Röhm, a former close friend. Hess argued that there was no justice in sparing Röhm
if others were to be executed. Lutze, asked his view, evaded clear comment.11 Röhm’s
was however the only one not checked on the list of seven names which Hitler handed
at five P.M. to Sepp Dietrich, commander of his S.S. bodyguard. The six others faced
a firing squad at Munich’s Stadelheim prison later that day.
Goebbels’ contribution to these shocking events is not recorded. They had been
mirrored in Berlin. Operating from Göring’s villa, Himmler, Göring, and the army’s
general Walter von Reichenau had settled many old scores while Blomberg and General
Werner von Fritsch looked in from time to time. While Franz von Papen had
been spared—to Goebbels’ annoyance—he learned that afternoon that Papen’s
speechwriter Edgar Jung, and his senior aides Herbert von Bose and Erich Klausener
had been shot in cold blood and that Berlin’s S.A. commander Karl Ernst had been
shot by firing squad. The orgy of murder had embraced even General Kurt von
Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, and Gregor Strasser, once Goebbels’
most powerful rival in Berlin.12 ‘Strafgericht,’ was his only terse comment: judgement
day. At eight P.M. he flew back to Berlin with Hitler. Witnesses said that he looked like
death as their Junkers plane landed at Tempelhof airfield two hours later. Göring met
them and nonchalantly told Hitler he had somewhat expanded on the original hit
list. Hitler was not pleased by this. ‘Göring reports that all went to plan in Berlin,’
recorded Goebbels. ‘Only cock-up: Mrs Schleicher bought it too. Tough, but can’t
be helped.’13
Back at the chancellery, Hitler vanished to take a bath, after which he nonchalantly
told his secretary, ‘Now I feel clean as a new born babe again!’14
THE NEXT day, Sunday July 1, 1934 Goebbels found that Hitler’s reputation had soared.15
Over lunch he found Hitler pale and consumed by bitterness. ‘Göring tenders his
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 347
report. Executions almost over. A few still needed. It’s tough but necessary. Ernst,
Strasser, Senle [Stempfle?], Detten ?. One final sweep and we’re through the worst.
It’s tough but can’t be avoided. For twenty years there must be peace.’ He spent the
whole afternoon with Hitler. ‘I cannot leave him on his own,’ felt Goebbels. ‘He’s
suffering badly, but hanging tough. The death sentences are pronounced with the
utmost gravity. Around sixty all told.’
Relenting to his more bloodthirsty colleagues’ pressure Hitler ordered his friend
Ernst Röhm—still in a Munich prison cell—added to the list. ‘Twice,’ recorded
Goebbels, ‘Röhm is given twenty minutes alone with a pistol. He doesn’t use it and
is then shot. With that, it’s all over.’
That evening Goebbels broadcast his own version worldwide for twenty minutes,
his own version of the purge. In the script he placed himself carefully right at the
Führer’s side throughout—in intimate, unchallengeable proximity. He spared no
nasty detail about Röhm & Co. They had brought discredit to ‘our S.A.’, indeed:
‘They were about to bring the entire party leadership into disrepute by their sordid
and disgusting sexual abnormality.’ Hitler had lanced the abcess, he said; nor did he
not stint his praise for the S.S.16 ‘The Führer was very nice to me and Magda,’ observed
Goebbels. ‘As was Göring, who was around all day. A stream of fresh news.
[Sepp] Dietrich reports on the executions. A bit white about the gills. We’re not cut
out to be executioners.’ On Monday July 2 Hitler told him the final toll of executed
was sixty—‘terrible losses,’ wrote Goebbels without explaining the adjective;
Hindenburg however had sent a ‘fabulous’ telegram, congratulating Hitler on having
saved Germany. ‘For God’s sake,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘let’s have an end to the shooting.
And the S.A. must not be too humiliated, above all not by the police.’17 He
returned to this theme, his concern about the S.A., several times in his diaries.18
Relaxing with Count von Helldorff later that evening at the Goebbels villa, Hitler
sighted Prince Schaumburg-Lippe in his S.A.uniform and asked curiously: ‘—And
where did you spend Saturday?’ Goebbels’ adjutant replied that he had been on duty
at the ministry. ‘You’re lucky,’ remarked Hitler. ‘I doubt I could have spared you
otherwise.’19
348 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
In Cabinet on Tuesday July 3 Hitler explained that firm action had been necessary,
and took full responsibility for ‘forty-three’ executions. General von Blomberg, speaking
for all of them, welcomed his action. Goebbels said nothing.20 Papen arrived half
way through, belatedly released from house arrest— ‘quite broken,’ observed
Goebbels without sympathy, ‘pleads for mercy. We all expect him to resign. His men
have all been shot. Edgar Jung too. He had it coming to him.’ They enacted thirtytwo
laws that day, all garbage in his view, and a mockery under the circumstances.21
He travelled to Kiel and told audiences of gauleiters, naval officers, and sailors
what he knew about the Röhm affair; which was not much. Back in Berlin on the
sixth, Hitler told of his visit to the now dying president. Hindenburg, recorded
Goebbels, had been a real sport. Papen was to stay in office until September 15, and
then be turfed out (abgemeiert)—‘There must be no suggestion he was one of Röhm’s
men.’22 He kept hearing fresh details about the death roll. ‘[Karl] von Wechmar was
shot too,’ he wrote indignantly on July 6, referring to the S.A. Brigadeführer in
Breslau. ‘Terrible! A lot of things happened that did not entirely accord with the
Führer’s will. Fate! Victims of the revolution! You learn to think little of human life,
once it gets lost like that.’ He also noted soberly that the murder of the Catholic
Action leader Klausener was having an anti-Nazi backlash in the catholic Saar region.
Goebbels
23
Hitler flew down to the Obersalzberg. In his absence wild rumours swept Berlin
and the foreign press. According to one Goebbels had ordered five young S.A. men
executed in his ministry garden and directed his staff to watch.24 Less implausible
was the story that Goebbels had Röhm’s villa raided and staged an exhibition of the
spoils in his ministry—delicately holding up silk lingerie and perfume sprays for his
staff’s inspection. One rumour had Goebbels personally ordering Strasser’s murder.
The gullible foreign journalists named thirty-nine other victims who were, as Reinhard
Heydrich indignantly protested later to Goebbels, still very much alive, including
Helldorff, Alvensleben, Manfred von Killinger, Lossow, Seisser, and the widowed
bride of Karl Ernst.25 (Goebbels offered Helldorff command of Berlin’s S.A. but
warned him to stop putting on airs.) As the foreign press hysteria grew louder,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 349
Goebbels noted nervously: ‘High time that the Führer speak and announce that the
lists of those shot and the heaps of documentary evidence are being checked and will
be publicized. Meanwhile: turn a deaf ear, and ke
ep our nerve.’26 Since Hitler delayed
speaking, Goebbels broadcast a diatribe against the British, French, and Russian
newspaper stories—‘the direst kind of revolver-journalism,’ he exploded, drawing
on his characteristically inventive vocabulary.27 Stung by his language, at their
next ministerial tea party the normally hardbitten foreign journalists in Berlin wept
into their teacups with rage and, as Louis Lochner put it, nobody minced their language
to Goebbels. ‘I don’t think he’ll invite us to teas hereafter!’28
GOEBBELS rejoined Magda out at their lakeside cottage at Cladow. She was plagued by
fears of assassination.29 Both needed a vacation. Hitler too came out to Cladow several
times that week. ‘He now sees things quite clearly,’ recorded Goebbels cryptically,
adding: ‘Lutze has become suspicious too.’30 Did this mean that Hitler realized
that he had been manipulated, as he had, by Göring, Himmler, and the armed forces?31
On July 7 Goebbels and Helldorff made a Sunday day trip up to Heiligendamm, a
Baltic seaside resort.32 On the thirteenth Hitler spoke to the Reichstag about the
purge. Goebbels, Göring, Hess, Lutze, and their respective wives gathered round
the exhausted Führer that evening and congratulated him.33 The next day Goebbels
and Hitler drove up to Heiligendamm. ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, who had just returned
from America, found them there. ‘Hitler,’ he wrote years afterwards, ‘had a flushed,
evil look, as though gorged on the blood of his victims.’ It was not a pleasant vacation.
The crowds gawped and cheered them wherever they went, and they had to
break off their stay.34
HITLER had begun to plot against his neighbour, Austria—he mentioned it at lunch on
July 10.35 Although he would protest his innocence in later years, there is no doubt
that he was fully apprised of the coup being prepared by Austrian Nazis under Theo
Habicht. Habicht claimed army backing for a plot to replace the dictatorial chancellor
Dr Engelbert Dollfuss with Dr Anton Rintelen, a prominent right-wing politi-
350 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
cian. Goebbels’ unpublished diary shows that he considered Habicht a hothead whom
Hitler, as was typical of his indecisiveness, was hanging on to far too long. When
Habicht brought the latest news on Austria on April 10, Goebbels again decided:
‘He’s obviously not up to the job.’36 After discussing Austria with Habicht and Haegert
two weeks later Goebbels noted: ‘We’ll be intervening there more strongly now.
Otherwise dilettantism rules.’37 Intervene—but how?
Attending Bayreuth for the annual Wagner festival on Sunday July 22, he found
Hitler conferring secretly with Habicht, Rosenberg, General Walther von Reichenau
and the former S.A. commander Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. They had decided on a
coup. In his diary Goebbels inked the terse comment: ‘Will it come off? I’ve very
sceptical.’38 For three days they went their normal ways: Hitler entertained Goebbels
and the others by reading from his Landsberg prison notes, and talking of the past;
once they all went for a picnic in the forests. Back at the Wagner household, Goebbels
had a little scene with Magda whom he caught ‘snooping’ through his mail.39
The coup was to take place the next day, Wednesday July 25. General Wilhelm
Adam, army commander in Bavaria, was ordered to report at nine A.M. on Wednesday
morning to Bayreuth, where Hitler boasted to him that the Austrian army was
going to overthrow the Dollfuss government that day: Adam was to arm all the Austrian
Nazis who had fled to Germany. The army general was also deeply sceptical.40
Goebbels was with Hitler as the first reports came in from Vienna. Things were
soon going badly wrong just as he had feared: ‘Big rumpus. Colossal tension. Awful
wait. I’m still sceptical. Pfeffer more optimistic. Habicht too. Wait and see!’
The word was that Habicht’s Nazis had seized Dollfuss and his minister of the
interior Emil Fey in a scuffle. Hitler put through endless phone calls to Berlin, because
lines to Vienna were dead. At three P.M. he phoned General Adam: ‘Everything
is going according to plan in Vienna,’ he lied. ‘The government building is in our
hands. Dollfuss has been injured—the rest of the news is confused as yet. I’ll phone
again.’ He never did; he and Goebbels listened to Wagner’s ‘Rhinegold’ that afternoon
with only half an ear. Then came uglier news: Dollfuss had been shot dead, and
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 351
the rebels were pulling out. ‘Habicht was all talk,’ decided an outraged Goebbels. ‘I
just manage to suppress a crazy communiqué by Pfeffer.’
Pfeffer and Habicht were very mute after this. Goebbels switched the propaganda
ministry over to emergency damage control. The foreign ministry blamed the German
ambassador and recalled him. ‘Führer remains quite calm,’ observed Goebbels.
‘Casting new plans. Dollfuss is out: that’s a serious blow to the Austrian regime.’
They tore up their remaining Wagner tickets and returned to Berlin the next day.41
Mussolini—who had secretly approved the idea of ousting Dollfuss—was furious
at the murder, and sent his army to the Austrian frontier. The Italian press waded into
the Nazis. Goebbels ordered his press to hit back. Hitler was angry that Mussolini
had changed his tune. ‘It’s all over with Italy,’ Goebbels decided. ‘The same old disloyalty.
The Führer has washed his hands of them.’42 As a bloodbath began in Austria,
he persuaded Hitler to dismiss the bungling, cynical dilettante Habicht if not actually
shoot him; Papen was sent as special ambassador to Austria. Late on July 27 Hitler
spoke to Goebbels about the future: ‘He has a prophetic vision,’ wrote the minister.
‘Germany as master of the world. Job for a century.’43 The assassins were publicly
hanged in Vienna.
LATE on July 30 word came that President Hindenburg was dying. Hitler and Goebbels
discussed what to do. ‘Immediately he dies,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘R.W. [armed forces]
and cabinet will appoint the Führer as successor. Then Führer will appeal to the
public.’44 The Cabinet agreed this late on August 1; Goebbels co-signed the decree.45
Early that day Hitler had gone to take leave of the aged field marshal and he had
phoned that afternoon as Goebbels was planning the state funeral. He had found
Hindenburg still alive—the president had recognized the chancellor, spoken of his
gratitude and affection, then mistaken him for the Kaiser and addressed him as ‘your
reverent and humble subject’.46 Goebbels broadcast Hindenburg’s death on August
2.47 Listening to the chaplain’s endless eulogy at the funeral ceremony in Tannenberg,
Goebbels decided: ‘No parson will ever speak at my grave.’48
352 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Hitler’s appointment was to be confirmed by a plebiscite on the nineteenth.
Goebbels revelled in controlling the giant new propaganda machine, but found the
results disappointing. Some thirty-eight million Germans, just under ninety percent
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 57
