Goebbels: A Biography

by Peter Longerich

  On December 5 he and a large group of supporters went to an evening screening of the film. They swung into action: “After only 10 minutes the cinema is like a madhouse. The police are powerless. The embittered crowd act against the Jews. The first incursion into the west [of the city]. ‘Jews out!’ ‘Hitler is at the gates!’ […] Outside, the box offices are under attack. Window panes tinkle. The screening is canceled, and the next one too. We have won.”52

  A few days later, after specific exhortations from Der Angriff to do so, National Socialists organized further riots at a screening of the film in the west of Berlin.53 On the Wittenbergplatz Goebbels addressed more than twenty thousand supporters, by his own estimate (the Berlin Lokalanzeiger newspaper put the crowd at about five thousand). A procession of demonstrators formed and succeeded in breaking through the police barrier and on to the Kurfürstendamm.54 The same scene was repeated the next day. This time the police employed force in an effort to disperse the demonstrators—Goebbels reckoned there were forty thousand of them—trying to gain access to the Kurfürstendamm, and eventually the law officers drew their weapons. The next morning the chief commissioner of police imposed a ban on demonstrations. Goebbels was delighted: “Our ordinary N.S. people dictate government action.”55 In the end the film was banned on the grounds that it “was a threat to German prestige”— for Goebbels this was a “triumph”:56 “The Republic is enraged by our film victory. […] In the eyes of the public we are the men of strength.”57

  The new year began with further acts of violence by the SA. On January 3 the Gauleiter made a laconic entry in his diary: “2 Reichsbanner shot dead by our people. That creates respect. The others start terror actions; we act only in self-defense.” Seeing the film Afrika on the same day seems to have confirmed his belief that he was on the right track: “Fight, fight is the cry of the creature. Nowhere is there peace, just murder, just killing, all for the sake of survival. As it is with lions, so it is with human beings. We alone lack the courage to openly admit the way things are. In this respect wild animals are the better human beings.”

  Around the middle of the month Hitler assured him that the Party in general was in good shape; however, there was “a danger that everything will take too long, so that the Party might lose its dynamic and stall. The answer is to raise the level of activity.”58 This was an endorsement of Goebbels’s mode of operation. A few days later, on January 22, a debate with the communist politician Walter Ulbricht in the Friedrichshain hall ended in a brawl.59 The Vossische Zeitung reported that the rioting “was like nothing ever seen before at a political meeting”: More than 100 people were injured.60

  The riot was the prelude to a whole series of violent outbreaks, as reported in Der Angriff over the next few days. One public site after another became the setting for a pitched indoor battle. Der Angriff—naturally blaming the opposition—declared that it was “open civil war”; force had to be used in confronting the “blood-terror of the communists.”61 “Drop Your Weapons!” demanded the headline of an editorial in the Vossische Zeitung, reacting to the violent clashes between National Socialists and communists that took place over the weekends of early February.62

  With the increasing deployment of the SA, Goebbels felt it advisable to forge closer links with Stennes again. In January he invited Stennes and his wife to an evening gathering in his new apartment and voiced his satisfaction at having “gotten much closer to the SA leader.”63 But a few days later, at an SA parade, Stennes again aroused Goebbels’s suspicions.64 All the same, he supported Stennes’s attempts to bring the Berlin SS unambiguously under his control.65 In February the two men had further talks, after which they were agreed on the basics: “We form a partnership. S.A. and I. That’s power.”66

  While he was making approaches to the SA and following an ever more radical course, Goebbels increasingly distanced himself from Göring, who had a special role to play in the capital, above all setting up contacts among the nationalist and conservative elites. From the beginning of the year his complaints about Göring became more voluble. Nonetheless, in the course of 1930—after many difficulties—Goebbels was at least able to establish reasonable personal relations with him.67 In April 1930 they even went on a vacation to Sweden together.68

  Early in January 1931, just after a minor dispute brought on by Göring’s desire to exclude him from a soirée with the army chief of staff, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord,69 Goebbels heard from a mutual acquaintance that “G. has given way to the vice of morphine again”;70 feigning concern, he passed this information on to Hitler two weeks later.71 Goebbels eagerly collected negative observations and complaints about Göring;72 objected that he “went snobbing around too much in alien circles”; criticized Göring for visiting the court of the exiled Kaiser (“what does Doorn mean to us?”); and accused him of being too optimistic about political questions.73 In a lengthy talk with Hitler, he discovered they were largely of one mind in their unfavorable opinion of his rival, whom Hitler accused of megalomania.74 In mid-March there was a frank discussion between Goebbels and Göring in which the two initially hurled serious accusations at each other but then parted “as semi-friends.”75

  Goebbels’s newly awakened radicalism widened the contrast with Munich. He was not pleased that at this time Hitler seemed completely taken up with the new headquarters in the renovated Brown House (once the Palais Barlow) in a prominent position on the Königsplatz, into which the NSDAP had moved in January.76 When in February he heard from Stennes that SA leader Röhm was possibly homosexual—the very person whom, a few weeks earlier, Goebbels had warned about a Berlin SA leader with the same reputation!77—he unleashed even more of his anger on the Party leadership: “Revolting! Hitler not taking enough care again. We can’t have this, the Party as the El Dorado of the 175ers.”*2, 78

  In a meeting with Berlin SA leaders in his apartment, Goebbels discerned a “strong antipathy to Munich,” but as for himself, he “was on good terms with the men.”79 In Munich at the beginning of March, he found himself agreeing with the Party leader on many questions, but he also concluded that Hitler was “too weak and too keen on compromise. Wants to achieve power at any price, and wants it right away.”80

  In the Bavarian capital he raised with Röhm the subject of the tensions in the SA, particularly the critical relations between SA and SS. “Röhm sees things the right way, but Hitler won’t hear a word against the SS. His hobbyhorse. The bodyguards!” In the dispute between the SA and the Party he saw himself in the noble role of “mediator.” He resolved to “support Stennes’s legitimate demands on behalf of the SA” but also to combat with all his might any tendency “to mount a putsch against the Party or Hitler.”81

  A few weeks later it was all Goebbels could do to prevent Röhm from dismissing Stennes. As on numerous other visits to Munich, Goebbels convinced himself that the blame for Hitler’s less “activist” attitude was due to the insidious influence of his coterie, the terrible “Munich milieu”: “Afternoon in the café. Boss as bourgeois. Terrible to see him among these Philistines.” On the other hand: “If it comes to a breach, I’ll stand by Hitler, although I think there’s so much that needs reforming at a lower level.”82 Ultimately, it was because—for all his doubts—he was always determined to stick to Hitler that his relationships with other National Socialist politicians such as Stennes, Göring, and Röhm were so fraught: He was not interested in being drawn into internal Party alliances that might ultimately land him in a confrontation with the Party leader. As he saw it, he owed his place in the NSDAP primarily to his special relationship with Hitler, and in no way would he permit any other political ties within the NSDAP to jeopardize this privileged position.

  The extreme adaptability of the Berlin Gauleiter was also apparent in another area. His own view of the Party’s economic policy was that it was badly in need of revising. After the September 1930 election he had written two editorials for Der Angriff calling for the Party to be more specific in its pronouncemen
ts on economic questions. He held that the Party’s twenty-five points, dating from 1920 and declared sacrosanct by Hitler (they included a demand for “a share of large companies’ profits” as well as land reform), could only be a “framework.” Goebbels called on leading Party comrades to assemble in order to “resolve by discussion and exchange of ideas the problems that are in part still contentious or unclear today.”83 And in fact such a session did come about, in December 1930. After consulting “Hitler and a large number of experts,” Goebbels came up with a definition of socialism that immediately met with Hitler’s “enthusiastic” approval: “placing the concept of the people above that of the individual.” Goebbels was certain that “this will find its way into the program.”84

  However, collective deliberations about a future economic program, let alone concrete policy decisions, were not the style favored by Hitler, who was fundamentally more inclined to take a tactical line on such questions. In January 1930 he set up a new economic policy unit at headquarters under Otto Wagener, who then went to work—in competition with other parts of the NSDAP machine—on an economic program. In March 1931, Wagener submitted a paper envisaging a private-sector economy under the supervision and direction of the state. Goebbels was appalled: “Not a trace of socialism left.” He wrote a scathing critique of the paper and tried to encourage Göring to oppose it, but he was not high on socialism. “G. is all about encouraging economic activity,” was Goebbels’s summary of Göring’s pro-business attitude.85

  What is more, in spring 1931 Hans Reupke, another newly appointed economic adviser, produced a leaflet in which he—Reupke was a board member of the Reich Association of German Industry—clearly departed from the earlier nationalization plans of the NSDAP. For Goebbels this was a “downright betrayal of socialism.”86 A few days later he discussed the economic policy with Hitler and allowed himself to be persuaded that Reupke had already been “shaken off.”87 In reality, Hitler never adopted any precise economic program for the Party. Engaging his consultant, Reupke, to write a paper was a clear signal that he wanted nothing to do with socialist experiments. Goebbels gave up trying to induce the Party to clarify its economic policy. It even seems that on his way to state power he ceased to care very much which economic and sociopolitical concepts were deployed to achieve it.

  Goebbels’s self-presentation as a radical, engaged in a daily struggle and under constant threat at his position in the front line, is exemplified by an episode he contrived in March 1931. On March 13, he records in the diary, “someone tried to kill me with a bomb.”88 A package that his office thought looked suspicious was found to contain “explosives”: No one was injured. The next day Der Angriff gave this incident headline treatment.89 A few weeks later it emerged, either as a result of police inquiries or of a leak by former Party employees, that the assassination attempt had clearly been faked by Goebbels himself—and quite crudely at that. The “explosives” consisted of some jumping jacks and a little gunpowder.90 That Goebbels wrote up the “assassination attempt” in his diary as a genuine threat shows his relationship to the truth: Having acted out a charade for public consumption, he then recorded it as a fact in his diary.

  A NEW STENNES CRISIS

  In March 1931 the Republic resorted to tougher measures against the NSDAP. On March 18 the Berlin police imposed a public speaking ban on Goebbels, and on March 20 he discovered shortly before an event in Königsberg that the police had prohibited him from appearing “for fear of a breach of the peace.”91

  When an emergency decree promulgated by the Reich president at the end of March restricted the political parties’ right to demonstrate and campaign, therefore limiting the scope for SA activities, it was bound to exacerbate further the conflict between the “activist” political troops and the “legal” course pursued by the Party leadership. Goebbels saw this as a confirmation of his radical approach: “Long live legality! It’s sickening! Now we’ll have to find other ways of working.” Too many mistakes had been made in the past: “Above all getting too close to the enemy. Now he is swindling us. That’s Göring’s doing. We should have remained an ominous threat and an enigmatic sphinx. Now we’re out in the open. […] Change of approach! Back to stubborn opposition. Struggle, work, action, not negotiation.”92

  With such pronouncements Goebbels projected himself as the spokesman of the SA, but as a Party Gauleiter he inevitably found himself caught between the two front lines, engendering mounting suspicion both in Munich and within the Stennes circle: “There’s a stink in the SA again. Stennes won’t give it a rest. But Munich is making major blunders, too. Headquarters is bringing us down again.” He heard from an SA leader that there was a “strong clique” working against him in Munich. “Hierl, Rosenberg etc., but Strasser, too.”93 On a trip to East Prussia at the end of March he learned from the Danzig Gauleiter, Albert Forster, that there was a similar “stink in the SA” in his area. Stennes, thought Goebbels, was operating everywhere behind the scenes.94 Goebbels was truly prescient in foretelling “the very grave crisis the Party will one day have to go through.”95 But this did not stop him from leaving the capital in these critical days and fulfilling electioneering engagements in Saxony.

  On March 31 Hitler unexpectedly called Goebbels to Weimar. The next day he learned there from Röhm that Stennes had been dismissed for open rebellion. However, Stennes had not reacted passively but had gone on the offensive, sending in the SA to occupy the Party’s Berlin headquarters and the editorial offices of Der Angriff. On April 1 the paper carried a statement by Stennes. Berlin, said Goebbels, was “an anthill.”96 But he came down unequivocally on Hitler’s side—“despite all criticisms.”

  Goebbels suspected that behind the Berlin putsch was the figure of Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, a former Free Corps and secret society leader who had placed himself at the head of an oppositional group within the SA. What he was certain of, however, was that this was “the biggest, and perhaps the last, crisis of the Party.” In the evening both he and Hitler participated in an event at which Goebbels declared his loyalty “to the leader without reservation.”97 Overnight he drove with Hitler to Munich. The putsch was put down from there. Hitler and Goebbels expressed themselves on the subject in the National Socialist press. In Der Angriff Hitler announced that he had given Goebbels “plenipotentiary powers to cleanse the National Socialist movement of all subversive elements,” but the Party newspaper also—to Goebbels’s vexation—gave Stennes space to air his views. Goebbels promptly fired the business manager of Der Angriff, Ludwig Weissauer.98

  The plenipotentiary used the special authority given to him to exclude the “traitors” from the Party. The issue of Der Angriff on April 4 was once again totally under Goebbels’s control and appeared with the banner headline “The End of the Mutinous Gang.” The page contained a two-column spread by Hitler appealing to Party comrades. Goebbels therefore had good reason to regard the revolt as having been “suppressed” after just a few days. Nonetheless, it stuck in his craw that Göring in Berlin had tried to play the leading role himself in the battle with Stennes: “I’ll never forgive Göring for this! People make you despair. He’s a lump of frozen shit.”99

  All the same, Goebbels took his time returning to Berlin. He spent Easter with Hitler in Munich and the surrounding area and only set off for the capital again on April 8. He was hoping, therefore, as in the two previous Stennes crises of 1928 and 1930, that his geographical distance from the scene would prevent him from being drawn too much into the conflict. For all his loyalty to Hitler, he had to be careful not to sever his links with the SA completely. Thus on his return to Berlin he declared that he was ill: He kept engagements and issued statements but avoided public appearances.100

  His collaboration with Stennes’s replacement, Paul Schulz, seemed to get off to a good start; moreover, he established that the Party organization had survived practically unaffected by the crisis.101 He called on the authority of the state, in the form of the police and some bailiffs, to enf
orce the return of the office furniture Stennes had removed.102 In Der Angriff of April 7 he wrote a long declaration of loyalty to Hitler, embracing his “legal” policy.103

  During the Stennes putsch he had kept faith with Hitler; now he laid the blame for the insurgency squarely at the door of headquarters in Munich, this “palace party.”104 A few days later, in time-honored fashion, he conspicuously demonstrated reconciliation with the SA by mustering 4,000 of them in the Sportpalast for a “general roll call.”105

  COURT HEARINGS

  By amending standing orders, the Reichstag had in February 1931 introduced restrictions on parliamentary immunity and made it easier for the law to prosecute members. Furthermore, Parliament decided to permit the courts to force the Reichstag member Joseph Goebbels to appear before them if he persisted in ignoring official summonses.106 A new tidal wave of trials was now about to engulf Goebbels.107

  On April 14 there were two cases to answer: One involved a further insult to the deputy commissioner of police, Bernhard Weiss, for which Goebbels was fined 1,500 Reichsmarks; the other, obstructive public comments on the banning of uniforms, attracting a fine of 200 Reichsmarks.108 The next case came two days later: “These trials are killing me.”109 He was fined 2,000 and 500 Reichsmarks, respectively, by the Berlin regional court for another “Isidor” insult to Weiss and for incitement to violence against Jews, both of which had appeared in Der Angriff the previous June.110

  When he failed to turn up at a court hearing at the end of April—it concerned still more insults printed in Der Angriff—having set off for a conference in Munich instead, the Berlin public prosecutor sent an official by plane to Munich. Goebbels was arrested the same day and brought back to Berlin on the night train in police custody.111 There he was fined another 1,500 Reichsmarks, and two days later he was sentenced to a fine of the same amount and a month’s imprisonment.112 Two days after that he was fined a further 1,000 marks.113 Goebbels complained in an editorial in Der Angriff about the fines that were piling up. In doing so, he also inadvertently revealed that the law’s relentless pursuit of him really was hurting him.114