The published diary represents its author, Goebbels, as the one comrade whom
Hitler trusts and regularly consults: two men sitting like spiders in the centre of the
Kaiserhof web, watching as their pawns move to topple first Groener, then Brüning
himself in the late spring of 1932.16 There is no trace in it of the depression that laid
him low the year before, and only the most antiseptic glimpses of his private life.17
The book records the gau’s crippling financial plight18, but suppresses any reference
to the excesses which the private diary reveals—for instance his craze for the latest
automobiles. On May 22 the diary notes, ‘The gentlemen from Mercedes come to
beg forgiveness. I am to get new coachwork [for the Opel Nuremberg] and a new
Mercedes open tourer. Now, that’s talking!’19
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 255
The published text also casts a discreet veil over Hitler’s private life. On the anniversary
of Geli’s suicide, Hitler tearfully visits her grave in Vienna.20 In ‘Kaiserhof’
however he is shown only as driving there for ‘a private visit.’ There is more: the real
diary shows that contrary to popular belief Miss Eva Braun, the blonde laboratory
assistant of Hitler’s photographer, did not step straight into Geli’s shoes, but that a
Miss Weinrich briefly claimed Hitler’s attentions first. ‘So that’s Hitler’s pet,’ notes
Goebbels. ‘Poor taste. Glum girl. Moist hands. Brr!’ He finds her lunching with
Hitler at the Osteria restaurant the next day. ‘Pig stupid,’ Goebbels decides, before
allowing more charitably: ‘How great Hitler’s longing for a woman must be!’ He
wondered what his chief saw in this little floosie—he ought to find a more respectable
lady friend.21 There is not even a hint of this in the published ‘Kaiserhof’ of
course.
NINETEEN thirty-two would be a year of elections—one presidential, two Reichstag,
and five provincial. In most the National Socialists would increase their vote. Goebbels
brought the national propaganda directorate permanently to Berlin from March 1,
and campaigned tirelessly. The police dossiers give the flavour of a typical Nazi function
—an audience of 2,500 S.A. men, an evening of brass bands, delegations of
standard bearers, and two musical skits by ‘The Ragdealers’ troupe mocking other
parties.22 Speaking that evening Goebbels shouted: ‘Should the regime try on the
basis of Article 48 to postpone or prevent the Prussian elections legally due under
the Reich constitution then this regime will become illegal and we the Opposition
shall—’ (The police agent missed the last phrase because of the roar of applause, but
the sense was ‘—seize power.’) ‘Dr Goebbels repeatedly stated that the decision will
come in the next four or five months.’ Their party was conscious of its duty, he
threatened: it promised no life of Beauty and Dignity. The police agent had to admit
that Goebbels’ delivery was ‘quite impressive.’
He now had a vast following in Berlin. The regime could no longer ignore the
Nazis. Brüning actually invited Hitler for talks about extending Hindenburg’s term
256 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
of office.23 After discussing it with his partners in the Harzburg Front, Hitler published
his refusal in the Völkischer Beobachter, insisting on a new presidential election.24
To Brüning’s embarrassment, deputy police chief ‘Isidor’ Weiss chose this moment
to ban Angriff for the tenth time in a year, for inciting contempt of the Jews—in 1932
there were 172,672 Jews among Berlin’s 4,024,165 population.25 On January 8 he
shut down a meeting at the Sport Palace just as Goebbels had begun speaking to
fifteen thousand people, for inciting contempt of Weiss in particular.26 Enraged by
Goebbels’ outrageous behaviour in court two weeks later during the Helldorff appeal
hearing—he had demanded that the police informant testify in open court—
Weiss slapped a fresh three-week gag on the gauleiter.27 Weiss also warned every
provincial governor in Germany: ‘National Socialist deputy Dr Göbbels [sic] forbidden
to speak here. Meetings only under proviso that G is not speaker. POLICE PRESIDENT
BERLIN.’28
At the next few meetings organisers read out messages from Goebbels, until the
police banned these too. The fight continued. On legal advice—and by now Goebbels
was surrounded by eager lawyers willing to help—he deeded his personal library to
a third person in case Weiss seized it on the pretext that it served the purposes of
spreading revolution.
The tide of political violence was rising. Eighty-six Nazis were murdered during
1932; in twelve months Goebbels alone lost seven men, and the police seldom caught
the murderers.
The killing of fifteen year old Herbert Norkus was particularly nasty. With five pals
he had been distributing Goebbels leaflets early one Sunday morning, January 24,
when they were overwhelmed by five times their number of communists (and, it
turned out, a sprinkling of Stennes’ supporters too). The body of Norkus, son of a
working-class Nazi from Plötzensee, was found in the entrance hall of No.4 Zwingli
Strasse bleeding to death from six stab wounds. Goebbels personally inspected the
scene with its twenty yard trail of dried blood and the one bloody handprint on the
whitewashed wall. After going on to the morgue he wrote these words in his newspaper:
‘There in the bleak grey twilight a yellowing childish face stares with half
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 257
open, empty eyes. The delicate features have been trampled to a bloody pulp. Long,
deep gashes have been torn into the thin body, a lethal wound gapes between lungs
and heart.’29 The next day he buried the artist Professor Ernst Schwarz, an S.A. officer
gunned down in a communist ambush a week before.30
ONE evening Dr Goebbels returned home excited, limped up and down chain smoking
for a while, then told Magda he had had a splendid idea. ‘Hitler himself must
stand for president,’ he said. Hitler however proved unexpectedly difficult to persuade:
he wanted the opposition to come out with their candidates before making up
his own mind. The other gauleiters were critical of Hitler’s reticence, and feared he
was prevaricating yet again. Hitler acted with studied calm. ‘He’s a wonderful man
to work with,’ Goebbels wrote in ‘Kaiserhof’. ‘There’s no human being less equipped
to be a tyrant than he.’31
Still delaying his decision on February 9 Hitler reviewed fifteen thousand S.A.
stormtroopers in the Sport Palace. Goebbels enthused, though only in the first edition
of ‘Kaiserhof’, ‘Chief of Staff Röhm has pulled off a miracle.’ This embarrassing
laudation peared only in the first edition of ‘Kaiserhof’, and was struck out of all
editions published after June 1934.32
Police chief Grzesinski gagged at the prospect of Hitler, his arch enemy, becoming
president. This centurion of social democracy made little pretence of impartiality:
‘How shameful it is,’ he declared in Leipzig, ‘that millions of Germans are trotting
along behind a foreigner… How shameful that this foreigner, Hitler, not only conducts
serious talks w
ith the government on foreign affairs, but is able to speak to
foreign press representatives about Germany’s future and about Germany’s foreign
interests without somebody seeing him off with a dog-whip.’33 Dr Goebbels made
hay with that remark.34 In Angriff he pointed out how often Grzesinski had banned
Nazis for precisely the same kind of incitement to violence.35 ‘Let’s see,’ he crowed in
‘Kaiserhof’, published when he already knew the answer, ‘which of us gets seen off
with a dog-whip out of Germany.’36
258 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Hindenburg announced on February 15 that he intended to stand again. Taking
Hitler’s decision for granted, Goebbels began designing election posters with punchy
slogans like Schluss jetzt!—‘Time’s up!’37 Hitler was still undecided. Goebbels decided
to present him with a fait accompli, subjecting him to the pressure of public
acclaim. To a cheering Sport Palace audience on February 22, Goebbels simply announced
that Hitler would stand for president.38 Hitler’s HQ in Munich was horrified
and issued an immediate embargo to the Party newspapers forbidding them to print
Goebbels’ announcement.39 Writing in ‘Kaiserhof’ two years later Goebbels claimed
that Hitler had phoned him after the meeting to express his delight that the announcement
had gone down so well.40
Whatever the truth of this self-serving statement, on February 23, speaking in a
Reichstag building surrounded by riot police, Groener announced the election date
as March the Thirteenth. After that, speaking on behalf of the Nazis, Dr Goebbels
launched into an hour-long assault on Dr Brüning, seated stony faced and with arms
folded near him. In one year, he said, the police had banned Angriff twelve times;
eight times the courts had ruled these bans illegal. ‘The Illustrierte Beobachter,’ he said,
‘the picture magazine of the National Socialist movement, has today been banned
until March 13—i.e., for the whole of the election period.’ In the last three months
twenty-four S.A. men had been murdered (‘probably by other Nazis,’ yelled a social
democrat) and now their police chief was talking of whipping Hitler out of Germany.
No foreign power, he declared, was willing to sign treaties with Brüning—
‘Because they know, Mr Reich Chancellor, that you are the Man of Yesteryear, and
that the Man of Tomorrow is coming.’
To a barrage of abuse from the left, Goebbels doggedly waded into Hindenburg’s
reputation. ‘Lauded by the Berlin gutter press, fêted by the Party of Deserters—’ he declaimed,
flinging out a demagogic arm toward the social democrat benches. The rest
of his words were lost in the howl of outrage that his taunt provoked.41
Furiously clanging his bell the Speaker called for silence. Dr Goebbels,’ he charged,
‘you have named one of the parties present in this House the “Party of Deserters”…’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 259
The social democrats screeched at Goebbels, ‘Who deserted? Where were you!’
One of them shouted, ‘You weren’t at the front for even one day!’ Amidst mounting
hubbub the communist bloc leader Ernst Torgler mocked, ‘Let war veteran Goebbels
speak.’ The social democrats were however now hysterical. ‘We were at the front!’
‘He was the dodger!’ ‘Withdraw!’ ‘Behold Goebbels, the political cripple!’
Barely pausing to draw breath Goebbels continued: ‘The Jews of the Berlin gutter
press have held the field marshal on high. These are the same Jews and social democrats
[shouts of Sit down! and Time’s up!] who dumped buckets of mockery and scorn
on the field marshal in 1925.’
‘Sit down! Sit down!’ roared the social democrats. ‘We’re not going to be insulted
by dodgers!’
The Speaker capitulated, and ordered Goebbels out of the chamber. Gregor Strasser
leapt to his defence, pointing out that the gauleiter had not accused any particular
party by name. ‘When he said “Party of Deserters” only the social democrats felt the
hat fitted!’42
Returning to the attack the next day Goebbels complained that the illegal and
unjust bans on Angriff had cost the newspaper 180,000 marks already. As for the
opposition’s specious allegations that he had just slandered Hindenburg as a ‘deserter’,
he retaliated by reading out devastating passages from press clippings in his
confidential archives, reporting what the social democrat organ Vorwärts, the Berliner
Morgenzeitung, the Berliner Morgenpost and Carl Severing himself had written about the
field marshal during the previous presidential election campaign. In a brutal closing
tirade he offered a string of definitions for the Nazi word System, ending with this
one: ‘Where criticising the Republic lands you in jail, but slandering and belittling
the entire German people is rewarded by the highest distinctions!’ He cried, ‘That is
why in the three weeks now beginning, one battle-cry will sound throughout Germany:
Time’s up, Away with the System … the system that Brüning and his Cabinet
represent!’ As screams of abuse erupted from the left, Goebbels taunted them: ‘Well
may you laugh and scoff. Events will prove us right. We shall meet again, on March
the Thirteenth, at Philippi.’43
260 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels opened the presidential election campaign with a Hitler meeting at the
Sport Palace on February 27. Not unimpressed, an opposition newspaper reported
that he ‘turned on the entire thundering apparatus of refined mass persuasion’—the
drum-beating Brownshirt S.A., the marching men, the entry of the banners: ‘First
Goebbels entered, to pave the way for the Führer’s appearance … then a command
to the S.A.: Attention! In the sudden silence that descends on the huge hall a crescendo
of Heils is heard from outside, and carving a path through the people comes
the Führer.’44 Waging an election campaign of dubious probity Brüning’s officials
confiscated the Völkischer Beobachter and banned Angriff yet again, for inciting contempt
of the Republic. But the Nazis had poster power. Kampmann, now Goebbels’
gau propaganda chief, plastered the circular Litfass pillars on street corners with
huge text placards: S.A. men stood guard on each site, and Nazi speakers harangued
the crowds that gathered around them.45 Outsized pictorial posters like Schweitzer’s
‘A Man Breaks his Chains’ adorned the facades of prominent buildings like the Cafe
Josty on Potsdamer Platz. Goebbels recorded a short speech, cleverly structured so
that its real propaganda message was not at first evident, and manufactured fifty
thousand cardboard copies of this little recording costing only three pfennigs each
for Nazis to mail to their marxist opponents.46 In 1930 he had seen an inspiring film
of Mussolini speaking; the Herold film company now produced a ten minute film of
Goebbels speaking, to be shown each night in town squares throughout Germany.47
Somebody—in the Reichstag the taunt was always ‘Thyssen!’—must have topped
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 42
