‘but unfortunately rather ageing,’ sister.22 When Hitler visits Berlin with niece
Geli Raubal in mid November, Goebbels again finds her ‘almost lovable’ but wisely
smites from his mind the horrendous idea of cuckolding the Führer.23 Wilhelm Kube,
another gauleiter, introduces him to Traute Tessel: she is an eager Nazi, but already
has an escort. ‘They all set up homes and take wives,’ Goebbels wails into the diary.
‘I just get lonelier.’ Traute pays a couple of furtive visits to him, chatters away in that
infuriating mixture of brightness and inanity that females have long monopolized,
then passes out of his life.24 He visits the Party’s Woman’s order, despite their harridan
Elsbeth Zander, and spends an evening watching the healthy young girls dance
and sing: surely a sign that he is desperate for female company.
IN 1928 alone he spoke at 188 meetings. He seemed not to know fear. On November
3 that year he led the S.A. into one of Berlin’s reddest suburbs. ‘A lot of blood will
flow,’ he accepted. ‘But I shall be with them.’25
His ‘Book of Isidor’ had sold out and was reprinting. Dr Weiss unsuccessfully canvassed
his prosecution for felonious remarks about the Rathenau murder.26 Not that this
left Goebbels free of problems. His bandmaster Wilhelm Hillebrand, the ‘Reich music
master’ whose band had recently serenaded the thousands in the Sport Palace, de-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 143
fected with a bundle of dirty linen from the Berlin gau which he compiled into a
poisonous brochure entitled ‘Off with that Mask!’ It clearly worried Goebbels and
he rejoiced when it was confiscated (‘A nightmare off my shoulders.’27) It particularly
annoyed him that Hitler did nothing to silence Hillebrand.28
When the Reichstag reconvened in November there were immediate moves to
strip Goebbels of his immunity. He hated the ‘rotten’ parliamentary system, behaved
outrageously during the debates, and attracted several reprimands.29 The ban on Hitler
speaking publicly in Prussia had been lifted. On November 16 Goebbels presented
him with a Sport palace overflowing with sixteen thousand listeners, martial
music, and the ceremonial entry of Berlin’s Nazi standards as a visible sign of the
Party’s growing might. As Hitler spoke eight hundred police protected the hall and
its audience.30 The two men sat far into the night with Hess; Goebbels could not help
noticing that Adolf now had his Geli, and Hess his Ilse, while he was still alone.
The next day the body of Hans-Georg Kütemeyer, a Scharführer in No.15 Sturm of
the Berlin S.A., was fished out of the Landwehr canal. What Goebbels called the
‘Judenpresse’ scoffed that Kütemeyer had killed himself, and there was report of a
morose letter to his wife about their poverty. Goebbels was not going to lose his first
major martyr that easily (‘Never have liars stooped so low!’); he wrote a eulogy in
Angriff and began a noisy propaganda campaign.31 The Party buried Kütemeyer with
full honours on November 21. Thousands gathered at the graveside. Sizing up the
sobbing widow and the anger of the dead man’s young comrades ‘clutching their
standards in chalk white fists’ Goebbels decided that one day he could indeed march
with these men against the Reichstag.32 ‘Marxists!’ his street placards challenged.
‘Why did you murder the worker Kütemeyer?’33 The police hefted into his dossier a
note that he had propagated ‘untrue statements’ on the case. The S.A. man’s two
killers were caught and given suspended sentences of two and four months for manslaughter
in June 1929. ‘Three Jews as judges,’ observed Dr Goebbels, and vowed
hatred, vengeance, and retribution against the system.34
AS the appointed ‘minister of culture’ of the little National Socialist faction he went
144 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
more often to the theatre and the movies, which were still silent. He took Schweitzer
to a love film but walked out before the end, but he found the romantic scenes in
‘Anna Karenina’ a delight.35 Once he went to an all-Negro revue; he sniffed at their
‘silly doo-dah’ing and dancing’ and was annoyed when the public roared applause.36
He found Buster Keaton unfunny and incomprehensible. After seeing his first Hollywood
movie, again with Schweitzer, he recorded: ‘Sheer hell. Jewish kitsch. Virtually
all you saw were Hebrews.’37 The dominance of the Jews in this relatively new industry
did not elude him.38 They were everywhere. He heard Offenbach’s opera ‘The
Tales of Hoffmann’ on the radio and dismissed it in his diary as Jewish music. ‘The
Jewish question,’ he added intensely, ‘is the question of all questions.’39
His enthusiasm for the Russian cinema, like much else from Moscow, was undeniable.
He viewed Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s silent epic ‘Ten Days that
Shook the World,’ and found its crowd scenes good but overburdened with party
politics. ‘We have a lot to learn from the bolsheviks,’ he readily conceded, ‘particularly
in the fields of agitation and propaganda.’40 He was thrilled by any film accompanied
by Russian music.41 Seeing Eisenstein’s famous ‘Battleship Potemkin,’ he rejoiced
in this spectacle. The sub-titles were so cunningly phrased that they defied
contradiction. ‘That is what is really dangerous about this film,’ he concluded. ‘I wish
we had such a film.’42
Thus the power of the film as political propaganda dawned on him. He saw ‘Verdun’
twice. On the first occasion it had just seemed tiresome and noisy with a shocking
lack of political direction; but the second time, viewed with Hitler and publisher
Max Amann, it deeply affected them all and Goebbels called it ‘a great war movie’
after all.43 He began to take an interest in the Party’s own film production efforts. He
supervised the cutting of the film of his September 1928 rally in the Sport Palace,
and helped with a little production called ‘Fight for Berlin’—his diary shows him
driving out to Bernau to direct scenes involving three hundred S.A. men.44 As the
genre got into his blood, he produced a second Nazi movie, ‘With the Berlin S.A. to
Nuremberg.’45 At its premiere, he introduced it with a little homily on cinema as a
propaganda weapon.46
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 145
DECEMBER 1928 finds Joseph Goebbels tired but increasingly fulfilled. He spends hours
orating to the Reichstag. He has his own newspaper. He has a piano. He has at last
perfected his autobiographical drama ‘Michael’47 and is about to rewrite his working-
class one-acter ‘Blood Seed’ for the Party’s Wallner Theatre.48 He will finish it in
the Reichstag under the droning voice of some despised democrat. He sends copies
to Ilse Hess and all his other friends—but even now Anka’s is the only opinion he
cares about.49
On December 9 we find him, heart thumping, in a train steaming into Weimar’s
station. He finds her waiting on the platform, and lends her the first proof copy of
‘Michael’ (in which she is of course herself the heroine) to come off the presses.
‘She’s been through a lot of travails,’ he writes afterwards. ‘We love each other as
though bu
t a day separates 1920 from now… She buries her head in my chest and
weeps.’ He misses two trains in his distraction.50 A letter comes, returning the play:
she is enthusiastic about it. ‘I send you the same affectionate greetings,’ she closes, ‘as
all those many years ago.’ ‘She loves me,’ swoons Goebbels in his notes, ‘and I her.’
There can only be, he reflects, one great, all-fulfilling love in any one man’s lifetime.
51 ‘I had awaited your letter with trepidation,’ he replies, asking to see her again.
He suggests Halle on Wednesday (‘at 10:20 A.M.’) or Erfurt (‘at 11:51’). Something
about these deliberately Brief Encounters pleases him: perhaps it is the reassuring
knowledge that any demands she makes on him will perforce be limited to the brief
journey between two stations. ‘I would like to talk things over with you,’ he writes
her alluringly. ‘I have got to do something about rearranging my life now that I have
put much of the past behind me with “Michael”.’52
No sooner has he lit this fresh candle for Anka in his heart than it is snuffed out by
the breezy debut of a young Berlin girl on his staff, Jutta Lehmann. She claims she’s
eighteen—a slender, gracious, rococo little doll who chatters and giggles all afternoon.
She pretends to be engaged to another, but folds into the little gauleiter’s arms
nonetheless and allows herself to be kissed before agreeing that she is not engaged at
all. ‘So that’s Jutta Lehmann,’ he muses, captivated: ‘This spotless, gracious girl.’53
He wallows in feelings of spurious guilt, knowing that sooner or later he must sacrifice
146 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
her too on the altar of his Mission.54 He lies awake, thinking of her tiny hand waving
as he drives away, the tears in her eyes when he leaves for his own family fold at
Christmas. She is silent on his return and he sees her as ‘a child, a lover, a comrade.’
He is lucky to possess her, he decides. ‘She’s a good listener. She sits as quiet as a
mouse just listening.’55 One day she comes in floods of tears because she thinks he’s
leaving; the next she turns up with a basket of things for his apartment like a coffee
machine and silverware, so that he can stay home of an evening: thus early does the
female begin to scheme. But he realizes that she is ‘pure’ and must stay that way. By
mid January 1929 he is back, in soul and body, in Weimar with Anka.56
Her husband Mumme is now ingratiating and servile to the gauleiter; Goebbels
despises him. She comes on January 19 to his Weimar hotel and they sit talking until
two-thirty A.M. on upturned crates at the railroad station. He decides that Anka loves
him. ‘And I?’ his asks his diary: ‘I love her, uh, quite differently.’57
The Nazi Party nationwide now numbered over one hundred thousand members. Its
leaders met here at Weimar on January 20, 1929 to discuss the coming year. Young
Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s bespectacled deputy propaganda chief, reported on his
efforts to develop their film and press propaganda.58 The only decisions which Goebbels
recorded in Weimar were that the S.A. was to be more firmly anchored to the political
leadership, and that the Nazi Party was to adhere henceforth slavishly to the legal
paths to power. ‘Take note, Berlin!’ noted Goebbels.59
Hitler had every reason to counsel restraint. Confronted with the growing Nazi
and communist lawlessness in Prussia, Albert Grzesinski had appealed to the Reich
minister of the interior, Severing, for a permanent nationwide ban on these parties
and their paramilitary formations. The Peace Treaty of 1921 provided adequate legal
grounds.60
Goebbels reluctantly bowed to Hitler’s dictate. Issue No.32 of Angriff portrayed a
communist Red Front streetfighter and his Nazi counterpart, both bandaged and
bleeding, shaking hands over the crumpled body of a Jew. ‘The Day of Realization,’
Schweitzer’s prophetic caricature was captioned: ‘The Dawn of the Third Reich.’61 A
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 147
similar caricature showed an S.A. man being detained by a Berlin policeman, both
fine Germanic figures: ‘Brother,’ the puzzled Nazi is asking, ‘wherefore art though
persecuting me?’ Darkly discernible behind the policeman was a shifty Jew, egging
him on.
Since January 5, 1929 Goebbels’ newspaper had twelve pages.62 Meanwhile he
methodically built up the infrastructure of the gau. Having a brand new limousine, a
bright-blue open seven-seater landau built by Opel, helped; its licence tag was IA-
53398—Goebbels claimed that a German idealist living in Argentina had just donated
it to the gau remarking, ‘Were it not for you we should never come back to
Germany.’63 The big car gave the crippled gauleiter power, authority, and mobility.
Taking his burly escort with him he used it to tour the sections in red-hot areas like
Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, Alexander Platz and Kreuzberg.64 Muchow was doing
fine work on the factory floor, establishing cells in big plants like Knorr Brake at
Lichterfelde. Too late the marxists woke up to this danger. Goebbels’s schools of
speaking and politics were also improving. Once he even let Gregor Strasser address
a course.65 Standards here were often higher than in the Reichstag, where listening to
long boring speakers was like being a fine pianist and having to hear some lout grinding
away on a magnificent grand piano, as he put it.66
Seeking to placate his impatient followers he offered his own interpretation of
Hitler’s new law-abiding approach to power in Angriff on February 18. There were,
he conceded, times when the genuine revolutionary had to refrain from actual roughand-
tumble: ‘Be prepared: that is everything,’ he argued. ‘Anybody can go around
getting locked up or banned or coshed. But to unleash volcanic emotions, to awaken
outbursts of anger, to set the masses in motion, to organize hatred and despair—to
do all these things with ice cold calculation and, so to speak, by legal means—these
are what distinguishes the true revolutionary from the rowdy.’ The revolutionary
must bide his time, even if the movement seemed to be drifting placidly along bourgeois
paths.67
Great though his conceit about his own oratory was, Goebbels conceded that Hitler’s
was better. Hitler, constrained by no considerations of loyalty, would claim that
148 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
he, unlike Goebbels, knew how to preserve the golden mean between reason and
rhetoric.68 In fact their styles were different. Hitler’s speeches were predictable and
repetitious; Goebbels’ were more analytical, executed with a thrilling elocution and
clarity. Albert Krebs later stated that his Nazis in Hamburg often debated which was
better; those who opted for Goebbels sometimes indicated that he would make a
better Party leader too.69 They were in equal demand all over Germany. ‘We lead real
gipsy lives,’ Hitler had commiserated with him a few days after Weimar.70
On character, however, Goebbels found serious fault with Hitler at this time, a
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 24
