NS.26/546).
48 Kaiserhof, Mar 6, 1932.
49 Ibid., Mar 2, 5, 1932.
50 Papers of Deutsche Welle GmbH, Mar 1932 (BA file R.55/1273).
51 Diary, Mar 9, 1932.
52 Kaiserhof, Mar 12, 1932. This glowed with false praise for Göring’s oratory.
53 Hindenburg won 18,651,497 votes, Hitler 11,339,446, the communist Ernst Thälmann
4,983,341 and the DNVP’s Duesterberg 2,557,729. In the still predominantly Red capital,
the Nazis gained 22.9 percent—well below their national average of 30.1 percent.
54 JG to all gauleiters, Mar 13, 1932 (NA film T581, roll 29; BA file NS.26/546).
55 Kaiserhof, Mar 14–17, 1932.
56 ‘A rain of blows on the defeatists’ (Kaiserhof, Mar 19); JG’s drafts of the posters and
leaflets
57 Hitler to Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Mar 17, 1932 (BA file NS.26/564).
58 JG to all gauleiters, Mar 23, 1932. NSDAP archives (NA film T581, roll 29; BA file
NS.26/546).
59 Drafts of his posters for the Apr 10, 1932 election are in BA file NS.26/287; similar files
of his Reich election directorate are in file NS.26/290.
60 Kaiserhof, Mar 29, 1932.
61 Die Welt am Montag, No.14, Apr 4, 1932 suggested that Hitler had forfeited the right to be
leader of a workers’ party, as the Kaiserhof had billed him for 4,408 marks for ten days’ food
and accommodation in luxury suites on the first floor; Kaiserhof, Apr 2, 1932.
62 In VB, No.97, Apr 6, and in Angriff, No.64, 66, and 68 of Apr 4, 6, 8. He claimed Hitler’s
suite was on the fourth floor. Die Welt sued Hitler and JG for libel, producing the original bill.
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, No.122, May 30, 1932 (BA file NS.26/1932.)
63 Severing papers (Friedrich Ebert foundation, Bonn, file 189).
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 267
64 Grzesinski alleged in his memoirs that his political police (Ia) raided a Nazi gau office in
Pomerania and found compelling evidence of high treason, automatic weapons, and plans by
Hitler to stage a putsch if prevented from taking office after an anticipated election victory.
See Märkische Volkszeitung, Mar 20, 1932; for the Hagen police HQ’s copy of Groener’s telegram
transmitting the ban to all police authorities see NA film T81, roll 90.
65 Leaflet drafts by JG are in BA file NS.26/286.
66 Kaiserhof, Apr 15–16; Kampmann, op.cit; NYT, Apr 16, 1932, p.4; Goltz MS (BA: Kl.Erw.
653/2).
67 Kaiserhof, Apr 24, 1932.
268 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels
18: Follow that Man
FOR THE NEXT months Hitler would spend more time in Berlin than in Munich,
wheeling and dealing in tandem with Göring in a persistent effort to
cover the last hundred yards to power. Goebbels did what he could to
undermine Hitler’s trust in Göring. When the aviator started an affair with blonde
actress Emmy Sonnemann, a married woman, he lost no time in telling Hitler.1 In
consequence, Hitler spent more time with the Goebbels’. Besides, he was almost
pathological about being recognized in the capital. He would hide his face when the
lights came on in movie theatres; one evening, the Goebbels were out when Hitler
returned to Reichskanzler Platz and he had to wait outside. He asked Darré to stand
between him and the street. ‘Hitler remained standing,’ said Darré, ‘in the corner of
the doorway with his face turned toward the house until Dr Goebbels got back.’2
The Centre party wooed Hitler the most persistently, stating as their only condition
that he must accept a junior role. There were those, Gregor Strasser among
them, who felt strongly that half a loaf was better than no bread. But Goebbels insisted
that they hold out for absolute power. ‘Either—or,’ he wrote: ‘Power, or opposition.’
3
His published diary contains only hints at the part in fact played by Franz von
Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher in bringing about the demise of the System.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 269
Missing from ‘Kaiserhof’ too is the juicy scandal caused when a Munich newspaper
published Röhm’s homosexual love-letters.4 Goebbels was not alone in his perplexity
at Hitler’s indulgence of such perversions; deputy chief of organisation Konstantin
Hierl wrote to Hitler warning that everybody felt that if he clung on to Röhm it
would damage the masses’ belief in the purity of the movement.5
BY 1932 Goebbels’ fame was spreading beyond Germany’s frontiers. Famous American
journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, writing from Berlin for the New York Evening
Post, singled him out as the ‘greatest master of public management’ that Europe had
ever known. To Goebbels, he wrote, went all the credit for Hitler’s election successes.
‘He is the best journalist in the party, and the best orator.’ His election billboards
were masterpieces. ‘In each election,’ wrote Knickerbocker, ‘he discerned
with uncanny accuracy the precise shade of appeal to the greatest mass.’6
Goebbels had lost his appeal against the two month sentence for libelling Dr Weiss.
and a warrant had been issued on February 11; on the twentieth Dr Bernhard Weiss
was informed that the sentence could now be enforced—as soon as Goebbels lost
his immunity.7 Meanwhile, on April 25 supreme court officials from Leipzig served
another forty-page indictment on Goebbels, this time for high treason. This document
too he shrugged off.8
The manœuvering between the Nazis and a camarilla of army officers had begun.
Goebbels’ diaries show that the negotiations were conducted on Hitler’s side by
Röhm, Göring, and Frick, while General von Schleicher operated through his colleague
Werner Count von Alvensleben, whom Goebbels identified only in his unpublished
diary.9 As the regime’s position weakened in May 1932 Hitler and Goebbels
who had been conferring in Munich hurried back to Berlin. A minister resigned and
Hitler, living in the Kaiserhof or with the Goebbels’, again negotiated with Schleicher
and Hindenburg’s emissaries. Power seemed so near to the Nazi leaders, and yet so
unattainable. When the Reichstag belatedly resumed Göring and Strasser spearheaded
the attack on Brüning’s ruinous financial policies. Brüning survived the Nazi motion
of no confidence, this time by 286 votes to 259. The gap was narrowing all the time.
270 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
The next day, May 12, saw scandalous scenes in the Reichstag. After Nazi deputies
roughed up an opponent, Dr Bernhard Weiss and his police officers stormed in and
arrested several of them. Goebbels was thrilled at ‘Isidor’s’ blunder in violating the
sovereignty of their parliament. The entire press echoed him. Groener resigned as
defence minister. The police arrested Strasser that evening on his train heading back
to Munich, and Weiss issued a libel writ against Goebbels for insulting him as a Jew.10
Clinging grimly to the tattered remnants of office, Brüning still refused to resign,
adjourning the Reichstag instead until June. Hitler was determined to force a new
election, so that his party could bring its now massive voting strength to bear.
For all his own public triumphs, Goebbels’ own finances at this time were on a
knife-edge. Angriff was having
to pay off his costs in one libel action by monthly
instalments of twenty marks. His lawyer tried to get the balance of 598 marks annulled.
11 His accountant declared a tax demand of 564 marks for 1931 to be totally
beyond his means, and asked if he could pay one hundred marks a month; Goebbels
indignantly penciled in the margin, ‘Pay—what from?’12 Magda’s lucrative alimony
payments from Quandt had ended of course with her new marriage.
Goebbels evidently refused however to touch the colossal funds that he raised for
the election campaigns. After his private diary recorded on May 22 a visit from some
gentlemen from Mercedes, the gau HQ was suddenly awash with funds. Magda, now
in her fifth month of pregnancy, rented a little summer cottage in the middle of an
orchard at Caputh, near Gatow, on Lake Schwielow. In this idyllic setting they spent
their summer nights while frogs bleeped and swallows flitted through their open
bedroom windows.13
AFTER Dr Brüning resigned on May 30, 1932, the clever, foxy career politician Franz
von Papen was appointed interim chancellor. The election was set down for the last
day of July. Goebbels called his staff out to a council of war. ‘We went over the
individual drafts of the election propaganda,’ wrote Kampmann, his propaganda chief,
‘in a little summer cottage … that he had rented at Caputh for his few remaining
hours of relaxation.’14
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 271
Once again it was Goebbels who masterminded the nationwide campaign, from
Hitler’s fifty-city aerial tour of Germany right down to the tiniest personal details
like obtaining the names of eight Berlin Nazis in prison and in hospital and dividing
between them the latest meagre royalty cheque from his book The Unknown S.A. Man
‘as a small token,’ he wrote them, ‘of recognition.’15
He did not intend to allow ‘Isidor’ to disrupt this campaign and started a determined
campaign to get him and Grzesinski sacked. Papen had appointed a bumbling
weakling, Baron von Gayl, as minister of the interior. Hitler got him to lift the eightweek
old ban on the S.A. and S.S. and Goebbels publicly called on Gayl to ‘get rid of
Messrs. Grzesinski and Weiss.’16 Under Nazi pressure Papen repealed virtually all the
bans. A Nazi was appointed Speaker of the Prussian parliament: under his dictate,
this body set up a formal commission of inquiry into Weiss’ activities. ‘Revenge is a
repast best served up cold,’ wrote Goebbels yet again. Weiss responded by banning
Angriff for five days.17
A month remained before the election day. This time the Nazis enjoyed limited
access to the air waves18. Goebbels scripted a broadcast on ‘National character as a
basis for national culture.’ It was stripped of its venom however by the radio censors
before he could broadcast it.19 The final list of Nazi candidates for Berlin and Potsdam
again poorly justified the claim to be a workers’ party: of the forty-one local names,
six were office workers, five businessmen, two former police officers, and among
the rest a civil servant, teacher, bookseller, pharmacist, tailor, librarian, and bank
clerk; only five were truly working class.20 All of these candidates, including Goebbels
himself, had to sign a five-point declaration for Hitler’s personal files, of which the
first two points read as follows:
1. I swear that I have no links or relations with the Jews;
2. I swear that I hold no directorships in banks or other corporations.21
With the irksome ban on the S.A. lifted by the obliging Franz von Papen, the
Brownshirt armies marched again. For two hours twenty thousand marched past
Goebbels and Strasser in Dessau on July 3. As he arrived in Hagen on the twelfth the
272 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
communists ambushed his car. Clutching a pistol, he signalled his chauffeur to put
his foot down and plough through the mob. After that the left signalled his car’s
number ahead to every town. In Mönchengladbach the communists passed out leaflets
stating that he was not to escape alive; no idle threat, because the tide of violence was
in full flood.22 Only a few days earlier he had buried S.A. Scharführer Helmut Köster
of No.24 Sturm; ten thousand people had packed the graveyard. In Wedding the
communists gunned down S.A. man Hans Steinberg. In the fifty days up to July 20
Prussia saw 461 political clashes, resulting in eighty-two deaths on all sides; in the
last two weeks of the campaign alone, thirty-two Nazis were killed. On July 17
communist gunmen opened fire on a marching S.A. column in Altona, near Hamburg,
leaving nineteen dead and sixty injured.23
SUDDENLY everything tilted in the Nazis’ favour. General von Schleicher agreed to
back a putsch against Prussia. Meeting with Göring, Röhm, and Goebbels in Cottbus
two days after the Altona bloodbath Hitler announced to them that they were going
to appoint a ‘Commissar for the Interior’ in Prussia; Carl Severing, the incumbent
minister of the interior, huffed that he would yield only to force majeure. ‘A touch
on the wrist sufficed,’ mocked Goebbels in ‘Kaiserhof’.24 Severing’s humiliation was
following by President Hindenburg signing a decree appointing Papen himself as
Reich Commissar in Prussia, displacing the leftist prime minister Otto Braun. When
Braun squealed Hindenburg—on Schleicher’s advice—called in the army. At 11:20
A.M. on July 20 General Gerd von Rundstedt, the garrison commander, phoned police
chief Grzesinski with word that he was imposing a state of emergency: his orders
were to replace Grzesinski with the police chief of Essen. Dr Bernhard Weiss was to
be summarily dismissed as well. The army sent in its officers at five-thirty P.M. to
arrest Grzesinski and Weiss.25 As they were driven away from their police HQ at
Alexander Platz in an army Mercedes, Weiss had no time even to gather up his bowler
hat and pince-nez eye-glasses.26
The sheer suddenness of it all took Goebbels’ breath away. It was the end of an era.
The Nazis had Papen eating out of their hand. He appointed ‘reliable’ police chiefs
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 273
and civil governors (Regierungspräsidenten) throughout Prussia. He banned the newspapers
that had been the bane of Goebbels’ life such as the Acht-Uhr Abendblatt.
All the fetters thus came off in the last eleven days of Nazi campaigning. In the
city’s Grunewald stadium Karl Hanke organised the biggest open-air rally yet for
Hitler a week later. It was a boiling hot day until evening when the heavens opened
and the rains drenched the 120,000 people gathered to hear him. But nobody left—
‘A sign,’ in Kampmann’s view, ‘of how the once Red Berlin had come around, thanks
to Dr Goebbels’ propaganda.’ A mighty cheer went up as Goebbels remarked that
even these rains had deterred nobody.27
He was in Munich when the election results were announced. The Nazis had attracted
nearly fourteen million votes, entitled them to 230 seats in the Reichstag.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 44
