to the opera, theatre, and film.
On August 14 his diary first mentioned a Chamber of Culture.35 Concerned by
Robert Ley’s attempts to force all cultural workers into his monolithic Labour Front,
a month earlier Goebbels had written hastily to the Reich chancellery stating that he
intended to set up such a chamber himself.36 He had set out his ideas to harness
Germany’s creative artistes to the new National Socialist state in a memorandum to
Hitler three days later.37 Hitler gave him the go-ahead on the Obersalzberg on August
24.38 This awesome governing body would become the umbrella authority for
seven sub-chambers, controlling the press (presided over by Nazi press baron Max
Amann),39 literature (Hans Friedrich Blunck), theatre (Otto Laubinger), music (Richard
Strauss),40 the graphic arts (Professor Eugen Hönig),41 film, and radio
(Hadamowsky).42 The Chamber of Culture dispensed considerable funds and subsidies,
setting up specialist schools, meeting welfare needs, providing legal aid, and
conducting professional examinations. Goebbels was its president and Funk vicepresident;
but the chamber’s day to day management was in the hands of the ruthless,
ambitious and antisemitic Nazi Hans Hinkel, with the equally rabid Nazi lawyer
Hans Ernst Schmidt-Leonhardt as his legal adviser. Full Jews could not belong; nor
could anybody stripped of German citizenship.43 Among the chamber’s records was
later found a blacklist enumerating all those anti-Nazi writers and emigres whose
membership was banned, including Dr Bernhard Weiss, Albert Grzesinski, and ‘Nahum
Goldmann, eastern Jew, businessman and agitator.’44
The Chamber of Culture began operations on September 22. Each of its sub-chambers
was further divided into Fachschaften and Fachgruppen—specialist chapels: the
Stage had forty thousand members, Dance six thousand, and Light Entertainment
thirteen thousand. Each sub-chamber was empowered to impose fines of up to one
hundred thousand marks. Each such penalty was reviewed by its corresponding ministerial
section and by Dr Goebbels himself.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 311
Henceforth, German art was to be pure. The chamber of music prohibited the
playing of atonal, ‘Jewish,’ and Negro music; surrealist art, cubism, and dadaism
were among the prohibited genres. At the formal dedication of the Chamber of Culture
in mid November in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall Goebbels declared the old
decadent, worm-eaten liberalism finished.45 In an analysis of the ‘ruling trio’ in Nazi
Germany, American ambassador William E. Dodd had no hesitation in nominating
Goebbels as Hitler’s ‘first lieutenant’ ranking even above Göring. ‘While Hitler is a
fair orator as German oratory goes,’ stated Dodd, ‘Goebbels is a past master. He …
has combined all the newspaper, radio, publications, and art activities of Germany
into one vast propaganda machine.’46
The Press Law (Schriftleitergesetz) enacted on October 4, 1933 abolished the principle
of anonymous journalism.47 It made journalists and their editors personally
responsible for their writings. Henceforth the proper qualifications had to be earned
either on the shop floor, starting literally as a compositor’s apprentice, or in an approved
university course in journalism.48 The editor became a Schriftleiter, a true
German word replacing Redakteur which to Goebbels’ ears had a Jewish ring. Jews
were excluded here too. ‘My dear “Poulette”,’ wrote Bella Fromm in her diary, referring
to journalist Vera von Huhn, ‘has been so upset, as she’s not wholly Aryan, that
she has O.D.’d on Veronal. I am at my wit’s end.’49
GOEBBELS had always taken a special interest in the film industry, that hotbed of reallife
passions and jealousies. He moved swiftly both to expand it and impose Nazi
constraints on its members. In May 1933 he reached agreement with Dr Ludwig
Klitzsch, general manager of the larger studio, Ufa, about setting up a film credit
bank initially financed by the ministry.50 He established a Nazi film chamber in July.
Once again no Jews were allowed, and on October 19 the chamber announced that
it would not pass any films on which non-members had worked.51
Under his patronage the German film industry bloomed. Forgetting, or perhaps
because of, the treasures that he and his ministry had lavished on them—the inflated
salaries, the pensions, and the handouts when they fell on hard times—its members
312 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
almost unanimously heaped calumnies on Goebbels after 1945. Secure in the knowledge
that he was dead, they related bawdy tales of blackmail and rape in the hope of
being regarded as the victims, and not the beneficiaries, of the Nazi reign. Cant and
cattiness would distort the image of a man who was, admittedly, no saint. Only one
actress, the stunningly beautiful Lida Baarova, would speak well of him (and still
does);52 others would spread malicious gossip, charging for example that actress and
director Leni Riefenstahl ‘only made the grade by going to bed with Goebbels.’ In
self defence Riefenstahl too talked unfavourably about the minister. ‘I always was in
bad standing with him,’ she would confide to her captors. ‘He was cold and forbidding
toward me. I almost hated him.’53
Five years younger that Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl was at this time a woman of
thirty. She specialised in snow-capped mountain dramas. By her account Goebbels,
freshly arrived as gauleiter in Berlin, had hung around the 1926 premiere of her film
‘The Sacred Mountain’ hoping for a glimpse of her; by his own diary’s testimony, he
saw her in 1929 starring in the mountaineering film ‘Piz Palü’, and found her a
‘delightful child’.54 He probably met her at Magda’s society gatherings at Reichskanzler
Platz in the autumn of 1932. In her memoirs she relates sharing a train journey to
Munich with him in November 1932; he talked for hours of power struggles and
homosexuality, before taking her along to see Hitler speak the next day. In his diary,
Goebbels wrote of this train journey: ‘Long talk with Mr Schnee … He travelled to
Munich with me and wants to speak with Hitler here. Arrived dead tired.’ It is probably
not too fanciful to suspect that his ‘Mr Snow’ was none other than Leni
Riefenstahl.55
Whatever ardour may have existed then faded rapidly. In her 1987 memoirs she
provided a lurid description of Dr Goebbels visiting her late in 1932 and forcing his
attentions on her—of him kneeling before her weeping, of her crying out, ‘Go, Herr
Doktor, go!’56 On Christmas Eve, so her narrative continues, Goebbels arrived unannounced
with two gifts for her—a red leatherbound first edition of ‘Mein Kampf’
and a bronze Goebbels medallion. ‘I am so lonely,’ he moans, explaining that Magda
had just been rushed to the clinic: ‘I fear for her life.’57
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 313
Human memory of course plays harmless tricks. It suppresses, elides, compresses
and inflates. But there was more. In May 1933, her memoirs relate, Goebbels persuaded
her to drive him deep into the Grunewald woods, where he showed her his
pistol (‘I don’t leave home wit
hout it’) and then made a pass at her as she drove her
car in a slippery slalom around the rain-lashed trees; as he put his arm around her
waist, the car hit a hummock and slithered to a halt, its wheels spinning. What had he
intended? What indeed had she? The vehicle now immobilized, he limped off distraught
in one direction, suggesting she head in the other.58
The Goebbels Diaries, not always a monument to truthfulness, made no reference
to any such undignified episodes. They did however report continued interviews and
discussions with ‘L. Riefenstahl’ of a frequency now difficult to reconcile with the
bodice-ripping tenor of her memoirs. She told him on May 16 of her production
plans; he suggested a film on Hitler himself; Leni, ‘inspired,’ accompanied the
Goebbels’ to Madame Butterfly that evening. A few days later she picnicked with him
and Hitler at Heiligendamm.59 Magda told her privately that she had only married
Dr Goebbels so as to be near to Hitler.60 What of Leni’s politics? ‘She is the only one
of all the stars,’ wrote Goebbels that summer, ‘who understands us.’61 Her name
often cropped up in the diary, and in mid August she spent the night at Heiligendamm
with the Goebbels’ again.62 Given all of this it is hard to visualize the further scene
which her memoirs now describe—Goebbels invited her over that summer, suggested
a film on the power of the press: he lunged at her breast she dragged herself
free, ran to the door, found a bell: by which she was saved.63 That September she
made her first great film of the Nuremberg rally, a masterpiece which would be
surpassed only by her second, ‘Triumph of the Will.’
ALL of this is not to say that Dr Goebbels does not stray from the path of marital
fidelity at all. He certainly dallied with Ello Quandt, Magda’s uhappily married sister
in law.64 Signing autographs at the Berlin S.A.’s sports festival that summer, Goebbels
points his pencil at a particular blonde. ‘Find out her name,’ he whispers to his adjutant.
Police HQ provide the data he needs, and a few days later she is glimpsed
314 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
traipsing down the red-carpeted marble staircase from the minister’s private quarters.
65
Relations with Magda are strained. She has accepted the post of honorary patron to
the Reich Fashion Bureau. It brings her into contact with the Jews of Germany’s rag
trade. When he orders Magda to resign, she sulks, and refuses to go down to the
annual Bayreuth festival with him. ‘If Magda doesn’t mend her ways,’ he grimly
records, ‘I’ll have to draw some consequences.’ Hitler sends his private plane to fetch
her. She makes her grand appearance after Act One, and the Führer negotiates a
truce between them. A true pal, reflects Goebbels: ‘He agrees with me,’ he adds,
‘women have no place in public life.’ But then the whole row flares up again, and
there is another scene in their hotel. Things hang on a silken thread—‘Then reconciliation.
Magda is sweet and good. She can be so nice. But in matters of principle I
am unrelenting.’66 Elegant World, the rag trade’s magazine, hits back: on its next front
cover it features a Storm Trooper next to a lady of fashion clad in the latest autumn
styles.67
At Bayreuth Goebbels whiles away many hours with Hitler. After Wagner’s ‘Valkyries’
on July 25 the minister is summoned by phone to visit a Baltic baroness waiting at
the festival restaurant. ‘A fabulous woman,’ sighs Hitler, and explains: ‘The bolsheviks
nailed her husband to the door of his house.’ She has donated her fortune to the
party. Now she wants to introduce Dr Goebbels to a friendly princess, alas a corpulent
and elderly dowager. Since he makes no secret of his lack of interest, the princess
declaims to Hitler loud enough for all the room to hear, ‘Excuse me, mein
Führer, but tell me: What do you think about adultery?’
Cringing, Goebbels comments in his diary on how unpleasant Bayreuth has become.
68 ‘An evening with princely personages. In a word, a gang of scoundrels.’ ‘The
likes of these,’ he writes a few days later after meeting another prince, ‘once ruled
Europe. The whole bunch ain’t worth tuppence.’69
On August 1 he exchanges his well-tailored party uniform for a white summer suit
and they begin a seaside vacation at Heiligendamm. He likes to nurse his Latin tan—
even in winter he uses a sun lamp—but frowns on women who use such artificial
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 315
aids. Once, sitting in his beach basket, he lectures the scantily clad beauties who
swarm around him: ‘The German woman does not bleach her hair.’ The girls suppress
astonished chuckles. He has not detected that his own wife is not a natural
blonde. ‘Since when have you worn lipstick, my sweetest,’ he once asks her. ‘Always,’
she replies. (He does not believe her.)70
So it goes on. On August 18 he opens the radio exhibition. A stately blonde penetrates
the S.A. cordon. Nervous, Goebbels signals to his adjutant. He learns her
name—she is a broadcasting employee. A few days later the aide sees his minister
receive her in his study. She may of course just have been interested in a position.71
Leni Riefenstahl describes one scene which rings very true. At the Chancellery
one day Hitler commands her to report on progress with her 1933 rally film. Strapped
for cash, she has filmed a few thousand metres of wooden, unconvincing footage of
the event, but protests to Hitler that Goebbels and the party have placed every obstacle
in her way. Humiliated, Goebbels bawls: ‘If you were a man, I would throw
you down the stairs.’72 Working now at the party’s command she completes the editing
of this film, ‘Victory of Faith,’ and is paid a director’s fee of twenty thousand
marks from ministry funds. The hour long movie has its premiere at the Ufa Palace
on the first day of December 1933, then vanishes for the next sixty years.
THAT summer Dr Goebbels organised an outing of thousands of automobiles along
the land corridor through Poland to East Prussia. It was a clever propaganda exercise;
the summer drive through Poland to this amputated German province with its
rolling farmland where the famous Trakehnen thoroughbred horses were raised and
its gaily decorated German towns like Rastenburg and Gumbinnen—names that still
had to find their shivering niche in history—was not without effect on the foreign
journalists.73
Tightening his grip on the press that September he brought all advertising under
the control of one advertising council, the Werberat. ‘All advertising must be true,’ his
guidelines laid down. More importantly in a country swamped with six thousand
different newspaper titles, he enforced the first elements of standardisation to en-
316 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
able even the smallest businesses to profit from advertising, using standard-size matrices.
74 Newspapers were also ordered to publish honest circulation figures. These
and other commonsense regulations would long outlive him in modern Germany.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 51
