Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 74
several Sundays out at Schwanenwerder with his platinum blonde wife, just like old
times. For a few days she has to go to the clinic—her heart is playing up again as the
final weeks of this, her sixth pregnancy begin to tell on her. ‘I soon comfort her,’ he
records.11 Perhaps this is the occasion when he confesses that he does not find it easy
to remain faithful, except now because Magda is pregnant.12 Magda blissfully repeats
these lines to her venomous sister-in-law Ello and adds, starry-eyed, ‘Joseph and I
are now just as close to one another as ever.’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 449
He is probably telling the truth. Lida Baarova is being difficult. He visits Lanke
twice alone in April; he plays the piano, sleeps, walks, indulges in some pistol practice,
then repeats in his diary, ‘I am all alone out here.’13 On May 2 he leaves Magda to
accompany Hitler on his state visit to Italy. ‘I give her a gold medallion bearing my
likeness,’ he records. ‘The dear thing cries at our parting.’14
AS they waited for their limousines at the chancellery Hitler told him that he hoped
to conclude a firm alliance with Mussolini which would keep him out of the anti-
German front that London and Paris were cooking up.15
There is little point in dwelling on their week-long visit to Italy. Goebbels’ newly
discovered diary confirms anew the Nazis’ contempt for monarchies. All were grimly
agreed: ‘Never again a monarchy!’16 The king of Italy treated Hitler’s ministers like
shoeshine boys, in Goebbels’ words. ‘This entire pack of royal toadies: shoot the lot!
They make you sick. They treat us as parvenus! … Here’s a tiny clique of princes
who seem to think Europe belongs to them.’17 Hitler decided he must warn his generals
once and for all against monarchist tendencies.18 As for the Italian people,
Goebbels observed that they seemed easily enthused. ‘But only the future can show
whether they will stand fast when push comes to shove.’19
In two long secret meetings with Mussolini on May 4, Hitler told him in confidence
of his plans in the east.20 He told Goebbels briefly that so far, so good. Mussolini’s
study, Goebbels afterwards found, was oppressively large, furnished with just
one monolithic desk and a globe. Hitler thanked the Duce for helping him get Austria,
and promised to repay the favour. ‘Over Czechoslovakia,’ noted Goebbels, ‘Mussolini
has given us a totally free hand.’ (Hitler had hinted in a secret letter to Mussolini
just before the Anschluss that he was going to deal with the Czechs next.) The
final outcome was, as Goebbels put it, a military alliance of sorts—though not one
on paper as Hitler would have hoped.21
Hitler rewarded Mussolini immediately. At their final banquet he ceremonially
guaranteed their existing frontier, thus writing off the South Tyrol for ever. ‘But it is
correct,’ conceded Goebbels lamely, as their train headed back north through Italy.
450 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
‘And things won’t work out otherwise.’22 Through the train windows Goebbels fancied
he could see clusters of weeping South Tyroleans whom his Führer had just
betrayed.23 Mussolini parted from Hitler in Florence with the words: ‘There is no
power on earth that can drive us apart.’24
WHILE on board the Italian flagship Conte Cavour Hitler has handed a signal form to
Goebbels. Magda has given birth to another girl at two P.M. that day, May 5. ‘Since
today is our Navy Day,’ Mussolini pompously suggested, ‘You might name her “Marina”.’
Goebbels merely grins. He will decide at first to call the infant Hertha, but
shortly opts for Hedda instead—Magda’s mother has just seen a fine performance of
‘Hedda Gabler.’25
A week passes before he is back in Berlin and sets eyes on his fourth daughter. She
has had a difficult birth. ‘What women go through for children!’ he sympathises in
his diary, and drives straight out to spend the next two nights at Lanke.26 Perhaps her
delivery has released him from his self-imposed constraints. Whatever; at his lakeside
villa he plays music, reads, and relaxes, then lazes, reads some more, takes out the
motor launch, basks in the sun, and enjoys ‘some music and parlaver,’ so he is evidently
not alone. By thought association his next diary entry mentions his spouse—
‘Magda is okay.’27
The next five weeks probably destroy any illusions that Magda may have cherished.
True, he writes about making plans with Magda for the future, but it is not certain
that that future actually includes her.28 There are bitter rows between them. Over the
next five weeks he registers eleven ‘parlavers’ with her29—and unequal bouts they
must have been, conducted between Goebbels with all his rhetorical skills and his
less sophisticated wife, with her Belgian convent accent still clinging thickly to her
vowels and consonants. Probably Lida Baarova is the cause, because he has been out
to Lanke again twice in mid May before fetching mother and baby Hedda home from
the maternity clinic on the seventeenth—and he goes out there again on May 20. His
infatuation with Lida is now at its zenith. He spends so many hours on the phone to
her, that Göring’s wiretappers have to assign extra staff to monitoring her line (be-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 451
cause she is a Czech and thus a potentially enemy alien.)30 The Gestapo is also involved.
He meets Lida at Hilde Körber’s villa in Grunewald, No.1a Lassen Strasse;
but she too is a Czech, and her nine year old son Thomas will remember Goebbels
sending him to keep a look-out for Gestapo cars from the window.31 Eventually Hitler
mentions this to Goebbels and suggests he break off the affair—but it is only this
security aspect that bothers him.32
On the day after Goebbels once more visits Lanke in mid-June, he, Magda, and his
sister all ‘talk things over’ in a little pub in Berlin’s West End.33 Only twice in all those
weeks does he escort Magda to public functions, in Charlottenburg (the diary logs
another row that night), and Vienna: on their way back from Vienna, he sets her
down in Dresden, where she is to take a cure lasting several weeks at her regular
clinic. ‘A heartfelt farewell,’ writes Goebbels, and drives straight out to Lanke again.34
That summer one of the two swans on their little lake died. ‘It’s an omen,’ says Lida.
‘It’s all over.’35
Magda only puts up with all this for so long. Once in his absence she spends an
evening with Hitler and hints at these problems. Embarrassed, Hitler refuses to listen.
Magda sniffs afterwards to Ello, ‘Once a corporal, always a corporal!’36
While Magda is away in Dresden, Goebbels decides to choose once and for all
between her and Lida. It is not an easy choice. He spends a week that July out at
Lanke, evidently alone. He decides not to allow anybody to visit.37 Once after strolling
through the rain-soaked woods he writes the exclamation ‘Melancholy!’ in his
diary.38 Visiting Schwanenwerder and the children, he takes girls out for boat trips a
couple of times, but unforecast stormclouds are threatening his love life.39 He is
sleeping badly, his head in a whirl. On July 8, 1
938, his diary suddenly erupts without
warning: ‘I’ve got such worries. They’re fit to burst my heart.’40
Goebbels invites Karl Hanke to talk sense into her. Hanke, over two years her
junior, pampers Magda and teaches her how to ride; Magda blossoms in Hanke’s
company. But by no means is he blindly loyal to his minister. For Hanke, it is ‘Tristan
and Isolde’. He sees Magda as a dreadfully wronged woman. A man of unquestionable
courage, he becomes her knight in shining armour. Sexually there is probably
452 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
nothing between them—she is far above this engine-driver’s son in social station.41
But she instinctively sees that with his unrestricted access to her husband’s private
mail Hanke may become a useful ally. Hanke promises to keep his eyes open. Goebbels’
problems are only just beginning.
HE often spoke with Hitler about the future. Seeking ways to thwarting any restoration
of the monarchy, Hitler had hinted in Cabinet early in 1937 at the creation of a
constitutional senate to elect his successor when the time came.42 Germany must
remain a Führer state, he told Goebbels after their visit to Italy.43 ‘The Senate,’ predicted
Goebbels in June 1938, ‘will soon be nominated and convened. It will be
incumbent on it to elect each Führer.’ Three hours after that the S.A., S.S., and
armed forces would swear allegiance to him.44 (No such elective senate was ever
appointed however, as the turbulent events of that summer eventually led directly to
war.)
Many of Goebbels’ measures were already predicated on a coming war.45 Meeting
his new military liaison officer, Bruno Wentscher, on the last day of July he drew
heavily on quotations from Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ to back his views. ‘We soon see
eye to eye,’ he wrote.46 Beginning with Breslau, Goebbels erected thousands of loudspeakers
in city streets so that he could address the multitudes at the flick of a switch.
There was to be no escape from his relentless propaganda. He ordered German
radio to extend its broadcasting hours until three A.M. to discourage Hitler’s subjects
from listening to foreign stations—a prospect that would soon became almost an
obsession in Goebbels. Meanwhile he laboured to increase movie receipts. Although
he had not been able to prevent some resounding flops like Karl Ritter’s ‘Capriccio’—
Hitler called it ‘premium-grade crap,’ and Goebbels found it ‘trivial, boring, frivolous,
and devoid of style’47—there were some box-office hits like ‘The Holm Murder
Case’, filmed with police assistance, and Riefenstahl’s now complete two-part film
of the Olympics, a stunning work of cinematic art which premiered on Hitler’s birthday
in Berlin.48 He proudly appeared at that premiere with Lida Baarova, not Magda,
at his side.49
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 453
Benevolent and brutal alike, Goebbels was adopting the allures of a Renaissance
man. He paid Riefenstahl a one-hundred thousand mark bonus from his secret funds.50
He pruned the excessive salaries paid to some film stars and doubled or even trebled
others.51 The world of music too trembled at his whim. Should the singing of Schubert’s
or Schumann’s lieder be allowed at Viennese music festivals (the words were by Jews).
Goebbels decided that they should.52 After hearing Richard Strauss conduct in
Düsseldorf, he nodded to the great composer, as a hint that he was persona grata
again (‘He has now done penance enough.’)53 In August 1938 an author annoyed him:
Goebbels had him incarcerated in a concentration camp, and brought back in a month
later. ‘A final warning! … One more transgression and he’s for the high jump. Now
we both know that.’54
OTHER capitals followed Berlin’s example in evicting the Jews from cultural life. Rome
fired Jews from teaching posts. Warsaw enacted anti-Jewish nationality laws. In Bucharest
the short-lived prime minister Octavian Goga forbade Jews to hire young
female domestic staff.55 ‘The Jews,’ applauded Goebbels, ‘are fleeing in every direction.
But nobody wants to let them in. Where to dump this scum?’ He felt that he had
the people behind him in hounding the Jews. ‘You’ve got to knock out a few front
teeth,’ he reasoned, ‘then talk.’56 He had squelched earlier plans by Streicher to plaster
Jewish businesses with garish placards naming people caught shopping there.57
But he ordered Jews excluded from bidding for public works contracts in March
1938.58 And talking with Hitler he argued that the Jews and the ethnic Czechs should
be squeezed out of Vienna—‘That way we shall be solving the housing shortage
too.’59 That a wave of suicides swept across the despairing Viennese Jews left him
unmoved. ‘It used to be the Germans killing themselves,’ he recorded. ‘Now the
boot’s on the other foot.’60
Inspired by Vienna’s example, he planned with Count von Helldorff, Berlin’s police
chief, a concerted effort to evict the Jews from the city. They outlined to Hitler
in April various ways of harrassing them, including restricting them to designated
swimming pools, cinemas, and eating places, and identifying Jewish shops and busi-
454 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
nesses as such.61 ‘We’ll put an end to Berlin’s image as a happy hunting ground for
Jews,’ Goebbels privately swore. ‘Madagascar would be the best place for them.’
Hitler, who was less keen, asked them to wait until after his state visit to Italy in May.
Helldorff arrested the first three hundred Jews on a pretext early in June; but then
he went on leave and to Goebbels’ dismay his legal staff released them all apart from
a handful with known criminal records.62 (His anti-semitism was only skin-deep; a
few weeks later Heydrich learned to his disgust that Helldorff had a Jewish dentist.
63) Recalling Helldorff from leave, Goebbels explained that the object was to
hound the Jews out of Berlin.64 He also spoke directly to audiences of police officers,
explaining this policy. Hitler meanwhile had left Berlin to summer in Bavaria.
To coordinate the persecution with Goebbels’ gau HQ, on June 13 Helldorff set
up a special Jewish section (Dezernat).65 Over the next few days, in a copybook
harassment operation, the Berlin police rounded up 1,122 criminal, 445 ‘anti-social’,
and seventy-seven foreign Jews found without proper papers; sixty-six were
imprisoned, 1,029 were thrown into concentration camps, the rest detained for days
in police cells. Helldorff imposed steep fines on those found to have been disregarding
Nazi price-fixing laws. Meanwhile his police seized 250 Jewish-owned automobiles
pending safety tests; he also demanded that Jews give up their adopted German
names, particularly those that implied aristocratic birth.66 There were inevitably distressing
scenes, some photographed by British newspapermen; Goebbels had their
films confiscated.67 Meanwhile Nazi hooligans placarded shops wherever their owners
were Jews. As the uglier side of human nature came to the fore, even Helldorff