True, he had weightier matters on his mind. ‘Sunday morning,’ he jotted on April
15. ‘We march, right into the communist districts. I stand in the thick of the mêlee
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 155
and am recognized. Our men march unflinching through the catcalls and whistles of
the Reds.’5 He was planning ahead for the Nuremberg rally in August and for an open
air rally in Berlin in September as a prelude to the important November municipal
elections.
Constantly expanding his horizons, on May 10 he launched a National Socialist
League of Schoolchildren at a jamboree of one thousand eager girls and boys. Cash
was always a problem however.6 He pleaded with Angriff not to court a renewed
prohibition. Finding in one issue a blatant libel on their foreign minister Gustav
Streseman he himself ordered all unsold copies recalled—not that he was loath to
wound the statesman.7 ‘This plenipotentiary of German democracy,’ he called him,
‘somewhat fat, jaundice-hued, perspiring, his little tricky eyes bedded carefully in
cushions of fat, a smooth, rectangular forehead topped by an enormous expanse of
bald head, there he stands, in the midst of his beloved Jews.’
THAT Easter outing to the Harz with Anka and George Mumme crowds his memory
for weeks. ‘Why must I lose out on Lady Luck?’ he ponders. ‘Probably so that everybody
in Germany is the happier one day.’ ‘Anka is everywhere,’ he adds. ‘But she
won’t declare herself.’8 Travelling to Cologne on an unclean Polish train, he takes the
fountain pen she gave him and writes her a plea to tell him all her innermost thoughts.9
Later in April Dr Mumme comes to Berlin and the two rivals for her affections drive
out for a coffee together and a chat about everything but the one thing that unites
them.10
Suddenly there is a new flavour of the month. Its name is Xenia (‘Stranger’), another
teenaged girl, and Goebbels risks a first letter to her just after writing to Anka.11
Xenia von Engelhardt’s unexpected visit to Dr Goebbels is the start of a platonic
friendship which endures almost to the end of his bachelor days. She wangles her
way past the sentinels posted on his heart by the usual wiles, pouring out her woes
about her unfaithful boyfriend, laughing, blushing, and instinctively gauging his needs.12
Once she stages a scene and turns on her heel; then stalks back and spends a night
with him which he describes as glückdurchbebt, quaking with happiness. By May 4
156 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
they have captured each other, each presuming victory. They take in a Greta Garbo
movie (another ‘divine woman,’ sighs Goebbels). The diary glimpses them motoring
off with the bickering Mr and Mrs Schweitzer for a weekend at Fürstenberg. After
another tiff, Xenia storms off, returns, knocks on his door. He does not open—he is
reading the Sunday papers and, yet again, Moeller van den Bruck’s ‘The Third Reich.’
That afternoon they go for a row, and make up again. ‘And then,’ records Goebbels,
picking his words carefully, ‘comes a long, blessed night, filled with silence. Xenia is
all modesty and sacrifice.’13
Back at his lodgings he finds a letter from the eternal temptress, Anka. She hopes
to see him at Weimar. ‘Poor Anka,’ he notes, ‘but she wants it no other way.’
I’m arriving Friday 11:51 A.M. [he scribbles tersely]. Will you book a room at
the Kaiserin Augusta? I’ll stay until Saturday morning. Unfortunately can’t stay
longer. In haste.Ê .Ê . Your ULEX.14
At Weimar Anka realizes that Xenia was coming between them and bursts into
tears. He returns to Berlin early. Here Xenia phones him, fearful on account of Weimar
and Anka, as the smug gauleiter records.15 Vacillating between the two women, he
writes back in Berlin, ‘I love Xenia a lot, because she is so young and unberührt [sexually
innocent] and all self sacrifice and goodness. Anka is too scatterbrained.’16 A
letter comes from Anka with her photograph.
My dear Anka … [he writes back]. On Sunday I too kept thinking of you… So
it’s very unfair of you to reproach me for having left so early. There was no choice;
besides, what matters is not how long, but how we meet. What d’you say I come
back to Weimar on Sunday week?Ê … But then we’ll probably have to hang around
with G. all day and can’t talk about the things we’re interested in.
At this instant in his complex epistolic devotions, Xenia arrives. Goebbels concludes
his letter to Anka with a hurried evasion: ‘Sorry can’t write much today…
I’m about to fly to Dortmund.’ But just as he is, in fact, dining at his lodgings with the
pure and innocent Xenia, the phone rings. A voice announce, ‘Hitler here—’; he is
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 157
in Berlin. Unable to conceal his joy, Goebbels dashes off the last line of the letter to
Anka: ‘Life is beautiful, O Queen! Yours, ULEX,’ and, abandoning Xenia, he hurries
off to Hitler. There is no doubting his order of priorities now.17
GOEBBELS sat with Hitler and Hess that night until two A.M. Hitler asked if he would
take over the Reichspropagandaleitung, propaganda at national level, travelling down
to Munich every fortnight for this with a second home there. Goebbels was uncertain,
and Hitler tried to tempt him. ‘After the Party Rally,’ the gauleiter noted, ‘we
shall all motor down to Italy for study purposes… I am to get a new Mercedes just
for this.’ The question was left unresolved18 and in July Hitler again failed to tempt
Goebbels down to Munich to this end.19
In Berlin, he felt he was somebody. His S.A. was growing fast. On May 26, at
Frankfurt on Oder, he took the salute at a parade of two thousand S.A. men and
heard the bands play a stirring new march with words written by Horst Wessel, Die
Fahne Hoch! (‘Hold the Flag High’). Later it would become a second national anthem.
He itched to use the S.A. to seize power although Hitler had told him, ‘We must
now learn to wait and above all avoid a ban.’20 Hitler had good reason to fear a ban.
The communists had begun violent disturbances in Berlin; in fighting after they threw
up barricades on May Day nine were killed and one thousand arrested.21 To Goebbels’
disappointment Grzesinski banned his main opponent, the militant Red Front. In the
resulting debate demanded by the communists on June 8 Goebbels spoke for forty
minutes using language that differed little from theirs. ‘What we have in Germany,’
he argued, ‘is not a State but a plantation of international capitalism, a colony of the
world’s tribute-enforcers which is not one iota different from a Black Bantustan in
central Africa.’ The essence of their ministers’ policy must be foreign, not domestic
policy. ‘They brandish the palm frond abroad,’ he scoffed, ‘and the police truncheon
at home. They are skulking pacifists abroad, but bloodthirsty militarists at home,
determined to choke any nationalist resistance at birth.’ ‘They sign slave-dictates
abroad and enact a law for the Protection of the Republic at home!’ Recalling that it
158 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
was Severing who had banned Hitler from speaking, Goebbels mocked: ‘Ev
ery Jew,
international pacifist, and traitor has the right of free speech but not a German soldier
four times wounded on the battlefield, on the pretext that he is a foreigner.’ The
Nazi Party had, he recalled, been dissolved in Berlin although it had erected no barricades.
‘We just tossed a lush out of a public meeting after boxing his ears.’ Dr. Weiss
had arrested seven hundred of his men returning from Nuremberg, which had cost
thirty-six of them their jobs. The Reichstag itself had annulled Gregor Strasser’s
immunity because he had dared to call the Republic a ‘moneybags-colony’. Countless
civil servants had been disciplined for joining the National Socialists.
Goebbels teasingly added that he had no intention of mentioning the private affairs
of the Prussian minister of the interior— ‘Whether or not for instance Mr Grzesinski
travels with his “lovely wife” to Vienna and it turns out the lady’s not his “lovely wife”
at all’—they were purely a question of taste.22 Nor would he dwell upon the fact
their police president had been chief carnival clown of Mainz before the war (‘Don’t
get me wrong. We’re not complaining that he was chief carnival clown. Merely that
he still is.’) As for Dr Weiss (‘whom we must not call Isidor’) he had now sued them
twenty-eight times for calling him a Jew. ‘So this police chief has himself recognized
how demeaning it is to be a Jew, and he considers it a libel to be properly identified
by what we would call his religion or what he would call his race.’ ‘The time will
come,’ he shrilled in his peroration, ‘when it will not be our Party which brings this
system crashing down, but the people itself.’23
Once more that month, June 1929, he addressed the Reichstag, on the suffocating
Law for the Protection of the Republic.
We National Socialists want there to be no doubt: we do not support political
murder. In our opinion the day must one day dawn in Germany when it will be
possible legitimately to hang all of those who have toppled the German people
into the abyss of misfortune.
After blandly reading out, to loud protests, a letter written by ‘the Jewish megaswindler
Julius Barmat to the former chancellor Heinrich Bauer promising him ‘an-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 159
other thousand or fifteen hundred U.S. dollars’ if needed, Goebbels retorted that in
forty years their former Kaiser had not had so many people charged with lèse majesté
as often as Braun had wielded the hated Law. He hurled this parting shot at the
protesters: ‘Once we have [the absolute majority] in the Reich, we shan’t need a Law
for the Protection of the Republic. We’ll hang the lot of you!’24 He happily noted
afterwards: ‘The Reds foam with rage.’25 The Reichstag adjourned for the summer
amidst satisfying scenes of tumult.
THE stage was gradually filling with the characters who would dominate this, already
the last one-third of Joseph Goebbels’ life. He knew young Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s
deputy chief of propaganda, as ‘a small, fine man, good natured but perhaps a bit
indecisive; a Strasser product.’26 On Hermann Göring he was ambivalent: he had got
to know the overweight, bemedalled aviator better after sharing a platform with him
in communist dominated Friedrichshain in May. Göring bragged of knowing Mussolini
intimately while in Italian exile (in fact they had not met).27 Partying with his
eleven fellow Reichstag deputies at Göring’s luxurious apartment in Badensche
Strasse, the gauleiter envied his style of life. Six weeks later he recorded that Göring
was ‘as thick as two planks and lazy as a tortoise’, but it was the former air force
captain who introduced him to Berlin’s high society.28 The princes, dukes, and counts
foregathered in the Göring apartment, and Goebbels gradually acquired a proclivity
for having blue-blooded men around him too. His opinions on the Baltic-born Alfred
Rosenberg, cold, arrogant, and unapproachable, varied sharply; he feared that
Rosenberg’s opaque treatise, ‘The Myth of the Twentieth Century,’ would cause friction
with the church.29 Surprisingly, he also disapproved of Julius Streicher’s ‘Jew
mania’. ‘This naked anti-semitism,’ he recorded, ‘is too primitive. The Jew can’t be
blamed for everything. We are as much to blame as anybody, and until we accept that
we’ll never find our way.’30 But by 1930 he had a soft spot even for Streicher, probably
because Hitler did too: ‘I like him a lot,’ he noted, ‘he’s a real [knorke] guy!’31
Both men like Goebbels. ‘I’ve had Dr Goebbels for a week with me at the Berghof,’
Hitler confided to Streicher once. ‘You know, anybody who can laugh as heartily as
160 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Goebbels, despite what Nature has inflicted on him, can’t be all bad.’ (And, commented
Streicher, Hitler was right, as Goebbels stayed his best man to the end.)32
Hitler towered over them all; but the picture of Hitler, still only forty and unmarried,
that is presented by the early Goebbels Diaries is an unfamiliar one: the Great
Cunctator, taking refuge in the comforting milieu of his beer-bench pals in Munich,
squandering the Party’s money, and for ever chasing young women of whom Geli
was, in Goebbels’ despairing estimate, only the latest example.33 But he had an instinctive,
engaging manner. Meeting Goebbels’ mother for the first time, Hitler remarked:
‘She’s just like my own.’34
THE summer of 1929, a real tar boiler in Berlin, sees Dr Goebbels still fighting shy of
sexual relations. He sees Hans Schweitzer, whose drawing pen is the scourge of the
highest officers of the Republic, living in mortal terror of his new wife. True, in her
temporary absences Schweitzer briefly flutters his clipped wings, but she always returns
wielding the clippers afresh.35 Goebbels prefers to shuffle the pack—Xenia,
Jutta, Anneliese, and occasionally a glimpse of Anka in Weimar. The kindly and submissive
Xenia, now on school vacation, tries in vain to dominate him: she sulks for
hours, then capitulates and returns for a night which the gauleiter mechanically logs
as selig, ‘blessed,’ though with no supporting details. He serenades her on the piano,
but has no intention of letting any woman capture him.36 He has witnessed too Tonak’s
fate, totally ensnared by ‘the hysterical females’ of the Nazi Women’s order (‘now
the silly lad’s gone and got engaged.’) So Xenia runs the whole gamut of female
trickery from flouncing and huffs to affectionate letters, in vain.37 ‘She is too easy
going and fluttery,’ he reports to his diary. ‘I don’t think it’ll last much longer.’38
Setting off on vacation to Prerow, on a Baltic peninsula, that July he takes his secretary
Josephine von Behr and does not invite Xenia despite her tearful entreaties.
Too late, on July 5, Anka phones from Weimar—she has a sudden chance to visit
Berlin for several days. Has the Great Moment finally arrived? Goebbels responds:
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 161
I have thought about it all night. I can’t stay in Berlin; I would never get away
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 26