18
In the approach to the city elections that month he was already using new techniques.
He had posed for a propaganda film in his office. Their amateurish film ‘Struggle
for Berlin’ and two documentaries on the Nuremberg rally were already circulating.
Taking control of their propaganda in Berlin, he composed twenty placards, some in
rhyme. In the evenings he held training courses to ensure that all candidates emphasized
their ‘socialist’ policies. After a bloc meeting in October he noted with approval
that all his fellow Reichstag deputies had come down firmly against the right
wing.19
With himself at their head, constantly aware of his own dwarflike shortcomings,
he led the S.A. and its battle standards on violent marches through the communist
strongholds of Berlin.20 He hammered into his S.A. that attack was the only sure
defence against being overwhelmed by the communists. Gatecrashing a communist
rally in Charlottenburg on August 25 he demanded permission to speak and, when
this was refused, turned 150 of his toughs loose on the audience.21 A few days later
Horst Wessel’s No.5 Sturm launched a violent attack on the communist headquarters
in Berlin-Kiez, injuring several Reds.22 ‘Drive the fascists out of the factories,’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 169
the Red Flag screamed, ‘smash them wherever you meet them!’ In private Goebbels
rejoiced. ‘This is a fight we’re going to see through with brute force.’23 Nazis and
communists alike declared savage war on each other. Goebbels called the Reds ‘roaring,
raging sub-humans,’ and the women worst of all—‘They scream, they shriek,
they bare themselves to us quite shamelessly.’ The communists referred to him as
‘Goebbels the workers’ assassin.’24
Police chief ‘Isidor’ Weiss was mortified. He too went onto the counter-attack.
Gregor Strasser, his immunity revoked, was sentenced to six months’ jail.25 In September
Weiss seized one entire issue of Angriff charging it with incitement to treason.
Angriff developed an iconoclastic style of its own, making fun of people’s names
and lampooning the Central-Verein, the pompous Jewish organisation which had protested
at a spate of Nazi attacks on ‘harmless passers-by,’ by calling it henceforth the
‘Central-Board of Harmless Passers-By.’26 To Goebbels’ discomfiture, the ‘Judenpresse’
struck back by printing every truly seditious word he had said (and many he had
not), trying to get the Party banned again.27 But there was no going back. Finding
signs that the communists were trying to frame the gau HQ in a bombing outrage,
Captain Stennes suggested they tip off Weiss. Goebbels was shocked at such naïveté.
‘These military types,’ he observed, ‘have no political instinct whatever. They haven’t
got wise to the Jews. To back off now in our fight against Isidor would be a catastrophe.’
Stennes went to police HQ on Alexander Platz nevertheless and returned with
word that Weiss wanted a truce; they would offer protection if Goebbels called off
the onslaught on Weiss. ‘A two-edged sword,’ mused Goebbels, scenting victory. ‘I’ll
play off both ends against the middle.’28
His courage, or bravado, was nearly his undoing. One Sunday in September 1929
he went with two thousand S.A. marchers into proletarian Neukölln. He expected
blood to flow, and it was nearly his own. He caught up with the marchers at Wiener
Strasse. Standing in his open car he took the salute, then ordered Tonak to drive on
and park near the Görlitz station. Here a burly communist called Hans Krause shouted,
‘It’s Goebbels, the assassin of the workers! Let him have it!’ ‘Before my very eyes,’
recorded Goebbels, ‘there appeared blackjacks, knives, and knuckledusters… A
170 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
communist hurls himself at me. A shot rings out.’ The shots were answered from his
car, a pistol loaded with blanks. His chauffeur was injured yet again. ‘I staunch Tonak’s
bleeding. He accelerates away, still conscious, sitting chalk white behind the wheel,
bouncing the car off street signs and kerbstones. A hail of rocks follows us, and more
shots are fired.’29 Tonak got them to a police station, but the police arrested them
both for using a firearm. It was seven P.M. before they were released.
The ill-conceived campaign for a referendum on the Young Plan, which would ask
voters among others things to approve the incarceration of any minister guilty of
‘enslaving’ the German people, occupied him throughout that month.30 He wrote
privately however that nothing was to be achieved by parliamentary means: ‘The
revolution must march.’31 By midday on November 2 it was plain that the Nazis and
D.N.V.P. combined had collected signatures from more than the requisite ten percent
of the electorate, some 4,135,000 names. The government however blocked
the referendum and the campaign collapsed.32
Goebbels’ next campaign was for the communal elections in Prussia. He ordered
every man and implement into the fray. ‘Our Doctor,’ wrote one, ‘was everywhere…
We organized choruses of National Socialist slogans. Trucks with illuminated banners
reading VOTE NATIONAL SOCIALIST roared through the streets.’33 He spoke in other
cities too. At Weimar he met Anka for five minutes in November—she suddenly
kissed him with tears in her eyes.34 But these women were now history, even Xenia
who had came to wish him well on his thirty-second birthday but also with her head
full of marriage and fantastic plans—‘This Dirne, this flibbertigibbet!’ He was impressed
by the sudden firmness of his own resolve.35
His HQ was like a warehouse with bales of printed propaganda being moved in and
out. Fighting on a shoestring the Nazis could not match their rivals’ expenditure but
his campaign was not without effect. While in May 1928 thirty-nine thousand Berliners
had voted the Nazi ticket, on November 17, 1929, his campaign attracted
132,097 votes—or 5·8 percent of the total. Twice during the night he gleefully phoned
Hitler. There would now be twenty-three National Socialist deputies in Prussia, with
Goebbels at their head.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 171
‘The next task,’ he formulated the day after the election: ‘Our own daily paper.’36
The problem of financing this leap forward had troubled him all year. Angriff’s street
sales were soaring. He hoped to go daily with it from January 1930. But they would
need at least eight thousand new subscribers and massive extra capital. Swallowing
his pride he asked Elsbeth Zander to get the Women’s Order to raise the forty thousand
marks and five five thousand new subscribers too.37 After he addressed a giggling
meeting of six hundred women on November 7 they raised 4,500 marks on the
spot. Police agents learned that Helene Bechstein later donated five thousand. As
another woman, of the old Russian Potempa family, handed over five thousand marks
Goebbels could not help noticing her pretty twin daughters.38
Party HQ in Munich was unenthusiastic about his publishing plans. His politics
were still radically different from Hitler’s. For a while Rosenberg talked of bringing
out a Be
rlin edition of his stupendously boring VB, with Angriff as a local supplement.
But the latter’s war chest was expanding. A Mr Heidenreich donated ten thousand
marks, ‘trusting,’ as he said, ‘in our victory.’ By early January the Women’s Order had
amassed twenty-six thousand marks and two thousand names.39
THREE days after the November 1929 election Goebbels had travelled down to Munich
for planning talks on Angriff. After an evening of speeches he stayed up talking
with Karl Kaufmann, Göring, and Kube. They shared his view of the Hitler’s beerhallg147
milieu. Hitler again promised to relinquish control of national propaganda to
Goebbels, if he would spend more of his time in Munich. Goebbels was appreciative
but critical: ‘I am not overlooking his failings,’ he wrote privately about Hitler. ‘He’s
too soft and he works too little.’ ‘I suspect,’ he continued primly in his diary, ‘that he
indulges in too much womanizing too.’ Lying awake pondering these failings in his
adopted father-figure, Goebbels charitably concluded that Hitler was different and
that he had a right therefore to be judged on a different scale. ‘Hitler the Myth must
stand, like a rocher de bronze.’40
172 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
In Rheydt, he was losing his real father. The Goebbels family doctor pronounced
the old man’s condition as beyond hope. Ashen and gaunt, his face streaked by tears
of pain, his father had lain on a sofa in their spotlessly tidy kitchen when he last saw
him at Rheydt, surrounded by his family. (‘There we are,’ Paul Joseph had soliloquized
in his diary, ‘the Goebbels family: of diverse character every one of us, but all
of the same blood. Soft as children, and hard as nails.’41) He wrote a long last letter to
the pious old man and travelled to Rheydt again. A living skeleton, whimpering with
pain, his father asked only that they all pray for him.42 On December 7 he died. What
person does not suffer pangs of remorse upon a parent’s death? ‘Without his children,’
Goebbels reflected, ‘and all alone, he crossed to the wilderness of Nirvana.’43
Tonak chauffered the Goebbels brothers up to the church where their father lay
alone surrounded by flickering candles; helpless tears trickling down his cheeks,
Joseph stroked the waxy hands and face of the man who would now never know to
what heights his own sacrifices had propelled his son.
A letter of condolences came from Anka. ‘It will be my endeavour,’ he solemnly
replied, ‘to equal my late father’s fanaticism and devotion to a cause, with the difference
that his was for his family, whereas mine shall be for my people and fatherland.’
‘I should be glad,’ he mechanically concluded, ‘to hear again from you soon.’44
In Rheydt he had run into Else Janke. She pinked, turned pale, and asked if he ever
thought of her. ‘What should I reply?’ he reflected, and answered with a lie.
All of these events unsettled him. A week before Christmas he had a grotesque
nightmare. He dreamed he was back at school being pursued along echoing corridors
by rabbis from eastern Galizia. The Jews were chanting as they ran, screaming
Hate, hate, hate! He always kept a few limping strides ahead of them, and answered
with the same taunt. In his dream it seemed as though the pursuit lasted for hours,
but they never caught up with him.45
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 173
1 Diary, Sep 10-12, 1929.
2 Ibid., Jul 5, 1929.
3 Ibid., Aug 24, 1929.
4 Ibid., Jul 12, 1929.
5 Ibid., Aug 2, 1929; Dokumente, 299ff; VB, Aug 3, 1929.
6 Wessel MS; and gau history, NA film T581, roll 5; BA file NS.26/133.
7 Stennes, statement on Jul 29, 1968 (IfZ: ZS.1147); and Prince Schaumburg-Lippe, War
Hitler ein Diktator? (Witten, 1976), 57f.
8 Diary, Jul 26, 28, Aug 5, 6, 1929.
9 Ibid., Aug 11, 13, 14, 1929.
10 JG to Anka, Sep 7, 1929 (Irene Prange papers).
11 JG to Anka, Sep 29, 1929 (ibid.)
12 JG to Anka, Oct 1, 1929 (ibid.)
13 Diary, Oct 3, 16, 28, 1929.
14 Ibid., Jul 5, Aug 14, 1929.
15 Ibid., Jul 21, 1929.
16 Ibid., Oct 6, Dec 1, 1929.
17 Ibid., Sep 2, 1929.
18 Ibid., Nov 25, 1929.
19 Ibid., Sep 3-5, Oct 1, 1929.
20 Ibid., Jun 18, 1929: with 1,000 marching farmers’ sons, ‘I feel like a dwarf.’
21 Ibid., Aug 27-29, 1929.
22 Angriff, Sep 9, 1929.
23 Diary, Aug 30, 1929.
24 Angriff, Nov 24, 1929; cit. Reuth, 153.
25 Diary, Aug 28: ‘The swine. All this will be repaid later.’
26 Angriff, 1928, No.22, 3 and 1929, No.4, 9; Bering, 236.
27 Diary, Sep 10, 1929.
28 Ibid., Sep 3, 10, 20, 1929.
29 Ibid., Sep 26, 1929; see the photo in Berliner Montag, Sep 23, and Dokumente, 304.
30 Diary, Sep 19, 20, Oct 5; and ‘Kampf gegen Young, eine Sache des deutschen Arbeiters,’ Rede
gehalten am 26. September 1929 im Kriegervereinshaus Berlin (Berlin, 1929)
31 Diary, Oct 28, 1929.
32 Ibid., Oct 31–Nov 3, 5, 29, 30, 1929.
33 Gau history, NA film T581, roll 1; BA file NS.26/133.
34 Diary, Nov 14; hearing (diary Nov, 22, 1929) that she was involved with another man he
had another showdown with Anka and parted without pain: ‘It seems I have gotten over
Anka.’
35 Diary, Oct 29, 1929.
36 Ibid., Nov 18, 1929.
37 Ibid., Sep 22, Oct 20, Nov 5, 1929; Franz Eher Verlag to NSDAP Hautparchiv, Feb 27,
1936 (NA film T581, roll 47; BA file NS.26/968).
38 Diary, Nov 17, 20, 1929; police file.
39 Ibid., Nov 20, 22, 23, 1929; Jan 7, 1930.
174 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
40 Ibid., Nov 22, 1929.
41 Ibid., Oct 10, 1929.
42 Ibid., Nov 29, 1929.
43 Ibid., Dec 11, 1929.
44 JG to Anka, Dec 14, 1929 (Irene Prange papers).
45 Diary, Dec 17, 1929.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 175
Goebbels
12: Hold the Flag High
WITH only five dead by the end of 1929 Berlin had as yet few Nazi martyrs.1
But the war in the streets was intensifying. Sometimes Goebbels found
somebody in the HQ’s kitchen being treated for stab injuries; bullet wounds increased.
2 As he was visiting Edmund Behnke, slowly dying from the original Pharus
rooms brawl, another man was brought in with a slashed forehead.3 On November 4
communists murdered Gerhard Weber; on December 14 a communist gunned down
Walter Fischer during a raid on an S.A. office. Capitalizing on these martyrs, Goebbels
organised ever larger funerals. At Fischer’s he spoke alongside Göring, Prince August-
Wilhelm, and Horst Wessel.4 Spending Christmas with his now widowed mother
he heard that their opponents had slit the throat of yet another S.A. man, the bookbinder
Fritz Radloff, and New Year’s Eve found him at a rainsoaked cemetery burying
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 28