Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 53
nations.2 ‘I am calling over the Rhine,’ he said at Bad Honnef a few days later, gesturing
toward France. ‘We want peace. We are ready to expunge the past.’3 He used
similar language as the guest of the Foreign Press association in Berlin, but joked to
the American Louis Lochner that he was glad there was a foreign press to blame
things on, now that there was no opposition in Germany.4 That October, Hitler took
Germany out of the League of Nations. On November 12 after a typical Goebbels
propaganda drive ninety-three percent of the German electorate voted their approval.
A campaign of anti-Nazi Big Lies began—many of them uncomfortably close to
the truth. In London, the Saturday Review published a forged article, attributed to
Goebbels, demanding the revision of the east German border at Poland’s expense.5
In France, the Petit Parisien reproduced instructions which Goebbels had allegedly
issued to his propaganda offices overseas, backing up these territorial claims; these
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 323
too were a forgery.6 Fighting back, Goebbels took up an idea which the party’s propaganda
office had already mooted as a fund-raising gimmick in 1932, an anti-Comintern,
as the counterpart of the Comintern, the Soviet Union’s international subversion
agency. ‘The Moscow Jews,’ wrote Dr Eberhard Taubert, head of his anti-communist
section, in a later overview explaining Goebbels’ tactics, ‘had to be defeated with
their own weapons.’7 Taubert’s anti-Comintern plugged the seductive line that bolshevism
was a Jewish swindle aiming for world domination, and that Hitler was the
only remaining obstacle. With the trial of the alleged Reichstag arsonists approaching,
Goebbels told Taubert to publish a documentation alleging that the communists
had been plotting a coup d’état; the book, ‘Armed Uprising,’ appeared a week before
the Leipzig trial.
Simultaneously Taubert devised a cunning indirect propaganda assault on the Soviet
Union. Highlighting the Soviet policy of exporting food while millions of Ukrainians
starved, Goebbels set up a charitable welfare organisation as a front named ‘Brothers
in Need’ to collect food for the ‘starving Volga Germans’; thus the propaganda
message (‘starvation in the Ukraine, the world’s granary’) was effectively conveyed
to the German workers. The phoney charity sucked hundreds of gullible clergymen
into becoming what Taubert called ‘the puppets of our propaganda.’ The high point
was when the Archbishop of Canterbury naïvely stated in the House of Lords that
not three but six million Russians had starved to death the year before—a wilful
exaggeration by Goebbels.
The Reichstag Fire trial confronted Goebbels with a difficult conundrum. At the
beginning of September a leftwing propaganda cell in Paris had published a convincing
‘Brown Book of the Hitler Terror’ accusing him and Göring of burning down the
Reichstag, and listing 250 people allegedly murdered by the Nazis since then. One
such alleged victim was Dr Ernst Oberfohren, a D.N.V.P. politician (who had actually
taken his own life in May).8 The book claimed that Goebbels had ordered his
murder to silence him. He set his propaganda the task of establishing that Moscow
lay behind the blaze. On October 10 the court came from Leipzig to Berlin to hear
testimony. Göring testified on November 4, and Dr Goebbels four days later. Magda,
324 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
with eye-shadow discreetly applied to her beautiful eyes and her blonde, Aryan tresses
gathered up beneath a black chapeau, as a court observer wrote in his notes that day,
applauded vigorously as her husband testified: he did so, the same expert observer
noted, in an extraordinarily suggestive manner—thus, when he appended the word
absurd to a train of thought he did so in such a persuasive manner that no other
verdict seemed conceivable.9 ‘As a layman,’ Goebbels stated, ‘I cannot conceive how
just one individual could carry out and execute the preparations for such an arson
attack.’ He reminded the court how often the communists had lied during the years
of struggle—the Pharus rooms battle, the drowning of Hans Kütemeyer, the smearing
of Horst Wessel as a pimp, the Goebbels–Ulbricht debate.
The ultra-civilized word-duel that ensued between Ernst Torgler and Goebbels
showed how similar their intellects were, as they bandied rival quotations about the
nature of revolutions. His clash with Torgler’s fellow-defendant the Bulgarian agitator
Georgii Dimitroff was less urbane. After one stinging rebuff, Goebbels replied
with a quotation from Schopenhauer: ‘Every man deserves to be looked at. But he
does not deserve to be spoken to!’ (The quotation had been recommended to him in
a letter tossed into his open Mercedes by an anonymous well-wisher the day before.)
10
‘I shall expect a loyal hearing from the foreign press,’ Goebbels said, concluding
his personal defence in terms of injured innocence, ‘and I hope they will find space in
their columns for this detailed rebuttal; because it is not right that the government of
a decent, diligent, and honourable people should be discredited before the whole
world like this.’11
WITH the domestic German press he had fewer qualms. His new press law kept the
journalists tightly muzzled, although it was not without its positive elements as well.
It imposed on journalists a duty to report truthfully and to refrain from writing
anything that might ‘injure illegally anybody’s honour or well-being, or damage his
reputation or hold him up to ridicule or contempt.’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 325
Like all such attempts to regiment the liberal professions, ludicrous situations developed.
The chamber of literature addressed warning letters to the Brothers Grimm
for not having filled in membership forms (they had been dead for eighty years).12
One Nazi censor banned an advertisement because it showed a girl clutching a bar of
soap to a part of her anatomy ‘which could not be identified for reasons of decency.’13
Operating through Max Winkler, who had a shrewd business brain, Goebbels began
to buy up or close down printing and newspaper concerns, beginning with
Hugenberg’s Verlagsanstalt (‘Vera’) and Ullstein, the big Jewish-controlled newspaper
publisher in Berlin.14 The Reich paid 8·5 million marks for Ullstein’s stock, including
two millions to liquidate Ullstein’s debts. Goebbels renamed it Deutscher
Verlag, and proceeded ruthlessly against its recalcitrant editors.15 When Ehm Welk,
editor of the Ullstein magazine Grüne Post, took too literally Goebbels’ invitation to
criticize, the minister shut the publication down for three months and removed Welk
to one of Göring’s new concentration camps.16 Through Winkler, Goebbels also
squared accounts with the Jewish Mosse publishing empire, whose Berliner Tageblatt
had been one of his most dedicated enemies. Real-estate speculation had landed the
owner Lachmann Mosse in financial difficulties and he had already fled to Paris before
Hitler seized power; the sequestrators were more than pleased to sell off the
Tageblatt to Goebbels after they found that Mosse had plundered his employee
s’ pension
funds. Winkler also acquired for him by more or less forceful methods the share
capital of the non-Jewish Börsenzeitung, the Frankfurt Generalanzeiger, and Hugo Stinnes’
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.17
GOEBBELS’ marriage is still faltering. On New Year’s Day 1934 he decides that it’s all
over between them; but he relents because she is pregnant again.18
He has all but forgotten Anka Stalherm. At the 1933 Nuremberg rally he spotted
her insufferable husband Mumme, now a middle-rank party dignitary.19 But now
they are divorced and Goebbels hears she is going to the dogs—‘Lost!’ he records,
‘What a comedown!’ On his birthday, greetings come from her; in a typed reply, he
mechanically suggests she drop in some time.20 The magic has gone. Besides, as over-
326 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
lord of Germany’s burgeoning film industry he has legions of willing, supple starlets
like Marianne Hoppe21 and Käthe Dorsch22 at his beck and call. He will follow the
rest of Anka’s story with only half an eye. ‘Frau Mumme tells me her woes,’ he writes
years later. ‘She is to be pitied. But what can one do?’23 She remarries; her husband
dies in action. Taking pity on her Goebbels has her appointed editor of the fashion
magazine Dame. In an editorial she will fondly mention the book of ballads that the
minister lovingly inscribed for her as a fellow-student at Heidelberg, by Heinrich
Heine, the Jew. Goebbels has her reduced to the ranks as a mere staff writer.24
During 1933 he has earned 4,317 marks (about a thousand dollars) from his seven
books in print.25 Unlike modern German government officials he is almost pathologically
proper in personal money matters. He draws his salaries as minister and
gauleiter but claims only his proper expense entitlements, not charging Magda’s car
or their household overheads against the ministry. His tailoring is equally punctilious.
Gone is his clothes’ slept-in look. He polishes his shoes himself. He takes delivery
of a motor yacht, and belatedly learns how to drive a car as well.26 ‘I’ll get the
hang of it soon,’ he writes confidently in his unpublished diary on April 6. ‘It’s just
the details that still elude me.’ At Easter 1934, as the time for Magda’s confinement
approaches, he rents a secluded, idyllic little property at Cladow on the Wannsee
lakeshore.27 She often accompanies him to lunch with Hitler now, and he is a surprisingly
frequent visitor to her in the clinic. Goebbels meanwhile pursues his old ways,
inviting Hela Strehl and Petra Fiedler on boating jaunts on the city’s lakes and waterways,
and taking them back to the cottage for late-night private film showings.28 On
April 12 after a farewell meal with him Magda is taken off to the clinic for the birth
of their second child. ‘Hope it’s a boy,’ prays Dr Goebbels, only to open the next
day’s entry with a surly outburst: ‘It’s a girl and her name’s Hilde. At first it brought
disappointment, but then joy and happiness… Once more the Führer has proven
right. It’s a little girl.’29 The unhappy task of breaking the news to Goebbels has fallen
to his adjutant, Prince Schaumburg-Lippe. ‘If fate thinks it can play silly pranks on
me,’ snaps the minister, stalking up and down in irritation, ‘it’s got another think
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 327
coming!’ He hurries over to the clinic and finds Magda lying flushed but happy surrounded
by pillows and flowers.
The rows resume. ‘Armed truce with Magda,’ Goebbels laconically notes in his
diary after one two-day tiff which ends with him going for a little drive-around.30
Documenting her irritation with him, Magda stays on with Ello at Dresden after he
leaves. Out at Cladow on June 2 he plays with Helga, his favourite daughter, but his
pleasure is alloyed by the presence of Magda’s very plebæian mother. ‘I’m cheesed
off by all this,’ he notes in his diary. ‘I’m often very depressed. I’ve got to work
harder.’31 He falls seriously ill with worry, and there are more almost suffocating
rows with Magda—a certain countess is the cause of some of them.32 On Wednesday
June 20 the entire Reich government has been summoned out to Göring’s new estate
on the Schorf Heath, Carinhall, to witness the solemn reburial—‘with Twilight
of the Gods and Tally-Ho,’ as Goebbels sardonically puts it—of Carin Göring’s remains
which have been violated in Sweden.33 Late that evening he is confronted by
Magda with an ugly scene—perhaps about the countess. He puts a spin on it in his
diary: ‘In the evening I learn something awful from Magda. It’s midnight, but I drive
out to Cladow. Frightful scene. I am quite shattered.’ The next day he keeps thinking
of Magda: ‘I’m fit to burst. Awful mental agonies.’ Magda joins him later and dissolves
into tears and hysterics. ‘Au fond,’ he writes, setting the scene for future readers,
‘she is good. I bear much of the blame too. A bitter pill to bite. A grey, rainy day
today. Deep down, we have separated.’ On Friday the twenty-third, a nervous wreck,
he has a long, late discussion with the lovely Hela Strehl, then settles his differences
with Magda. ‘She finds her way back to me. But I am more than a little to blame
myself.’ History would of course like to know more about these differences: his
infidelities? hers? We do not know and cannot speculate: but one lesson is that the
Goebbels Diary is becoming more tricky as a source with each year that passes.
POLITICALLY too his quagmire deepened. Those who offended the minister joined Ehm
Welk in concentration camp: there was Dr Jacob Wassermann, the Jewish nephew of
the onetime director of the Deutsche Bank, sent to Oranienburg camp for slander-
328 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ing Goebbels and Magda; there was an engineer who remarked casually that Goebbels
was ‘Germany’s hoodoo’; there was a former Stahlhelm official, convicted for insulting
Goebbels.34 ‘Anybody may grumble,’ mocked Angriff on May 18, ‘if he’s not afraid
of the concentration camp.’ Operating primarily from the safety of Prague, the emigrés
around Bernhard (‘Isidor’) Weiss orchestrated a raucous outcry about alleged Nazi
atrocities: they claimed that two Jews had died in a pogrom at Gunzenhausen, and
that the former social democrat deputy Heilmann was being maltreated in concentration
camp. The stories were fictional, but fact would inevitably follow fiction.35
Ingeniously, the emigrés paraded a live Nazi ‘victim’ in Prague for pathologists to see
his ‘strangulation’ marks. The Czech newspapers headlined this gruesome stunt ENTER
A HANGED MAN. (The Gestapo finally identified the alleged victim as a notorious
communist confidence trickster.36) He reprimanded the Czech envoy, and Prague
promised to silence the emigrés.37
Goebbels bided his time. Addressing foreign newspapermen at the end of February
1934 he took a robust line. ‘If anybody gives greater credence to marxist emigrés
than to us,’ he said, ‘then we can’t help them.’38 But he was aware that even his
powers were limited. When a Mrs Ebeling asked him to get somebody out of prison,