The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  September 3:-Else is here! On Tuesday she returned from Switzerland—fat, buxom, healthy, gay, only slightly tanned. She is very happy and in the best of spirits. She is good to me, and gives me much joy.

  October 14: Why did Anke have to leave me? … I just mustn’t think of these things.

  December 21: There is a curse on me and the women. Woe to those who love me!

  December 29: To Krefeld last night with Hess. Christmas celebration. A delightful, beautiful girl from Franconia. She’s my type. Home with her through rain and storm. Au revoir!

  Else arrived.

  February 6, 1926: I yearn for a sweet woman! Oh, torturing pain!

  Goebbels never forgot “Anke”—Anke Helhorn, his first love, whom he had met during his second semester at Freiburg. His diary is full of ravings about her dark-blond beauty and his subsequent disillusionment when she left him. Later, when he became Propaganda Minister, he revealed to friends, with typical vanity and cynicism, why she had left him. “She betrayed me because the other guy had more money and could afford to take her out to dinner and to shows. How foolish of her! … Today she might be the wife of the Minister of Propaganda! How frustrated she must feel!” Anke married and divorced “the other guy” and in 1934 came to Berlin, where Goebbels got her a job on a magazine.3

  It was Strasser’s radicalism, his belief in the “socialism” of National Socialism, which attracted the young Goebbels. Both wanted to build the party on the proletariat. The diary of Goebbels is full of expressions of sympathy for Communism at this time. “In the final analysis,” he wrote on October 23, 1925, “it would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism.” On January 31, 1926, he told himself in his diary: “I think it is terrible that we [the Nazis] and the Communists are bashing in each other’s heads … Where can we get together sometime with the leading Communists?” It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing. “You and I,” he declared, “are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies.”

  To Adolf Hitler this was rank heresy, and he watched with increasing uneasiness the success of the Strasser brothers and Goebbels in building up a vigorous, radical, proletarian wing of the party in the north. If left to themselves these men might capture the party, and for objectives which Hitler violently opposed. The inevitable showdown came in the fall of 1925 and in February of the following year.

  It was forced by Gregor Strasser and Goebbels over an issue which aroused a good deal of feeling in Germany at that time. This was the proposal of the Social Democrats and the Communists that the extensive estates and fortunes of the deposed royal and princely families be expropriated and taken over by the Republic. The question was to be settled by a plebiscite of the people, in accordance with the Weimar Constitution. Strasser and Goebbels proposed that the Nazi Party jump into the fray with the Communists and the Socialists and support the campaign to expropriate the nobles.

  Hitler was furious. Several of these former rulers had kicked in with contributions to the party. Moreover, a number of big industrialists were beginning to become financially interested in Hitler’s reborn movement precisely because it promised to be effective in combating the Communists, the Socialists and the trade unions. If Strasser and Goebbels got away with their plans, Hitler’s sources of income would immediately dry up.

  Before the Fuehrer could act, however, Strasser called a meeting of the northern district party leaders in Hanover on November 22, 1925. Its purpose was not only to put the northern branch of the Nazi Party behind the expropriation drive but to launch a new economic program which would do away with the “reactionary” twenty-five points that had been adopted back in 1920. The Strassers and Goebbels wanted to nationalize the big industries and the big estates and substitute a chamber of corporations on fascist lines for the Reichstag. Hitler declined to attend the meeting, but sent his faithful Gottfried Feder to represent him and to squelch the rebels. Goebbels demanded that Feder be thrown out—“We don’t want any stool pigeons!” he cried. Several leaders who would later make their mark in the Third Reich were present—Bernhard Rust, Erich Koch, Hans Kerrl and Robert Ley—but only Ley, the alcoholic chemist who was leader of the Cologne district, supported Hitler. When Dr. Ley and Feder argued that the meeting was out of order, that nothing could be done without Hitler, the Supreme Leader, Goebbels shouted (according to Otto Strasser, who was present), “I demand that the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be expelled from the Nazi Party!”

  The vituperative young Goebbels had come a long way since he had first fallen under Hitler’s spell three years before—or so it must have seemed to Gregor Strasser.

  “At that moment I was reborn!” Goebbels exclaimed in recording his impressions of the first time he heard Hitler speak, in the Circus Krone in Munich in June 1922. “Now I knew which road to take … This was a command!” He was even more ecstatic over Hitler’s behavior during the trial of the Munich putschists. After the verdicts were in, Goebbels wrote the Fuehrer:

  Like a rising star you appeared before our wondering eyes, you performed miracles to clear our minds and, in a world of skepticism and desperation, gave us faith. You towered above the masses, full of faith and certain of the future, and possessed by the will to free those masses with your unlimited love for all those who believe in the new Reich. For the first time we saw with shining eyes a man who tore off the mask from the faces distorted by greed, the faces of mediocre parliamentary busybodies …

  In the Munich court you grew before us to the greatness of the Fuehrer. What you said are the greatest words spoken in Germany since Bismarck. You expressed more than your own pain … You named the need of a whole generation, searching in confused longing for men and task. What you said is the catechism of the new political belief, born out of the despair of a collapsing, Godless world … We thank you. One day, Germany will thank you …

  But now, a year and a half later, Goebbels’ idol had fallen. He had become a “petty bourgeois” who deserved being booted out of the party. With only Ley and Feder dissenting, the Hanover meeting adopted Strasser’s new party program and approved the decision to join the Marxists in the plebiscite campaign to deprive the former kings and princes of their possessions.

  Hitler bided his time and then on February 14, 1926, struck back. He called a meeting at Bamberg, in southern Germany, shrewdly picking a weekday, when it was difficult for the northern leaders to get away from their jobs. In fact, only Gregor Strasser and Goebbels were able to attend. They were greatly outnumbered by Hitler’s hand-picked leaders in the south. And at the Fuehrer’s insistence they were forced to capitulate and abandon their program. Such German historians of Nazism as Heiden and Olden, and the non-German writers who have been guided by them, have recounted that at the Bamberg meeting Goebbels openly deserted Strasser and went over to Hitler. But the Goebbels diaries, discovered after Heiden and Olden wrote their books, reveal that he did not betray Strasser quite so abruptly. They show that Goebbels, though he joined Strasser in surrendering to Hitler, thought the Fuehrer was utterly wrong, and that, for the moment at least, he had no intention whatever of going over to him. On February 15, the day after the Bamberg meeting, he confided to his diary:

  Hitler talks for two hours. I feel as though someone had beaten me. What sort of Hitler is this? A reactionary? Extremely awkward and unsteady. Completely wrong on the Russian question. Italy and England are our natural allies! Horrible! … We must annihilate Russia! … The question of the private property of the nobility must not even be touched upon. Terrible! … I cannot utter a word. I feel as though I’ve been hit over the head …

  Certainly one of the great disappointments of my life. I no longer have complete faith in Hitler. That is the terrible thing: my props have been taken from under me.

  To show where his loyalties stood, Goebbels went to the station with Strasser and tried to console him. A week l
ater, on February 23, he records: “Long conference with Strasser. Result: we must not begrudge the Munich crowd their Pyrrhic victory. We must begin again our fight for socialism.”

  But Hitler had sized up the flamboyant young Rhinelander better than Strasser. On March 29 Goebbels noted: “This morning a letter from Hitler. I shall make a speech on April 8 at Munich.” He arrived there on April 7. “Hitler’s car is waiting,” he recorded. “What a royal reception! I will speak at the historic Buergerbräu.” The next day he did, from the same platform as the Leader. He wrote it all down in his diary entry of April 8:

  Hitler phones … His kindness in spite of Bamberg makes us feel ashamed … At 2 o’clock we drive to the Buergerbräu. Hitler is already there. My heart is beating so wildly it is about to burst. I enter the hall. Roaring welcome … And then I speak for two and a half hours … People roar and shout. At the end Hitler embraces me. I feel happy … Hitler is always at my side.

  A few days later Goebbels surrendered completely. “April 13: Hitler spoke for three hours. Brilliantly. He can make you doubt your own views. Italy and England our allies. Russia wants to devour us … I love him … He has thought everything through. His ideal: a just collectivism and individualism. As to soil—everything belongs to the people. Production to be creative and individualistic. Trusts, transport, etc., to be socialized … I am now at ease about him … I bow to the greater man, to the political genius.”

  When Goebbels left Munich on April 17 he was Hitler’s man and was to remain his most loyal follower to his dying breath. On April 20 he wrote the Fuehrer a birthday note: “Dear and revered Adolf Hitler! I have learned so much from you … You have finally made me see the light …” And that night in his diary: “He is thirty-seven years old. Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple. These are the characteristics of the genius.”

  Goebbels spent a good part of the summer with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and his diary is full of further encomiums to the Leader. In August he publicly broke with Strasser in an article in the Voelkischer Beobachter.

  Only now do I recognize you for what you are: revolutionaries in speech but not in deed [he told the Strassers and their followers] … Don’t talk so much about ideals and don’t fool yourselves into believing that you are the inventors and protectors of these ideals … We are not doing penance by standing solidly behind the Fuehrer. We … bow to him … with the manly, unbroken pride of the ancient Norsemen who stand upright before their Germanic feudal lord. We feel that he is greater than all of us, greater than you and I. He is the instrument of the Divine Will that shapes history with fresh, creative passion.

  Late in October 1926 Hitler made Goebbels Gauleiter of Berlin. He instructed him to clean out the quarreling Brownshirt rowdies who had been hampering the growth of the movement there and conquer the capital of Germany for National Socialism. Berlin was “red.” The majority of its voters were Socialists and Communists. Undaunted, Goebbels, who had just turned twenty-nine, and who in a little more than a year’s time had risen from nothing to be one of the leading lights of the Nazi Party, set out to fulfill his assignment in the great Babylonian city.

  AN INTERLUDE OF REST AND ROMANCE FOR ADOLF HITLER

  The politically lean years for Adolf Hitler were, as he later said, the best years of his personal life. Forbidden to speak in public until 1927, intent on finishing Mein Kampf and plotting in his mind the future of the Nazi Party and of himself, he spent most of his time on the Obersalzberg above the market village of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. It was a haven for rest and relaxation.

  Hitler’s monologues at his headquarters at the front during the war, when late at night he would relax with the old party comrades and his faithful women secretaries and reminisce about past times, are full of nostalgic talk about what this mountain retreat, where he established the only home he ever owned, meant to him. “Yes,” he exclaimed during one of these sessions on the night of January 16–17, 1942, “there are so many links between Obersalzberg and me. So many things were born there … I spent there the finest hours of my life … It is there that all my great projects were conceived and ripened. I had hours of leisure in those days, and how many charming friends!”

  During the first three years after his release from prison Hitler lived in various inns on the Obersalzberg and in that winter reminiscence in 1942 he talked for an hour about them. He finally settled down in the Deutsche Haus, where he spent the best part of two years and in which he finished dictating Mein Kampf. He and his party cronies, he says, were “very fond of visiting the Dreimaederlhaus, where there were always pretty girls. This,” he adds, “was a great treat for me. There was one of them, especially, who was a real beauty.”

  That evening in the headquarters bunker on the Russian front, Hitler made a remark to his listeners that recalls two preoccupations he had during the pleasant years at Berchtesgaden.

  At this period [on the Obersalzberg] I knew a lot of women. Several of them became attached to me. Why, then, didn’t I marry? To leave a wife behind me? At the slightest imprudence, I ran the risk of going back to prison for six years. So there could be no question of marriage for me. I therefore had to renounce certain opportunities that offered themselves.4

  Hitler’s fear in the mid-Twenties of being sent back to prison or of being deported was not without some foundation. He was still on parole. Had he openly evaded the ban against his speaking in public the Bavarian government might well have clapped him behind the bars again or sent him back over the border to his native Austria. One reason that he had chosen the Obersalzberg as a refuge was its proximity to the Austrian frontier; on a moment’s notice he could have slipped over the line and evaded arrest by the German police. But to have returned to Austria, voluntarily or by force, would have ruined his prospects. To lessen the risk of deportation, Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship on April 7, 1925—a step that was promptly accepted by the Austrian government. This, however, left him staatenlos, a man without a country. He gave up his Austrian citizenship but he did not become a citizen of Germany. This was a considerable handicap for a politician in the Reich. For one thing, he could not be elected to office. He had publicly declared that he would never beg the republican government for a citizenship which he felt should have been his because of his services to Imperial Germany in the war. But all through the last half of the 1920s, he secretly sought to have the Bavarian government make him a German national. His efforts failed.

  As to women and marriage, there was also some truth in what Hitler related that evening of 1942. Contrary to the general opinion, he liked the company of women, especially if they were beautiful. He returns to the subject time and again in his table talk at Supreme Headquarters during the war. “What lovely women there are in the world!” he exclaims to his cronies on the night of January 25–26, 1942, and he gives several examples in his personal experience, adding the boast, “In my youth in Vienna, I knew a lot of lovely women!” Heiden has recounted some of his romantic yearnings of the early days: for a Jenny Haug, whose brother was Hitler’s chauffeur and who passed as his sweetheart in 1923; for the tall and stately Erna Hanfstaengl, sister of Putzi; for Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner. But it was with his niece that Adolf Hitler had, so far as is known, the only deep love affair of his life.

  In the summer of 1928 Hitler rented the villa Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden for a hundred marks a month ($25) from the widow of a Hamburg industrialist and induced his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal, to come from Vienna to keep house for him in the first home which he could call his own.* Frau Raubal brought along her two daughters, Geli and Friedl. Geli was twenty, with flowing blond hair, handsome features, a pleasant voice and a sunny disposition which made her attractive to men.5

  Hitler soon fell in love with her. He took her everywhere, to meetings and conferences, on long walks in the mountains and to the cafés and theaters in Munich. When in 1929 he rented a luxurious ni
ne-room apartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse, one of the most fashionable thoroughfares in Munich, Geli was given her own room in it. Gossip about the party leader and his beautiful blond niece was inevitable in Munich and throughout Nazi circles in southern Germany. Some of the more prim—or envious—leaders suggested that Hitler cease showing off his youthful sweetheart in public, or that he marry her. Hitler was furious at such talk and in one quarrel over the matter he fired the Gauleiter of Wuerttemberg.

  It is probable that Hitler intended to marry his niece. Early party comrades who were close to him at that time subsequently told this author that a marriage seemed inevitable. That Hitler was deeply in love with her they had no doubt. Her own feelings are a matter of conjecture. That she was flattered by the attentions of a man now becoming famous, and indeed enjoyed them, is obvious. Whether she reciprocated her uncle’s love is not known; probably not, and in the end certainly not. Some deep rift whose origins and nature have never been fully ascertained grew between them. There has been much speculation but little evidence. Each was apparently jealous of the other. She resented his attentions to other women—to Winifred Wagner, among others. He suspected that she had had a clandestine affair with Emil Maurice, the ex-convict who had been his bodyguard. She objected too to her uncle’s tyranny over her. He did not want her to be seen in the company of any man but himself. He forbade her to go to Vienna to continue her singing lessons, squelching her ambition for a career on the operatic stage. He wanted her for himself alone.