step to state power. He who purveys his
Weltanschauung with terror and brute force will one day possess the power, and
thus t
he right, to overthrow the state.
The document also referred to orders published in a recent issue of Letters which
were to be promulgated when the Nazi ‘Third Reich’ came to power. ‘As such aims
of association are incompatible with the criminal law,’ Zörgiebel concluded, ‘disbandment
is justified.’2
Goebbels was mortified. He refused to sign a form acknowledging receipt of the
ban, stating that it was written in unintelligible German.3 Writing to Grzesinski, he
pointed out that his gau embraced the whole province of Brandenburg, not just Berlin:
‘The ban is therefore null and void,’ he argued. He also claimed that Berlin’s
‘gutter press’ (Asphaltpresse, another invented Goebbels word) had deliberately distorted
the Pastor Stucke business. He made no apologies for having publicly identified
the journalists who dared to jibe at Hitler, ‘a German front line soldier.’ As for Stucke,
he said, the clergyman had called out ‘du Hund!’ (you dog) whereupon members of
his audience has ‘slowly ushered him out.’ He blamed the weapons arsenal on agents
provocateurs and added that his gau had appealed in writing to Dr. Weiss for police
protection after individual members had been attacked by ‘Red mobs’. ‘Your police
president,’ he lectured Grzesinski, ‘is being praised by the entire press of the international
money-capital. This proves that it is not the German people, only a clique of
international moneybags who had an interest in seeing the German freedom movement
banned.’ If Grzesinski still refused to lift the ban, history would prove him
wrong since he did not possess the power to kill an idea.
As a veteran marxist you are yourself a living witness that even the entire might
of the bourgeoisie was unable to suffocate the marxist movement; and that despite
bans, or perhaps even because of them, it became ever more active until it
finally conquered Germany on November 9, 1918. Today you are the incumbent
minister of the interior in Prussia; and for that you have only one thing to thank—
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 115
that people once tried to cripple a revolutionary movement by prohibition and
dissolution.
Perhaps this may afford even to you an insight into things to come.
Still smouldering, he spoke to a provincial Nazi rally in Stuttgart with Hitler on
May 7, seizing the opportunity to accuse Weiss, Zörgiebel, and Grzesinski of stagemanaging
the incident with Pastor Stucke, a parson unfrocked for morals offenses.4
On his arrival back in Berlin his fans rioted at the Anhalt station, and he was taken off
for questioning.5 He hired a lawyer and appealed, using the gau’s headed notepaper;
Zörgiebel silkily advised him to refrain from using the banned Nazi notepaper or
rubber stamp again.6 Goebbels’ friend Heinz Haake, a former south Rhineland
gauleiter who was now a member of the Prussian parliament and thus immune,
staged a protest demonstration in a Charlottenburg hall on May 11.7 But after that a
great silence overcame the Party organisation in Berlin.
One fact buoyed Goebbels at this dark hour, the knowledge that he would soon
found a weekly newspaper of his own in Berlin, called Angriff—attack. He announced
his plan at a secret meeting in his apartment. Raising the finance was not easy.8 Gregor
Strasser was furious at the plan, and tackled Hitler at his favourite Munich restaurant
about rumours that he had agreed to write a regular leading article; Hitler assured
him the rumours were not true.9
Goebbels had no time for the Strassers since their newspapers had lampooned him
and his club foot. A homeopath, Dr. Steintel, had told him in a Berlin pub how the
Strasser brothers, especially Otto, had plotted to ruin Goebbels by highlighting his
‘racial defect.’ There was enough circumstantial detail to make it seem plausible.
When Steintel curiously asked the truth about the club foot, Goebbels declared that
he had had an accident as a teenager, which ruled out the racially ‘otherwise permissible’
inference. Armed with this new information Goebbels dictated a furious letter
to Hitler: neither Jews nor marxists had, he said, stooped so low to get at him. ‘He
has to be destroyed,’ the Strassers seemed to have said, ‘because he is inconvenient
for Kampf Verlag, a private enterprise.’ Hinting at resignation, he warned Hitler that
116 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
he would never succeed without ‘eradicating’ personalities like these.10 When Hitler,
in a quandary, did not reply, Goebbels nagged Hess, Hitler’s secretary, to issue a a
statement backing him.11 At a private meeting of the Berlin gau’s officers on June 10
attended by Steintel he asked for a vote of confidence. He pointed out that Erich
Koch, a humble railroad official, could not possibly have authored such a venomously
clever article; the club foot, he again insisted, was not congenital but the consequent
of a teenage mishap.12
The split widened, as Goebbels stepped up the pressure on his rivals. When Gregor
Strasser spoke in Berlin he had a member of the audience ask about his lucrative
pharmaceutical practice and fat Reichstag pay-cheque.13 By mid-June the bickering
was so bad that Emil Holtz, the gau’s legal arbitrator, appealed to Hitler to settle it in
person. Holtz sided with the Strassers, while conceding that Goebbels had succeeded
in spurring the Berliners on: ‘He has made the movement famous,’ Holtz told Hitler.,
‘But he lacks inner stability and attention to detail.’14 Since Goebbels was calling
on his members to buy only Angriff—it was now due to appear on July 4—Holtz
feared irreparable damage to Strasser’s publications (which was just what Goebbels
desired). Nobody, Holtz pointed out, could tell how long Angriff would survive.
Goebbels hurried off to see Hitler in Munich. He wanted both Strassers evicted
from the Nazi Party. The Party’s chief arbitrator ruled that the Führer would settle
the whole matter at some major Berlin function later on.15 While still in Munich on
the evening of June 20, Goebbels addressed 450 people on his first six months as
Berlin’s gauleiter—and the ban.
His aim [the police transcript quoted him as saying] had been to get the movement
noticed in Berlin, and with the help of the Jews he had succeeded. As elsewhere,
the Jewish press in Berlin had ridiculed the movement and then cloaked it in
silence. All the Berlin parties had concurred in its banning.
A prominent leader of the Stahlhelm party had pointed out to [Goebbels] that
his politics were bound to result in prohibition. He had, he said, retorted that if
he could have paraded 120,000 men through Berlin like the recent Stahlhelm
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 117
rally he wouldn’t have offered the guarantees of a peaceful turnout that Stahlhelm’s
leaders had. One thing was certain—120,000 National Socialists would not have
left Berlin in the same state as they found it.16
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 19
