he blames Ello—but they kiss and make up. A few days later when he takes home the
unquestionably beautiful Baroness Sigrid von Laffert back home to the now refurbished
villa, he finds Magda there—unwilling to stay at the clinic, although her labour
begins the next day.52
On October 2, 1935, she gives birth to a boy. She calls him Hellmut after her
tragic love, Günther Quandt’s firstborn son. ‘A real Goebbels face!’ triumphs Dr
Goebbels; as though there might be some doubt.53 In fact his paternity as the years
pass is undeniable—the flattened temples, the receding forehead, and even the hint
of an overbite. Hellmut Goebbels grows to a solemn, slow-witted mutt of nine, 136
centimetres (four feet six inches) tall, with no greater recorded ambition than to
become a Berlin subway driver, a source of constant worry to his father, who can see
how his sisters—eventually there are five of them—are spoiling him.54
True, Hellmut’s arrival does restore matrimonial peace, but only for three weeks.
After a protracted session with actress Jenny Jugo on October 22, 1935, the diary
records Goebbels as working late; he is accordingly subjected to an ‘endless parlaver’
by Magda, ‘who puts to me,’ he wearily writes, ‘her views on marriage and family.’55
One Tuesday a month later the same diary glimpses Miss Jugo wailing that one of her
lesser films is likely to be canned. On Wednesday he confers with her. ‘Perhaps her
film can still be saved,’ he records afterwards.
His lifestyle is decorated, if not enriched, by this chattering throng of women
passing through his portals, not all of whom are even pretty. ‘A young poetess Käthe
Summer,’ he remarks to his diary after she leaves, adding the scandalous generalization:
‘Why do brainy women all have to be so plain?’56 Of his own good looks he has
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 371
no doubt. He willingly allows photographers, artists, and sculptors to portray, paint,
and cast his own frail, 110 pound, five-foot four frame, immaculately uniformed, for
posterity.57
Image is everything and Goebbels, the only Nazi leader with a family, workes hard
on his. It is his daughter Helga who hands Hitler the posy of flowers on his birthday.
Twice in 1935 she is cover girl on illustrated magazines. A week after Hellmut’s birth
Goebbels speaks at the Harvest thanksgiving festival at Bückeberg in the Harz. Three
hundred thousand farmers’ throats roar their congratulations—or so it seems to his
diary.58 Less cordial receptions are not recorded for posterity. Invited to meet him at
the Friedrichshain halls, scene of many a pitched battle, he finds himself booed and
hissed by Berlin’s discarded S.A. veterans. He begins jovially, ‘I hope I’ve not blundered
into a meeting of emigrés by mistake—’ but the whistling only gets worse and
he orders the radio microphones switched off.59
Shining through his diary’s pages is his affection for his eldest daughter Helga.
December 1935 finds them both rattling Winter Relief collection boxes for the assembled
media outside the Adlon Hotel.60 He dutifully spends Christmas with the
family at the Oberhof ski paradise; he does not omit to send gifts to Anka, but increasingly
he prefers escorting more exotic women like Hela Strehl, Ello Quandt,
and Jenny Jugo to the opera and theatre.61 In January 1936 he makes this note: ‘I
want to find a role for Miss [Ilse] Stobrowa’—an up and coming Berlin actress. These
are trivial and no doubt innocent pursuits, but they bring problems in train which he
talks over exhaustively with Magda.62 There is a clue to what kind of problems when
he complains to Hitler about Himmler’s secret police: ‘This loathsome snooping has
got to stop,’ he writes. ‘Above all into ones most private affairs.’63
Hitler promises to ask the minister of posts whether any Reich ministers are
being wiretapped, against his orders, and to prohibit check-ups on hotel rooms.64
But it will make more than the Gestapo to stay Goebbels’ roving eye. A batch of
new secretaries is introduced to him that March. ‘One of them,’ he adds laconically,
‘is usable.’65
372 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
A LENGTHY midlife crisis was beginning. One day in 1935 death knocked loudly on his
door. At midday on August 20 he heard a rumble from where a subway tunnel was
being excavated just outside his villa in Hermann-Göring Strasse (as the street was
now called.) Before his eyes the crane and several trees on the far side began to sink
out of sight and the excavation caved in amidst blues flashes from short-circuiting
cables. Goebbels phoned Hitler and had the site managers arrested. He spent many
hours watching the rescue operations and brooding about the nineteen missing men,
trapped ‘cold and rigid’ below ground. Several of the bodies were laid out in his
garden—a sight he would not easily forget.66
He asked Göring to look into his own pension rights. Looking at the cracks wrought
by the cave-in in his own walls, he had seen the first fissures in his own immortality.67
He had continued his point-scoring over General Göring throughout 1935. Listening
to his speech on Hitler’s birthday, diplomats had noticed his emphasis on the
Führer’s austere and unostentatious life style and interpreted it as a sly dig at Göring.68
With the opening in November of Goebbels’ rebuilt Opera House in Charlottenburg
the rivalry moved onto a new plane, because as prime minister of Prussia Göring
controlled the no less magnificent Prussian State Theatre, and under Gustav
Gründgens’ inspired direction it became a mecca for all the fine performers seeking
to escape Goebbels’ cultural straitjacket. He directed Hans Hinkel to savage the
State Theatre’s ‘Hamlet’ as a ‘typically Jewish’ production. Göring telephoned
Goebbels in a rage. The minister reminded him of who controlled Germany’s newspapers
now. ‘With Göring,’ he now found, ‘I no longer have any sources of friction.’69
Nevertheless he continued to pick fights with the general. He remarked at Hitler’s
table in January 1936 that fellow lunch-guest Göring’s annual opera ball had just cost
three hundred thousand marks to stage. ‘How can you square that with our National
Socialism?’ he challenged in his diary.70 Minister and general continued to skirt warily
around each other. ‘Göring [was] very nice to me,’ he wrote that autumn. ‘He’d
like a word in my ear soon.’71
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 373
BY no means above reproach himself, he adopted a Puritan stance in his office and at
home.72 He pounced on any corruption in his gau HQ or ministry.
Huge sums of money were at his disposal. The ministry’s revenues were now boosted
by the box office receipts from the Opera House.73 He took a firmer hand in the
struggling film industry and particularly in expanding its domestic market. Film exports
had previously covered forty percent of production costs, but now, with the
increasingly effective worldwide Jewish boycott, barely seven percent.74 He accepted
without rancour that American productions were often superior. The Americans had
Greta Garbo, and his passion for her had not dimmed. But
he now had directors like
Leni Riefenstahl— ‘A woman,’ he gasped, reeling from their latest encounter, ‘who
knows what she wants!’75 Her international award-winning documentary of the chilling,
spectacular, drum-thumping 1934 party rally, ‘Triumph of the Will,’ had been
premiered in Munich in March and would go on to become one of the greatest
propaganda films of all time.76 Goebbels set aside 1·5 million marks to finance a
Riefenstahl epic on the approaching Olympic Games. The 1936 Games, he decided,
should become a show-case for National Socialism.77
His propaganda techniques were subtle and oblique. ‘Operate seemingly without
purpose,’ he directed Hadamowsky, criticising the government radio’s obtrusive
politicking: ‘That’s far more compelling.’78 This being so, his continued indulgence of
Julius Streicher, publisher of the crude tabloid Stürmer, is hard to understand. The
party and Rudolf Hess demanded a ban on the newspaper. But Streicher enjoyed
Hitler’s personal backing, which gave him immunity from the normal press sanctions
—until he published a scurrilous item about Emmy Göring. Then Hitler ordered
Stürmer’s suspension. ‘At last,’ rejoiced Goebbels.79 But after Streicher delivered
a particularly crude speech in the Sport Palace that August he decided that
Streicher was ‘a great guy’ after all. The newspaper was frequently ‘pure porn,’ he
agreed, but Streicher himself, gauleiter of Nuremberg, was ‘a character and man of
principle.’
Stürmer’s favourite ploy was to publish items exposing people who had done little
personal favours for Jews.80 If anything redeemed Streicher in Goebbels’ eyes, it was
374 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
this antisemitic crusade. It made him a useful ally at a time when, as the Nazis felt,
the Jews were beginning to throw their weight around again. In mid-July 1935 reports
reached him at Heiligendamm that Jews had actually staged a demonstration
outside a Berlin cinema showing an antisemitic film. In consequence, Jews had been
manhandled in Kurfürstendamm—the foreign press spoke loosely of a pogrom.81
Hitler had long wanted to replace the capital’s police president, Admiral Magnus von
Levetzow. Goebbels suggested that his friend Count von Helldorff replace him.
It was a further indication of the decline in his moral probity. By this time the
allegations against Helldorff—even within the Nazi party—filled seven pages. His
gambling debts ran into the hundreds of thousands; he was in arrears with his rent;
he had borrowed heavily from Jews; he smoked expensive cigars; he had bought a
heavy Mercedes to swan around the countryside with a Mrs von B.; he had been
turfed out of the feudal Union Club for dishonourable conduct.
The ugliest allegation concerned the death of the famous Jewish clairvoyant Erik
Jan Hanussen (alias Steinschneider): late in 1932 Hanussen, currying favour with the
Nazis, like many Jews, had offered to donate 150 new uniforms, boots, and cash to
the S.A., and he had been seen at Hedemann Strasse early in 1933 handing over
money to Helldorff. In February 1933 a Berlin gossip columnist reported that
Helldorff had attended a Hanussen séance in full uniform along with Marx, Jewish
general manager of the Scala strip-club, and the purported Grand Duchess Anastasia.
Helldorff was alleged to have accepted bribes to grant bookmaking concessions to a
Jewish applicant, Josef Mihlan (he started a libel action, but withdrew). Gottlieb
Rösner, who had founded the Berlin S.A., waged a bitter war against Helldorff without
success. As the count dodged and weaved to evade bankruptcy action, an arrest
warrant was issued. In March 1933 he became police chief of Potsdam. Frantically
covering the tracks of his earlier misdeeds, Helldorff told his twenty-eight year old
chief of staff Karl Ernst to have the Jew Hanussen liquidated.82 The clairvoyant was
arrested late on March 24 and found soon after shot in the back of the head. The
papers relating to his donations vanished. After Ernst in turn was shot during the
Röhm purge a year later police searched his house and found an envelope marked
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 375
‘Count Helldorff’ behind a cupboard, containing receipts for the money paid over
by Hanussen to Helldorff.83
Early in 1935 Berlin’s deputy S.A. commander had discussed the scandal with Dr
Goebbels. Goebbels ignored what he was told and on July 18 persuaded Hitler to
promote Helldorff to be the new police chief of Berlin. The next day S.A. chief Lutze
suspended Helldorff from the S.A. and took away the right to wear its uniform. Both
Goebbels and Hitler continued to protect Helldorff however and a few months later
all legal action against him was halted.84
What Helldorff had going for him was that he was a vicious antisemite. Summoning
him to Heiligendamm, Goebbels swore that between them they would ‘clean up’
the capital. It was time, he announced two weeks later, to tell the Jews ‘thus far and
no further.’ In recent months eighteen thousand more Jews had actually poured into
Berlin. Speaking in Essen on August 4, he announced that the Germans had put up
with provocations from their Jewish ‘guests’ for two years. The emigrés abroad retaliated
with fresh horror stories about persecution. The Manchester Guardian published
a wholly untrue story about East Prussian mills denying flour to Jewish bakers,
and about foodstores and pharmacists refusing to serve Jews. A Warsaw-based
United Jewish Committee against Anti-Jewish Persecution in Germany appealed for
world action.85
Goebbels plotted his revenge. In his calculus, the Jews and bolsheviks went hand in
hand. That August he read fascinated the typescript memoirs written in concentration
camp by Ernst Torgler. It blew the lid right off bolshevism.86 The revelations
came at an opportune time, because Goebbels had persuaded Hitler to give the
upcoming Seventh Nuremberg Party Rally a pronounced anti-communist flavour.
Dr Taubert provided both Hitler and Goebbels with the raw information they needed.
Goebbels’ great Nuremberg speech, later published as ‘Communism with the Mask
Off,’ was a chilling indictment of the Moscow Jews’ methods, which did not stop
short, he alleged, of deliberate starvation and mass murder. The Hungarian communist
exile Béla Kun (whom Goebbels ‘unmasked’ as Aaron Cohn) had alone ordered
sixty thousand men machine-gunned in the Crimea one year in the nineteen-twen-
376 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ties. Among the 1·8 million liquidated by the bolsheviks in the first five years of their
reign had been teachers, doctors, officers, and policemen, and also 815,000 peasants.
(In the House of Lords on July 25, 1934,’ Goebbels declared, ‘the Archbishop of
Canterbury said that the number of victims of starvation in Soviet Russia was nearer
six million than three’—an interesting early example of his later propaganda technique
of citing a fact that he had himself planted overseas.) Who was behind this
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 61
