Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 68
Chicago, publicly denounced Hitler over the Koblenz trials. Goebbels, retaliating,
began the first trials of protestant clergymen on homosexuality charges too. He inaugurated
this new campaign in his biggest speech that spring, from the new
Deutschland Halle in Berlin on May 28, 1937.40 The state, he declared, was responsible
for providing the people with bread, raw materials, currency, cannon, and
airplanes; the churches had merely to secure Eternal Happiness—surely, he asked to
loud guffaws, that task was big enough for them? He argued that the Nazis had set an
example in June 1934: ‘over sixty people who tried to cultivate this vice [homosexuality]
in the party were shot out of hand; on top of this, the party frankly reported to
the nation upon this episode.’ The bishops had however become accessories, by shielding
those guilty of such practices.41
Not hesitating to interfere with the judiciary, Goebbels dictated stage directions to
the public prosecutor at Koblenz, Paul Windhausen, who had the rank of Brigadeführer
in the S.A.42 (To western eyes it seems offensive, but in Germany throughout the
twentieth century prosecutors and judges have always been the catspaws of the government
in office.) Case files piled up on his desk as he compiled dossiers with all the
revolting details.43 Up and down the country that summer the angry priests bravely
struck back from their pulpits. Police arrested two of Goebbels’ most prominent
scourges, Pastor Martin Niemöller and Otto Dibelius.44 Dibelius was acquitted—
Goebbels called it a slap in the face of the state and got straight on the phone to
Hitler. Hitler however ordered all such trials halted for the time being.45 Fearing that
his Führer was getting cold feet, Goebbels sent Hanke to the Berghof with the most
loathsome dossiers, but in vain.46 Several times he reverted to the matter, in December
1937 and again in January. But on each occasion Hitler responded that he wanted
peace restored on the church front: it was not a battleground of his own choosing.47
Without doubt this anti-church campaign damaged Goebbels’ reputation both at
home and abroad. An open letter, four pages of articulate, closely-typed criticism,
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 413
circulated in Bavaria. It expressed alarm that the propaganda minister was seemingly
able to dictate which cases to prosecute and when. Referring to Goebbels’ speech to
a ‘well-briefed party mob’ at the Deutschland Halle, the pamphlet scoffed that far
from acting swiftly to shoot its leaders for homosexuality, the Nazis had turned a
blind eye on them until Röhm and his consorts got out of hand. The people were sick
of the extravagances of the leaders of the so-called Workers’ Party, the letter continued,
what with their country mansions, limousines, and yachts. All of this touched
very raw nerves indeed. Goebbels had the authors, a church worker and a lawyer,
arrested.48
Corrupted by power he was becoming more autocratic, even dictatorial. He arbitrarily
forbade his adjutant to touch alcohol for six months. He punished radio station
directors for going on a binge. He ordered a careless bus driver arrested.49 He
took a sterner line at home too—putting little Helga across his knee when she began
to fib; and when two-year-old Helmut answered him back, Goebbels paddled the lad
too, though reluctantly. ‘He doesn’t give in,’ he noted indulgently. ‘Not a bad sign!’50
HIS diary is innocent of any consciousness of his own double-standards. He expressed
horror at Stalin’s show trials, although Hitler had not offered his victims even this
formality before shooting them in June 1934. He fiercely protected his own
Staatssekretär, the podgy Walter Funk, even while prosecuting the clergy. When Hitler
forbade further police prying into Funk’s sexual perversions, Goebbels breathed
into his diary: ‘Thank goodness.’51 Lustful in private, he was starkly puritan in public.
‘They can have a thousand nude women if they want,’ he pontificated. ‘But without
those nasty, smutty jokes.’ He sent for Miss Trude Hesterberg, one of the Scala’s
lovelier singers, and lectured her on the indecency of her act. After visiting the Scala,
a burlesque theatre, he threatened to have it aryanized or even shut down altogether.52
But he disowned any aspirations to act as a chastity-overlord: when Heiner Kurzbein,
the (unfortunately named) chief of his ministry’s photogrtaphic section, suggested
they censor some of the more risqué photos of the 1938 film ball, Goebbels would
414 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
overrule him: ‘A dollop of healthy eroticism is not out of place,’ he defined, ‘and far
better normal than abnormal.’53
The aryanization of the sub-chambers of the Chamber of Culture, particularly the
chamber of music, would plod on far into 1939.54 Furtwängler kept butting in, interceding
for individual Jews.55 At his speech to the chamber of culture on November
26, 1937 Goebbels would boast of the fact that he had completely eliminated the Jew
from the artistic life of Germany: ‘Imagine my surprise,’ wrote Louis Lochner privately,
‘when the next day Musical American arrives and I read that with the approval of
the German Government no other person than Yehudi Menuhin, … a Jew, has obtained
the right to produce the [newly rediscovered] Schumann [violin] concerto in the
USA!’56 Elsewhere Goebbels enacted police ordinances to exclude the Jews from
stage, screen, and concert performances; he also clamped down harder on their
publishing houses and bookstores.57 When Jews in the United States protested, led
by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, Goebbels banned Jewish and Zionist
communal activities in Germany for two months.58 After Nazi hooligans smashed the
windows of Jewish stores in Danzig, the international clamour resumed.59 Goebbels
aryanized Germany’s remaining Jewish-owned theatres and turfed the last Jews out
of Germany’s recording industry.60 To break the Jewish near-monopoly on overseas
film distribution, he arranged with Alfred Hess, Rudolf’s brother, to use the party’s
Foreign Organisation, the AO, instead.61
In March 1937, using precisely the methods that he had previously branded as
Jewish, Goebbels took over the major Ufa film company for the Reich. As a warning
to Ufa he had instructed the press to trash its latest production; the film flopped
disastrously, and the company agreed to sell out.62 ‘Today we buy up Ufa,’ recorded
Goebbels, ‘and thus we [the propaganda ministry] are the biggest film, press, theatre,
and radio concern in the world.’63 Dismissing the entire Ufa board, he began to intervene
in film production at every level, dismissing directors, recommending actresses
(like the fiery Spaniard, Imperio Argentina), forcing through innovations like colour
cinematography, and rationalizing screen-test facilities for all three major studios,
Ufa, Tobis, and Bavaria. 64 Depriving the distributors of any such in such matters he
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 415
created instead artistic boards to steer future film production. Suddenly the film
industry began to surge ahead. Blockbuster films swept the box offices. With a sure
touch, Goebbels s
topped the production of pure propaganda and party epics, opting
for more subtle messages instead—the wholesome family, the life well spent.
Until then the status of the acting progression had been lowly. He changed all that.
He converted the old Rathenau villa on Skagerrak Platz into an Artiste’s Club. Its
lush furnishings, its dimly lit cocktail bar, and its dance floor made it a popular haunt
for raffishly dressed actors, actresses with plunging necklines, and strutting officials
of the Nazi party. Both Magda and Dr Goebbels often went there—though seldom
in each other’s company.
ALTHOUGH he strives to conceal it from his diary, Joseph Goebbels’ infatuation with
the ravishingly beautiful Lida Baarova has grown more hopeless. The 1937 diary
mentions her name without special emphasis, but he carelessly spills enough clues
around for the researcher to grasp what is happening. ‘Strolled in the park and talked
with Magda,’ he writes dutifully. ‘She is so nice and adorable. I have taken her into my
heart.’ Then, ‘I drive on out to Bogensee’—the lake at Lanke on which he now has
his isolated little wooden house.65 It is out here, in the depths of the forest, that
somebody is usually waiting for him. These are, it may be recalled, the very days
when Hitler’s Cabinet is solemnly discussing fierce new laws on divorce and adultery.
’Out to Bogensee in the afternoon,’ he writes the next day, having again left
Magda in Berlin. ‘Some music, reading, and writing.’ That month he takes a special
interest in Lida’s latest film, the spy-thriller ‘Patriots,’ being made for Ufa. He reviews
the screen-tests, discusses the story line with director Karl Ritter (‘It must get
a nationalist slant’), and reworks the filmplay himself; on January 25, he goes out to
Babelsberg to watch shooting begin.66 Viewing the first takes, he finds Lida’s acting
wonderful. ‘The farewell and final scene are deeply touching,’ he writes.67 He becomes
addicted to re-runs of her earlier movies. After watching her and Gustav
Fröhlich in ‘Barcarole’ on February 23—after seeing the very scene in which he and
Hitler first set eyes on her at the studios—he tells the diary, ‘La Ba[a]rova’s acting is
416 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
wonderful, moving, and heart-breaking.’ (Fröhlich however is ‘a little twirp who
can’t act.’)68
A few days earlier all three have been involved in a silly incident outside Fröhlich’s
villa on Schwanenwerder. With Magda in the maternity clinic since February 2,
Goebbels is often lonely in the evenings. Twice that month he drives out to his own
empty villa on the peninsula (the house at Lanke is being ventilated).69 Early on one
of these evenings Lida arrives at Gustav’s villa; later, hearing a limousine, she steps
out into the snow to greet her lover but finds Goebbels inside instead with his chauffeur
Alfred Rach at the wheel.
‘Hello,’ exclaims the minister. ‘What brings you out in the middle of the night!’
She puts one foot on the running board and explains, ‘I’m waiting for Gustl. He’s
having a premiere.’
Even as they exchange these brief pleasantries, Fröhlich himself drives up. He leaps
out, white with rage, and grabs Lida’s arm, perhaps even slapping her. ‘Well, Herr
Minister,’ he snaps, assuming that she has just stepped out of the limousine. ‘Now we
know where we stand!’
Goebbels acts astonished. ‘What was that about?’ he asks Lida.
The actress stammers apologies for her lover. When Fröhlich lets himself into his
villa, he finds Lida’s handbag already there and realizes his mistake.70 (It must be said:
at this time there had been no intimacies between her and the minister.) Fröhlich
phones an abject apology to Goebbels. The minister records only one further meeting
with him, in May 1937—ostensibly they chat about casting and taxation problems,
and they trade society gossip. ’Frö[h]lich,’ he mocks in his diary, ‘is of consummate
stupidity.’71 A few weeks later he makes a note to look for a good man to play
opposite Lida.72
Soliciting Lida more persistently, Goebbels often phones her at home. She has no
objections. Once, he hears her doorbell ring and the phone being snatched from her;
then Fröhlich screaming into the mouthpiece, ‘Who is that!’ The minister can hear
the betrayed lover raging, ‘It’s Goebbels, isn’t it! I knew it! How long has this been
going on! We’re through! Our love is dead—we are standing at its graveside.’ Up to
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 417
this point, in fact, no intimacies have passed between her and the minister.73 She
rents a fine villa, No.14 Taubert Strasse, in the Grunewald; but Goebbels is never
alone there with her.
Initially he keeps his interest in her a close secret. Hoping to see her privately, he
once directs her to prepare dinner for ten at her Grunewald home, and to join him
seemingly unexpectedly that evening in a box at the Scala where she is to invite him
and his entourage back home for dinner. Play-acting, Goebbels looks completely
surprised. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says, ‘shall we accept?’ All do so with alacrity, except for
Hanke who comes along in bad grace. Goebbels never visits her Grunewald villa
alone.74
Lida Baarova moves out of Fröhlich’s life and Goebbels gives her the key to the
barrier on the back road to the Lanke villa. Emotionally she is his slave—and he is
hers. They spend days together at Lanke, with him playing the piano, and her dozing
on a sofa or reading. Their relationship is almost platonic. For a year sex hardly comes
into it—and then only for weeks rather than months. She does not even notice that
he wears a leg-brace. They sleep in different rooms—Kaiser tiptoes in each morning
at five a.m. to wake her, as they both have early starts back to Berlin.75 If Goebbels
cannot get away from the ministry, he commands her to be at the other end of an
open phone line: from time to time he picks up the earpiece just to hear her breathing.
Sometimes she drives into Voss Strasse and walks past, for him to adore her from
his window across the street.76 Once, out at Lanke, he commands her to show him
how she will recognize him if things go wrong and they meet only in Heaven; she
walks a few yards, turns round and, a consummate actress, plays the little cameo role
to perfection.77
Throughout 1937 the affair warms up, while he consequently neglects Magda. The
doctors have warned him after Holde’s birth that she must not get pregnant for two
more years. ‘I’ll see to that,’ promises Goebbels, and whiles away the afternoon with
a film actress with professional problems (‘I believe I can help her.’)78 Two or three
days later he helps another actress to the best of his ability, noting afterwards: ‘She’s
a good sort.’79 Having meanwhile met the young sculptress Barbara von Kalckreuth
418 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
in a train, he sits for her in his snow-decked villa at Lanke and she gets twenty more
diary entries over the next three years.80 He sits for famous sculptor Arno Breker