49 Ibid., Aug 23 (‘Hope Fatso departs soon’) and Sep 2, 1933. JG’s rivaly with Göring
occasioned much scandalized comment among diplomats in Berlin. Cf Basil C Newton to
Orme Sargent (F.O.), Sep 29, and Eric Phipps to Sir John Simon, Oct 25, 1933 (PRO file
FO.371/16728).
50 Borresholm, 92f.
304 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels
21: Bonfire of the Books
IN April 1933 the Reich Cabinet tackled May Day: should this traditional workers’
festival now be proscribed?
‘Leave May Day to me,’ said Goebbels, and declared it a Nazi national
holiday instead—bigger and brasher than anything that had gone before. He rallied a
million and a half Berliners on the Tempelhof fields and basked beside the Führer in
his open limousine as it majestically rolled through the cheering masses.
‘Mein Führer,’ he boasted at the microphone, ‘I stand before you as the spokesman
of the greatest multi-million movement that German soil has ever borne!’1
At the Kaiserhof on May 9 he lectured the assembled theatre actors and managers
on his concept of a militant Nazi culture. ‘I want to protest,’ he said, ‘at the notion
that the artist alone has the privilege of being unpolitical… The artist may not merely
trail behind, he must seize the banner and march at the head.’ Turning to the Jewish
question, he grimly affirmed that there was no need for special legislation to extrude
the Jews from the world of German art. ‘I think the German people will themselves
gradually eliminate them.’
An acrid stench filled the Berlin air as Hitler was dining with Auwi the next evening.
He heard that an enormous bonfire of books was blazing beneath newsreel floodlights
in the Opera square, and made a wry comment about Goebbels’ revolutionary activism.
2
In fact Goebbels was not the instigator.3 The party’s student organisation had first
approached his ministry a month earlier for financial support for this symbolic burning
of decadent and anti-German literature. Although they had listed him as princi-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 305
pal speaker in a draft programme as early as April 10 for several weeks he had kept
his distance: he had after all studied under famous Jewish teachers like Waldberg and
Gundolf. It was not until a week before the event that his adjutant finally conveyed to
the students his agreement to deliver the main speech.4 Between the Opera and the
university they had erected a criss-cross log pyre, some twelve feet square and five
feet high, on a thick bed of sand. Some streets away, five thousand students assembled
in their full regalia and solemnly marched to the square carrying flaming torches,
with an S.A. marching band at their head. Forty thousand Berliners packed the square.
As the students hove into sight, followed by motorized tumbrils charged with the
condemned books and pamphlets, the Berliners’ cheering turned into mass hysteria.
‘I thought they’d all gone stark raving mad,’ wrote Bella Fromm privately, ‘particularly
the womenfolk.’5
The students marched around the bonfire tossing books onto it. Indictments were
read over the loudspeakers. As each hated author was named, the cheers rang louder—
and not just in Berlin: in every German university city the bonfires blazed that night,
on the Königsplatz in Munich, the Römerberg in Frankfurt, and the Castle Square in
Breslau.
At midnight the Little Doctor himself drove up and mounted the swastika-decked
rostrum. Golo Mann, a student witness of the scene, noticed that Goebbels seemed
distinctly ill at ease.6 His brief radio commentary was heard all over Germany. ‘The
Age of Jewish Intellectualism is over,’ he remarked, in a tone that was more reasoned
than inflammatory.7 ‘This symbolic fire is blazing now outside many a German university,
to show the world that here the intellectual basis of the November Republic
is sinking into the ground.’ ‘If the old men cannot understand what is going on,’ he
intoned, ‘then let them grasp that we young men have gone and done it!’
The ugly bonfires seized the world’s headlines. The New York Times devoted a whole
page to the bonfires, and published the Nazis’ list of 160 proscribed authors in full.8
Not all the confiscated books were burned. A paper mill paid one mark (27¢) per
hundred kilos (220 pounds) for the rest. The regurgitated paper reappeared over
ensuing months bearing the stamp of a very different propaganda.
306 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Speaking in the Sport Palace the next day Goebbels warned the Jews against continuing
their international boycott against Germany. ‘We have spared the Jews,’ he
said, ‘but if they think … that they can again stroll down the Kurfürstendamm as if
nothing at all has happened, let them heed my words as a last warning.’ The Jews
were guests in Germany, he said, and must behave accordingly.9
THAT month, May 1933, Goebbels announced extensive overseas trips to explain the
new Germany. He mentioned Danzig, Vienna, Rome and Chicago (he hoped to be
Germany’s delegate to the World’s Fair). Reaction was swift. The Danzig Senate banned
him from speaking, and the Jews orchestrated massive protests in Chicago.10
Italy posed none of these problems. Goebbels went there at the end of May taking
not only the Italian-speaking Magda, as Otto Wagener remarked jealously to Bella
Fromm, but ‘a few of his mistresses who are disguised as his secretaries.’11 The incumbent
ambassador Ulrich von Hassell struck Goebbels as singularly incompetent.12
Officially Goebbels’ purpose was to study the Italian film industry, but he also engaged
in secret talks with the king and Mussolini. He had long admired Mussolini as
an inspiring orator. ‘Mussolini,’ he once observed, ‘does not like to be photographed
smiling. Why should he? To be a statesman takes instinct, circumspection, and a gift
for both organisation and oratory.’13
On parting, Mussolini bade Goebbels assure Hitler that he would go through thick
and thin with him.14
A MEN’s fashion magazine publishes a photograph taken in Rome—of Goebbels in
gala uniform, with the tongue in cheek caption: ‘The Society Dress for Storm Troopers.’
15 Magda has similar public relations problems. Commanded by Ullstein’s now
Nazi-grovelling Berliner Zeitung to include her in a series on prominent society hostesses,
Bella Fromm gags and persuades Bertolt Brecht to write the piece for her.
Magda’s secretary politely returns the draft with the directive that ‘Frau Reichsminister
Goebbels … does not desire the public to be told of her interest in Buddhism.’ A
reference to her playing chess is also to be deleted.16
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 307
With the Frau Reichsminister, as the Goebbels Diary hints that spring, the first
problems are arising. The honeymoon is over, and his lifestyle is to blame. After one
frigid drive to Koblenz, he writes that he has sorted things out with her—‘We were
beginning to fall out… She really is a sweet and lovely woman.’17 While omitting this
private passage from ‘Kaiserhof’, he does leave in their subsequent visit to Freib
urg
with ‘its Castle Hill, and old chestnut trees’—surely a little subtle flagwaving to
Anka, whom he fondly imagines among the book’s millions of readers.
In his view there is no room for women in politics.18 To his irritation however
Magda becomes a patron of the new National Socialist Welfare organisation (N.S.V.),
and a few days later she broadcasts on Mother’s Day.19 Goebbels angrily attends her
inaugural reception for the N.S.V. at the Kaiserhof. His diary takes note only of the
other gorgeous women there.20 When her millionaire ex-husband is arrested for tax
evasion, Goebbels, jealous of their continued clandestine meetings, refuses to intercede;
bail is set at four million marks (a million dollars).21 On May 10 he records
tersely, ‘Row with Magda.’ He has told her while in Italy that they should now add to
their little family, and try this time for something more useful, perhaps, than a girl.22
With the necessary act still unperformed, Magda betakes herself and their infant
Helga to fashionable Heiligendamm for the summer, leaving the little doctor to cool
his heels and ardour in Berlin for a while. When Goebbels briefly joins her he again
brings several females with him: among them, Bella Fromm learns, is the lovely Hela
Strehl, a fashion editor at Scherl Verlag. ‘Relations between Hela and Magda Goebbels,’
records the journalist, ‘are inevitably strained.’23
The Goebbels’ apartment on Reichskanzler Platz is now overcrowded, what with
the chauffeur and burly S.S. bodyguards. At the end of June 1933 Hitler assigns
Hugenberg’s former official residence to them. It is a secluded little villa built in
1835 in an overgrown park and shielded from the street—soon to be renamed
Hermann-Göring Strasse—by centuries old trees. The villa stands next to the American
embassy. Goebbels hands the villa’s keys to Magda on July 1. She swiftly turns it
into a fairy-tale castle, furnishing it with expensive antiques from a store in Nettelbeck
Strasse. Two weeks later they can move in. A week after that Director Jakob Werlin of
308 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Daimler-Benz brings them a new Mercedes motor car.24 What more can the modern
German minister’s heart desire?
HIS propaganda ministry has a lavish budget from the first day. He had boasted that it
was going to cost the taxpayer nothing, and kept his word. It would have an income
in fiscal 1933 of 10,737,500 marks (around $2·7m at that time), largely from radio
licence fees. Its projected expenditure was 13,528,500 marks; the shortfall would
be more than matched by the money, put at 4,247,000 marks, consequently saved by
the ministry of the interior, the Reich Chancellery, and the foreign ministry. For
Goebbels himself the ministry’s budget provided an annual expense allowance of
4,800 marks plus a net ministerial income of 59,500 marks (around fifteen thousand
dollars). The 1933 budget also allowed 25,000 marks for the purchase of two automobiles
for Dr Goebbels and Funk, as well as 190,000 marks for setting up provincial
propaganda agencies, Landespropagandaämter (from 1937, Reich Propaganda Agencies);
of these there would eventually be forty-one. A quarter of a million marks
were set aside for enlarging the ministry building by fifty rooms, and eighty thousand
marks for expanding its telephone network from seventy-four to 150 extensions.25
His own instrument had over fifty pushbuttons coded in a kaleidoscope of colours:
his ministry would eventually sprawl over fifty-four buildings in Berlin alone.
His corruption aside, he was a model minister. By enforcing economies on the
Berlin radio network alone he would save one million marks and use this money for
other cultural activities.26 He regrouped the regional networks under one national
radio authority. In his first months of office he replaced the top echelons in broadcasting
with trusty Nazis with the self-important and humourless Eugen Hadamowsky
as national director.27 Once he had tucked most of the old radio station directors
away in Oranienburg concentration camp, broadcasting in Nazi Germany prospered
as in no other European country at that time. From four million listeners in 1933 the
figure would soar to twenty-nine million in 1934 and ninety-seven million in 1939,
with a corresponding leap in his licence income. He was thrilled by the technological
advances. At the radio exhibition he found himself telephoning with Siam, and
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 309
with the captain of the liner BremenÊ on the high seas. People told him that television
would follow within months.28
A biography is not the place for a full analysis of the ministerial structure which Dr
Goebbels created and ran. He changed its organisational chart frequently—an amorphous
structure of vertical sections (Abteilungen) which split, subdivided, spawned,
and coalesced against over the ministry’s twelve year existence. His office was large
but not lavishly furnished, boasting only a desk, some book cases, and a globe. He
had selected tough young Nazis as his lieutenants and their verve, coupled with the
bureaucratic skills of the civil servants, initially assigned by other ministries ensured
his success. Eighty-two percent of his initial staff came from outside the civil service;
they were Angestellte (salaried staff), not Beamte (civil servants)—an important
distinction.29 Ninety percent were veteran party members. One hundred of his initial
350 staff members had the party’s badge in gold.30 He preferred revolutionary
fervour to bureaucratic ability.31 He promoted on performance, not age or seniority
—Dr Werner Naumann, quickwitted, lean, and ambitious, would become his last
Staatssekretär in 1944 at the age of only thirty-four.
At first there was a shambles as his erstwhile desperadoes and bare-knuckle
streetfighters learned the ropes of government service. But they soon had the ministry
up and running. Most outstanding amongst his minions was Karl Hanke, not yet
thirty: bullet-headed, dour, and handsome, he was put in charge of Goebbels’ private
office (Ministerbüro). Goebbels persuaded the Cabinet to allow Hanke the civil
service rank of Ministerialrat.32 He remained a loyal Nazi, defending his native Silesia
against the Russians until the bitter end, when Hitler would appoint him to succeed
Himmler as Reichsführer of the S.S.
Now Goebbels not only chose the game, he laid down the rules. ‘Why the complaints?’
he boasted to cheering Nazis at the Sport Palace, explaining his new press
laws. ‘The foxes outsmarted the sheep, and it’s only right that the foxes now forbid
the sheep to attack them.’33 That the professions in Germany were regulated was
nothing new: there was already a Literary Academy, of which Heinrich Mann was
chairman. The press association had also existed before Hitler.34 But within six months
310 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels would force everybody working in the field of German cultural endeavour
to toe the party line—from journalism, writing, and publishing right across the spectrum
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 50
