from work… I can’t cancel Prerow, and I’m fed up with Berlin.39
He suggests an alternative plan: that Anka come to a town fifty miles from Berlin
and he will come over and spend one or two days with her there. He even spells out
the train times and connections. But at Prerow his little fantasy is dashed. She telegraphs
that she cannot come.
How about this plan [Goebbels then suggests]. I’ll come down for a week to
Weimar. Can you get me that room in your building again? I hope it won’t be too
expensive, as I want to go to England in August and to Italy in September… Is it
okay by you and George if I come on Saturday [July 20]? You’ll have to leave me to
myself a bit as I’ve a new book in my pen. And don’t tell anyone I’m coming to
Weimar.
He begs her to cable her agreement— ‘Otherwise I may go up to Sweden for a
week.’40
The book is his drama ‘The Wanderer’ which he has begun to rework at Prerow.
Walking along the rainsoaked beaches he contemplates the placid, grey-green Baltic
and reflects how different it is from the wind-whipped North Sea—the one a gentle
mistress, the other a diabolical old maid.41 The Great Moment in any young man’s
life is, it seems, drawing nigh.
But there is an unscheduled interlude. At a seaside concert he sits next to Erika
Chulius, teenaged daughter of a local forester. Not good looking, he concedes, but
provocative.42 Is the chase on again? She presses a posy of flowers into his hand and
for several days goes out with him and Josephine. Together they all go on a moonlight
sail, and Erika talks and flirts and asks bright questions. He suddenly realizes that it is
the young Anka that she reminds him of. As his train pulls out, bound for Berlin and
Weimar, he finds between the pages of ‘Michael’ a pressed leaf that Erika has placed
there for him.43
162 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Back in Berlin, Xenia comes round for the evening; then it is on to Weimar for the
great, week-long adventure with Anka. Georg Mumme carries their self-invited guest’s
baggage to the apartment just above their own in Johann-Albrecht Strasse. ‘I am torn
many ways,’ confesses Goebbels in his diary that night. Something—is it fear?—is
clutching at his vitals. He thinks a lot about Erika Chulius, and suddenly misses Prerow
after all. But here he is, at last, only one floor above his dream woman. ‘Anka,’ he
writes, ‘is waiting downstairs for me.’44
One day that week Georg goes off to Leipzig. Anka bustles happily around her old
friend, cooking and looking after him, but nothing happens. Neither makes a move.
The last day comes, July 25, 1929. Dr Mumme has again gone away, and Goebbels
and Anka spend a blissful afternoon out together. Even at two A.M. Georg is still not
back. Cursing himself, Goebbels is upstairs, standing irresolutely in the middle of his
room when he hears a soft tap at the door. He opens: it is Anka, trembling with so far
unrequited passion.
‘Georg just phoned,’ she announces. ‘He can’t get back tonight.’
Seized by panic, Goebbels firmly closes the door on her. Perhaps he has smelt an
ambush; or just possibly he may have been motivated by those loftier emotions which
he carefully sets down for posterity in his diary afterwards:
No! I cannot abuse the hospitality and trust of Georg. Wretched though he is in
my esteem: and though mine be far the greater right to this beloved woman standing
before me in all her wondrous loveliness: Anka must leave the room.
I am trembling in every limb. I lie awake for a long, long time. But this morning
I shall be able to look Georg squarely in the eye.45
Their paths cross briefly at Weimar station—Goebbels and Mumme. ‘Fare thee
well, the both of you,’ he writes. ‘I’ll have to leave you to your wretchedness and
nothingness… Greater missions await.’46
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 163
1 JG to Anka, Apr 9, 1929 (Irene Prange papers).
2 Papers of the Albertus Magnus Society; and see diary, Mar 21, 1929: ‘In the morning a
process server comes on an embarrassing business.’
3 Lawyers Erwin Plätzer and Carl Bauer to the society, Apr 29, 1929.
4 Diary, May 17, 1929.
5 Ibid., Apr 15, 1929
6 Ibid., Apr 12, Jun 2, 1929.
7 Ibid., Apr 7, 9, 1929.
8 Ibid., Apr 1, 3, 1929
9 JG to Anka, Apr 9, 1929 (Irene Prange papers).
10 Diary, Apr 18, 1929.
11 Ibid., Apr 18, 1929.
12 Ibid., Apr 19, 21, 25, 1929.
13 Ibid., Apr 28, 30; May 5, 6, 13, 17, 20, 1929.
14 JG to Anka, May 21, 1929 (Irene Prange papers).
15 Diary, May 25, 26, 1929
16 Ibid., May 28, 1929.
17 JG to Anka, May 28, 1929 (Irene Prange papers); diary, May 29.
18 Ibid., May 29, 1929. In Dokumente der Zeitgeschichte (Eher Verlag, 1938), 271, it is wrongly
stated that JG was appointed Reichspropagandaleiter on Jan 2, 1928 with Himmler as deputy.
This is not confirmed by JG’s diary.
19 Diary, Jul 5, 1929.
20 Ibid., May 29, 1929.
21 Ibid., May 2, 1929; statement by Carl Severing to Reichstag, Jun 8, 1929, in Reichstag.
80. Sitzung, 2218ff.
22 Ibid. Grzesinski (MS) lived with a Mrs Daisy Torrens although not divorced until May
12, 1930; he married her at the end of May.
23 Cf. Diary, Jun 9, 1929.
24 Reichstag. 95. Sitzung, 2918ff, Jun 25, 1929.
25 Diary, Jun 26, 1929
26 Ibid., Nov 22, 1929.
27 Ibid., May 3, 4, 1929.
28 Ibid., May 14, Jun 27; and see Sep 2, Nov 8, Dec 21, 1929.
29 Ibid., Feb 20, 1931.
30 Ibid., Jun 29, 1929.
31 Ibid., Nov 8, 1930.
32 Julius Streicher’s diary, Nov 13, 1945 (courtesy of Karl Höffkes); Hitler had invited JG
to the new Berghof in the autumn of 1929 (diary, Sep 22, 1929).
33 Ibid., Oct 28, 1929.
34 Oven, 241, ‘Apr 24, 1944.’
35 Diary, Jun 1, 4, 1929.
36 Ibid., Jun 2, 4, 9, 19, 23, 24, 1929.
37 Ibid., Jun 16, 20, 24, 25, 1929.
38 Ibid., Jun 30, 1929.
164 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
39 JG to Anka, Jul 6 (Irene Prange papers); and diary, July 6, 1929.
40 JG to Anka, Jul 8 (ibid.)
41 Diary, Jul 6, 1929.
42 Ibid., Jul 13, 1929.
43 Ibid., Jul 15, 17, 20, 21, 1929.
44 Ibid., Jul 23, 1929.
45 Ibid., Jul 25, 1929.
46 Ibid., Jul 26, 1929. In Irene Prange’s papers is the snapshot JG sent to Anka, ‘With
heartfelt greetings and with happy memories of a beautiful week in Weimar. Your ULEX, Jul
30, 1929.’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 165
Goebbels
11: The Nightmare
JOSEPH Goebbels’ obsessive devotion to Hitler was illustrated in 1929. He was
about to speak at Breslau when a telegram signed ‘Rosenberg’ arrived: ADOLF
HITLER KILLED IN ACCIDENT. Goebbels swayed on his feet and nearly fainted. The telegram,
a fake, left him a sobbing, nervous wreck. ‘Only now,’ he wrote afterwards,
‘do I realize what Hitler means to me and to the movement: Everything! Everything!’
1
Hi
tler began to need Goebbels too. In July the two men quietly debated the best
form of future constitution for Germany. Rather remarkably for someone so contemptuous
of the democracies, the model that Goebbels suggested was reminiscent
of Westminster—an elected ‘political parliament’ and a senate with sixty or seventy
respected and highly paid appointees and elected senators.2
The latter part of the year was dominated by the final illness of his father and his
cam-paign against the Young Plan.3 He embarked on the latter unwillingly, as it had
been initiated by their ‘reactionary’ rivals the Stahlhelm and the D.N.V.P. (German
National People’s Party), who were demanding a referendum (Volksbegehren); but
Hitler gave him no choice. Visiting Berlin on July 4 he told him he was meeting
Alfred Hugenberg, chairman of the D.N.V.P., to discuss a joint campaign against
Versailles and the Young Plan. The prospect of Hitler amongst these moth-eaten reactionaries
alarmed the radical Goebbels.4 In Nuremberg on the eve of the annual
Party rally, however, Hitler invited him to dine in his suite with him and Geli—‘a
pretty child,’ noticed Goebbels again, and managed to get close to him in the group
166 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
photographs later. He addressed the rally on propaganda and politics.5 With their
great fireworks displays, concerts by the S.A.’s massed bands and torchlight marches,
the famous Nuremberg rallies were beginning to take shape; however he could not
help noticing with vexation the Stahlhelm dignitaries lined up on Hitler’s platform.
Three chartered trains had brought his men from Berlin. Erika Chulius stepped out
of the first; to his delight she had a twin sister too. The Berlin stormtroopers marched
snappily into the city centre with Horst Wessel at the head of his Sturm.6 The S.A.
contingent from the Palatinate wore white shirts; the French occupation authorities
had banned the brown. ‘The time will come,’ Hitler promised them to cheers, ‘when
we’ll have the shirts off the French!’
There was one episode with the S.A. that forewarned of trouble to come with
them. Hitler was in mid speech when the heavy doors burst open. Several hundred
communists had arrived from Berlin under the leadership of Max Höltz, bent on
staging a bloodbath. The S.A. dealt with them roughly and, their blood lust aroused,
rampaged through the streets of Nuremberg afterwards leaving two dead and many
injured. Hitler sent a chalk-faced Goebbels out by car to call the stormtroopers to
order. Horst Wessel showed particular bravery in reining in his young toughs. Walter
Stennes, his S.A. commander, later said that the Brownshirts would have taken over
the city there and then had he and their national commander Franz von Pfeffer not
headed off the catastrophe.7
ON the evening after the riot Erika Chulius joins Goebbels, brimming with still unrequited
passion. She mentions that she has a twin sister: double-delight! To Goebbels’
dismay Xenia von Engelhardt also suddenly appears, furious at his romantic foray to
Weimar. Hoping no doubt to escape her, he drives with Erika over to picturesque
Rothenburg. Downstairs the next morning he finds the importunate Xenia again.
But as suddenly as this tearful apparition appears, it melts away.8 Back in Berlin he
broods all day on the fair sex. ‘Women!’ he generalizes. ‘Women are to blame for
almost everything.’ It is all getting him down. ‘This has got me tied in knots,’ he
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 167
reflects. He tells Xenia and Jutta that he is putting an end to it all. He will dump the
lot of them. ‘Otherwise I’ll just wither away. I can’t do both. One thing or the other!’9
For Anka, of course, he will always make an exception. Twice after the Weimar
fiasco, which must have wounded her deeply, he writes to her and cannot understand
why she makes no reply. Twice he asks chattily if she has the ‘time and inclination’ to
see him on his way through Weimar. Again no reply. ‘How lazy you are at writing!’ he
chides her.10
‘Here in Berlin all hell is loose,’ he adds. And in a sense it is, because Erika and her
twin Traute have come to drive him out to their forest home. He takes the ‘insufferably
jealous’ Josephine von Behr along too. On September 29 he writes again to
Anka. ‘The Reichstag is meeting on important matters,’ he explains, and suggests
she ask Georg’s permission to come to Berlin. ‘You’d get to see all sorts of things.’11
She makes an excuse—she is not well. Goebbels apologizes that he cannot come to
Weimar because of the Reichstag. ‘It is just frightful,’ he continues, writing from the
Reichstag, ‘In the long run one has to dispense with every friendship for the good of
the cause.’ He might be able, he adds, to fit in Weimar on Sunday. ‘But .Ê .Ê . I’ve also
got to go home as my father is gravely ill.’ ‘Fare well!’ he concludes. ‘The division bell
is ringing. It’s showtime.’12
None of these letters has been published before. He makes no mention of them in
his diary. Anka has defeated him.
NOTIONS of nationalism had stirred only infrequently in his diaries until now. In October
1928 he had thrilled at the majestic airship Graf Zeppelin cruising over Berlin on
her 112-hour flight to New Jersey; four weeks later, he and Schweitzer had watched
the newsreel report, furious at the jeers from an audience who only a few minutes
later fiercely applauded a Soviet film.13 In August 1929 he copied down the inscription
on the Brandenburg Gate: ‘To all the World War dead,’ and made the acid comment
that they had forgotten to add: ‘—except the German’. The idea of taking over
national propaganda began to appeal to him.14
168 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Staying at Anka’s house he had read Erich Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war book,
‘All Quiet on the Western Front.’ He had found it a mean-spirited and even seditious
work, and ventured the prediction: ‘Two years from now nobody will talk about this
book any more.’15 Nature documentaries like ‘With Amundsen to the North Pole,’ or
the mountaineering movie starring the delectable Leni Riefenstahl, enthralled him.16
He fully recognized the subtle persuasive power of the cinema. At the advertising
exhibition in Berlin he lingered at the movie section, and a few days later he took his
editor Dagobert Dürr to see the latest sensation, a talking film. He dismissed the
production, ‘The Singing Fool,’ as kitsch, but the technological advance itself impressed
him. ‘Here lies the future,’ he wrote, ‘and we should be wrong to dismiss this
all as American gimmickry. Join it! Beat it!’17 He wanted to use sound films for
propaganda. ‘Here,’ he repeated in November 1929, ‘lies a gigantic future, particularly
for us orators. The more the movement grows, the more we must exploit technology.’
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 27