Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 36
allures, he visited the college more than once claiming to be her uncle, and took the
218 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
matron and Magda out in his open landau.14 She dropped out of college, and phoned
him instead; one thing led to another, she invited her mother out to his lakeside villa
at Babelsberg, outside Berlin. Events moved rapidly toward matrimony. As a first
step Quandt required her birth certificate to be amended so that she was declared
the legitimate daughter of Ritschel, to expunge the undesirable name Friedländer.15
Ritschel lodged the necessary application in mid 1920.16 As a second step, Quandt
required his bride to embrace the protestant faith. They were married on January 4,
1921 at Ritschel’s parental house in Godesberg. After the honeymoon, said her mother
later, Magda rushed into her arms wailing, ‘How could you have let me marry him!’17
But as their first and only child Harald was born just ten months later the matrimonial
ardour evidently flickered just long enough.18
Günther Quandt was old for his age. Escorting her to concerts or the theatre he
usually fell asleep behind the Berliner Börsenzeitung. The boardroom was his true world.
Once when she, with girlish pride, produced her meticulous household accounts he
absent-mindedly signed them in red ink, ‘Seen and approved. Günther Quandt.’ She
rapidly tired of his company. Even when he went on business trips to exotic locations
like Egypt or Palestine she was reluctant to go with him. He wrote her regularly
from abroad, she replied only once.19
She began a furtive relationship with his oldest son Hellmut. Sexually unfulfilled,
the twenty-three year old Magda was fatally attracted to this gifted and delicate young
man, then aged only eighteen. Her husband found it wise to send young Hellmut to
complete his studies in London and Paris. After an operation for appendicitis in Paris,
complications set in and young Hellmut died tragically in her arms in 1927. Heartbroken,
she accompanied her husband on a six month tour of the Americas, taking
their big red Maybach car everywhere they went. Standing next to the balding,
blazered, bow-tied millionaire Quandt this bored, blue-eyed blonde was a star attraction
in high society on both sides of the Border. Something intimate evidently
passed between Magda and the former president Herbert Hoover’s nephew, because
he came to Berlin after her estrangement from Quandt and pleaded with her to
marry him.20
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 219
Back in Berlin Quandt had settled down and purchased a roomy winter home in
Charlottenburg, while keeping on their new villa at New Babelsberg for the summer.
Magda took refuge from her boredom in books—buying a ten-volume Buddhist
catechism one day in Leipzig—and wafted from store to store, from one empty
social event to the next until she could stand it no longer.21 In the summer of 1929
she embarked on an affair with a thirty-year old law student, a Jew.22 She pleaded in
vain with Quandt to release her. Hoping to catch him in some infidelity, she had him
watched, but equally in vain. The student was a perfect and attentive lover, plying her
with flowers, and she accompanied him on a trip to the Hotel Dreesen at Godesberg.
This time however Quandt had hired the detectives; after reading their report, he
threw her out.
Penniless and unemployed Magda returned to her mother while she negotiated a
settlement with Quandt. Ello Quandt, her sister-in-law, advised her to blackmail her
aging husband about a bundle of papers she had found.23 It proved unnecessary, however.
He remained a perfect gentleman, agreed to a divorce, and willingly accepted
the fiction that he had contributed to the breakdown of the marriage. ‘Do we not all,’
he would write, ‘at times assume the blame, when in fact we are not in the wrong?’24
Until she remarry he granted her custody of their son, a lavish four-thousand mark
monthly allowance, and fifty thousand marks to purchase a house. She leased a sevenroom
luxury apartment at No.2 Reichskanzler Platz in West Berlin.
There could be no question of marrying her unemployed student lover—marriage
to anybody would cut off her alimony cornucopia. So she lived, loved, and travelled
around as her law student’s paramour while privately planning her future—without
him. Drinking heavily one evening at the Nordic Ring club she met the Hohenzollern
Prince August-Wilhelm (Goebbels’ S.A. comrade, ‘Auwi’). The prince suggested
that the party needed people like her. She heard Goebbels speak soon after; fascinated,
she enrolled at the Nazi party’s minuscule West End branch run by the young
engine-driver’s son Karl Hanke. Her Party membership dated from September 1,
1930.25 She found herself taking charge of the local Women’s Order. From there she
gravitated to headquarters at No.10 Hedemann Strasse. With her above-average edu-
220 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
cation she was appointed secretary to Dr Hans Meinshausen, Goebbels’ deputy as
gauleiter.26
Goebbels, it must be said, had little going for him at this time. He was a cripple; his
total monthly salary was one-eighth of Magda’s monthly alimony; but she heard him
speak again, and she passed him once as he came limping up the steps. ‘I thought I
might almost catch fire,’ she told her mother excitedly, ‘under this man’s searching,
almost devouring, gaze.’27 She told Ello Quandt that to judge by his suit Goebbels
was obviously in need of, well, mothering. A few weeks later it struck Günther Quandt,
who still frequently met her, that she talked of nothing but the Nazis. ‘At first I
thought it was just a passing fad for the oratorical gift of Dr Goebbels,’ he wrote. Her
law student lover also noticed, and flared that she seemed to be losing her head to
that clubfooted loudmouth.
‘You’re mad,’ she snapped. ‘I could never love Goebbels!’
GOEBBELS had other preoccupations right now. At the end of January 1931 an S.A.
man had gunned down the Berlin communist Max Schirmer; four days later Nazis
shot dead the communist Otto Grüneberg in a Charlottenburg street fight.28 On
February 4 police chief Grzesinski banned Angriff for two weeks. Goebbels was also
down with ’flu. What sickened him even more than this was how close to the communists
he found his position really was. After one Reichstag interruption on the
fifth a Social Democrat rounded on him with the stinging rejoinder, ‘—That is from
a gentleman … fully aware that Messrs Hitler, Frick, Jung, etc., have been to the
Ruhr several times to explain their National Socialist programme to the gentleman
of heavy industry and to demonstrate that they have nothing to fear from the National
Socialist brand of socialism.’
That day the communists in the Reichstag called for a vote of no confidence. As
Walter Ulbricht rose to speak, many of the Nazis including Goebbels drifted out.
The communists taunted, ‘Goebbels is ducking out!’ ‘Mr Goebbels only dodges,’
shouted Ulbricht, ‘when the allegations of the communists rain down on him.’ He
added to loud cheers, ‘When the boys of big business beckon, he wags his tail.’ ‘For
&nb
sp; GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 221
weeks,’ Ulbricht continued, ‘we have been asking Goebbels Ten Questions. We asked
him if it’s true that the Nazis are subsidized by heavy industry; that they haven’t
backed a single action on behalf of the unemployed; and that they have backed every
action against the unemployed. He is too much of a coward to answer.’
When Goebbels rose there were communist taunts of ‘The Race Man!’, ‘Pure race
from head to toe,’ and ‘a real Germanic type!’
‘Comrade Ulbricht asked for a clear answer to certain questions,’ Goebbels shrilled.
‘He could have had this clear answer from me in front of Berlin’s assembled workers
in the Friedrichshain Hall—’ amidst rising Nazi cheers, ‘—if only he hadn’t prevented
it by a premature brawl.’ He accused Brüning of creating a national catastrophe:
the farms were in rebellion, the middle class being ground down by inflation,
the cities facing bankruptcy, the Poles bearing down on Upper Silesia, and Germany
naked and disarmed in a hostile world. Although they were the main opposition
party, the Nazis found themselves with every newspaper except one currently banned.
If the government continued to rig the rules of the Reichstag to disadvantage them,
he said, people would begin to ask: ‘Why bother to convene this Reichstag at all? It’s
done nothing else in recent months but adopt emergency decrees.’ They, the opposition,
might as well go on vacation. Elections had shown that their backing was still
growing. He confirmed however what Hitler had said in the recent supreme court
hearing in Leipzig: ‘We intend to come legally to power. But what we do with this
power once we have it—that’s our own affair.’ As for Prussia, he declared a few
minutes later, ‘The conquest of the Reich takes precedence over the conquest of
Prussia—’
‘In a Mercedes-Benz!’, a communist voice mocked.29
A few days later the government revoked the immunity of three hundred deputies
including all the Nazis. Goebbels alone had eight criminal cases pending. He recommended
to his colleagues that rather than just becoming ‘poorly paid extras’ they
should walk out en masse. Their salaries would stop, but the tactics were undeniably
sound. The move would demonstrate to voters that the Nazis dissociated themselves
from the government’s rule by emergency decree.
222 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
On February 10 the Nazis marched in, remained standing while their bloc leader
Franz Stöhr read out the tough declaration which Goebbels had formulated, then
marched out again. After that, one hundred police officers raided Hedemann Strasse
and searched the building. Goebbels’ Lustgarten rally of the fifteenth was banned on
the usual pretext (‘danger to peace and quiet’).
‘Your peace and quiet,’ swore Goebbels in his diary, ‘will be endangered soon
enough.’30
IT has been a tense and angry week for Dr Goebbels in the Reichstag. At its end
Magda Quandt comes round to see him in his new, luxurious Steglitz apartment. He
finds himself captivated by this woman. Her dress is subtle, her whole posture is that
of a person who now knows where she is going.31 It is a Saturday—February 14,
1931—and Goebbels enters certain code phrases, circumlocutions, into his diary
which show that this visit is not for mere archival gossip: ‘And stays for a very long
time,’ he carefully records. And, ‘How are you, my queen?’ The answer follows: ‘(1)’.
Magda has seduced him, after Olga only the second girl in his life to do so. Sunday
finds him in a trance, or ‘replete with satiated happiness,’ as he writes. Magda writes
him a fond note the next day.32
Magda Quandt returns to her elegant leased apartment and servants, and Dr
Goebbels goes over to Dortmund where twenty-thousand people are waiting to hear
him. In Hamburg he speaks to twelve thousand.33 His mind is on her. When he speaks
at Weimar, Anka’s Weimar, he takes Magda with him. He phones Anka, speaks tersely
with her, and decides that he can’t stand her whining and her ‘lack of discipline’ any
longer. Now that he has Magda he can afford to be stand-offish.
He takes Magda to the automobile show in Berlin. She wants to buy a new car, but
can’t make up her mind. Does she buy him one? Suddenly he has a new Opel (it has
been stolen already by March 9).34 They have the usual rows. Magda writes a farewell
note. Goebbels has seen it all before—‘the same old melody!’, he writes, amused.
He can handle it. She comes round for a ‘very formal’ talk and flounces out as though
to leave. Goebbels holds the door open for her. ‘You are so hard,’ she murmurs, and
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 223
relents.35 She visits several times during March 1931, chats, laughs, makes music
with him, meals for him, and—occasionally-love. On the ninth he adds ‘(2, 3)’ to his
score, and five days later ‘(4, 5)’.36
But mysteries abound. She is often sick; she does not yet invite him back to her
own fine apartment in Reichskanzler Platz. Sometimes she is inexplicably away, or
does not answer her phone. Jealousy wells up within him. He tries hard to please: he
takes her to Carl Zuckmayer’s ‘Captain of Köpenick,’ and decides that soon they
would get on just fine. At this time time the adventure probably means very little to
her; but not to him.37 Goebbels has drawn a historic line under his philanderings.
‘I’m going to stop the womanizing,’ he writes secretly on March 15, ‘and favour just
the one.’
IN Hamburg the gauleiter Karl Kaufmann had once remarked to Goebbels that Brüning
for one considered Göring mad.38 Göring had certainly been unbalanced by Carin’s
near fatal illness during January 1931. After visiting her sickbed Goebbels wrote that
he revered her, a word he had used before only for his mother.39 He was alarmed at
Göring’s character regression, probably a result of his addiction. ‘We’ve got to get
him into a mental clinic in time,’ he despaired. ‘He mustn’t go to the dogs like this.’40
Hitler promised to tackle Göring about the morphine. Göring’s behaviour worsened
to outright megalomania. ‘He alternates,’ observed Goebbels in February 1931, ‘between
imagining he’s Reich Chancellor and defence minister… Today he’s just ludicrous.’
41
After both spoke at Essen to an audience of sixteen thousand including both Krupp
and Thyssen. Göring accompanied him back to Berlin but refused to discuss his drug
problem. The gauleiter’s remarks about him took on a bitter edge. After they both
addressed some twenty-five thousand people in Frankfurt, Goebbels wrote that
Göring had spoken the ‘usual crap.’42 One Sunday he again tackled Göring about the
addiction; the aviator spluttered denials that were too thin to be plausible to
Goebbels.43
224 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Göring counter-attacked, accusing him of being over tolerant of the still-mutinous
Captain Stennes, and mocking his self-aggrandisement in Angriff. Goebbels said that