The first hours of 1933 see him hurrying by sled and car to Munich; as he waits for
the overnight train to Berlin the power of prayer returns to him. ‘I am nothing without
her,’ he writes. The clinic tells him by phone that her fever is worsening. She is at
286 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
death’s door. ‘Is this how 1933 is to begin? Horrifying! Even so, I shall stand and
fight.’ The next morning he arrives to find the crisis over. Magda lies there weeping,
with intravenous tubes still connected to her arm, but the fever has passed on.10
Over the next weeks she makes a slow recovery, and Hitler often comes to see her.
FOR an analysis of the epoch-making events of January 1933 the handwritten diaries
of Dr Goebbels, preserved in Moscow, are an indispensible tool.11 For a biographer
however their content is less revealing than their structure. True, he was preoccupied
with Magda’s illness; her gynæcologist Professor Walter Stoeckel had already
written her off, it turned out.12 As Hitler’s and Göring’s meetings resumed with
Schleicher, Hugenberg, and Papen, Goebbels dutifully recorded them—but only at
second or third hand. On January 4 he launched the Lippe campaign: he now discovered
rural Germany, speaking in tiny farming villages sometimes of only a few houses
and barns surrounded by fields glistening with snow. Meanwhile Hitler and Himmler
secretly met Papen at the Cologne home of a young banker friend of the party.13
Briefing Goebbels on this meeting, Hitler said that the ex-chancellor still claimed
Hindenburg’s ear and was now willing to offer Hitler the chancellorship in return
for the vice-chancellor’s office for himself.14 But much depended on the Nazis winning
a convincing victory at Lippe.
Goebbels shuttled between Berlin and Lippe. Leftists had murdered another young
Nazi, the tailor’s apprentice Walter Wagnitz, on new Year’s Day. Goebbels gave him a
funeral fit for a prince, parading the coffin for three hours in drizzling rain past a
hundred thousand party members and formations of the S.A., S.S., and Hitler Youth.
The figure of Gregor Strasser still haunted the pages of his diary. Unlike Stennes,
the man still enjoyed wide support in the party’s ranks. Even Hitler was not as hostile
to him as Goebbels would have liked. Indeed, Hitler sent the gauleiter of Saxony
to hint to Strasser that he could let bygones be bygones even now.15 At Göring’s
apartment on the tenth, the talk was again only of Strasser. Hindenburg’s office told
the press that he was thinking of appointing ‘a National Socialist’ as vice-chancellor,
and on the twelfth his state-secretary Otto Meissner revealed that Strasser had se-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 287
cretly met the president. The next day Göring told Goebbels that Strasser was about
to do the dirty on them; the press too hinted that Strasser was to become vicechancellor.
16
The voting in Lippe on January 15, 1933 brought the personal triumph that Hitler
therefore badly needed. The party’s vote surged forward by twenty percent. Strasser
was done for. On the sixteenth Hitler addressed the gauleiters assembled at Weimar
for three hours. He said that nobody was going to come between him and the chancellor’s
throne where Bismarck had once sat. ‘Hitler’s victory,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘is
total. We have sweated out the Strasser affair.’17 Speaking four days later to party
officials packed into the Sport Palace, Hitler threatened to break the neck of the
party’s defeatists. But even at this late date Goebbels found that Hitler had not entirely
written Strasser off. There were rumours that Hitler was planning to see him
again in Munich. Goebbels’ paranoia about the man continued until the very last
moment. ‘Strasser,’ he wrote just four days before the final seizure of power, ‘is intriguing
against me. I sense it everywhere.’18
THE REICHSTAG was due to meet again at the end of January 1933, but in effect the
Nazis were alread in control, as Goebbels proved, staging an outrageous provocation
a few days before then: the memorial to Horst Wessel was to be dedicated on the
twenty-second. He arranged for twenty-thousand S.A. men to parade on Bülow
Platz right outside the communist party’s national HQ. Schleicher pleaded with Hitler
not to risk attending. ‘He who dares,’ advised Goebbels, ‘wins!’19 The Berlin police
had to protect the parade with machine-guns, armoured cars, and sharpshooters.
The Nazi pageantry was blemished only by Mrs Wessel; she repaid Hitler’s earlier
indifference to her son’s death by arriving late and making him wait half an hour.
Hindenburg’s slow-witted son Oskar and his secretary Otto Meissner encouraged
Hitler to fight on. All were agreed that Schleicher’s time was up. For two days rumours
flew as Göring and Frick negotiated with the other aspirants to power. On
January the twenty-seventh Schleicher had been reconciled to resigning on Saturday,
but he was still campaigning stubbornly against Hitler’s taking over.20 Hitler bar-
288 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
gained with Hugenburg about a coalition that evening. But the D.N.V.P. stated unacceptable
demands. Schleicher resigned on Saturday the twenty-eighth. The Reichstag
was to resume on the following Tuesday. Goebbels sat at home, nervously playing
with the infant Helga, while Göring carried on the bargaining process. On Sunday
Goebbels drafted a belligerent leading article, then went over for coffee at the
Kaiserhof. As he was nervously chatting with Hitler, Göring burst in and roared: ‘It’s
all fixed.’ Papen had agreed to recommend Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Those
present solemnly rose and shook hands all round. Göring added that Frick was to be
minister of the interior in the Reich, with Göring his counterpart in Prussia.21 Hitler
announced that he would dissolve the Reichstag at once. To establish an absolute
majority he needed to fight one more election campaign— ‘the very last one,’ noted
Goebbels cynically, ‘but we’ll pull it off.’
There was one serious snag for Goebbels. Hitler’s canny opponents had not allowed
his Nazis even now more than three ministerial portfolios. Goebbels had taken
a propaganda ministry for granted. Hitler cleverly weaned him off his disappointment,
arguing that a government minister of propaganda could hardly direct a necessarily
partisan election campaign. He promised Goebbels he would get his ministry
—later; they would appoint a straw man to keep the seat warm meanwhile.
At the eleventh hour, that Sunday January 29, 1933, Alvensleben, Schleicher’s man,
brought rumours of an army putsch being planned by his general with General von
Hammerstein, the army chief of staff. Not for the last time, however, the German
army proved incapable of decisive political action.22
AT eleven A.M.—it was now January 30, 1933—President Hindenburg sent for Hitler
and swore him in as chancellor. Goebbels waited at the Kaiserhof. ‘The Old Man
was quite emotional,’ Hitler told him afterwards. ‘He’s delighted that the nationalist
rightwing has united at last.’ Goebbels phoned Magda with the news.23
‘Herr Doktor,’ Ello Quandt admonished him afterwards,
‘now the going gets
tougher. You’ve got to show what you and your friends can do.’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 289
His joy evaporated. ‘Whatever!’, he snapped. ‘Now we’re in power. And nobody’s
going to cheat us of that. We know all the dodges!’24 He ordered Berlin’s biggest-ever
torchlight parade for that night, changed into uniform, and drove off to the Reich
chancellery for the first time in his life.
1 Lochner to daughter Betty, Dec 11, 1932 (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Lochner
Papers, box 47, copy in FDR Libr., Toland papers).
2 Diary, Dec 11, 1932
3 Haegert and other propaganda ministry personnel are briefly characterized in
CSDIC(UK) Paper 80, ‘Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,’ by Dr
Richard Arnhold, pers. Referent of Prof Bömer (PRO file WO.208/4174 and NA file RG.165,
entry 79, box 766).
4 Adolf Hitler, ‘Memorandum on the internal reasons for the directives on enhancing the
movement’s striking power’ (NA file T120, roll 2621).
5 Angriff, No.267, Dec 21, 1932; Dokumente, 418.
6 Diary, Dec 23, 1932.
7 Revue, No.23, Jun 7, 1952.
8 Diary, Dec 24, 1932.
9 Ibid., Dec 26, 1932; Behrend, No.19, May 10, 1952; JG to Hitler, Jul 18, 1944 (BA file
NL.118/107).
10 Diary, Jan 2, 1933.
11 The microfiches are in Fond 1477.
12 Diary, Jan 13; Kaiserhof, Jan 12, 1933.—See ‘Stationen eines Arztes. Operieren bei
Sauerbruch, Kinderkriegen bei Stoeckel,’ in FAZ Magazin, May 8, 1987, 52ff.
13 Kurt Baron von Schröder, born Nov 24, 1889; later SS Brigadeführer. See his personnel
file in BA, NS.48/73.—Diary, Jan 6–7, 1933.
14 Diary, Jan 10, 1933.
15 Lohse, MS.
16 Diary, Jan 14, 1933: ‘That sounds like a traitor to me. I always saw it coming. Hitler is
very dismayed.’
17 Ibid., Jan 17, 1933; Lohse MS.
18 Diary, Jan 26, 1933.
19 Ibid., Jan 22; Kaiserhof, Jan 22, 1933.
20 Diary, Jan 23–27, 1933.
21 In the diary, Jan 30, 1933 JG writes that Hugenburg was to be economics minister.
Fröhlich has ‘Krisenminister’perhaps a misreading (see Author’s Acknowledgements).
22 Diary, Jan 30, 1933.
23 Ibid., Jan 3-–31; and diary of Count Lutz Schwerin von Crosigk, Jan 30, 1933.
24 Revue, No.16, Apr 19, 1952.
290 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels
20: The Big Lie
FOR Joseph Goebbels the years of poverty and struggle seemed to be over, though
he still had no formal government office.
He was now thirty-five, his life already three-quarters spent. ‘G.’ wrote
one official English visitor at this time, ‘has charm and a captivating smile and manner’
—surprising, he felt, in one described as the cruellest man in the whole movement.
The Englishman detected in Goebbels something of an intensely enthusiastic
undergraduate, but also a dangerous fanatic.1 Franz von Papen was struck by the
wide mouth and intelligent eyes.2 General Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s new defence
minister, felt that Goebbels was convinced of his own superiority.3 Goebbels’
staff would find him a disagreeable employer. He rarely showed gratitude, and preferred
cruel sarcasm to measured criticism. ‘A man with many enemies,’ concluded
Blomberg, ‘Goebbels had no friends at all.’
Wisely, most of his enemies had fled. Albert Grzesinski had escaped to Paris where
he was even now composing memoirs in which Dr Goebbels would not fare well at
all.4 Dr Bernhard Weiss had fled to Czechoslovakia. With their departure, Goebbels
was at a rather loose end. ‘G.,’ Alfred Rosenberg would write, ‘was a discharger of
purulence. Until 1933 he squirted it at Isidor Weiss. With him gone, he began to
discharge it over us instead.’5 The publication in 1934 of his opinionated memoirs
‘Kaiserhof’ would infuriate the other top Nazis. ‘They used to say that the falsification
of history begins after fifty years,’ Ribbentrop would snort to his family. ‘Wrong—it
starts at once!’ (Goebbels had not mentioned him.)6
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 291
Not that the diaries are devoid of inherent usefulness. While the later volumes utilized
repeatedly the same stereotype phrases, this very ossification enables us to deduce
where perhaps other unwritten events need to be suspected between the lines.
They lauded Magda Goebbels so cloyingly that one suspects that Goebbels’ occasional
nocturnal Spazierfahrt (motor outing) through Berlin was designed to grab
more than just the ‘breath of fresh air’ to which he referred. The diaries portray him
at other times as flogging himself to the limits of endurance for the cause. (‘Twelve
hours non-stop sitting at my desk today,’ he writes in July 1933.) But as the years
passed the pages filled with unbecoming references to villas, boats, and motor cars—
the latter evidently donated by the party’s benefactors in the Daimler-Benz company.
‘Kaiserhof’ made him briefly a wealthy man. Tax returns among his papers indicate
that his literary royalties total 34,376 marks in fiscal 1933, 134,423 in 1934 (the
year of ‘Kaiserhof’), 62,190 in 1935, 63,654 in 1936, and 66,905 the year after that.7
He had firmly hitched his star to his Führer (still often referred to as ‘Hitler’ in the
1933 diary). Over the following years Goebbels consolidated their personal relationship,
becoming a regular lunch guest at the Chancellery, where he delighted the
others with his repartee. ‘Magda exaggerates so much,’ he teased her in front of the
others. ‘She won’t admit we live at No.2 Reichskanzler Platz, but No.20!’ Far into
the night he and Hitler yarned about cars and kings and criminals. ‘And how we
laughed,’ he recorded after one session that summer. ‘Until my jawbone ached.’
In September 1933 Hitler turned the first sod to begin work on Germany’s autobahn
network; Goebbels saw the crowds cheering and weeping.8 Often Hitler revealed
to him his secret plans—to unite and expand the Reich under one central
government, but also eventually to create a Senate to provide the checks and balances
that even a dictatorship must need. After President Hindenburg’s demise, they
agreed, Hitler himself should become head of state, with a popular vote to confirm it
when that time came.9
292 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ON that historic day when Adolf Hitler came to power Goebbels stood next to him in
the Chancellery window looking down on his six-hour torchlight parade. One million
Berliners surged past them, holding up their children to their new leader, to the
thump and blare of brass bands. A radio truck arrived and Goebbels spoke a running
commentary; he found that speaking into a radio microphone took some getting
used to. ‘It is a moving,’ he ended, ‘for me to to see how in this city where we began
six years ago with just a handful of people, how in this city the entire public has
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 47
