shadow still darkens the horizon.
IMPORTANT new faces met him at his gau HQ. The dynamic, heavily built, square-
242 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
jawed Karl Hanke, aged twenty-seven, was his new chief of organisation.52 He had a
dry, ironic manner that belied his tough, non-nonsense attitude. Berlin’s new propaganda
chief was Karoly Kampmann; determined to force back to rising Munich tide
of bourgeois Reaktion—best translated by the word ‘diehards’—Goebbels ordered
Kampmann to concentrate his efforts on recruiting new members from Berlin’s factory
floors.53 Millions of leaflets and stickers were printed with the new slogan, ‘Into
the factories!’54 That was the only place, Goebbels would write, where the workers
could be won over—and he intended to gain ten thousand new members in the next
three months.55 In consequence of this shift of emphasis to the factory floor, the
regular pace of his public propaganda slowed down that autumn; in October, his gau
would stage only 125 public meetings.56
DURING 1931 the political violence worsened. Since May 1930 there had been twentynine
political murders in Berlin alone—including twelve communists, six Nazis,
one Stahlhelm member, two Social Democrats, and four policemen.57 In July 1931
Ernst Röhm put a new man in charge of Berlin’s S.A., the thirty-four year old aristocrat
Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorff. Helldorff had only joined the party in August
1930; Goebbels, meeting him a month later, had not liked him at the time. A
whiff of perfume caught his nostrils, and he wondered if Helldorff were a poofter
like the rest. He had since then tackled Hitler about Röhm’s perversion, about which
a Munich newspaper had made headlines in June.58 Goebbels concluded that
Helldorff’s appointment was a back-door affair with Röhm and his bi-sexual adjutant
Karl Ernst. ‘The future of the S.A. looks grim to me,‘ wrote Goebbels. ‘§175
[the clause of the penal code on homosexuality] casts its shadow right across it.’59
Yet he soon came round to liking, even adoring, Helldorff, forming an enduring
friendship with the scoundrel which, in the words of the Spanish proverb, tells us
much about Goebbels himself. Helldorff was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, a
bully, a Jew-baiter, and a murderer. Police records showed one warrant against him
in 1922 for manslaughter, and another for carrying an unlicensed weapon.60 Born on
October 14, 1896, the arrogant, wastrel son of a blue-blooded landowner, he had
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 243
not bothered to join the party until August 1, 1930. During the Stennes revolt he had
sided with the insurgents, saying ‘Hitler is a traitor.’61 None of this appeared to bother
Goebbels. Early in September 1931 he briefed Helldorff and his chief of staff Karl
Ernst to stage an operation—ostensibly a demonstration by unemployed—to rough
up Jews along Kurfürstendamm on their New Year’s day, Yom Kippur.62 On the chosen
day, September 12 Helldorff cruised up and down the boulevard in his green
Opel, according to police reports, directing his stormtroopers, who were disguised
as ordinary passers-by, to set on anybody who looked like a Jew.63 The police however
had been tipped off—one disgruntled S.A. man in Potsdam said later that it was
odd that the police learned what had happened at a secret briefing attended only by
Goebbels, Helldorff, and Ernst64—and arrested Helldorff with Ernst, another member
of his staff Heini Gewehr and thirty-four other S.A. men.65 (More likely the
informer was Goebbels’ own secretary Ilse Stahl.66) The police docket six days later
described Helldorff’s private life as messy—he was swamped with unpaid bills, currently
separated from his wife, and not on speaking terms with his family, and he had
all but bankrupted his family estate at Wolmistedt. The court sentenced him to six
months in prison as ringleader of the riot but he did not serve one day.67 At Helldorff’s
appeal in January Goebbels stood by his new friend, screamed at the prosecutor Dr
Stenig, outrageously insulted the court, demanded that the chief of police produce
his informant as a witness, and flatly refused to testify otherwise, bringing about the
collapse of the prosecution case and earning a fine of five hundred marks for contempt.
Helldorff’s sentence was reduced to a piffling fine of one hundred marks.68
(His lawyer was Roland Freisler, whom he would meet again under different circumstances
after July 20, 1944.) Helldorff’s streetfighters were less fortunate: they
received prison sentences of up to two years for affray.69 This inequality widened the
breach between Goebbels and the S.A. men, and that winter saw several intemperate
leaflets circulating in Berlin claiming that he and Helldorff had left them in the
lurch.70
His attitude toward the S.A. officers became ambivalent. He began sniping against
Röhm.71 But he kept up his support for the ‘army’s’ rank and file. On September 11,
244 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
1931—the day before the Kurfürstendamm riot—he resorted to his old propaganda
tricks at a Sport Palace fund-raiser for the S.A. clinic, at which he presented six
recent S.A. casualties.
On Goebbels’ instructions [wrote one of the six] we were given brand new
white hospital gowns and the staff at the Party clinic began to bandage us. One of
us who just had a bad headache was given a gigantic turban bandage. Another …
who had been kicked in the stomach was given a large and totally pointless bandage
around his abdomen. As we entered the Sport Palace it was announced that
we were the ‘victims of political terrorism.’ The resulting applause was deafening.
72
Three days after this, Goebbels was delivering the graveside eulogy for an S.A.man,
Hermann Thielsch. On the twentieth he spoke at Brunswick when the new Nazi
minister of the interior Dietrich Klagges was sworn in. He harangued factory cell
officials at Stettin the next day, and so violently that the police called for intensified
surveillance of such assemblies in future. On the last day of the month his topic in
Halle was ‘Germany has Awakened.’ The next day he addressed a public rally at the
Sport Palace.73
Still ruling by emergency decree, on October 6 Chancellor Brüning empowered
the police to shut down ‘dens of activities hostile to the state.’ Grzesinski and Weiss
immediately sent in their police to evict the S.A. and S.S. from the hostels that
Goebbels had set up for them in Berlin, tossing the beds and furniture into the street.
Hundreds of Nazis, already unemployed, now became homeless too. The steamhead
of hatred slowly built up pressure.
To the authorities’ distress Adolf Hitler now moved his political headquarters away
from Munich—where a personal tragedy, the suicide of his niece Geli in his apartment
had deeply shocked him—to Berlin. Burying for ever the womanizing, indolent,
procrastinating Hitler of old, he retained a suite of rooms in the Kaiserhof
hotel,within leering distance of the Reich Chancellery. Here he held court with his
henchmen like Röhm, Hess, and Julius Schaub. Grzesinski and Weiss were shocked
GOEBBELS. MASTERMI
ND OF THE THIRD REICH 245
at their government’s lack of dignity in tolerating this; their agents learned that Hitler
was meeting top businessmen including even Günther Quandt at the Kaiserhof,
and that they were pouring money into the Nazi coffers having accepted that Brüning
was not going to rescue Germany.74
THE locals jostle and vie with each other for Hitler’s ear. Göring, his political attaché
in Berlin, is also overshadowed by tragedy, as his wife Carin has now contracted her
final illness and returned to Stockholm with no hope of recovering. Goebbels tries to
buy from the prosecutor’s office the documents incriminating Röhm. Röhm, stung
by Goebbels’ campaign against him, tells Hitler that all Berlin is gossipping about
Goebbels’s affair with the former Mrs Quandt.75 But this backfires on Röhm, as
Goebbels now often hangs around the lobby of the Kaiserhof with Magda taking tea.
Once they send young Harald Quandt, now nearly ten, upstairs to see the Führer
wearing the little blue uniform she has sewn for him. Harald gives Hitler the appropriate
salute and says that he feels twice as strong when wearing a uniform. Goebbels
invites Hitler downstairs to meet Magda—‘the divorced wife of the industrialist you
saw earlier,’ he adds. A stickler for etiquette Hitler asks Göring whether there is any
reason why he should not be seen with Magda. ‘No,’ admits Göring, ‘but you can’t
been too careful with a “Madame Pompadour”.’ The name means nothing to Hitler,
and he does not grasp that Magda is in a relationship with his propaganda chief.76
Thus the three points of an extraordinary triangle converge—Hitler, Magda, and
Goebbels. Over tea Magda, not quite thirty, and the freshly bereaved Hitler, twelve
years her senior, feast their eyes on each other. To Hitler she looks uncannily like
Geli77; while Magda, imbued by this time with Nazi lore, feels she is in the presence
of a demi-god. Hours later, in his upstairs suite, Hitler remarks to his henchmen that
in Geli he believed he had found something almost Divine: ‘I thought these feelings
were dead and buried,’ he adds. ‘But today these same feelings have suddenly overwhelmed
me again.’
For an instant he seems to have fantasized about Magda; she told her mother that
he had made cautious and discreet advances to her.78 His reverie last however only a
246 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
few hours. After midnight he learned that Magda had casually invited Schaub, Sepp
Dietrich, and his chauffeur back to her apartment for drinks; Dr Goebbels had then
shown up there, letting himself in with a key, and declared stiffly that he was somewhat
surprised to find them there at such a late hour. Hitler was clearly astonished to
hear this from them: Goebbels, that limping little runt, had pulled this Germanic
beauty? He pulled a wry face and tried to laugh off his disappointment. ‘It was just a
brief relapse,’ he confessed to an aide.79
Carin Göring died early on October 17. Hitler took this fresh personal loss hard
and again spoke wistfully to Otto Wagener about Magda Quandt. ‘This woman,’ he
mused, ‘might yet play a role in my life… She could become a second Geli for me.
It’s a pity,’ he continued, thinking out loud, ‘that she is not married.’ Wagener took
the hint, and we have his account of what followed. That day, October 17, and the
next Hitler and Goebbels were both due to attend a rally by the S.A. at Brunswick.
Wagener invited Magda to go in his large 100-horsepower Horch.80 On the drive
over, Wagener stopped for a picnic and put an unusual proposition to her: Hitler, he
said, was a rare genius who needed a woman’s gentle influence; she must be able to
help the Führer to find himself as a human being—somebody to accompany him to
the opera, and to entertain him to tea with the finest porcelain. ‘This woman could
be you.’
‘But I would have to be married to somebody,’ she pointed out.
‘Correct,’ he said, and mentioned Goebbels. Magda was hesitant. ‘But for Adolf
Hitler,’ she bravely announced, ‘I am willing to do anything.’ She promised to keep
Wagener informed.
It seems to have been an unusual bargain all round. Magda later told her sister in
law Ello Quandt that Goebbels attached one condition to their marriage, if he was
quasi to share her with Hitler, namely that he be allowed extra-marital adventures; a
man of his vitality needed this emotional leeway, he argued.81 She concurred. Early
in November she phoned Wagener to say that they would both be coming to Munich
a few days later: ‘I have come to keep my promise.’ Over lunch with Hitler they
announced their engagement and he attended their little hotel celebration after-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 247
wards. ‘The mood was so carefree,’ recalled Wagener, ‘that I had the feeling that
three people had at last found happiness.’
THE Reichstag was due to reconvene after its seven-month recess on October 13,
1931. On the tenth President Hindenburg sent for Hitler to size him up. He was not
impressed. On the following day, in an attempt to concert their opposition, Hitler
chaired a meeting with the bourgeois opposition leaders at Bad Harzburg. The upshot
was the formation of a ‘Harzburg Front’ against Brüning. On the fourteenth the
Nazis re-entered the Reichstag, but only briefly because two days later they walked
out again.
By the end of the year there were 5,660,000 registered unemployed—a desperate
people turning to the Nazis for their salvation, and a regime determined to stay in
office by hook or by crook. On December 8 Brüning issued still more emergency
decrees banning political uniforms and prohibiting all political assemblies until the
new year. Two days later Hitler held court again at the Kaiserhof with Röhm, Hess,
Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl and Schaub; the next day police HQ learned that Hitler
was conferring all morning with the Ruhr steel millionaires Albert Vögler and Fritz
Thyssen, and planned to hold a press conference with American journalists. Grzesinski
pleaded with Severing to ban at least the press conference as an ‘illegal assembly’, or
failing that to deport Hitler from Prussia as persona non grata: the Berlin police
could then forcibly put him on the midday train to Munich. President Hindenburg
however disapproved—another sign that the Nazis were coming in from the cold.
HITLER had begun visiting Magda Quandt’s apartment on Reichskanzler Platz more
often than Göring’s. Both Goebbels and Gregor Strasser welcomed this—the Görings,
said Strasser, had always had a houseful of fortune hunters hoping to meet the Führer.
(‘I myself get on quite well with Goebbels,’ Strasser told Wagener.) With Carin now
dead, Göring moved permanently into the Kaiserhof. Fleeing from the political atmosphere
there, Hitler became a more frequent visitor to Magda’s household. ‘Here,’
he told Goebbels, ‘we’ve got everything to ourselves.’ Magda served her home-baked
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