wrote, ‘it’s full steam ahead into the great asphalt jungle Berlin.’
94 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
HE who held Berlin held Germany. Winning the ‘Red city’ was the task that confronted
Dr Goebbels. Hitler gave him authority to rule the gau with an iron fist.
‘November 5,’ recorded Goebbels. ‘Hitler. Munich. Signs my terms.’21
The Reich capital was like no other city in Europe—over-populated, throbbing
with life twenty-four hours a day. It was an international hodgepodge of races, the
collision point of western and eastern cultures. This gigantic, sprawling heap of bricks
and stone and asphalt was divided into twenty boroughs varying in size from wealthy
Zehlendorf, with 470,000 inhabitants, to the proletarian slum Kreuzberg with
370,000. Politically the city was a red stronghold like the towns all around—
Oranienburg, Nauen, Fürstenwalde, and Zossen. Goebbels would find only a few
hundred paid up Nazis in Berlin; in the whole Reich there were still only forty-nine
thousand. In the March 1925 presidential election 308,591 Berliners had voted for
the communist (K.P.D.) candidate Ernst ‘Teddy’ Thälmann. In the municipal election
that October, 52.2 percent had voted for the marxist parties, the K.P.D. increasing
its vote to 347,382. Its front organisations like the Red League of Combat
Veterans (Frontkämpferbund) and the Central Office of Red Aid (Zentralstelle der Roten
Hilfe) were funded by the Soviet embassy and trade mission.
Thus Goebbels had a highly visible opponent. Besides, he would be doing battle for
the first time with the Jews. ‘Berlin,’ Muchow observed, ‘is Red and Jewish in equal
measure.’22 In 1816 there had been only 3,400 Jews, but this figure had swollen to
36,500 by 1871, and to one hundred thousand at the turn of the century. By the time
of Goebbels’ arrival, one-third of Germany’s half-million Jews were concentrated in
the city.23 They made up 4.3 percent of its population: but they provided over half
Berlin’s lawyers, fifteen percent of the real estate agents, and nearly eleven percent
of the doctors; they dominated the wealthy ranks of Berlin’s dentists, pharmacists,
judges, public prosecutors, and academics, and maintained a near stranglehold on
the world of the arts. While Mosse’s Berliner Tageblatt would become one of Goebbels’
principal enemies, he would lump all the bourgeois newspapers into the general
category of ‘Judenpresse.’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 95
When he said that the real power was in Jewish hands there was a grain of truth in
it. Dr Heinrich Brüning, Chancellor of the Reich from 1930 to 1932, could find only
one bank not controlled by them. After ordering a government inquiry, he directed
that its findings be kept secret for fear of provoking anti-Semitic riots.24 A series of
scandals surrounding Jewish swindlers like Kutisker, Sklarek, and the Barmat brothers,
paraded through the courts.25 Many of the judges and public prosecutors in Berlin
were Jewish. Goebbels would portray the Berlin police as largely Jewish controlled;
in fact of the top officials only the powerful vice-police chief (Vize-Polizeipräsident)
who directed section Ia, the three hundred man political police force, forerunner of
the Gestapo, was a Jew.
He was not just any Jew. Forty-six years old, the son of a millionaire grain merchant,
Dr Bernhard Weiss had served like his three brothers with distinction in the
war, won the Iron Cross and become the first Jew ever to be accepted for the Prussian
higher civil service.26 His army personnel file speaks of his highly developed
sense of honour but also his over-developed ambition, conceit, immodesty, and ‘a
powerful over-sensitivity tending to cloud his clarity of judgement.’27 Appointed
deputy police chief on March 17, 1927 in the red brick police HQ on Alexander
Platz, the diminutive (five-foot-four) Bernhard Weiss would become Goebbels’ sworn
enemy—not just because of the rigour with which he deployed his fourteen thousand
truncheon-wielding uniformed police in the struggle for the streets of Berlin,
but because he was a Jew and even his best friends said he looked like a caricature of
one.28
Dr Goebbels would shun no libel to blacken his name. Instinctively carrying on an
ancient tradition of name-calling, he seized on his nickname of ‘Isidor’ and commissioned
a scurrilous Nazi marching song about him.29 He would highlight every malfeasance
of the criminal demimonde and identify it as Jewish. In the Weimar republic,
he was unfortunately not always wrong. In 1930 Jews would be convicted in
forty-two of 210 known narcotics smuggling cases; in 1932 sixty-nine of the 272
known international narcotics dealers were Jewish. Jews were arrested in over sixty
percent of the cases of running illegal gambling dens; 193 of the 411 pickpockets
96 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
arrested in 1932 were Jews. In 1932 no fewer than thirty-one thousand cases of
fraud, mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews.30
Statistical comparisons are of course usually odious, but it was against this background
that Goebbels now started his campaign. He would concentrate initially on
the western boroughs Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg, and Tiergarten,
where over half Berlin’s Jews had settled. They had originally populated the dishevelled
streets around the railroad termini of central and north western Berlin where
they had arrived from the east and from Galicia, but as they had prospered they had
descended on the leafier western boroughs. Over thirteen percent of Wilmersdorf’s
196,000 inhabitants were Jews.31
His battle against the Jews turned into a battle against one man, the deputy police
chief Dr Weiss. The sheer scale of the legal battle fought between them can be judged
from the court records. The police targeted the Nazi gauleiter with no fewer than
forty court actions; Weiss himself was involved in twenty-three cases; Hitler came
only eighth, with sixteen. Goebbels and Weiss would clash head on in four groups of
trials, involving ten specific charges against Goebbels and a score more against his
editors and journalists. In addition Weiss started nine other court actions, including
three against Gregor Strasser, for calling him Isidor. Nearly all of these immensely
complex cases were appealed all the way up the German legal system, but he secured
sixty convictions (including nineteen against Dr Goebbels). To non-Germans
unfamiliar with the stiffness of Prussia, the pomposity of a civil servant resorting to
such legal sanctions seems breathtakingly pointless and even self-defeating. His first
action, in May 1927, was against a Berlin newsvendor who had displayed a Völkischer
Beobachter featuring a competent and by no means hostile sketch of Dr Weiss, on his
newsstand; the unfortunate newsvendor went to jail for a month.32 ‘The mere application
of the name Isidor, whereas the Police Vice President’s first name is in reality
Bernhard, was a deliberate and purposeful insult,’ argued Weiss’s superior, Zörgiebel,
on June 1, demanding the Völkischer Beobachter editor’s prosecution too.33 In a telling
lapsus linguæ police chief Zörgiebel’s indictmen
t of Goebbels dated March 2, 1928
actually accused him of libelling ‘the Polizeiprasident Dr. Weiss’—thus accidentally
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 97
conceding what all Berlin already knew, that it was his deputy who called the shots,
and not he.34
Tirelessly and at taxpayers’ expense Weiss fought the battles against Goebbels and
his newspaper: the court dockets ooze with his cold fury at irreverent cartoons (Weiss
asking a policeman who demands the arrest of a communist thug: ‘Ban them? Why—
did he attack a Jew?’); at its caricatures (a bespectacled, big-nosed donkey splaylegged
on thin ice)35, and even at a crossword puzzle, whose solution turned out to
be: ‘Get out Angriff until Isidor’s defeated.’36
ON November 7, 1926 Goebbels arrived in Berlin.37 Dr. Otto Strasser met him at the
station.
Goebbels’ own legend, written up as Battle for Berlin, would have him hurrying
straight from the Anhalt station to a packed public meeting. The truth was more
prosaic. The Berlin gau was penniless and in disarray. He made his first public speech
at a memorial ceremony organised on the ninth, the anniversary of Hitler’s failed
Munich putsch, by the party’s Women’s Order (Frauenorden) in the Veterans’ Building
(Kriegervereinshaus) in Chaussée-Strasse. When Otto Strasser expressed irritation that
Goebbels had arrived late, and had squandered money on a taxi, the new gauleiter
replied: ‘On the contrary. I would have arrived in two cars if I could have. The
people must see that our firm is up and running.’ In his speech he expressed admiration
for the men who had gunned down the Jewish politician Dr Walther Rathenau
four years earlier. (For this remark he later summoned to police HQ; but the resulting
prosecution was subsequently abandoned.38)
On the same day he issued a famous Circular No.1 to all gau officials beginning, ‘As
of today I am taking over the Berlin-Brandenburg gau as gauleiter.’ Addressing the
unappetizing conditions at the ‘opium den’ in Potsdamer Strasse, he decreed that gau
HQ was neither a flop-house nor a waiting room; in future Party members would
need an appointment to speak with him. His circular displayed both realism and
clever psychology. While appointing the troublesome and ambitious S.A. commander
Kurt Daluege—who was twenty-nine—as his deputy, he simultaneously downgraded
98 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the former Greater Berlin gau to the rank of Ortsgruppe , or local, and downgraded
the present locals to sections.39 This made for a tighter ship and fewer illusions. Defining
the role of the militant S.A. he wrote: ‘S.A. and S.S. are the instruments whereby we
shall attain power,’ and he ruled that neither was to appear in public without his prior
consent. He ended the circular with the promise: ‘Adolf Hitler will visit the gau as
soon as we have become a united force and one to be reckoned with.’40
The Strasser brothers were aghast at Goebbels’ arrival in ‘their’ capital. But over
the coming months he forced a level of activity that Berlin had not seen before; he
founded a Nazi speakers’ school, he developed a constant, intrusive, drum-beating
propaganda, he provoked clashes with the communists that hit Berlin’s newspaper
headlines time and again. On Sunday November 14 he led a deliberately provocative
propaganda march through the working-class suburb of Neukölln which aroused
both fury and consternation among the local communists; the newspapers reported
that in the ensuing disorders use was made of ‘missiles, knuckle-dusters, clubs, and
even pistols.’41 Cutting out the dead wood, he threw out half of their members. To
secure their finances he founded an elitest Freedom League of three or four hundred
Berliners pledged to contribute ten percent of their income in return for promises
of later rewards.42 His first imperative was to finance new premises for the gau in the
city centre; his second, to fund a marching band of forty or fifty musicians with a full
time instructor; his third, to purchase motor transport. ‘Thus,’ summarized Muchow,
‘job will follow upon job until the Freedom League is confronted, as Dr Goebbels
puts it, with its ultimate task: the order to occupy and clear out the Reich Chancellery!’
At the end of December Goebbels moved into new offices at No.44 Lützow
Strasse, four office rooms with all mod. cons. and two telephone lines.
His tactical object was to capture the communists’ pawns, the unemployed hordes
of Berlin. Typical of his S.A. foot soldiers was the young law student Horst Wessel,
whose diary we now have. Aged just nineteen, he had joined the Party that autumn.
‘How I came to the National Socialists?’ he asked. ‘Out of disillusion really. My nationalist
radicalism, or rather my radical nationalism had not found a home. But the
Nazis, as they were already called, were radical—radical in every respect.’ Wessel
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 99
had been a member of the Bismarck- and then Viking League since 1922, but these
organisations had just played soldiers. Goebbels’ gau was, he soon found, different.
Goebbels put the accent on socialism. ‘The rightwing parties spurned us for our socialist
slant,’ wrote Wessel, ‘and they weren’t all that wrong, because National Socialists
had more in common with the [communist] R.F.B. [Rote Frontkämpferbund]
than with the [rightwing] Stahlhelm.’ At first he found it hard to follow the new Nazi
policies. ‘But unlike earlier, I now began to think politics.’43
During December Goebbels reorganized Berlin’s S.A. into three regiments
(Standarten). He tightened discipline, banning smoking and drinking on duty. On
November 20 he met section leaders (Kreisleiter) and laid down guidelines for the
future. Later than month he spoke in the Veterans’ Building on ‘Germany, Colony or
State?’ Scores of new members joined that same evening. Two weeks later eighteen
hundred people crowded in to hear him speak on ‘The Road to Power.’ A breathless
unanimity replaced the brawling and bickering of previous gau meetings. Speaking
at a beerhall in Schöneberg to the Freedom League elite he assured them that they
would be on the inside track when they seized power44. Police agents saw him swear
in eight new members that night. ‘Isidor’s’ political police, he announced, had just
charged him with having praised Rathenau’s assassins.45
Horst Wessel was one of those dedicated to the Party. ‘No sacrifice in time or
money,’ he would write, ‘no danger of arrest or violence could scare me off… The
Sturmabteilungen, the S.A., were the stewards, the movement’s fist against the police
and the marxists. The structure itself was copied from the communists—sections
instead of locals, the cell-system; our press advertising and propaganda clearly betrayed
their [communist] inspiration. The vitality of this new movement was vast,
best demonstrated by the defections to us from the marxist camp.’ Goebbels created
an atmosphere of constant activity. ‘To Dr Göbbels [sic] alone,’ wrote Wessel, ‘goes
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