the credit for having impinged the movement so rapidly on the Berlin public’s consciousness.
The man had extraordinary talents for oratory and organisation. There
was nothing he couldn’t turn his hand to. The members were devoted to him. The
S.A. would have let itself be torn to pieces for him. Göbbels was like Hitler him-
100 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
self… He took care of the injured—he really was a first class leader, a leader with
class.’46
At first the ‘Judenpresse’ ignored Goebbels. Denied the oxygen of publicity, he
forced bloody confrontations with the communists. After an initial blooding in Spandau
on January 25, when two hundred of them infiltrated intending to disrupt his speech,
Goebbels’s ‘troops’ fought three battles, at Cottbus, in Berlin’s sleazy Pharus Rooms,
and at suburban Lichterfelde.
Goebbels had sent five truckloads of S.A. men to Cottbus to boost the puny local
contingent during a two-day Nazi ‘freedom rally.’ It was an icy January night, and the
men drove into Cottbus at dawn where the local S.A. provided billets. ‘We wanted
to show them,’ wrote Muchow, ‘that the Berlin S.A. turned up everywhere we were
needed.’ The march through Cottbus began: ‘Our Doktor [Goebbels] was with Daluege
at Kaiser-Wilhelm Platz, taking the salute.’47 As Goebbels delivered an impromptu
speech there were already taunts of ‘long live the communist Internationale!’ A pitched
battle broke out. The police and soldiers waded in with truncheons and rifle butts.
But the S.A. stood their ground and attacked ‘like true soldiers, just as out Doktor
had taught, over and over again.’ The S.A. had two seriously injured, the police four.
But the blood had been shed for naught: ‘The entire Berlin “Judenpresse”,’ lamented
Muchow, ‘breathed not a word about our Cottbus demonstration.’
The Strassers’ Arbeiterzeitung (masthead slogan: ‘The workers’ only newspaper in
Berlin not beholden to loan-capital’) published Goebbels’ appeal for funds for ‘our
wounded S.A. comrades.’ Seven hundred marks flowed in. Goebbels owed a lot to
the Strasser brothers.48 Otto had also arranged for Hans Steiger, an editor on a bourgeois
Berlin newspaper, to provide cheap lodgings in the rooming house run by Frau
Steiger at No.5, Am Karlsbad. No doubt he wanted to keep an eye on Goebbels. Mrs
Steiger provided a full-length mirror to enable him to practice public-speaking postures;
but her husband erred badly, trespassing on Goebbels’ feelings by circulating a
ballad that touched upon the gauleiter’s private live and using a limping, lop-sided
meter designed, Goebbels felt sure, to mock his disability.49 Goebbels, it turned out,
could stand any amount of satire so long as it was not levelled at him.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 101
The second great battle happened in the rundown Pharus rooms, a traditional
communist meeting place behind No.124 Müller Strasse in Berlin’s working class
suburb of Wedding, on February 11. There were two hundred communists among
his thousand strong audience. As Goebbels spoke on ‘The Collapse of the Bourgeois
Class State’ trouble broke out and Daluege sent in the S.A. to evict the first troublemakers.
The communists retreated but the Nazis held the high ground, the gallery. In
the few minutes before the police could intervene, the S.A. had roughed up eightythree
communists. When Goebbels resumed speaking, the platform was littered with
bloodstained stretcher cases.50 One man, Albert Tonak, 21, was hospitalized with
concussion.51 In the VB report Goebbels described how he had learned that a surgeon
called Levy was planning to delve into Tonak’s skull; one hundred of his S.A. men,
‘unemployed proletarians in brown shirts,’ had stormed the hospital and rescued
him. Goebbels added an appeal for funds to establish a Party clinic of seven or eight
rooms to treat their own emergency cases.52 Tonak became the Little Doctor’s chauffeur,
and later died on Hitler’s eastern battlefields. Edmund Behnke, an S.A. man
also injured in the Pharus rooms, would lapse into a coma and die in the clinic in
1930.53 Hanno Maikowski, another S.A. veteran of the battle, would be the last Nazi
to be killed in the struggle for power, in January 1933.54
After this battle the press howled with rage—and more funds flowed in. Goebbels
had found the right formula. He claimed that anonymous benefactors donated a
four-seater Benz motor car to the gau, but ‘Isidor’ Weiss determined that this vehicle,
licence tag 26637-IA, had previously belonged to a merchant bank, Grundman
& Co., that the two thousand marks purchase price had come from the Freedom
League, and that it was registered in Goebbels’ own name.55 By late February treasurer
Franz Wilke could report that the gau now had eight to ten thousand marks in
cash and assets.56 Lecturing the Freedom League, his cash cows, on ‘My Political
Awakening’ on the fifteenth the gauleiter again claimed to have been plotting clandestinely
with Hitler in Munich as early as 1919, and to have fought in the resistance
against the French and Belgians occupying the Ruhr.57
102 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Just four days after the Pharus rooms fight, Goebbels and his S.A. hooligans filled
all fifteen hundred seats at a hall in Spandau. The left, still reeling, stayed away. Their
newspapers uttered dire warnings to the workers to keep their eyes on this unexpected
‘fascist menace’. The police watched with mounting fury as control of the
streets passed into the hands of the political mobs.
A perverted sense of pride seized the S.A. Chronicler Reinhold Muchow doubted
that the brownshirts of Stuttgart, Weimar, or Hamburg could have survived such
battles. Now, he observed, the Berlin Jews saw the writing on the wall. More printing
ink would flow against the Party during February 1927 than in all three months
before.
A high water mark in this carnage came on March, just three days after ‘Isidor’s’
appointment. Goebbels had ordered a nighttime function of the Berlin S.A. to be
staged at Trebbin, a little town twenty miles away. About seven hundred S.A. men
proudly wearing their uniform of jackboots, flat caps, breeches and brown shirts
made their way to Trebbin: a bonfire blazed on the hillside, the flags and standards
foregathered, and Goebbels played organ music to them and then spoke. ‘These sons
of the Brandenburg countryside,’ reported Muchow in purple prose, ‘hung on every
word of this man, their appointed leader in life and death; something ineffable united
them with the sacred soil on which they stood, soil steeped in blood throughout its
history.’ The next day he addressed them again on Trebbin’s market square, a clever,
mocking speech, scoffing at their State ‘in all its beauty and dignity,’ proclaiming that
blood was still the best cement to hold them together in their onward struggle against
‘Jewish marxism,’ and ending with the battle cry of the S.A., ‘Deutschland—awake!’58
So far, so good. The trouble began as the seven hundred Nazis piled into the train
back to Berlin. Sitting near the front, they found twenty-three bandsmen of the Red
Front’s Se
venth District (Brandenburg) and a communist member of the provincial
parliament, Paul Hoffmann. By the time the train pulled into East Lichterfelde station
every window had been shattered. As the Nazis jumped out a shot rang out and
Waldemar Geyer, leader of the S.A.’s first regiment (Berlin-Brandenburg) was hit in
the stomach. Another S.A. man was grazed on the head by a bullet. The police stormed
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 103
the platform and arrested several Nazis. They found the communist bandsmen cowering
on the floor amongst the shattered glass, splintered wood, and rocks; eighteen
of them were injured, twelve seriously. Hoffmann was barely recognizable, his face
smeared with blood. Twelve bullet holes peppered the train. The band’s instruments
were no longer playable. A thousand more Nazis had meanwhile arrived outside the
station to join the S.A. for a march through Berlin’s bourgeois western suburbs. The
gunfire caused uproar. Goebbels, Daluege and gau manager Dagobert Dürr arrived
in their dark-blue limousine, a seven-seater Opel-Landaulet, to storms of applause.
‘Where the road curved,’ wrote one S.A. man, ‘there stood our Doktor in his car…
Standing with arm raised he saluted us and looked into our faces.’ Goebbels would
claim at the resulting court hearings to have called for discipline and calm as their
injured comrades were carried out of the station.59 The owner of a neighbouring
soap-store testified however that after an injured thirty-five year communist was
carried into a taxi two Nazis had torn its door open: one, a thin young man, pulled a
pistol out of his pants pocket, and shouted, ‘I’m going to shoot the dog dead!’ The
other, a little man with a right club foot that turned inwards, had dissuaded him.60
They marched past Steglitz city hall and on through west Berlin. Wherever Jews
were spotted they were set upon and clubbed to the ground.61 At Wittenberg Platz
where eight thousand people had gathered Goebbels made a speech. ‘The reds have
spilled our blood,’ he shrieked. ‘We’re not going to allow ourselves to be treated as
second class citizens any more.’ He ended with a transparent hint: ‘Now don’t all go
chasing off massacring those Jews down Kurfürstendamm!’62 ‘Deutschland—awake!’
came the response.
Those were his methods. Horst Wessel, soon to become commander of No.5 Sturm
based on the communist-infested Alexander Platz area, was in the thick of it all.
‘March through Neukölln,’ he summarized. ‘Eight hundred against tens of thousands.
Ê .Ê . We carried it off! That’s the main thing. We were the first to carry it off. Then
Battle of the Pharus rooms, four hundred versus three thousand; ten badly injured,
but victory. Gunfight on East Lichterfelde station, three injured but victory. Victory
everywhere the S.A. goes into action : everything for the movement!Ê .Ê . We relied
104 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
only on ourselves, that was our strength.’ ‘We accomplished what no other movement
had in Germany,’ wrote Wessel with bitter irony in 1929, ‘namely to unite the
entire people: because they were all united against us—incredibly united.’63
Goebbels now had two more men in the hospital. Eight had been arrested, several
would draw prison sentences. ‘Isidor’ Weiss ordered his Charlottenburg and Moabit
section HQs ransacked for weapons, and for several days the Red Front exacted
revenge on any Nazis caught alone in the streets. They had captured the Party ID of
one Nazi, and splashed its photograph on placards all over Berlin two days later:
WANTED—DEAD OR ALIVE.64 ‘The National Socialists,’ reported the police, ‘charged
into the communists with a fusillade of revolver shots and wielding steel flagpoles
like lances, leaving nine slightly and five seriously injured on the battlefield.’65
Goebbels’ version in Völkischer Beobachter differed. ‘The first shot fired by the Red
assassins,’ he claimed, ‘hit one of the two police constables in the forearm. He appealed
to our S.A. for help, shouting: “Guys, help us, we can’t handle it on our
own!”’66 While the police however accused Goebbels of exulting in the violence and
referring to a ‘battle won’ he judged only by results: four hundred more Berliners
joined the party, bringing its membership to three thousand.
The Strasser brothers despaired, preferring reason and logic to brute force. The
‘Judenpresse’ seized upon the differences between them and articles appeared in the
communist Welt am Abend, the Berliner Tageblatt and the equally Jewish Vossische Zeitung
gloating over a ‘feud in the house of Hitler.’67
STILL perfecting his techniques, Goebbels stood in front of the folding triptych mirror
in Mrs Steiger’s drawing room practising each oratorical pose and gesture.68 He
rode the mood of his audience, leading them on a tide of invective to to a hysterical,
cheering, table-rattling finale. He had instinctively developed the art of ceremonial
too, to bring audiences to fever pitch—the flags, the bands, the deliberately delayed
arrival. He spoke at locations from Weinheim in the south to Hamburg in the north.69
Writing in the Letters on April 1 he prescribed how to deal with hecklers. ‘You don’t
seem to realize that you’re at a National Socialist meeting,’ the speaker was to shout
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 105
at the unfortunate interrupter. ‘I’ll not be able to guarantee that you won’t be made
into a useful member of the human race by a suitable head massage.’
When I speak in Essen or in Düsseldorf or in Elberfeld [he had written once]
it’s like a holiday for me… We don’t have to search for the enemy, he’s in our
midst, lurking in the audience ready to pounce. When I come into the hall a
thousand voices shout Down With Him, there’s a hooting and a screeching. Then
the struggle begins—two, three hours, sometimes longer… And the miracle
happens. What was a wild, howling mob turns into human beings of flesh and
blood who think and feel just as we do, only more tormented, more trampled on,
with an immense hunger for light and succour… And gradually the people are
re-created before my very eyes. I see just fists and eyes, and there is a holy fire in
those eyes.70
The Ruhr gau held its annual rally on Sunday April 25. Here too the party’s ranks
were swelling. ‘Essen is dominated by the swastika & our flag!’, Rudolf Hess boasted
to his fiancée Ilse.71 Goebbels mailed a picture postcard of the huge assembly to Anka
Stalherm. While he and Hitler addressed the fourteen thousand invited Party members
however Goebbels was seething with rage: people had drawn his attention to a
scurrilous article published anonymously in the Strasser’s newspapers on April 23,
entitled ‘Results of Race Mixing.’ (Its secret author was Erich Koch).
It is well known [this venomous piece began] that miscegenation results in
mental disequilibria… Physical equilibrium is disturbed, either by disease or by
the stunted growth of individual limbs or by other physical defects.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 17