nationwide, with rather less in Berlin, had endorsed Hitler as head of state.49 The
catholics had let them down; he blamed Rosenberg and his tactless anti-catholic effusions
of late.50 In his imagination Goebbels saw the ‘missing ten percent’ glaring at
him, and for the next three months he dinned into his staff the need to win them over
too—all, that is, except the ‘anti-social dregs and professional bleaters’ who were
incurably hostile to the regime anyway.51 He quoted to them Martin Luther’s advice
on rhetoric: ‘If you want the people’s ears, watch their lips!’ ‘Propaganda,’ he declared,
‘is not a set of hard and fast rules, but the product of a lively and active
imagination.’ If Friedrich Schiller were still alive, he claimed in Weimar, he would
without doubt be one of the great literary champions of the Nazi revolution.52
Broad sections of the S.A. were deeply disaffected by what Hitler had done. S.A.
brigadier Richard Fiedler, Horst Wessel’s old comrade in arms, pleaded that the
party had got the S.A. all wrong.53 Goebbels stabbed them in the back. Twice that
summer, addressing them in Berlin, he justified the ‘radical cure,’54 the ‘purgative’55
which had been necessary among their leaders. ‘Let nobody come to me,’ he shrilled
to twelve thousand Brownshirts drawn up before him in the Lustgarten on August
25, ‘and say: “The S.A. has served its purpose—it’s got nothing left to do.” Close to
ten percent of our poulation still has to be won over.’ Speaking in September to
thirty thousand S.A. men he unfeelingly commended to them this quotation from
Nietzsche: ‘That which does not slay us makes us even stronger!’56 According to
Hanfstaengl, Goebbels was booed several times during Berlin meetings over the next
two years.57
Both Goebbels and Hitler were long racked by remorse after the massacre. Hitler
suffered from insomnia and a ringing in his ears which he attributed to that origin,
and ordered generous pensions for the purged men’s next of kin.58 Goebbels took up
the cause of the S.A. men who had died in earlier years, protesting to Martin Bormann,
who ran the party’s benevolent fund, that some S.A. men’s widows were drawing
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 353
pensions of only seventeen marks (four dollars) per month, while Geyer’s widow
had received nothing at all.59
His own finances were in better shape. At the end of October 1934 he paid cash for
a swanky new five-litre Daimler-Benz tourer.60 His ministry’s budget for fiscal 1934
projected a revenue of 22,341,250 marks from radio licence fees, against outgoings
of 27,545,300 marks. His own pre-tax salary and allowances would total 72,900
marks (around $18,000).61 And why not? he had worked hard that autumn, limping
around the country addressing uniformed farmers (seven hundred thousand of them
arrayed like soldier-ants on the slopes of the Bückeberg for the Nazi annual harvest
festival), uniformed roadbuilders (who serenaded him with their specially composed
Ballad of the Spade), uniformed Hitler Youth, and uniformed Nazi maidens with
blonde pigtails and uniformly glistening eyes.62
In Hitler’s new Reich everything was uniform, especially the press, and Goebbels
knew it. Lecturing journalists in November he mocked at their monotonous output
and lack of courage, as though he himself were in no way to blame.63 Captain Wilhelm
Weiss, deputy editor of the Völkischer Beobachter and head of the press association,
would explain later that it was Goebbels’ own draconic press laws that had reduced
its fifteen thousand journalist members to gibbering servility (which still persists
today).64
The fire had gone out of the media. It needed an identifiable, flesh-and-blood enemy.
With the Jews now fled or fleeing, the protestant church emerged slowly to fill
the role. One village church had disobeyed Goebbels’ order for bells to toll when
Hindenburg died. The pastor had told local party officials, ‘I don’t take orders from
Joseph the catholic.’65 This attitude was symptomatic of the church problem., ‘A
nation of sixty-six millions,’ said Goebbels at Stettin, ‘cannot afford twenty-eight
different churches.’66
Speaking at Trier a few days later he suggested that only National Socialism had a
truly Christian programme, as witness its Winter Relief fund.67 He had launched this
Winterhilfswerk fund in September 1933; after glowering at the sumptuous farewell
repast for guests at Bayreuth that summer he had there and then decided that mil-
354 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
lions of Germans could easily forego one meal each month and donate the proceeds
to a national fund to feed and clothe the poor.68 Only the churlish would deny the
real benefits that this WHW fund brought to the hungry and unemployed. In the
winter of 1933–34 it had raised 358,136,040·71 marks, and helped 16,617,681
needy Germans, almost a quarter of the population.69 His motives were of course
partly political. Emigrés, he warned party officials in Cologne, were banking on the
collapse of the regime during the coming winter.70 He would devote much time to
Winter Relief, tyically visiting a Berlin depot where party volunteers were preparing
bread and potato meals for the capital’s starving thousands.71 In Moabit the S.A.
set up a Christmas table eight hundred yards long for three thousand starving local
Berliners, laden with food and gift packs, each bearing a green label reading, ‘Germany
for You, and You for Germany!’72 Magda invited the next of kin of killed S.A.
men to bring her their Christmas lists; one widow wrote a touching thank-you: ‘The
Führer loves justice,’ she wrote. ‘So he will look after us too.’73
Germany was Hitler, Hess had said at the Nuremberg rally, and Hitler was Germany.
Goebbels had certainly cast his lot permanently with the Führer. Hang together
or be hanged separately: the saying is much the same in German. On December
13 his pathological dependence on Hitler was documented again when Hans
Frank told him that Hitler believed he might be dying, and caused the Cabinet that
same afternoon to pass a law allowing him to name a successor.74 ‘He thus seems to
be assuming the worst,’ recorded Goebbels, shocked. ‘I am very downcast. I go home
full of worry and cares… We’ve got to find a good doctor. The Führer must be
brought back to health. The people around the Führer are too lackadaisical.’ At
Bremerhaven the next evening however he found Hitler looking well. Words failed
him, he was so relieved. ‘Our Führer! Long, long may he live!’75 On the nineteenth
Hitler nominated Göring as his successor, but kept it to himself and a few others—
not including Goebbels. A few weeks later, discussing how to compensate Göring for
taking the Reich reform programme away from him, Hitler told Goebbels he was
‘thinking’ of nominating Göring as his successor. Goebbels could not even bear to
think of that sad eventuality. ‘Hitler’s got to outlive us all,’ he pleaded in his diary. ‘We
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 355
need him like our daily bread.’76 That Christmas Hitler wrote to Goebbels, telling
him how dear he and Magda were to him.
77
WHAT of Goebbels’s private life during that turbulent year, 1934? As minister, he is a
magnet for Berlin’s nouveau chic society; he is a host to dazzling starlets, and less
frequently their male counterparts. His motor yacht cruises the Wannsee with Magda
and a glittering array of twittering females of stage and screen in its well, like Renate
Müller, Lil Dagover, Jenny Jugo, Gretl Slezak, Maria Andergast, and Magda’s sister
in law Ello, who says she’s being dragged through a messy divorce by her husband’s
cunning Jewish lawyer.
Ello is all eyes and ears. Once that September her friend Maria Strehl makes a
bitchy comment in Magda’s hearing about Petra Fiedler, another of the minister’s
friends. ‘Female hysteria,’ he scoffs guiltily in his diary. The ensuing row with Magda
leaves him aggrieved and sleepless for days afterwards.78 For a while Magda shuts her
ears to Ello’s gossip, mindful perhaps of her eccentric pre-nuptial bargain with Joseph.
In his official villa their separate bedrooms are divided by an ante-room and bathroom.
One night that autumn she hears a door banging in the wind: she goes to close
it: she finds the connecting bathroom inexplicably locked. Toward morning she hears
Joseph softly unlocking the door. She makes no scene; she tells Ello, and over breakfast
she icily informs his house guest, a certain countess, ‘My car will be taking you to
the station in half an hour.’79
She punishes him in a subtle but cruel way. To see in the New Year, 1935, she drags
him down to the Black Forest—on a skiing holiday. She goes off skiing all day, leaving
her lame husband with the infants and a nanny at the hotel.
TO keep him company Hitler’s press chief sent down to the Feldberger Hof hotel a
senior journalist, Dr Alfred Detig, with instructions to let him win every hand at
cards. Detig’s newspaper, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, had just carried a critique
by Furtwängler of Goebbels’ recent persecution of the composer Hindemith.80 ‘Do
you know,’ snapped Goebbels arrogantly, ‘why we allow the DAZ to keep publishing?
356 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
It’s because if you’ve got a plague of rats you always leave one or two holes open to
see which rats peep out. That way you can trash them better.’
He was facing, unfortunately, a man with literally a better hand of cards than his.
By lunchtime Detig had taken him to the cleaners. As the gong sounded and Goebbels
made to leave, Detig detained him. ‘Minister,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘gambling
debts are always settled on the nose.’
Goebbels forgave him—temporarily. While Magda went off skiing, he took his
friends down into Freiburg to see his old university. He refreshed nostalgic memories
of Anka and Castle Hill, of Dattler’s, and Berlinger’s coffee house. In one lecture
theatre he pointed out a limerick he had carved into a bench fifteen years before:
‘The maiden and the inkpot /Get their rims wet quite a lot. /What’s the source of
all that damp? /All that dunking—scamp!’
Smirking naughtily he went off to record his New Year’s Eve broadcast. Years later,
Detig would ponder upon the minister’s tortured psyche: for the two hours that
they had trailed this little cripple around with them he had taken such pains to convince
them that while at university here he had been a real ‘Inkpot Hero’ too. How
much was true, and how much propaganda? As for the Furtwängler incident, Goebbels
had Dr Detig arrested by the Gestapo for sedition and he spent several months in
their Munich prison cells.81
1 Thus infantry general Röhricht hypothesized that JG had joined Hitler’s ‘punitive expedition’
to Munich primarily to escape the clutches of Himmler and Göring in Berlin. (Kurt
Dittmar diary, Sep 3, 1945; author’s collection, film DJ–60).
2 Lutze diary.
3 The nature of the FA’s reports can only be conjectured. Ministerialrat Walther Seifert,
former chief of the FA, wrote to Fritz Tobias on Mar 17, 1977 that both Schleicher and
Bredow were wiretapped, though without much success. Milch recalled in a memoir written
at Kaufbeuren on Sep 1, 1945 that Göring told him he had sent Körner by plane to
Hitler with ‘the final bits of evidence against Röhm & Co, probably mostly wiretaps.’ (Author’s
collection). Writing to me on Jun 8, 1989, Klaus von Klitzing of the FA confirmed
that they had exposed Röhm’s plot, as does a BAOR (British Army of the Rhine) report on
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 357
the FA, Jan 2, 1946 (NA file RG.226, XE-4986). The FA’s Dr Gerhard Neuenhoff told me
that their section head Rudolf Popp had himself run the Röhm surveillance.
4 Hitler summarized their purported content to the Cabinet on Jul 3, 1934, 10 A.M. (BA
file R43I/1469); on the specific Forschungsamt intercept(s) concerned, see David Irving,
Das Reich hört mit (Kiel, 1989).
5 Lutze diary.
6 Rosenberg diary, Jul 7, 1934; his observation of JG’s psyche was astute. On Jan 4, 1935
JG would approvingly note (unpubl. diary) a visit to the State Opera: ‘Entire German leadership.
Men only.’
7 He made a virtue of this in his broadcast on Jul 1: ‘Once again the Führer acted on his old
principle of only telling those who needed to know, and only what and when they needed.’
(VB, Jul 1–2, 1934.)
8 Diary, Jun 29, 1934. He repeated the phrase, ‘So, it’s on’ (Also geht es los) in his unpubl.
diary, Jul 1, 1934, recounting Friday’s events. Probably he was quoting Hitler.
9 Unpubl. diary, Jul 1, 1934; this author corresponded with the late André François-Poncet,
who denied any intrigue with Röhm; nor have French archives revealed any such plot.—
Hanfstaengl recalls one outburst by JG in autumn 1934 over dinner with Hitler in the chancellery,
about the monarchists, Potsdam, and the army: ‘These people will never change.
One should get them together one fine day and mow them down. Reihenweise sollte man sie
niederschiessen mit dem Maschinengewehr.’ Report on JG for Pres. Roosevelt, Jul 16, 1943 (FDR
Libr. PSF box 126)
10 Bella Fromm diary, Jul 3, citing a hotel employee (Boston Univ. libr.: Fromm papers,
box 2).— Lutze diary, and JG broadcast Jul 1, 1934.
11 Lutze diary.
12 The final death roll was probably eighty-three: NA film, T81, roll 90 (this source says
that Kausener ‘committed suicide on arrest’); on Strasser’s murder see Frau Strasser to
Frick, Oct 22, 1934 in Lothar Gruchmann’s article in Viertelsjahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ),
1971, 409f.— One [unnamed] source, who had been present at Otto Strasser’s May 6, 1930
meeting with Hitler, found himself in the next cell to Gregor Strasser as the shot was fired,
and personally recognized the murderer: ‘Strasser was taken into temporary protective custody
on Jun 30, 1934 in the house jail of the Berlin Gestapo, Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8, in cell
15. A few hours after his arrival the cell door opened and Gregor was shot down by a personal
friend and emissary of Dr Joseph Goebbels, a man named Weiss… Hitler completely
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