into Goebbels’ apartment, flung a salute, and roared: ‘Adolf, don’t get tough
with your own S.A.!’32
Urged by Harwardt to give Stennes himself a hearing, Hitler reluctantly agreed. It
lasted until six a.m., when Hitler sent for all the S.A. commanders once more and
declared that he was going to cut their Brown army rigorously in size.
This was getting nowhere. Goebbels left to snatch an hour’s sleep—he had to be in
court for yet another libel action that morning (he refused to offer any defence, was
sentenced to prison, appealed).33 Exhausted and almost asleep on his feet he pleaded
200 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
with Hitler once again to promise the S.A. whatever they demanded.34 Winning the
election must come first.
It was now Monday September 1. According to Goebbels’ diary, at four P.M. Hitler
took the decision he had urged: Stennes should stay. But he would dismiss Pfeffer as
Supreme Commander and take over the S.A. himself (with the notorious Ernst Röhm
as his chief of staff).35 A letter went to Stennes, and Stennes pledged loyalty. Goebbels
accompanied Hitler to the S.S. unit under Kurt Daluege at Anhalt station. The S.S.,
Goebbels noted, had remained loyal throughout. Taking selected S.S. men as an escort,
Hitler demanded to speak to ‘his’ entire Berlin S.A., and in the Veterans Building
that evening he told these simple stormtroopers that it was their duty to ‘draw a
thick line’ under past events. Assuring them that he was not blind to their bloody
sacrifices, he promised to meet Stennes’ fundamental demands. Giving Stennes his
hand, he declared that he would for ever remain true to him.36 Police observers
reported that Hitler, his voice cracking, appealed hysterically for unswerving loyalty:
‘Let us pray in this hour that nothing can divide us, and that God will help us
against the Devil!’ screamed Hitler. ‘Almighty Lord, bless our fight!’—and the roars
of Heil, so the police reported, had died away as the audience noticed their Führer’s
hands folded seemingly in prayer.37
The Görings threw a little reception at Badensche Strasse afterwards. Stennes was
not invited. The whole reconciliation with him was a charade designed to appease
the S.A. until later, as Goebbels had recommended to Hitler. This became plain from
remarks made by the top Nazis at the reception.38 ‘Everything shipshape,’ wrote
Goebbels later that day. ‘That’s the end of the Stennes putsch.’39 They would, he
added, be drawing the necessary consequences after the election. The campaign resumed.
GERMANY had never seen a battle like this. Over the last two weeks the Nazis staged
hundreds of dramatic meetings—in the open air, in halls, by night, in marquees, by
torchlight. He willingly spoke side by side with Gregor Strasser.40 His HQ printed
tens of millions of leaflets. The streets were carpeted with them. Sixty truckloads of
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 201
Nazis careered around the capital tossing out pamphlets; Goebbels clambered from
truck to truck, haranguing pedestrians through an amplifier and whipping on his
men. The posters clearly betrayed his own handiwork. One contrasted unlovely photographs
of all their thick-lensed oppressors, with Dr Weiss in pride of place, with
majestic studio portraits of the top eleven Nazis. As for his own likeness, Goebbels
placed this right next to Hitler’s.41
Unemployment had been two million as the year opened. It would reach 4,380,000
as the year ended. ‘Out with this rabble!’ shrieked Goebbels in Angriff. ‘Rip the masks
off their hideous countenances! Take them by the scruff of their necks, boot their fat
bellies, and sweep them right out of the temple with due pomp and circumstance!’
And the worried middle classes particularly, the peasants, the businessmen, the office
workers, danced off behind the Nazi demagogue as willingly as the children had
followed the pied piper into the mountain labyrinths beyond Hamelin.
He hoped for a quarter of a million Nazi voters in Berlin. When Hitler came to the
Sport Palace on September 10, one hundred thousand people applied for tickets.
The photos show him with clenched fists raised, orating into a box microphone some
three feet ahead of him (in Hermann Schäfer, Goebbels had now gained one of Europe’s
finest public-address system technicians).42 ‘With fanaticism like this,’ wrote
Goebbels afterwards, ‘a nation can and will rouse itself again.’ He attributed the
public curiosity to the S.A. mutiny. ‘The S.A. must give up all political ambitions,’ he
wrote after discussing the problem over supper with Hitler and Göring (now the
party’s liaison to the S.A.)43 All three—Hitler, Goebbels, and Stennes—were to be
seen amiably sharing a meal the next day.44 On the final electioneering day, the twelfth,
the little gauleiter spoke at seven meetings—motoring in his Mercedes Supercharger
from hall to hall, flanked by motorcycle outriders.
‘Keep calm!’ he admonished himself. He had rented the Sport Palace for election
night itself, September 14, 1930. By mid evening the cavernous hall was rocking
with cheers as the first results came in. Hitler had banked on winning fifty seats, or
eighty at most. As midnight approached, the Nazis had already won 103.45 Exultant
young men jogged around the hall with Goebbels on their shoulders. The final tally
202 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
was 6,406,397 votes, entitling the Nazis to one hundred and seven seats. Suddenly
the Nazis were the strongest party in Germany after the Social Democrats. This was
democracy with a vengeance. The communists however had also increased their share,
from 10·6 to 13·1 percent. (In Berlin the Nazis, with over 360,000 votes, had won
12·8 percent of the vote.) ‘Hot months lie ahead,’ predicted Goebbels. ‘The communists
have gained too.’46
He is in grave danger of arrest. A month will pass before the Reichstag convenes and
he is immune again.
He needs to empty his fevered brain, and for this purpose female company is ideal.
He flutters around with the two Mannigel teenagers Gerda and Ursel, who are ‘sooo
keen’ on him; he invites both of these virginal Mannigels to the movies, and keeps
things going until their ‘tyrannical’ and ‘evidently hysterical’ mother puts her foot
down.47 He needs a larger apartment, and Xenia (‘the best of all’) helps him homehunting.
48 He flirts with her, he escorts Carin Göring, he accompanies the delightful
Potempa twins, or phones Charlotte, and he gets to know not only Professor Paul
Schultze-Naumburg the Weimar architect but his lovely wife as well, and decides as
often as he needs to that they are all madly in love with him.49
Horrified at the Nazis’ election victories, Weiss’s police show him no mercy. Five
days after the election baton-wielding police fling him down the steps of a police
station as he protests at their treatment of an S.A. man brought in for questioning.50
The courts set down five new cases for—surely no coincidence—Monday October
Goebbels
13, the very afternoon that the Reichstag is due to swear...
ordered to bring him in by force if need be. He takes refuge out at Erika’s forest<
br />
cottage, armed with a dispensation from his doctor. He hunkers down in the back of
the Potempa’s car to go to Weimar where Hitler speaks in the National Theatre, with
Göring following as a somewhat implausible decoy in the Supercharger. ‘What wizard
fellows these fliers are!’, enthuses Goebbels, changing his mind yet again.
He drives back from Thuringia that Sunday night in the Schultze-Naumburg’s car,
squeezed enjoyably between the professor’s comely wife and her stepdaughter Babette;
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 203
he sleeps at the Schultze-Naumburg’s and just as well, for Dr Weiss’s police are meanwhile
ransacking his lodgings in Württembergische Strasse and lying in wait for him.
October the Thirteenth comes. He lies doggo all morning writing up his diary. ‘In
three hours I am immune again, thank God!’ As Berlin’s Nazis go on an orgy of
destruction through the West End, smashing the windows of Jewish-owned stores on
the Potsdamer Platz and in Kurfürstendamm—an inspired move by the gauleiter to
distract ‘Isidor’—he is driven at breakneck speed over to the Reichstag.
‘Portal zwei!’ he shouts. Plain clothes detectives see him hobbling frantically up the
long flight of steps to Door Two, wearing a light raincoat buttoned tightly to his neck,
and grab at him just as he lurches through the great doors. The gau official Hanno
Konopath and a Reichstag flunky get a firm grip on him and bundle him inside.51
They have torn off his coat. Beneath it for the first time he is wearing the forbidden
uniform of the Nazi party. He is immune, and he can do and say as he likes.
1 Diary, Nov 5, 1929.
2 JG’s police file, Apr 5, 1930, 10 (NA film T581, roll 52, BA file: NS.26/1224).
3 [Lieutenant of the Reserve Walter Jahn], ‘How it came to the Stennes putsch!’, typescript
in NSDAP archives, IfZ: Fa.88/83. Jahn, the anonymous author, was Stennes’ chief of
staff. Stennes testified (letter to Prof H Krausnick, Nov 12, 1956, IfZ: ZS.1147) that the
document was written for internal S.A. use; in fact it was published (with the sub-title
‘Adolf Hitler largely to blame’) in consecutive issues of the organ of the Stennes fraction
(the NSKD), Wahrheit der Woche from No.7 (Oct 10, 1931) on (BA file NS.26/325).
4 Jahn.
5 Diary, Jul 28, 1930.
6 Stennes MS, Jul 1968 (IfZ: ZS-1147, vol.ii).
7 Diary, Jul 21, 23, 29, 1930.
8 E.g., Princess zu Wied. Diary, Aug 4, 1930.
9 MS history of Berlin politics by an unknown Nazi (NA film T581, roll 5; BA file NS.26/
133).
10 Diary, Jul 25, 26, Aug 1, 1930.
11 When addressing the NSDAP section at Hanover on Sep 5, 1929.
12 Diary, Jul 29, 1930; police file.
13 Ibid., Aug 4, 1930.
14 Ibid., Aug 8, 12, 13, 1930; and Jahn.
204 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
15 Ibid., Aug 24, 1930.
16 Ibid., Aug 9, 1930; Goltz MS (BA file Kl. Erw. 653/2)
17 Diary, Aug 13; Goltz; Angriff No.65, Aug 14, 1930.
18 The letter read: ‘From a declaration made to me by Dr Goebbels I infer that he had no
intention of personally defaming me personally with the remarks that are the substance of
the action against him, but was merely acting in his own political interests. I would withdraw
my complaint of Dec 31, 1929 against Dr Goebbels if that were possible at this stage. As it is
not in law possible, I have to content myself with the declaration that I regard the matter as
closed and have no further interest in punishing Dr Goebbels.’
19 Court transcript in ZStA Potsdam, files of justice ministry (IfZ film MA.118); diary, Aug
14–15; Goltz; Angriff, Aug 17, 1930.
20 Court transcript (loc. cit.) and case files in Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep.58, item 25; Angriff,
Aug 17, 1930.
21 JG was also prosecuted for inciting disrespect for the Reich flag in the NSDAP
Mitteilungsblatt Aug 1930 (Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep.58, item 8).
22 Diary, Aug 21, 23, 26, 1930.
23 See Dr Conti’s letter to (‘Osaf’) Pfeffer, Sep 8, 1930, in Stennes’ papers, NSDAP archives
(BA file NS.26/325); on the background of Pfeffer’s resignation as Osaf and the first
Stennes putsch see Himmler’s aide memoire of May 24, 1941 (NA film T175, roll 123,
8772ff).
24 Himmler (loc.cit.) recalled that Pfeffer resigned a few days before the Berlin mutiny, and
dismissed Pfeffer’s alternative version. ‘Pfeffer could no longer exorcise the spirits he had
summoned up and had to admit his incompetence to the Führer.’ Dokumente (p.341) agrees,
reporting that Pfeffer resigned on Aug 29 ‘for political reasons’, and that Hitler took over on
Sep 2. JG’s diary states that Hitler dismissed Pfeffer on the afternoon on Sep 1, i.e. afterwards.
25 Wiedemann, in conversation with Fritz Tobias, Jun 1973 (Tobias archives.)
26 The Berlin police HQ dossier states: ‘On the night of Aug 30–31, 1930 [Stennes] issued
the written order to SA-men to occupy the Greater Berlin Gau HQ…’ NSDAP archives
(BA file NS.26/1368).
27 Hitler had promised to expel anybody carrying firearms; the Prussian ministry of the
interior reported in Feb 1932 that between Feb and Sep 1930, despite fifteen trials of NSDAP
members for firearms offences, not one had been expelled; there were seventy-one more
such cases by Jul 1931, again without expulsions (BA file R.18/3864).
28 Himmler (loc. cit.): ‘Upon receiving this alarming news [by phone from Bouhler to
Hess] the Führer ordered an immediate departure for Berlin although we had slept hardly at
all the last few nights.’ They had only just arrived in Bayreuth at 1:30 A.M. Aug 31.
29 Diary, Sep 1, 1930. Wiedemann has Hitler and Hess staying at her apartment.
30 Ibid., Sep 3; VB, No.210, Sep 4, 1930.
31 Thus in JG’s broadcast on Jul 26, 1944: ‘In Aug 1930 a hireling of the Prussian ministry
of the interior staged a revolt.’
32 Borresholm, 71f.
33 NYT, Sep 2, 1930.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 205
34 Göring seems to have disapproved. According to Stennes’ chief of staff Jahn (loc. cit.)
Göring told Wetzel on Dec 31, 1930 that he now saw the grave injustice done to Stennes,
and that he ‘would see an end put to the ugly double-game being played by a certain gauleiter
and would not hesitate to have Himmler deposed as Reichsführer SS.’
35 Röhm was still in Bolivian army service; Dr h c Otto Wagener continued as chief of staff
until Jan 5, 1931.
36 Jahn.
37 Report by Berlin Landeskriminalpolizeiamt, Sep 16, 1930 (Bremen city archives, 4.65,
vol.5); cit. Reuth, 173.
38 Wiedemann.
39 Diary, Sep 1, 1930. Stennes was in no doubt about Goebbels’ two-faced role (IfZ:
ZS.1147).
40 Darré diary, Sep 3, 1930 (BA file Darré papers, vol.65a.)
41 Dokumente, 333, 335; diary, Sep 7, 9, 1930. In Berliner Illustrierte his photo was captioned
‘Paul J. Goebbels,’ leading to mocking suggestions by Otto Strasser’s Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 33
