Goebbels claimed to have added six hundred new members during April. ‘Let the
gentlemen in Berlin,’ he said, ‘take note that the time will come when the National
Socialists will pay them back in the same coin and with interest. Nothing will be
forgotten.’
The fight against ‘Isidor’ Weiss went on. ‘He who has the police HQ in Berlin has
Prussia,’ Goebbels would define. ‘He who has Prussia, has the Reich.’17 Justifying his
rowdy methods in a speech on July 10 at Potsdam, just outside Weiss’s fief, he said
there was a difference between selling soap-powder and fighting for liberty. ‘You
may say,’ he admitted, ‘that for the time being the cautious, sober desk-warriors have
proven right; but even if our methods have resulted in the ban they have had one
effect already—that every youngster in Berlin now knows of the National Socialist
party… A movement which means to smash the old State cannot march in bedroom
slippers,’ he continued, ‘We may not have won the affections of this city of four
million, but we have earned its hatred, and hatred can turn to affection.’18
Even more seditious in police eyes was Goebbels’ now widely disseminated fifteen
page brochure ‘The Nazi’ which clearly spoke of plans to overthrow the State.19 ‘We
shall create a power-group with which we can conquer this state,’ he had written.
‘And then ruthlessly and brutally, using the State’s prerogatives, we shall enforce our
will and our programme.’ On the following page Goebbels claimed, ‘History has
seen repeatedly how a young, determined minority has overthrown the rule of a
corrupt and rotten majority, and then used for a time the State and its means of
power in order to bring about by dictatorship… and force the conditions necessary
to complete the conquest and to impose new ideas.’ So too, wrote Goebbels, it would
be with the Nazi party. ‘And then we, the responsible minority, will enforce our will
upon a flabby, lazy, supine, and stupid majority lurking behind which the Jew prosecutes
his dark plans.’ All of this was noted in Dr. Weiss’s police files, and more: ‘If
118 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the German people does not want to be liberated,’ Goebbels had written, ‘then we
shall act without their consent.’
Then [continued Goebbels] we march against this State, we take one last great risk
for Germany; from revolutionaries by word we become revolutionaries by deed.
Then we stage a revolution!Ê … The will to power will procure the means to
power. The others may have the weapons but we have what he does not: the
willingness to use force, and this willingness will procure the weapons that we
need.20
Speaking in Düsseldorf that summer he reiterated: ‘Without weapons we’ll get
nowhere.’21
FOR the moment Goebbels’ only weapon was the printed word. During the last days
of June 1927 he rained a carefully timed series of blood-red posters on Berlin. The
first read simply, ‘Attack!’ The second, ‘Attack is coming.’ The third, ‘The attack will
come on July 4.’
To edit Angriff he had picked Dr Julius Lippert; Lippert was imprisoned shortly
before the first issue, and Dagobert Dürr, a former meteorologist, stood in for him.
But the first edition squibbed. The badly designed, anæmic sheet sold only twelve
hundred copies; the next only nine hundred. Losing money and morale, several of
his staff walked out.
Goebbels was no quitter. His street salesmen adopted ruthless tactics. Angriff’s
circulation staggered upward to around two thousand. Its style was soapbox oratory
in print. With a Jesuit’s sure instinct for the niceties of the law he defamed without
libelling; his pen dipped, thrust, parried, then dipped again. It was more anti-capitalist
than Hitler approved of, but the Berlin working classes lapped up the subtle
antisemitism of Mjölnir’s caricatures. Goebbels contributed a venomous diary column
and a weekly leading article ripe with lush verbal raspberries about ‘the readerrabble
of the gutter press.’ The newspaper would develop a sarcastic, irreverent,
scurrilous, mocking style of its own, not unlike the satirical newssheets of later dec-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 119
ades: written partly in a well-captured Berlin dialect, its humour was a mixture of
sophomoric poetry, puns, innuendos, and insider-jokes for the entertainment of a
very few. The chief butt of its humour was of course the unfortunate Dr. Bernhard
Weiss, the self-important, horseback-riding, bespectacled Jewish ex-cavalry officer
whose features were, even his dearest friends admitted, anything but Aryan. Each
week Angriff carried a regular column mocking the police force, entitled ‘Watch that
truncheon!’ The paper’s pages were strewn with puns on the name Weiss, with both
blatant and surreptitious antisemitism, with unflattering comments on his riding and
driving skills and on the shape of his nose, and with assertions that of course his real
name was Bernhard—was it not illegal now to suggest anything else?22 Soon it was
enough for Goebbels to paint a word picture of Him, motoring in a princely limousine
down Kurfürstendamm, for every reader to know who was meant.23
He seized upon his opponents’ more cherished slogans. If enemies called him a
Bandit, his next posters announced him as the Arch Bandit of Berlin. A politician of
the Weimar republic had spoken of provided a ‘life of beauty and dignity.’ Goebbels
rode that phrase into the ground over the next six years. He began an article on the
mounting suicide rate with the ironic comment, ‘The following were unable to endure
any longer the happiness of this Life of Beauty and Dignity.’ He recognized that
the target must always be an identifiable individual, like ‘Isidor,’ rather than an idea
or group. Humourless, dedicated and self-important the police chief Dr Weiss made
the perfect butt.24 Goebbels used that ‘Isidor’ with such a thudding regularity that all
Berlin came to assume it was Weiss’s real name, as did some of his own officers
whom he then also prosecuted. Weiss had enjoyed a high profile until Goebbels’
debut in Berlin: the papers carried many pictures of this diminutive, self-important
official at public functions sporting a silk hat, tailcoat,and striped pants. Mounting a
campaign brilliantly designed to undermine his authority, Goebbels published no
fewer than six leader articles about him.25 In every issue of Angriff until No.44 there
was an attack on Weiss; its cartoons depicted him as a flatfooted Jew with bow legs,
thick lensed pince-nez, moustache and jug ears. Undaunted by the laws of libel
120 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels accused Weiss in effect of being a Jew and trying to conceal it. When Weiss
sued, again and again, the courts decided that ‘Isidor’ alone was not libellous.
If a group of people [mocked Goebbels] took it into their heads to call a guy named
Fridolin something else—”Max,” for instance—would Fridolin ever dream of
taking them to court?
So why does Dr Bernhard Weiss have us up before the judge just because we call
him ‘Isidor’? Does he think the name doesn’t suit him? Or does it sui
t him too
well—perhaps because Isidor is a euphemism for a Jew? Since when was it derogatory
to be a Jew, then?26
The supreme court in Leipzig found with Goebbels that to call a Jew a Jew was no
more defamatory than to call a catholic a catholic.
AT the end of the third week in August 1927 the Nazis staged their third national rally,
this time in Nuremberg. One one hundred thousand people poured into the city:
with unemployment rising, curiosity about Hitler’s party was increasing. Berlin’s
forbidden S.A. turned out in force, eager to wear their uniforms; fifty of them had
marched all the way to Nuremberg and Goebbels sent hundreds more in chartered
trains. On their return ‘Isidor’ Weiss ordered the trains stopped at Teltow and his
police arrested 435 Nazis.27 They were detained in police cells all day, and seventy
lost their jobs in consequence: Goebbels could not care, because martyrs were more
useful to his gau. As Schweitzer’s banners for the Nuremberg rally had said, ‘Ours is
the Future.’ In northern Germany, in Hamburg and Brunswick, the National Socialists
were now winning electoral seats. By the end of the year the Party would have
72,590 registered members.
Of these however only some four thousand were in Berlin. Still banned, the gau
was not finding the struggle easy.
On October 29 Goebbels was thirty. At a small party his office staff handed him an
envelope containing torn-up notes for the loans used to launch Angriff and two thousand
marks in cash, and gave him the news that they had collected 2,500 new sub-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 121
scriptions to the weekly. It was about to break even. In February 1928 it would be
selling 31,000 copies each week.28 Powered by his articles, the newspaper would
appear twice weekly from September 30, 1929 and daily from November 1, 1930,
increasing its daily circulation from an average 68,600 in 1931 to a peak of 119,000
just after the seizure of power in 1933.29
ON his birthday October 29, 1927 the Berlin political police lifted the speaking ban
on Goebbels; but he was still on probation. The posters announced that he was to
speak on Tuesday November 8 in the working class suburb of Neukölln on ‘The German
People’s Dance of Death.’ Even without the swastika, Goebbels’s hand was unmistakeable.
Addressed to ‘Men of the fist and Brow, Proletarians of the Factory Bench
and Study Cubicle,’ the posters heaped ironic praise on the grandiose achievements
of the Social Democrats since 1918., ‘Full of awe we marvel at the granite foundations
of the new Social Order founded by the soldiers of the revolution and their
great Social Democratic generals at the end of the war. Peace, freedom, work and
bread! All of these Social Democracy has given to the German working man, plus’—
in large letters—‘A LIFE OF BEAUTY AND DIGNITY.’ Tickets were fifty pfennigs (only ten
for the unemployed.) Thus the battlewagon was rolling again, and on November 6 he
had the pleasure of seeing his semi-religious play ‘The Wanderer’ premiered in a
matinee by the ‘National Socialist Experimental Theatre Company’ too.
AT the end of 1927 Dr Joseph Goebbels, agitator, streetfighter and journalist, received
a letter from Cologne, as though from another world: the Catholic charity in
Cologne was still trying to recover its student loan to him.30 They had reduced their
claim to four hundred marks. Goebbels tossed the letter away.
Permitted to speak but with his Party still banned in Berlin, he was careful to speak
well of Hitler to people with close ties to Munich.31 He particularly befriended Rudolf
Hess, Hitler’s private secretary, flattered Hess’s fiancée Ilse with flowers and wrote
her praising the Führer in the sure knowledge that his words would be passed on. ‘I
was with the chief in Nuremberg on Sunday and Monday [the 14th and 15th],’ he
122 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
wrote to Ilse on November 16. ‘What a guy he is! I could almost envy you for being
around him the whole time. We can all be downright proud of him. Now,’ he continued,
‘I have barricaded myself back into this omnibus-ridden asphalt desert…
Meanwhile we’re back in combat with this magnificent ugly dragon, Berlin. We’re at
each other’s throats again and that’s why things are looking up again. Thank God,
they’ve started cursing at us again.’32
These Goebbels methods worked.
The propaganda [he defined in a speech] which produces the desired results is
good, and all other propaganda is bad…Ê Therefore it is meaningless to say your
propaganda is too crude, too cruel, too brutal, or too unfair for none of those
terms matter… Propaganda is always a means to an end. It is an art which can be
taught to the average person like playing the violin. But there comes a point when
you say, ‘You’re on your own now. What remains to be learned can only be accomplished
by a genius.’
If people say, ‘But you are only propagandists,’ then you should answer, ‘And
what else was Jesus Christ? Did he not make propaganda?… Is Mussolini a scribbler
or is he a great speaker? When Lenin went from Zürich to Saint-Petersburg
did he rush from the station into his study to write a book or did he speak before
a multitude?
By early 1928 Hitler confided in him intimately. In January he told Goebbels he
was planning shortly to meet ‘Benito’.33 In February he promised him that if the
Nazis secured enough seats in the forthcoming Prussian election, Goebbels would
be their bloc leader; and that he would also be a Reichstag candidate like Gregor
Strasser.34 A month later Hitler dangled the latter promise over him anew. ‘The Chief,’
Goebbels recorded smugly, ‘used very bitter language about Dr [Otto] Strasser.’
Strasser had founded a newspaper in Essen competing with the local gauleiter’s.
‘Now they all see how right I was in my fight against this filthy swine,’ wrote Goebbels;
he would take pleasure in helping the gauleiter, Joseph Terboven, to smash Strasser.
‘That’s what you get for heaping filth on me month after month,’ he remarked in his
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 123
unpublished diary. ‘Revenge is a repast best savoured cold’ (one of his favourite aphorisms.)
35
His speeches were now one of Berlin’s top attractions. ‘[Goebbels] spoke on March
23 in the Swiss Gardens at Friedrichshain,’ the political police solemnly reported,
opening yet another dossier. ‘Poked fun at Mr Polizeivizepräsident Weiss.’36 Weiss had
twenty-one thousand officials, fourteen thousand uniformed police, three thousand
detectives, and four thousand civil servants; there were forty-seven thousand photos
and half a million fingerprints in his Rogues’ Gallery; his museum even had the original
uniform of the Captain of Köpenick.37 Yet he could not keep down this poisonous
dwarf limping at the head of his Nazis in Berlin. Indeed, in March Goebbels sent off
to the printers his 168-page lampoon of Weiss, ‘The Book of Isidor,’ subtitled ‘A
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 20
