was corny, but ‘the Baarova woman’ acted well.
48 Lochner to children, Aug 1936 (FDR Libr., Toland papers, box 52); cf William E
Dodd, Ambassador Dodd’s Diary (London, 1941), 349f.—On JG’s two Peacock Island parties
see BA file R.55/511, and Gutterer MS (Lower Saxony provincial archives, Wolfenbüttel).
49 Diary, Jun 27, 1936.
50 Ibid., Jul 30; first outing in it, Sep 30, 1936.
51 Ibid., Aug 28, 1936.
52 Ibid., Aug 11, 1936.
394 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels
26: Femme Fatale
LIVE wild, live fine!’ writes Goebbels in September 1936, opening a new diary.1
He has just embarked upon the most destructive emotional entanglement of
his life. Having seen Lida Baarova in her new film in June, and at the Peacock Island
fête in August, it may be no coincidence that Goebbels’ new villa on Schwanenwerder
is only a stone’s throw from Gustav Fröhlich’s twelve-roomed mansion, set amidst
tennis courts and boathouses by the lake. With Magda a fugitive from marriage in her
Dresden sanitarium and again broodily pregnant—is Lüdecke perhaps the father?2—
the young minister soon tires of his latest private secretary Lucie Kammer. He often
glances at his neighbours. When Lida returns one afternoon from the August Olympiad
she finds him casually strolling down Insel Strasse with Helga and Hilde. He asks
if he may have a look over the Fröhlich mansion. Her lover Gustl innocently obliges,
while the little girls and Lida play with Fröhlich’s lavish train set.3
On August 18, three days after Peacock Island, he invites the young couple out in
his launch.4 Years later she will give her own shy account of this picnic cruise. The
pretty actress sisters Höpfner, whom Goebbels is also cultivating, have joined them.
It is a broiling hot day, they swim, cruise, and sip tea until her Gustl apologizes that
he has an all-night shoot at the studios and can one of the police escort-launches take
them ashore?
‘I always go everywhere with him,’ explains Lida. The words strike a chord in
Goebbels—Magda shares none of his interests. He insists jovially that Lida stay. Gustl,
visibly annoyed, leaves without her. As the full moon rises, reflected in the still wa-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 395
ters of the Wannsee, Goebbels limps over and stands behind Lida at the railing. ‘How
do you like it here in Germany?’ he asks. His melodious, rich voice seems to caress
her, she will later say. The bond is forged at this moment.
His rival, Gustav Fröhlich, meanwhile makes a classic mistake: after visiting his
estranged spouse, a Jewess who has emigrated to London, he accidentally calls Lida
by the wife’s name at a tender moment. She flounces back to her own humble lodgings
off Kurfürstendamm.
For a while that August Goebbels lets things drift. He takes Magda to Venice. But it
is the actress Lilian Harvey with whom he punts along the canals while pregnant
Magda stays in the hotel.5 The hunt is on—he cannot get Lida out of his mind. She is
a head and shoulders taller than he is, but she has an arresting Slavonic beauty. Her
fresh young face has both childish innocence and womanly guile. Early in September
he ascertains that she is resting with her mother at Franzensbad, a spa near Nuremberg.
Suddenly he is looking forward to this year’s Nuremberg rally after all. His
diary records ‘diverse phone calls’ on the fifth about the premiere of ‘Traitors’, her
latest film with Fröhlich—he is arranging to switch it to Nuremberg; phoning Magda
from Nuremberg he pleads with her to stay away at Dresden or Schwanenwerder.
Then phoning Lida he invites her over to Nuremberg, reassuring her that fellowactors
Irene von Meyendorff and Willy Birgel will be coming too—‘You can’t miss
out on this!’ he says.
His rally speech on September 8 is one of his finest. Towering above the thousands
on a lofty pulpit, he forcefully describes the murderous rampage of the bolsheviks in
Spain, and the ‘pathological and criminal madness’ of their Jewish masters in Moscow.
6
Lida arrives the next day, Saturday September 9. At the Grand Hotel banquet after
the premiere he fusses over her, he flirts, and then commands her to accompany him
over to Hitler’s hotel. Here a female singer softly croons Nico Dostal’s hit, ‘I am so
much in love…’, and Lida is flustered to hear Dr Goebbels murmur in her ear,
‘…me too!’7 He has done this so often before, it is second nature to him now. As the
party breaks up she plants a harmless kiss on his cheek; he removes the smudge with
396 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
a pocket handkerchief, solemnly preserves it in his top pocket, and pleads with her
to stay over and lunch with him the next day, Sunday. Here he inquires casually if she
is still unmarried, and catching an aggrieved undertone in her reply about her lover’s
reluctance to re-marry, he diffidently asks: ‘Would you turn me down if I asked to
see you again?’
That Sunday afternoon he asks her to stay on, to hear his second great speech.
‘Please look at me closely as I speak,’ he says, and pulls out that handkerchief. ‘I shall
dab at my lips with this, as a sign that I am thinking of you.’
What twenty-two year old female (Lida’s birthday has fallen just three days before)
is not bowled over by such artful devices? Bedazzled, Lida again puts off returning to
her mother at Franzensbad. Goebbels makes no mention whatever of her in his diary
of these days. ‘A miracle has happened,’ is all he writes.8 After the speech, in a circumlocution
that will become familiar to its readers, he carefully records ‘a little
drive to recuperate’; the next afternoon, Monday, ‘some sleep’; and then, without
mentioning whose, ‘departure to Franzensbad.’9 He sends his adjutant to the railroad
station with roses and a photograph inscribed, ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’ A few days later
he certainly sees her again in Nuremberg. ‘A visitor from Franzensbad,’ he notes,
‘about which I am much pleased.’10 This is the first time that he has passed significant,
if camouflaged, comments on a prospective lover in his diary.
Lida Baarova will affect him more profoundly than any other woman since Anka.
They will bring to each other great happiness: but the ensuing romance, which is
almost entirely platonic, will sweep him to the bring of divorce, self-exile, and even
suicide. As for Lida, she will nobly abstain from the general calumny of him after his
death. Legions of obscure actresses will claim, without a shred of evidence, that he
forced himself upon them. ‘It would have left him no time for work,’ Lida points out.
‘Toward me,’ she still insists, ‘his behaviour was impeccable.’ It is his courtesy and
patience as a suitor that have impressed her. But does she ever truly love him? Even
years later she cannot be sure. ‘I loved him in my own way,’ she will recollect. ‘I was
very young and you are very susceptible at that age … He loved me so deeply, that I
fell in love with love itself.’11
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 397
AT this Nuremberg rally Hitler announced a four-year plan for Germany.
His grand
plans on foreign policy came as no surprise Goebbels.12 After sitting in on one conference
aboard Hitler’s yacht Grille at Kiel in May 1936 he had noted down Hitler’s
prophetic vision of a United States of Europe under a German leadership. ‘Years,
perhaps even decades of work toward that end,’ commented Goebbels in his diary.
‘But what an end!’13 Mussolini’s victory in Abyssinia had seemingly confirmed one
important lesson: that might was right. ‘Anything else is nonsense,’ concluded
Goebbels.14
Clearly at Hitler’s behest he was already gearing up for future hostilities. He established
close relations with the Wehrmacht, and had quiet talks with Blomberg about
beefing up transmitter powers and mobilizing war reporters.15 ‘The Führer,’ he added
after another secret meeting with Hitler, Papen, and Ribbentrop, ‘sees a conflict
coming in the Far East. Japan will thrash Russia. And then our great hour will come.
Then we shall have to carve off enough territory to last us a hundred years. Let’s
hope that we’re ready, and that the Führer is still alive.’16 Anticipating that moment,
late in November 1936 Hitler signed a deal with the Japanese. Over dinner with the
signatories, Hitler prophetically remarked that it would not bear fruit for another
five years. ‘He really is taking the long view in foreign policy,’ marvelled his propaganda
minister.17
While relations with Göring were strained but stable, a never-ending feud with
Alfred Rosenberg had broken out, fuelled by Goebbels’ doctrinaire plans for a 105-
member cultural senate and a seventh sub-chamber of the Reich Chamber of Culture.
Suffice to say that Rosenberg still claimed culture as his own domain.18 Toward
Hess as deputy Führer Goebbels preserved a bemused if antiseptic cordiality; in
truth he found Hess bourgeois and probably unbalanced. Hess’s business-like chief
of staff Martin Bormann suggested that he had neither imagination nor initiative—
and would be proven wrong on both counts five years later.19 Goebbels had already
spotted that it could be dangerous to have Bormann himself as an enemy.20 Goebbels’
early admiration for Ribbentrop had waned during 1935 and expired entirely after
he was appointed ambassador in London in August 1936. He then took every oppor-
398 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
tunity he could to score off him. When agency photos arrived arrived showing
Ribbentrop’s seventeen year old son leaving their Eaton Square house in his Westminster
college uniform of top hat and tails, Goebbels cruelly ensured that they
were printed in every Berlin newspaper that Hitler read.21 Mercy was not a quality in
which he excelled.
IT is mid September 1936 before Magda returns from Dresden to Berlin. She works
off her rancour on her little husband. ’Magda’s changing,’ he notes self-righteously.
It’s sickening!’22 Seeking affection he turns to Lida Baarova, temporarily ensconced
in the Hotel Eden with Fröhlich, to whom she has returned; their two villas on
Schwanenwerder are mothballed for the winter. He obtains an advance print of
Fröhlich’s latest movie, ‘City of Anatolia,’ and offers to show it to them. The actor
swallows the bait and his pride, and brings Lida along. Afterwards Goebbels notes
that Fröhlich’s acting is not all that good; but it is with Fröhlich that Lida nonetheless
leaves, bound for Franzensbad.23
A grander campaign plan is called for. With some prodding the City of Berlin agrees
to give Goebbels for his lifetime a domain in one of its forests on his forthcoming
birthday. He has inspected it with Karl Hanke in mid September; it is near the forest
village of Lanke, about twenty miles north-east of the capital. Hanke has selected an
idyllic location on a little swan lake, the Bogensee, enveloped by groves of fir, beech,
and pine. ‘All around, the deepest solitude,’ describes Goebbels. ‘Hanke has done his
stuff well.’ With manpower provided by the labour service, a two-storey woodframed
house is rapidly erected on an incline at the water’s edge. A tall wire fence will be
thrown up around the entire lake to preserve the minister’s privacy.24 (House and
fence are still there. The author, visiting it in 1993, found one rusting hook in a
nearby mildewed tree where once a children’s swing had hung.)
Later that month he flies to Greece with Magda, taking in the Acropolis (‘this
noble temple of Nordic art’) and Parthenon; he meets prime minister Johannis
Metaxas, who professes to like the Germans as much as he loathes the Jews and
bolsheviks. Then he returns to Berlin and continues furnishing his love nest at Lanke,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 399
including among its accoutrements a special diary—kept just during his visits out
here.25
He fantasizes about being out here alone with Lida Baarova. He phones her in
Prague, where she is visiting her mother, to ask when she will be back. ‘Quite soon,’
she replies guilelessly. ‘Gustl’s staying on at Karlsbad.’
He escorts her out frequently in the evenings. On October 5 his diary coyly records
‘a little Spazierfahrt,’ a motor outing before he returns late to bed.26 Appeasing Magda
he buys her a costly ring on Hellmut’s first birthday. His diary sparkles with occasional
flattery of Magda, but it has a dutiful quality.27 Visiting the gracious spa resort
of Baden-Baden (without Magda) in October he is evidently not alone, as witness the
unexplained phrases that slip into its pages like those on the twelfth, when the night
ends with ‘a big disappointment’, followed by the disembodied remark: ‘Did not
come down from room any more.’ Followed by: ‘I am so sad.’28 At Berlin upon his
return he finds Magda livid: ‘About nothing—nothing at all.’ Undaunted he goes out
motoring again that afternoon, and stops in at their (deserted) Schwanenwerder
villa on the way back. It would be charitable to assume that he was alone, were it not
self-evident that his diary has now become the vehicle for half-truths.
On the day before the new house at Lanke is formally handed over to him Magda
takes the dour but handsome Hanke out to see it. Goebbels seizes the opportunity to
visit Schwanenwerder again, where Lida Baarova is house-sitting the dust-sheeted
Fröhlich villa three lots from his own.29 He phones to invite himself round for tea.
Lida points out how improper that would seem; covered with embarrassment, the
minister suggests they motor out one day to see Lanke instead.30 ‘You know I have a
little house out there now,’ he says. ‘We can have tea there. It’s very pretty.’ She
helplessly falls in with his suggestion that one day she should motor out along the
new autobahn in her little black and white BMW to the Lanke exit where his chauffeur
Alfred Rach will be waiting to meet her with his new open Horch tourer.31 ‘All
Berlin used to speak about his love affairs,’ Rach will later reminisce, adding a revealing
remark: ‘He found that very flattering.’32
400 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 65
