he refused. ‘I’m not burning my fingers,’ he noted privately.39
THROUGHOUT this time he had turned a deaf ear on the growing internal unrest generated
by the inequities of the Nazi revolution. The S.A. were once again in revolutionary
ferment, and he broadly sympathised. But Hitler needed the regular armed
forces more than he needed the S.A., the party’s two-million strong Brownshirt
army. Not caring to offend the stormtroopers he was putting out ambiguous signals
which Goebbels was not alone in misinterpreting. Hearing Hitler declare to the assembled
gauleiters in Berlin in February 1934 that there were still ‘fools’ around
who argued that the revolution was not yet complete,40 Goebbels nodded approvingly;
he did not realize that Hitler was talking about the S.A.
To Goebbels, the unseen enemy throughout the first six months of 1934 was the
Reaktion—a nebulous concept, best translated as ‘diehards’, which embraced the
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 329
conservative politicians, journalists, intellectuals, reserve officers, and the catholic
clergy but never the S.A.41 ‘The diehards,’ he told a working class audience in Berlin’s
Lustgarten, ‘are putting on airs right across the country. But if they imagine we
captured these high offices for them, or that we’re just keeping them warm for them,
they’re very much mistaken.’42
The young minister found strong support in the now expanding armed forces.
Impressed by an ideological lecture in the defence ministry at the end of November
1933, the new minister General Werner von Blomberg had persuaded Goebbels to
address officers based at Jüterbog; the official record shows that his remarks were
greeted with ‘storms of applause, ending with a hooray for the minister.’43 He spoke
too to officers at Dresden, Hanover, Kiel, and Wilhelmshaven.44 As tensions grew
between the army and the S.A., particularly in Silesia, Blomberg asked Goebbels to
arrange a second tour; but when he spoke in the Silesian capital Breslau on March 15
he insisted on the presence of the local S.A. and S.S. officers as well.45 His fame
spread among the army officers. In April he spoke in Frankfurt-on-Oder and Stettin.
General Walther von Brauchitsch, the commanding general in Königsberg, persuaded
him to address seven thousand of his officers and men too. To all of these audiences
Goebbels explained the Party’s ideology, the nature of revolutions, the Jewish problem,
and the relationship between the Party, army, and state.46
In all these speeches, slavishly adhering to Hitler’s line, he confirmed that only the
regular soldier had a ‘sovereign right’ to bear arms for Germany.47 But he had nursed
his own relations with the S.A. high command as well—ever since the Stennes ‘putsch’
of 1930. Not for nothing had he appointed an S.A. officer, Schaumburg-Lippe, as his
adjutant. For all his professed loathing of the homosexual cliques, he had learned to
get along with Ernst Röhm and with S.A. Obergruppenführer Edmund Heines, the
police chief in Breslau; indeed, he had testified during the Reichstag Fire trial that he
had spent a recent election evening with Heines roaring with laughter about the lies
about them in the ‘Brown Book’.48 Count Helldorff, now police chief in Potsdam,
was a regular cruising companion aboard his yacht.49 On February 24 a glowing Dr
Goebbels presided over a Sport Palace display by the Berlin S.A. at which the ban-
330 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ners and uniforms of the prohibition era were paraded. ‘Is the world to believe,’ he
intoned in his speech, ‘that we have forgotten all of this? That all this was for nothing?
No! The Führer knows, as do we all, to whom we owe this Third Reich.’50
And why should he not utter sentiments like these? Hitler too was still fraternizing
closely with Röhm. He had appointed him to Cabinet rank in December, written
cordial New Year’s greetings to both Goebbels and Röhm, and shared with both men
his innermost thoughts on foreign policy during a train journey to Munich on January
1, 1934. If anything, he was marginally more critical of Hitler—impatient at his
continued lethargy in foreign affairs and Reich reform. ‘We’re not making any headway
at all,’ he wrote in March. ‘Hitler doesn’t want to hurt anybody. But there’s no
other way.’51 On the eve of Hitler’s birthday in April, however, Goebbels privately
prayed: ‘God save our Führer. He’s everything to us. Happiness, hope, and future.’
‘The people are right behind Hitler,’ he wrote after the Führer’s 1934 birthday. ‘Never
did one man command such confidence in them as he.’52 He could not overlook that
Hitler valued Goebbels’ wife Magda—perhaps his only protection in the shark-infested
waters of the Third Reich. Goebbels used more old-fashioned methods to win
Hitler’s affection too: he donated ‘a wonderful Bechstein’ piano to him for his new
official residence53 and brought him all the latest American movies, particularly those
starring John Barrymore.54 Visiting Dresden for the national theatre week at the end
of May 1934 with his own new female interest, the beautiful dark-blonde Baroness
Sigrid von Laffert, Hitler would invite only the Goebbels couple to share dinner
with them at the Bellevue hotel, and they stayed up until three A.M. talking politics.55
Goebbels had seen nothing wrong in fraternising with Röhm. When a wrangle had
developed that spring between Magda and ex husband Günther Quandt over the
custody of Harald,56 he canvassed Röhm’s backing as well as Hitler’s and Göring’s,
and he noted one evening, ‘Röhm makes a magnificent speech about the S.A.’57 He
had obviously still not singled out any one enemy. Late in April he tilted briefly at the
catholic church, warning its functionaries in a speech to eighty thousand people in
Düsseldorf: ‘You gentlemen should not believe that you can deceive us by wearing
the mask of piety. We’ve seen right through you.’58 Visiting Hitler with Himmler and
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 331
Pfeffer on April 27, Goebbels was interested only in securing decisions in his fight
against ‘sabotage’ by the church; he got Hitler to authorise a fight against the opposition
Emergency League of Clergymen on Friday May 4.59 But Hitler’s heart was not
in it, and when Hindenburg now fell ill he urged Goebbels to go easy on the church,
as it would only cost the Nazis public sympathy.60
On May 5 however he noted for the first time in his unpublished diary that the S.A.
were causing trouble in Berlin and elsewhere. He felt that they lacked a clear objective.
61 Visiting Hitler on May 17 to discuss film business, he found himself taken aside
to listen to Hitler griping about Röhm and his personnel policies. Hitler mentioned
too the homosexual scandals. Puzzled by this shift in emphasis to the S.A., Goebbels
noted afterwards: ‘Disgusting! But why isn’t anything done about it.’ Still floundering,
he went on to warn Hitler about monarchists. A few days later Count Helldorff
brought him more worries about the S.A.: ‘Röhm’s not doing too well,’ wrote
Goebbels. ‘He’s causing too many conflicts. He’s not on such good terms with the
Fü
hrer either.’ Goebbels decided—at least for his diary’s eyes—to stand by Hitler:
‘He is our bulwark. We must not despair.’ On May 21, 1934 he mentioned his worries
to Magda—‘About the situation and public mood. Neither all that rosy. Magda,’
he continued, ‘is very shrewd and loyal to me.’62 Twice in May he had talks with
Gruppenführer Karl Ernst, the doomed S.A. commander in Berlin: after running
into him on the seventh he noted, ‘He acts very nice’—the emphasis being on the
verb;63 on the twenty-sixth, after Ernst came to complain about friction with the
regular armed forces, Goebbels recorded: ‘I don’t trust him any longer. He’s a bit
too friendly.’
In Dresden the S.A. had staged a magnificent march past for Hitler and Goebbels.64
But Hitler had already resolved to purge the S.A. leadership. On June 1 Goebbels
saw Hitler. ‘He no longer really trusts the S.A. leadership,’ he recorded. ‘We must all
be on our guard. Don’t start feeling too secure. Be prepared at all times. Nothing
escapes the Führer’s notice. Even if he doesn’t say anything. Röhm [is] the prisoner of
the men around him.’65
332 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels opted for neither side. His own position was precarious. Unlike Himmler
or Göring, he had no private army; but he also had no friends. While in 1932, at a
typical get-together of battle- and bottle-scarred party veterans in Berlin, Count von
Helldorff’s arrival had been greeted with silence, a ‘storm of applause’ had gone up
before Goebbels could get inside the hall.66 But his popularity now was substantially
lower. The Nazi minister of agriculture wrote scathingly of him in private as did
Alfred Rosenberg, who noticed how the other gauleiters hated the commercial success
of Goebbels’ ‘Kaiserhof’.67 Nobody liked Goebbels’ methods. Rosenberg wrote
to Hess protesting that Goebbels would not allow him to broadcast, and was muscling
into Culture, which had been Rosenberg’s territory for fourteen years.68 On
May 1 Hitler upset them both, by appointing the former gauleiter of Hanover, the
suffocatingly narrow-minded Bernhard Rust, as minister for science, culture, and
public education. Creating such rivalries was precisely the way that Hitler instinctively
worked.
During June the rivals jockeyed for allies. Goebbels made common cause with
Göring. He had noted that on New Year’s Day Hitler had not written to the general at
all (‘out with him!’ he had gloated.)69 He had also heard Hitler crack jokes at Göring’s
expense behind his back.70 But now Hitler advised him to patch up his differences
with Göring; he had read the proofs of ‘Kaiserhof,’ and advised Goebbels to tone
down one or two passages and insert a paragraph praising the general: ‘It will be
worth your while,’ advised Hitler cynically.71 Evidently touched by the (published)
references in ‘Kaiserhof’, Göring now wrote a conciliatory letter to Goebbels, offering
him his friendship again.
A STIFLING grey uniformity had descended by now on the abashed and apprehensive
German press. Acres of space were devoted to the obligatory reporting of Dr
Goebbels’ aimless and opaque speaking campaign during May 1934 against ‘grousers
and fault-finders, rumour-mongers and deadbeats, saboteurs and troublemakers.’72
Typical of these speeches by Goebbels, flailing against ill-defined enemies, was one
at Gleiwitz on June 6, to fifty thousand Silesians, whinging about the ‘cowardly carpers
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 333
at their beer tables,’ and about ‘the heroes who today are too elegant to go marching
with an S.A. Sturm themselves, but stand on the kerbside registering all their petty
misdemeanours and excesses.’73 Among other specific enemies identified by Goebbels
were the Centre politicians and militant churchmen. The people themselves had to
take the law into their own hands, he said: ‘They’re making a big mistake,’ he added,
‘if they believe we’d be cowardly enough to call out the police or army against them.’
Goebbels’ campaign blundered on toward its climax—coincidentally set for June
30. His speeches still ignored the S.A., on the party’s left, and lambasted only the
troublemakers and diehards on the right, the churches, the conservative elite, the
exclusive Herrenklub and its principal member the vice-chancellor Baron Franz von
Papen. ‘The Nazis,’ wrote one shrewd American correspondent, seeking to rationalize
Goebbels’ puzzling campaign, ‘know that they cannot stand still. Their movement
is like a bicycle—if it stands still it falls.’ He deduced that the Goebbels campaign
was a smoke-screen to cover a gradual cutback in the two million S.A. stormtroopers.74
This was close to the mark. By early June Ernst Röhm was fostering talk of a ‘second
revolution.’
Perhaps Goebbels was hedging his bets—half conniving with Röhm, as once he
had with Captain Stennes in Berlin. Hanfstaengel would comment on how Goebbels
had recently declared that the Nazi Revolution was by no means over, and that ‘reactionaries’
would be swept away by the will of the masses; that was before he did his
volte face.75 According to Otto Strasser, never the most reliable of sources, Goebbels
had a private tryst with Röhm in his ‘local’, the Munich Bratwurstglöckl tavern;
Strasser’s only evidence was the liquidation of Karl Zehnter, the bar’s owner, in the
coming purge. Goebbels certainly spoke in Munich’s Künstlerhaus on June 4, but his
diary makes no mention of Röhm or the tavern.76 The ubiquitous Bella Fromm also
claimed that Goebbels met with Röhm that day (‘That little S.A. man Ulicht told me
that,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘the one on the Morgenpost staff.)77 British diplomats
went further: they learned late in June that Goebbels backed Röhm’s attack on the
armed forces clique, hoping that Göring might ‘finally be eliminated.’ Later however
he had withdrawn his backing for Röhm, fearing to jeopardize his relations with
334 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Hitler.78 On June 7 Count Helldorff came to relate to Goebbels how Röhm had once
done him wrong. Goebbels gave it only the briefest mention; he was preoccupied
with his feud with Rosenberg.79
ONE small episode during June 1934 showed that Goebbels was still padding out his
personal reputation. Envious of Göring’s recent visits to Italy and the Balkans,
Goebbels secured an invitation to stage the first visit by a member of Hitler’s cabinet
to Poland although Poland’s great game reserves would have made Göring the more
obvious choice.80 His diary shows that Hitler was seriously alarmed by the prospect
that an ‘intransigent’ France might invade Germany to prevent further violations of
the Versailles treaty; Germany needed to ensure that Poland and Italy stayed out.81
Goebbels flew to Poland for two days on the thirteenth to a chorus of protests
from the country’s socialist and Jewish newspapers (Jews made up one-tenth of Poland’s
and one-third of Warsaw’s population.) Lecturing an invited audience including
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 54
