Magda has inspected a tempting neighbouring lot at Schwanenwerder, Nos.12/14
Insel Strasse. It is owned by a Jew, Samuel Goldschmidt, director of the Goldschmidt-
Rothschild bank.22 Goebbels’ friend Dr Lippert, erstwhile editor of Angriff and now
mayor of Berlin, forces Goldschmidt to sell it to the city for only 117,500 marks;
after the sale, Goebbels emerges as the real purchaser.23 He will rebuild this art deco
building, converting its stables into a private cinema and the house into what he calls
his Burg (citadel)—another refuge from Magda and her tantrums. Sometimes he will
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 431
withdraw to his citadel with a guest, explaining to Magda with a heartless wink that
he wants to play the latest records to her.24 Thus all seems set in December 1937 for
a ménage à trois—as soon as Lida is ready. On the eleventh he drives out to
Schwanenwerder, talks things over with Magda, and decides to move next door ‘to
get some peace.’25 They have been married for six years. ‘We are all so happy,’ he
hypocritically informs his diary. ‘The children are playing all around us. I am sitting
in my new home in the next door house. Deep snow lies round about. Slept in.’26
Often that January of 1938 he drives out to Lanke where his villa is embedded in
snow so deep that his new Maybach barely gets through. Is Lida out there? We don’t
know. Occasionally he drives into Berlin to see his family, to play some music and
deliberately lose a few hands of Black Peter to Helga before driving back to spend
the night at Lanke or his ministry.27 In his ministry too he is installing a little boudoir,
so that he can devote more time to his work there; it is a tastefully furnished bachelor
apartment with a bedroom, a bathroom, and an array of bell-pushes to inform
his staff when he does not wish to be disturbed.28
Simultaneously work will begin on the reconstruction of his official residence. On
January 16 Hitler gives the go-ahead. The Goebbels’ spend hours more or less happily
poring over Professor Baumgarten’s plaster model and blueprints; the funds are
requisitioned, and on April 27 the wreckers and bricklayers move in. ‘I say my farewells
to these rooms I have loved so much,’ writes Goebbels with false pathos: ‘It
really hurts. I clear things out and pack, and find manuscripts from my childhood
that seem pretty ridiculous today… So adieu dear home! Now let the pick-axes
swing.’29
There is one snag. Lida Baarova wants to be no part of his planned ménage. Fearing
that she is trapped, she momentarily goes to England to talk with the talent scouts
that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer have sent from Hollywood. Gustav Fröhlich persuades
her to show them his photos too. Robert Taylor and Maureen O’Sullivan plead with
her to leave Berlin. Nothing comes it, but at the next gala gathering of the film world
in the Kroll opera house in Berlin Goebbels will warn darkly that the German film
industry is not a haven for Hollywood’s cast-offs. ‘If anybody else leaves for Holly-
432 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
wood,’ he declares, ‘they’ll find they can’t get back into Germany when they fail.’30
Miss Baarova interprets this threat as directed against her. But Goebbels has others in
his sights too, like Luise Ullrich, another popular star who has designs on Hollywood.
31
Bulky with her new unborn child, Magda is stuck out at Schwanenwerder. She is
hoping for another boy, to call Hartmann or Harder.32 She seldom has enough funds
for the household running costs and property taxes.33 The purchase of the second
property has strained their resources; early in 1938 Goebbels moves his mother in
with Magda and there are always shoals of other house-guests. His visits to
Schwanenwerder are punctuated by acrimonious scenes The more he promotes his
family-man image in the media however, the less time he actually seems to spend
with them.34
HIS real close family was one man now, Adolf Hitler. More than once in January 1938
Hitler had prolonged private consultations with him, on affairs well outside his fief—
asking for example whom he should now appoint to the German embassies in Rome,
Paris, and Bucharest (Goebbels portentously started a card index for key future appointments.)
35 When Hitler decided to replace his foreign minister he informed
Goebbels two weeks before breaking it to the victim, von Neurath.36 Goebbels frankly
warned him that Ribbentrop, the suggested successor, was a ‘zero.’37 When it came to
naming their latest new battleship (the Bismarck) Hitler again consulted Goebbels.38
During the major scandal now almost upon them, the Blomberg–Fritsch scandal,
Hitler and Goebbels would be closeted together for hours on end. Surprisingly,
Goebbels would recommend the ultra-conservative chief of general staff, General
Ludwick Beck, against the radical Nazi Walther von Reichenau to succeed Fritsch as
the army’s commander-in-chief.39
THE broad outlines of the Field-Marshal Blomberg scandal are now well known. On
December 14 the war minister, nearly sixty, had unblushingly revealed to Goebbels
his intention of marrying a young girl of common stock. Seemingly not appreciating
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 433
quite how common this twenty-four year old’s stock had been, Goebbels wished
him luck.40 Both Hitler and Göring officiated as witnesses at Blomberg’s hasty wedding
on January 12 (the girl had told him she was pregnant).
The crisis burst upon them soon after. At Hitler’s lunch table on the twenty-fifth
Goebbels detected a certain tension in the air. Aided by an unusually jovial Göring he
tried to cheer Hitler up, but it was already too late.41 Helldorff, now police chief of
Berlin, told his friend Goebbels that Blomberg’s bride had a criminal record for
peddling pornographic photographs featuring herself. He showed Goebbels the police
dossier—it was ‘hair raising.’ Obviously Blomberg had landed Hitler and Göring
in a hideous position. Goebbels was speechless with rage at the injury the field marshal
had done to his idol. Twice he hinted that any honourable officer should shoot
himself.42 But Blomberg merely resigned as war minister on the pretext of ill health,
and left on a world tour with his bride instead (who turned out not to be pregnant
after all.)
This was just the start of Hitler’s problems. Who should succeed Blomberg? Göring?
General von Fritsch? Himmler now charged that the latter, though the obvious candidate,
had once been blackmailed as a closet homosexual. This scandalized Hitler.
Since the Röhm affair, his eyes glazed at the slightest mention of homsosexuality.
Goebbels suggested that Hitler himself take over Blomberg’s position, thus becoming
supreme commander in one step.43 Fritsch did not however stand aside without a
fight. He denied the allegation of homosexuality, on his word as an officer, and he did
not even crack under the Gestapo’s grilling.44 ‘It’s one man’s word against another,’
perceived Goebbels, fascinated by Hitler’s dilemma: ‘That of a homosexual blackmailer
against that of the army’s commander-in-chief.’ But Hitler no longer trusted
Fritsch, and there was the rub.
Innocent or guilty, the general was doomed even
though he refused, to Himmler’s dismay, to confess.45 ‘Heydrich has conducted several
all-night interrogations,’ recorded Goebbels equally perplexed. ‘Fritsch is taking
it all on the chin, but standing up to him.’46
Goebbels’ problems as propaganda minister were also beginning as juicy rumours
washed around Berlin. He spent sleepless nights, he even saw Hitler in tears with
434 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
worry.47 He promised to keep the lid firmly on things. He suggested that it would
help if Hitler chose now to carry out a reshuffle of both his cabinet and armed forces.
‘The damage that one woman can do!’ gasped Goebbels, as the hit lists were drawn
up. ‘And that kindÊ of woman too!’48
Hitler announced his reshuffle to his ministers at eight P.M. on February 5, 1938.
Goebbels’ diary provides the only detailed record of this, the last formal Cabinet
meeting ever held.49 Struggling to do justice to both Blomberg and Fritsch and choking
with emotion, Hitler spoke of the personal tragedies that had obliged them to
resign. He announced that he himself would take over as supreme commander (as
Goebbels had suggested).
For a few days the world’s press seethed with fierce but ill-informed speculation—
what Goebbels called ‘horror stories.’50 He directed his rough-and-ready lieutenant
Berndt to scatter dust in the eyes of the press corps in Berlin.51 ‘He had the nerve to
tell us,’ recorded an American journalist, ‘that Blomberg’s resignation was due solely
to reasons of health (yet he was healthy enough to marry!)’52 To an equally sceptical
Dutch pressman Berndt tactlessly flared, ‘What would you say if our newspapers
were to state that the baby just born to your Royal family isn’t really [Crown Princess]
Juliana’s baby!’53 Unimpressed, the foreign journalists still churned out ‘horror
stories’. So Goebbels told Berndt to go the whole hog and plant rumours that Hitler
intended invading France. The newshounds went yelping off after that scent instead.
It all provided an interesting example of news-management. ‘Anything is better than
the truth,’ reflected the propaganda minister, in a departure from his norm.54
LAYING a second smokescreen Hitler briefly55—as he imagined— and unexpectedly
turned to Austria. He summoned Austria’s pettifogging chancellor Dr Kurt
Schuschnigg to the Berghof on February 12. No formal record was taken of Hitler’s
blustering, ranting threats but he boasted with some relish to Goebbels afterwards
ofhow he had talked ’pretty tough’ with Schuschnigg on a list of demands, and had
threatened to get satisfaction by force (‘guns speak louder than words’56). ‘It was not
just an ultimatum,’ summarized Goebbels. ‘It was a threat of war. Schuschnigg was
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 435
shattered.’57 Under a secret protocol agreed between them Austria guaranteed to
model her foreign and military policy on Germany’s, and to call a truce in their press
war; Schuschnigg was also to appoint the Austrian lawyer Arthur Seyss-Inquart (described
by Goebbels as ‘our man’) as minister of the interior. In return Hitler agreed
to refrain from interfering in Austria’s domestic affairs.58
Four days after the Berghof meeting, Schuschnigg’s Cabinet agreed to Hitler’s dictates.
‘The world’s press rages,’ observed Goebbels, ‘and speaks—not entirely unjustly
—of rape.’59 Hitler formally thanked Schuschnigg in the Reichstag on the twentieth.
In private he added that he envisaged cutting a similar deal with Prague when
the time came, although he warned Goebbels that the Czech president Edouard
Beneoar(s,ˇ) was a far more deadly opponent, ‘a crafty, squinny-eyed little rat.’60
For all his other sins, Hitler did adhere to the Berghof agreement. When two Austrian
Nazi leaders visiting Munich on February 25 still talked of staging a coup, he
forbade them to return.61 Schuschnigg was less scrupulous. After the newly re-emancipated
Nazis staged big demonstrations in Graz and Vienna he called out the army
against them, in violation of the agreement. Goebbels directed the German press to
hold its tongue.62
He had other things on his mind—principally the trial of Pastor Niemöller, arrested
seven months earlier on sedition charges.63 As the still overly conservative
ministry of justice set aside a full two weeks for a public trial, all Goebbels’ hatreds
boiled over. ‘Lawyers are all mentally defective,’ he had written the year before.64 He
pleaded for a two- or three-day trial in camera, followed by Niemöller’s swift and
permanent removal from public view. Hitler himself had ruled that Niemöller was
never to be turned loose again.65 Was that not an edict simple enough for even the
most pettifogging lawyer to understand? When the trial began on February 7, however,
the court refused to impose reporting restrictions and allowed the pastor an
entire day to reminisce about his career.66 Goebbels persuaded the court to go into
closed session. At this Niemöller’s lawyers walked out.67
These were the kind of tactics that Goebbels himself had used against the catspaw
courts of the Weimar regime, and now, used against him, they stung. When a brave
436 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
civil servant, Ernst Brandenburg, testified for the pastor, Goebbels had him dismissed
from the party.68 On March 2 the judges handed down a derisory sentence on
Niemöller, allowing his immediate discharge. Exploding with wrath, Goebbels released
only the briefest press notice.69 Hitler directed Himmler to have the pastor
removed by a back door from the courthouse and taken straight to Oranienburg
concentration camp. ‘He won’t be set free again,’ triumphed Goebbels.70
HIMMLER’S organs did have their uses. Mostly however Goebbels gave a wide berth to
the Reichsführer now. ‘His entire being breathes sterility,’ he decided. ‘He is a little
man without an ounce of style. Ignore.’71 When Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s executive
chief, started sniping at Taubert, the minister fired off a terse rebuke. The
police, he noted, might poke their nose in elsewhere, ‘but not here!’72 Once, Helldorff
warned him against his personal assistant Fritz Ehrhardt, pointing out that he also
held the rank of Hauptsturmführer (captain) in Himmler’s security service, the S.D.
‘When I became police chief of Berlin,’ explained Helldorff, ‘I removed from my
staff every S.S. officer who was working for the S.D. I advise you to do the same.’73
If Goebbels had any doubt as to Himmler’s code of ethics it soon became apparent.
After Helldorff revealed something of the Gestapo’s spying techniques, Goebbels
exclaimed in his diary, ‘We’re heading toward a world of informers and sneaks.’74
Helldorff, Hanke, and Lutze told Goebbels that everybody was now surrounded by a
vast network of Gestapo informers. All this informing—which seemed his particular
worry—was not only stupid but despicable. ‘It just begets cowardice, terror, and
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