inexpressible sweetness and power. The Gift of the East!’1
Try as he could, Dr Weiss could not nail him. His prey always dodged in time.
More items were clipped into the police dossier: Munich police were charging
Goebbels with illegal fund raising; Berlin police heard him announce on May 13,
‘The present state is a dungheap and the police president a Jew’; an action was pending
for ‘incitement to class war’; and there were countless breaches of press regulations.
2 The court hearing of the Pastor Stucke case in June lasted all day. Goebbels
spoke for two hours; the six week sentence was reduced to a fine of six hundred
marks. ‘A Jew, Löwenstein, sat on the judge’s bench,’ he observed, ‘otherwise we
should probably have got off scot free… Not a penny shall I pay anyway.’3 He continued
to run rings round the courts; his supporters packing the public galleries hooted
and jeered as he and his lawyers made monkeys out of police witnesses, prosecutors,
130 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
and the bench.4 The fines were derisory. ‘Two hundred marks or twenty days,’ he
recorded, ‘for libelling Ia,’ Weiss’s political police.5
He received his free travel pass. ‘Let my voyaging now commence,’ he wrote, ‘at
the Republic’s expense!’6 The new Reichstag opened on June 13. The twelve Nazis
marched in wearing uniform. Meeting afterwards, the Nazi bloc assigned to him the
portfolios of culture and internal affairs.7 The Strassers blamed him in their publications
for the party’s poor showing in Berlin.8 He sensed Gregor’s hostility, but decided
he could live with it. They were equals now. As he limped down the steps there
was a ripple of applause that he recorded for posterity in his diary. ‘Parliamentarianism,’
he concluded: ‘I’ve seen my fill of it. They won’t find me around much in future.’
With a more measured insight he mused a few days later, ‘The whole show is so
mean and cunning, but so sweet and seductive, that only a few characters emerge
unscathed.’9
After a month the Reichstag, under joint pressure from its communist and Nazi
members, approved an amnesty for all political crimes committed before 1928. Dr
Weiss saw his tormentor’s slate suddenly wiped all but clean. A year later Berlin
police headquarters would endorse his file, ‘All judgements and outstanding cases
against Dr Göbbels have been quashed or annulled on the basis of the Law of Amnesty
passed on July 14, 1928.’
LATE in June 1928 he transferred the gau HQ to No.77 Berliner Strasse in
Charlottenburg—fourteen newly furnished rooms on one floor, ‘not bad going for
eighteen months,’ he reflected.10
His health, never robust, had suffered in the election campaign.11 He now felt perpetually
tired; overshadowing the head- and backaches, which he attributed to nervous
problems, was the permanent agony of his steel-encased lame leg—‘chronic pains
and unpleasantness,’ he would write that autumn, before a phrase which suggests he
was beginning to doubt his own sexuality: ‘plus the malicious gossip that I’m a homosexual.’
12 Such gossip was inevitable. Here he was, a young man of thirty, of brains,
courage, and notoriety, and yet: a bachelor. Seeking company he was as likely to pick
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 131
Tonak or Schweitzer for a walk à deux around the park at Wannsee or a visit to the
lofty new Radio Tower as to scoop up two or three of his female staff for a stroll in
Potsdam.13 ‘I am sick in mind and body,’ he would confess.14 Since doctors found
nothing wrong, he resorted to that most German of remedies, a Kur; that did help
him, or so he imagined, which was what mattered.15 His club foot never ceased
hurting—‘for weeks on end now,’ he would write early in 1929. ‘Sometimes it just
blights my whole day.’16
His worries had been magnified by the onset of his father’s last illness in the late
spring of 1928. Laden with filial remorse Joseph Goebbels visited the paternal home
as often as he could, sat silently watching the grey-bearded old man, wept as he felt
the thin, bony fingers, and romanticized each farewell wave in his diary in case it was
the last.
IN July 1928 Adolf Hitler came to Berlin. Goebbels wrote that he was fond of him
like a father, and staged a huge private meeting for him at Friedrichshain. ‘Although
it was the summer silly season,’ wrote young Horst Wessel admiringly, ‘the hall was
packed out. Who else could do that in high summer?’ New members flooded in after
Hitler’s speech.17 Before Hitler left, Goebbels vented his anger about Dr Otto Strasser,
and the Führer waffled reassuringly about winding up the Strassers’ publishing house
in Berlin. He mentioned that he and his stepsister Angela Raubal would be taking a
trip to the island of Heligoland with Angela’s daughter ‘Geli’—would Dr Goebbels
like to join them? Knowing Geli already, Goebbels jumped at the chance.18
On Heligoland he found himself alone. He limped over to the aquarium and watched
for a while as large, spiky, predator busied itself devouring the smaller fry. It comforted
Goebbels’ own radical beliefs to see how nature in microcosm was as pitiless
as mankind.
HE has met Geli Raubal, Hitler’s barely nineteen year-old niece, in Munich four months
before. Unaware of the nearly forty year-old Hitler’s proprietary interest in her, he
hatched plans to bring her to Berlin.
132 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
He is still pining for Anka Stalherm. But married to the humdrum George Mumme
she lives in Weimar and he has not seen her for years. ‘I must have a good, beautiful
woman!’ he writes in his unpublished diary at the start of 1928.19 Göring has come
back from Sweden married to a beautiful Swedish countess; Hess is marrying his
Ilse.20
His cri de cœur seems answered by a teenaged girl working at headquarters, a girl
of, he writes, almost Asiatic submissiveness.21 ‘I love Tamara von Heede,’ he records.
‘Wonder if she loves me? Hardly. That’s how it always is: what you get, you don’t
want; and what you want, you don’t get.’22 Tamara puzzles the naïve and sexually
innocent gauleiter by being off colour at monthly intervals.23 He bridges these periods
by ogling the wife of Dr Müller and a toothsome Nuremberg maiden he has met
on a train, one Luise Scherff, who is ‘just like a little mother.’24 One evening canoodling
with him in the park Tamara freezes him with a thoughtless remark, perhaps about
his foot. She makes up the next day with a basket of fruit and other delights.25 Their
friendship causes the usual tensions at HQ.26 Meanwhile Anka suddenly returns to
his life: there she is, standing in the doorway of the hotel foyer at Weimar after a
renewed staging of his play ‘The Wanderer’. By his own account Goebbels trembles
and stammers with joy at seeing his long lost love.
For half an hour Anka pours out her heart about her joyless marriage: Mumme has
concealed from her upon marriage that he is impotent from syphilis; her four-month
old son is by another man. Goebbels is under her spell again, it is as though they
never parted. ‘O, l’amour!’ his pen exclaims af
ter he has lain awake all night. ‘I am
like a child!’27 Tamara is disconsolate that Anka has surfaced again from his past;
nevertheless he phones Anka from Berlin and they agree to meet again.28 They drive
over to Erfurt. ‘Her marriage is a mess,’ Goebbels describes, ‘her husband does not
understand this dainty creature at all and insults her. She has a boy [Christian] and
loves me as much as ever. A woman of class. All others pale before her.’ Returning to
Berlin he carefully records that ‘not a breath of an attestation of love’ has passed
between them— ‘But for me it’s as though this precious woman belongs to me, me
alone.’29 A few few days later she phones him twice, weeping, in the middle of the
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 133
night, saying she wants to come to Berlin; divorcing Mumme, he suggests, is her only
escape. She arrives at his apartment but receives only coffee and sympathy as she
rehearses her entire tragic life once more for him.30
‘I have kissed her,’ he writes afterwards, ‘and a lucky star has crossed from her to
me.’ After Anka departs, Tamara phones. ‘Poor Tamara!’, he writes, and: ‘Poor
Anka!’—and many a reader of his diary may agree.
He spends another day with his goddess in Weimar soon after. ‘I love her, she loves
me, neither of us says it but we both know it.’31 At Easter however there is an awkward
scene when her husband shows up. Goebbels capitulates. ‘I’m off. Curtly and
formally took leave of them both… I’m shutting off my heart. For good!Ê Great tasks
wait upon me… Before me stands a nation! Germany!’32
A few days later, great task or no, he phones her Weimar number. Dr Mumme
answers and Dr Goebbels hangs up. ‘God only helps those,’ he writes on a bouquet of
flowers for her, ‘who help themselves. Farewell. ULEX.’33
He is not blind to the fairer sex. There is a Dora, a ‘hysterical lover’ who puts a
letter through his door threatening to poison herself (‘Doesn’t know me too good,’
he comments callously. ‘I’ve already yielded far too much to this hussy. Let her do it
if she really must. I can’t say anything but no.’34) ‘Since I have set eyes again on Anka,’
he sighs, justifying his sexual inactivity, ‘all female beauty pales.’35 It is therefore no
surprise to see him shortly alighting from a train at Weimar on the way home from
Wiesbaden, embracing Anka on the platform and sharing a compartment for a few
minutes until the next halt at Weissenfels. An icy hand may well have clutched at his
heart as she chatters away, because she now hints at leaving Mumme for Goebbels in
Berlin. The ardent suitor takes refuge in the language of a cheap novel: ‘Farewell,
farewell!’ he writes in the diary. ‘She waves until we are out of sight of each other.’36
He spends the next days in a guilty panic. No word comes from Weimar.37 Will she
really leave her Georg? And what then?
Dr Goebbels appraises the alternatives: there is ‘a pretty Miss Böhm’ at Schweinfurt;
there is Willi Hess’s little sister (‘a darling thing, unfortunately not good looking’; he
will find the same trouble with a Miss Bettge on Borkum island too—‘Pity she’s not
134 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
prettier.’38) He has to speak at Weimar late in May, and diffidently phones the Mumme
household. A voice tells him that Madam is away.39 Back in Berlin the next day he
bumps into Dora, who has not poisoned herself after all: few girls do nowadays.
‘Anka is to blame for all this,’ he writes helplessly. ‘She’s brought me to the point
where women are just playthings. The revenge of a creature spurned.’40
For ten days that July he vacations on Borkum island pursuing women, though only
from a safe distance. That ‘crazy [Christine] Pohlmann’ writes to him and he decides
to write her off as well.41 Two days later he has an attractive female in his sights and
the usual Goebbels romance develops: he worships her, from afar; returning to Berlin
on August 2 he has still not spoken to her. ‘I leave here a girl I love,’ he agonizes in
his diary. ‘But I don’t even know her name.’42
She is soon forgotten in Berlin. He is overhauling his gau, appointing Reinhold
Muchow his chief of organisation on July 1, 1928.43 He has resumed work on ‘Michael,’
rewriting, dictating, proof-reading, and dictating it for Eher to publish that autumn.
He goes on a chaotic gau outing down Brandenburg’s waterways, a wasted day were
it not for one beautiful girl. ‘Without a word,’ he romanticizes again, ‘we are in love.
Neither of us betrays this by the slightest sign, but it is so.’44 Chemicals are brewing
within the crippled, now thirty-year old Dr Joseph Goebbels which he still does not
care to test. ‘I’ll go to pot altogether,’ he fears, ‘if I can’t get together with women.’
They are out there, besieging him, but he is searching for a woman that he does not
know. Two days later at Bayreuth, as the curtain goes up on the last act of ‘Tristan’ he
finds a stunning beauty next to him: ‘We partake of a little feast of love, without a
word between us—just two glances, two sighs. And then she’s gone. I look for her! I
come back downstairs as though in a trance. Tristan and this woman… The whole
evening I am at my wit’s end.’45
Matrimony is claiming all his friends. Even Karlheinz Kölsch, ‘Pille,’ his closest
friend and rival from those Freiburg days, gets married that August. Tipsy and reeking
of liquor he throws his arms around the little gauleiter and kisses him; Goebbels
recoils, fearful that they might be seen. ‘Ghastly,’ he exclaims in his diary. ‘Kölsch
always was an arsehole.’ Together they pen a postcard to Anka at Weimar.46
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 135
So it goes on: his roving eye feasts on every female, spinster or spoken for, and
ravishes or rejects them all—the arrestingly beautiful wife of Dr Robert Ley (‘a
terrible tramp’), and a pompous editor’s wife with whom he falls deeply in love for,
probably, hours at a time.47 To complicate matters the banker Karl Müller phones
one day that he’s bringing his family to hear him speak, and it turns out that his
daughter is the nameless one from Borkum; anonymous no longer, her allures somehow
diminish.48 Besides, each time his train passes through Weimar he peers out,
hoping for a glimpse of Anka.49
In September the chase is suddenly on again. This time, his quarry is young Hannah
Schneider, a true Germanic beauty from Mecklenburg. She is a member of the Party’s
young women’s order. After a hard day’s work at his desk, Goebbels begin to
look forward to negotiations with the order which he previously hated. He adores
Hannah’s natural childishness (she is in her late ’teens.) She is pretty and clever, and
another virgin. It is surely interesting that he writes of her as this ‘glisteningly clean
maiden.’50 He takes her to her first movie show: the star, the gorgeous, swashbuckling
Emil Jannings, sends shivers down his spine. Hannah too is like a little girl, ‘full
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 22